THE LOUDEST VOICE:  Sunday 10PM on Showtime The rise of Fox News through its dark visionary Roger Ailes, and the resulting effect on media, politics and the world at large, is one of the most important sociopolitical stories of this era, but on the basis of its opening hour, Showtime’s 7-hour limited series THE […]

  BLOOD & TREASURE:  Tuesday 10PM on CBS Summer has come to network TV, which means 4 months with tons of unscripted offerings and the occasional downscale scripted series.  The latter is typified by CBS’s BLOOD & TREASURE, which had a 2-hour premiere after the NCIS season finale in an (unsuccessful) attempt to goose the ratings. Most of […]

  DEAD OF SUMMER:  Tuesday 9PM on Freeform – If Nothing Else Is On… Freeform’s DEAD OF SUMMER arrives with A-list auspices.  Two of its co-creators, Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz, are also the creators of Once Upon A Time (the remaining co-creator and series showrunner, Ian Goldberg, is a former Once writer/producer), and Horowitz […]

  Time-travel tales are everywhere on TV these days–Timeless, Making History, Time After Time  and Frequency will join Legends of Tomorrow next season, and even Game of Thrones dabbled in the genre this year.  But the works that take themselves seriously are fiendishly difficult to pull off, apt to fall into traps of timelines that coexist […]

  TV’s summer of 2016 was notable for a splendidly entertaining and emotionally satisfying 1980s-themed horror thriller.  Unfortunately for Freeform and DEAD OF SUMMER, it was Netflix’s Stranger Things.  Dead, which ended a low-rated season tonight, did have its moments, though, especially in its grand guignol final episodes. The general pattern of the series was […]

  UNCLE BUCK:  Tuesday 9PM on ABC – Change the Channel ABC’s UNCLE BUCK is exactly what you’d expect from a network sitcom left on the shelf for the entire regular broadcast season, then unloaded two at a time during the summer.  As ABC sitcoms go, it is to Black-ish what Family Tools briefly was […]

  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 […]

  INSECURE:  Sunday 10:30PM on HBO Issa Rae’s INSECURE became progressively more assured during the course of its first season, and although it wasn’t more than a moderate success, its ratings trended upward through its run, until it was outrating its higher-profile lead-in, Sarah Jessica Parker’s Divorce.  HBO has rewarded it by scheduling Season 2 […]