GRAND HOTEL:  Monday 10PM on ABC ABC’s cardboard summer soap GRAND HOTEL is set at a resort hotel in Miami that isn’t as much fun as the one in Jane the Virgin.  This one has a standard-issue set of crises:  the hotel is bankrupt, its owner Santiago Mendoza (Demian Bichir) in debt to shady […]

  EUPHORIA:  Sunday 10PM on HBO HBO’s new teen transgression drama EUPHORIA is produced by the indie studio A24, and for those who frequent what’s left of the American indie landscape, most notably the films that come out of Sundance, Euphoria is less revolutionary than it presents itself as being.  The drugs- and porn-saturated world […]

  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 […]

  BIG LITTLE LIES:  Sunday 9PM on HBO There are two notable additions to the second season of HBO’s BIG LITTLE LIES–one of whom has understandably been talked about much more than the other–as well as a subtraction.  The celebrated newcomer, of course, is Meryl Streep as Mary Louise, mother of the deceased Perry (Alexander […]

  Showtime’s BILLIONS has cultivated one of the most recognizable signatures on television, from its rudely epigrammatic dialogue, to its love/hate relationship with its ruthless, narcissistic characters, to its very narrative devices.  Tonight’s Season 4 finale, written by series co-creators David Levien and Brian Koppelman and directed by experienced Billions hand Colin Bucksey, was precisely […]

  NOS4A2:  Sunday 10PM on AMC It wouldn’t matter so much that the scares per hour rate of AMC’s new horror series NOS4A2 is so low, if the material in its place were more compelling.  The series is AMC’s latest attempt to find something compatible with its Walking Dead franchise, and it has promising auspices, […]

  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 […]

  FX’s FOSSE/VERDON was a triumph of narrowcasting, a showbiz hall of mirrors about a showbiz hall of mirrors.  That was never more so than in its final installment, where it met its meta-destiny by depicting Bob Fosse (Sam Rockwell) depicting a just-slightly fantasized version of his own life and death in All That Jazz.  […]