PARTNERS:  Monday 9PM on FX – Change the Channel Anyone who’s seen the promos on FX over the past several weeks has known what was coming:  PARTNERS is a sitcom with the charm of an IRS audit.  It’s really less a TV show than an illustrated business deal, the latest in the assembly line […]

  CALL ME KAT:  Thursday 9PM on FOX   There’s been widespread hope that a change in calendar pages would reverse the traumas of 2020, and that 2021 would bring in gusts of new air to blow away all that’s been awful in the world.  Sadly, the arrival of FOX’s CALL ME KAT, the first […]

  KRYPTON:  Wednesday 10PM on Syfy – Change the Channel With the engagingly odd exception of The Magicians, Syfy hasn’t had much luck with its big swings, and KRYPTON is unlikely to change that.  The network’s position for the last several years has been so strange as to be almost nightmarish:  in a pop culture […]

  DALLAS – Wednesday 9PM on TNT:  If Nothing Else Is On…   DALLAS is a gusher, all right.  TNT’s disinterment of the 1980s blockbuster soap is loaded with so many emptily portentous glares and melodramatic reaction shots that it might almost be a telenovela. In 1978, the year the original Dallas went on the […]

  A TO Z:  Thursday 9:30PM on NBC starting October 2 – If Nothing Else is On… PLAYERS:  Series creator Ben Queen (he wrote the script for Cars 2).  Non-writing producers Rashida Jones and Will McCormick.  Stars Cristin Milioti and Ben Feldman.  Supporting performers Henry Zebrowski, Lenora Crichlow and the voice of Katey Sagal.  Pilot director […]

  BIG LITTLE LIES:  Sunday 9PM on HBO – DVR Alert We no longer blink when movie stars sign on for TV work, and this week’s arrivals are Oscar winners Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman, not to mention Shailene Woodley, whose 7-hour HBO project BIG LITTLE LIES is so star-heavy that Adam Scott, Alexander Skarsgard […]

  SALEM:  Sunday 10PM on WGN America – If Nothing Else Is On… There’s more than vanity to the desire of just about every cable network to have at least one original scripted series (although that’s part of it).  There’s also a clear dollar and cents value to original scripted programming, which pays off in […]

  BITTEN:  Monday 10PM on Syfy Syfy’s Canadian werewolf import BITTEN is noticeably low-rent.  Even its transformation sequences use as little CG as possible:  a morphing hand, a back becoming increasingly hairy, and voila, there’s the fake wolf. Although the show has a bit more sex then the Syfy norm, it gives off a very […]