EMPIRE:  Wednesday 9PM on FOX – Potential DVR Alert The producer/writer/director Lee Daniels creates films that are compellingly moving (Precious), insane (The Paperboy) or both (The Butler), so it’s a wonder that it’s taken him this long to come to television.  Working alongside his Butler screenwriter Danny Strong, he’s now given us EMPIRE, an […]

  THE FOSTERS:  Monday 9PM on ABCFamily In its first half-season, THE FOSTERS pulled off a feat of considerable difficulty.  Its saga of multi-racial lesbian couple Stef (Teri Polo) and Lena (Sherri Saum) and their mixed brood of Stef’s biological son Brandon (David Lambert), adopted twins Jesus (Jake T. Austin) and Mariana (Cierra Ramirez), and […]

  THE WALKING DEAD:  Sunday 9PM on AMC The back half of THE WALKING DEAD‘s fourth season began by bringing the series back to square one:  isolated figures wandering without a clear goal through an anonymous landscape riddled with zombies. The episode, entitled “After,” picked up immediately after last fall’s finale, and established quickly that […]

  MAN SEEKING WOMAN:  Wednesday 10:30PM on FXX – If Nothing Else Is On… You know how on Family Guy a character will say “This is just like when________” or “You’re like________,” and there’s an instant cutaway to whatever the character was talking about, no matter how bizarre?  (An example from this past week:  Stewie […]

  24: LIVE ANOTHER DAY:  Monday 9PM on FOX – DVR Alert Jack Bauer didn’t speak until 40 minutes into the first hour of tonight’s 24: LIVE ANOTHER DAY premiere.  It’s not that he wasn’t around:  he had a fight scene, a chase, and some interrogation sequences during that span.  He just didn’t say anything.  […]

  THE SLAP:  Thursday 8PM on NBC – Potential DVR Alert THE SLAP is strikingly different from everything else on broadcast television–it’s unusual even by cable standards, with an indie film, non-genre mindset that brings little to mind beyond Showtime’s The Affair and HBO’s Togetherness (and even The Affair has its flash-forward murder plot to help […]

  AMERICAN CRIME:  Wednesday 10PM on ABC AMERICAN CRIME‘s first season was, if not great network television, certainly ballsy.  John Ridley’s series took on race and class and religion to boot, and it was shot in a self-conscious “art film” way, with lengthy, intense close-ups, a measured pace, and a minimum of both music and […]

  THE FAMILY:  Sunday 9PM on ABC Previously… on THE FAMILY:  Ten years after his disappearance and presumed death, a now-teen Adam Warren (Liam James) appears, freshly escaped from what he describes as a decade spent in a hole in the ground near a “dragon.”  In the intervening years, his mother Claire (Joan Allen) has […]