THE STRAIN:  Sunday 10PM on FX The decision to make Season 4 of FX’s THE STRAIN its last (a year earlier than the originally announced plan) meant that there was a lot of story to cram into 10 hours, and tonight’s season premiere was all plot and set-up.  The show’s canvas has become wider […]

  POWER:  Sunday 9PM on Starz Although Starz has embraced the classy Outlander as the face of its original programming, recently giving it a 2-season renewal, the network’s bread and butter is Courtney A. Kemp’s  hip-hop crime saga POWER, which is by far its highest-rated original.  This season, Starz is using the 3rd stanza of […]

  BRAINDEAD:  Monday 10PM on CBS – Potential DVR Alert The Good Wife was always as much about politics as the law.  And while it was officially a serious drama that dealt with Big Issues, Dark Themes and Edgy Characters, it was sneakily one of TV’s funniest sophisticated comedies.  So Robert and Michelle King’s segue […]

  DOWNWARD DOG:  Tuesday 8PM on ABC – If Nothing Else Is On… Television may have undergone a revolution over the past few years, but one thing hasn’t changed:  broadcast networks don’t air their A-level material during the summer.  ABC’s odd gimmick comedy DOWNWARD DOG is premiering a pair of episodes at the very tail […]

  AMERICAN GOTHIC:  Wednesday 10PM on CBS – Change the Channel Since even ABC is having trouble these days with its trademark soaps about melodrama, dark reveals and violence among close relations (The Family, Blood & Oil, the exhausted cancellation of Revenge), it’s not much of a surprise that CBS is completely out of its […]

  OUTCAST:  Friday 10PM on Cinemax – If Nothing Else Is On… The surprise is that it took Cinemax so long to enter the world of TV horror.  With the notable exception of The Knick (and somewhat less notably, the network’s trademark “Skinemax” late-night soft-core programming), all of its original series have been genre pieces, […]

  BURDEN OF TRUTH:  Wednesday 8PM on CW This summer’s crop of original broadcast dramas (Reverie, Take Two, The Outpost) has been notably bad, and in that context, CW’s new Canadian import, the straightforward legal drama BURDEN OF TRUTH, comes as something of a relief. The set-up is a much tamer version of the one […]

  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 […]