BLACK MONDAY:  Sunday 10PM on Showtime Showtime and Don Cheadle didn’t look far afield for their follow-up after 5 seasons of the network’s House of Lies.  In that series, Cheadle played a fast-talking, rule-breaking business consultant whiz, while in the new BLACK MONDAY… he plays a fast-talking, rule-breaking Wall Street whiz.  (For its part, […]

  REVENGE:  Sunday 9PM on ABC WHERE WE WERE:  Discovering that the long-vanished mother of Emily Thorne (Emily VanCamp), who’s really Amanda Clarke (don’t get us started), is actually alive.  This was among a Hamptons mansion’s worth of season finale revelations, the least convincing of which was that Cruella de Ville Victoria Grayson (Madeleine Stowe) […]

  SUCCESSION:  Sunday 10PM on HBO HBO’s new drama SUCCESSION may be too much of its moment for comfort.  The series, created by Jesse Armstrong (previously a writer/producer on Armando Ianucci’s Veep, The Thick Of It and In the Loop), shares the fascination of its Sunday-mate Billions with the hideously scheming ultra-rich of Manhattan.  Unlike […]

  HAPPY! – Wednesday 10PM on Syfy – In the Queue HAPPY! counts as one of Syfy’s infrequent big swings, although its ultra-violent grunge aesthetic gives it a look and feel that isn’t all that different from the network’s usual diet of micro-budgeted co-productions.  This one, though, has a name star in Christopher Meloni, and […]

  RAISING HOPE:  Friday 9PM on FOX With series creator Greg Garcia spending his time these days (God help him) at his new The Millers, there’s been a change of regime at RAISING HOPE, which had its belated Season 4 debut tonight with back-to-back episodes.  The new showrunner is Mike Mariano, who’s been with the […]

  LEGION:  Tuesday 10PM on FX The first season of Noah Hawley’s LEGION was enthralling, and a bit of a disappointment.  Hawley’s adult off-shoot of the X-Man franchise toyed with narrative structure, temporal and spatial displacement, and extravagant shifts in tone, until it seemed like Hawley might blow up the entire superhero genre.  Instead, it […]

  GRIMM:  Monday 9PM thru Sept 10; Friday 9PM starting Sept 14 on NBC – Worth A Look   WHERE WE WERE:  Meeting Mom.  Nick Burkhardt (David Giuntoli) is a Portland homicide detective who’s also a “Grimm,” with the hereditary ability to see the fairy tale monsters lurking within seemingly ordinary human beings, and the […]

  BATES MOTEL:  Monday 9PM on A&E BATES MOTEL has lit up its Vacancy sign for a second season, and it’s retained its particular blend of soap, black comedy and horror thriller.  The strength of Bates is that even if we didn’t recognize its protagonist’s name, and know what lies in his Hitchcockian future, the […]