TURN:  Sunday 9PM on AMC – If Nothing Else is On… Unlike just about any other armed conflict in history, and for reasons that have never really been pinned down, the American Revolutionary War has rarely been a fertile source of drama either in the movies or on television.  Mel Gibson’s The Patriot was […]

  YOU’RE THE WORST:  Thursday 10:30PM on FX – Worth a Look YOU’RE THE WORST overplays its hand from the start, and its gooey center is all too visible beneath its hard-candy exterior, but it’s still far more enjoyable than Married, its companion comedy on FX.  Series creator Stephen Falk’s concept (he’s a longtime associate […]

  ASCENSION:  Mon-Wed 9PM on Syfy In the post-Battlestar Galactica era, Syfy has barely even seemed to be trying.  It’s rather sad:  at a point when nearly every network–even CBS!–has at least one substantial piece of inventory in the science-fiction/fantasy genre, Syfy has been filling its air with tame programmers like Eureka and Haven, or […]

  KILLJOYS:  Friday 9PM on Syfy – If Nothing Else Is On… KILLJOYS is yet another sparse, grungy Syfy Canadian cheapie, although it has a bit of B-movie verve.  It concerns a pair of galactic bounty hunters, the beauteous yet deadly Dutch (Hannah John-Kamen) and her more easygoing junior partner John (Aaron Ashmore).  They work […]

  RUSH HOUR:  Thursday 10PM on CBS – Change the Channel It wasn’t long ago that CBS produced a pilot for a rebooted Beverly Hills Cop and decided, despite the participation of Eddie Murphy, not to proceed to series.  One can only imagine how horrible that pilot must have been after seeing RUSH HOUR, which […]

  FREQUENCY:  Wednesday 9PM on CW – Potential DVR Alert We still have ABC’s Time After Time and FOX’s half-hour Making History to come, but of the time-travel sagas we’ve seen so far, CW’s FREQUENCY accomplishes more with far fewer resources than NBC’s lavish Timeless.  While it’s not entirely clear how Jeremy Carver, a longtime […]

  THE MAYOR:  Tuesday 9:30PM on ABC – Worth A Click The premise for ABC’s breezy THE MAYOR is wall-to-wall gimmick, in a likable way.  Courtney Rose (Brandon Micheal Hall) is a young aspiring rapper in the small town of Fort Gray, CA who decides to get himself some publicity by declaring his candidacy for […]

  ON BECOMING A GOD IN CENTRAL FLORIDA:  Sunday 10PM on Showtime There’s an overlap between two of cable’s more high-profile new shows, which also happen to air against each other in the linear world.  Both HBO’s The Righteous Gemstones and Showtime’s ON BECOMING A GOD IN CENTRAL FLORIDA are dark comedies about pernicious American […]