SUITS:  Wednesday 9PM on USA 7 seasons ago, Aaron Korsh’s SUITS was introduced by USA Network as the story of a young con man with a photographic memory named Mike Ross, hired by flashy New York lawyer Harvey Specter (Gabriel Macht) to be his mentee, sidekick and quasi-little brother.  Along the way, Mike became […]

  TAKE TWO:  Thursday 10PM on ABC ABC’s TAKE TWO has an unusually classy set of auspices for a summer broadcast series.  Its co-creator is Andrew W. Marlowe, who gave the network its long-running hit Castle (his writing partner on the new show is Terri Edda Miller, a Castle writer/producer and also Mrs. Marlowe), and […]

  REVERIE:  Wednesday 10PM on NBC In recent seasons, original summer dramas on the broadcast networks have tended to cluster in two varieties:  straightforward procedurals like Rookie Blue and The Night Shift, and fantasy-thrillers like Under the Dome and Extant.  NBC’s new REVERIE, created by Extant‘s Mickey Fisher, tries to mix the genres, with indifferent […]

  HALT AND CATCH FIRE:  Saturday 9PM on AMC The links between AMC’s HALT AND CATCH FIRE as a television series, the stories it tells, and its characters have gone unusually deep.  The positive part has been that as series creators Christopher Cantwell and Christopher C. Rogers have grown steadily more assured and ambitious in each […]

  MR. MERCEDES:  Wednesday 8PM on Audience Network (DirecTV) – DVR Alert It’s been quite a week for the splintering of television.  FX announced that it, like AMC, would launch a pay version of its service, allowing viewers on certain platforms to watch its shows without commercials for a monthly fee.  Then Disney dropped a […]

RAY DONOVAN:  Sunday 9PM on Showtime Showtime has been having an awful summer, marked by the abject failure of I’m Dying Up Here and Twin Peaks, an 18-hour stunt that is filling the tiniest of niches.  (The soon-to-return Episodes and Dice have never been blockbusters either.)  For deliverance, the network is turning to its own Monarch of Moroseness, the […]

  THE SINNER:  Wednesday 10PM on USA – Change the Channel USA’s THE SINNER wants so, so much to be Prestige TV.  Alas, Derek Simonds’ 8-hour drama (based on a novel by Petra Hammesfahr) is more like an exhibition of the genre’s tropes.  There’s the antiheroic protagonist, in this case Cora Tannetti (Jessica Biel), a […]

  MANHUNT: UNABOMBER:  Tuesday 10PM on Discovery – In the Queue Discovery’s 8-hour docudrama miniseries MANHUNT: UNABOMBER features its Ted Kaczynski (Paul Bettany) only in the final sequence of its opening 2 hours, a decision that gets the show off to an unfortunately pedestrian start.  As the title indicates, the focus isn’t on the charismatic […]