Game WISDOM OF THE CROWD:  Sunday 8PM on CBS – Change the Channel CBS’s WISDOM OF THE CROWD is for the people who thought the problem with FOX’s canceled APB was that it didn’t star Jeremy Piven.  Once again we have a high-tech billionaire who decides to privatize crimefighting after someone close to him is […]

  INSTINCT:  Sunday 8PM on CBS – Change the Channel It’s a coincidence that the movie Love, Simon and CBS’s series INSTINCT premiered over the same weekend, but both are facets of a newish stage in LGBTQ pop culture:  the ordinary genre story that happens to have a gay lead.  In the case of Love, […]

  THE CHI:  Sunday 10PM on Showtime – More Mean Streets Showtime’s THE CHI is geographically close enough to the Chicago of its veteran hit Shameless that its characters could bump into Gallaghers at any given moment, but series creator Lena Waithe is influenced more by the work of David Simon, and not so much […]

  FEAR THE WALKING DEAD:  Sunday 10PM on AMC Each season of FEAR THE WALKING DEAD has been somewhat different from the one before, with a setting that shifted from Los Angeles to somewhere off the coast of Mexico to various locations in Mexico itself, frequent deaths of major characters, and a tone that found […]

  MR. ROBOT:  Wednesday 10PM on USA – Potential DVR Alert There are networks, especially in the pay-TV universe, that play the instant-renewal game, announcing as soon as a new show has premiered, or sometimes even before, that another season has been ordered.  It’s a PR move, for the most part, and sometimes only semi-legitimate, […]

  GRIMM:  Fridays 9PM on NBC NBC took a risk in placing GRIMM, one of its few successful shows, onto its microscopic bench for months of midseason hiatus, but at least it broke off with a solid cliffhanger.  Without overdoing the backstory:  our hero, homicide detective and erstwhile monster-hunter (aka “Grimm”) Nick Burkhardt (David Giuntoli) […]

        This summer, TNT is airing an ambitious slate of original programming, including the final season of its signature series The Closer, the launches of spinoff Major Crimes and new procedural Perception, a reboot of Dallas, new seasons of the elaborate Steven Spielberg production Falling Skies as well as Leverage and Rizzoli […]

  RAY DONOVAN:  Sunday 10PM on Showtime – Potential DVR Alert Ray Donovan (Liev Schreiber) is a fixer with plenty to fix.  Professionally, he’s sort of a lower-rent LA version of Scandal‘s Olivia Pope, employed by Hollywood agent Lee Drexler (Peter Jacobson) to do whatever’s necessary to clean up after Tinseltown’s celebrities and studio execs.  […]