SNOWFALL:  Wednesday 10PM on FX – In the Queue It used to make sense to judge a new TV series based on its pilot, because the pilot was a template of all the episodes that would follow.  In the serialized, bingeable TV era, though, an opening hour is often just an introduction to the […]

  THE INBETWEEN:  Wednesday 10PM on NBC The flow of broadcast summer product continues with NBC’s workmanlike paranormal procedural THE INBETWEEN.  The show was created by Moira Kirland, previously a writer/producer on Medium, Hawaii 5-0 and Madam Secretary, among other shows.  It’s the first of those that counts here, as The InBetween is very much […]

  CITY ON A HILL – Sunday 9PM on Showtime Showtime’s new CITY ON A HILL wears so many influences on its sleeve that there’s hardly any garment to be seen.  The show hails from Executive Producers Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, and it’s sort of a subtweet of Affleck’s The Town, with a plot […]

  THE MIST:  Thursday 10PM on Spike – Change the Channel THE MIST is far from the most imaginative or robust of Stephen King’s works.  King has rarely been accused of too much concision, but he was only able to wring out enough material from this premise for a novella; the title conveys just about […]

  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, […]

  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 […]

  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 […]

  SCREAM:  Monday 11PM on MTV New showrunners (Michael Gans and Richard Register) or not, Season 2 of MTV’s series version of the Wes Craven/Kevin Williamson movie franchise SCREAM faces the same structural challenge as the first:  slasher movie stories were never meant to be told over 10 hours.  The rollercoaster ride sensation of the […]