RAY DONOVAN:  Sunday 10PM on Showtime – Potential DVR Alert Ray Donovan (Liev Schreiber) is a fixer with plenty to fix.  Professionally, he’s sort of a lower-rent LA version of Scandal‘s Olivia Pope, employed by Hollywood agent Lee Drexler (Peter Jacobson) to do whatever’s necessary to clean up after Tinseltown’s celebrities and studio execs.  […]

  AMERICAN GODS:  Sunday 9PM on Starz – Potential DVR Alert It seems only fair to note upfront, upon the arrival of Bryan Fuller’s new Starz series AMERICAN GODS (created with Michael Green, and based on the novel by Neil Gaiman) that I was not among the congregation that worshiped Fuller’s Hannibal.  I admired the […]

  DALLAS:  Monday 9PM on TNT The ratings didn’t collapse for the reincarnated DALLAS when it had to weather the loss of Larry Hagman and his iconic character J.R. Ewing last season, so the show is back.  Without Hagman, the plot machinations keep churning along, but based on tonight’s Season 3 premiere, it all feels […]

  THE EXPANSE:  Tuesday 10PM on Syfy – If Nothing Else Is On… The one thing we can tell conclusively about Syfy’s new series THE EXPANSE from its first hour is that it’s in no hurry.  The hour, which aired as a special preview on Monday night before the series moves to its regular Tuesday […]

  THE NEIGHBORHOOD:  Monday 8PM on CBS The opening half of CBS’s doubleheader of new Monday sitcoms has one joke to tell in its pilot, and it spends half an hour telling it over and over.  THE NEIGHBORHOOD is almost exclusively about the hilarity of a midwestern white family moving into a black Los Angeles […]

  The world of television may have undergone a revolution over the past decade, but it hasn’t hit the continent of late-night network talk shows, which have introduced variations from their 1950s-era formats, but little meaningful change.  There is, every time, the (middle-aged white) guy who does a topical monologue, the desk (or pre-taped) piece, […]

  The opening 15 minutes of the 38th season premiere of SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE (fun fact:  Barack Obama was 14 years old when the show first went on the air) set a blazing pace that the rest of the show, alas, couldn’t sustain.  This is a season of transitions for the series–Kristen Wiig and Andy […]

  ZOO:  Tuesday 9PM on CBS Viewers who enjoyed the first dumb season of CBS’s ZOO last summer–and there were quite a few of them–should have little quarrel with Season 2.  In fact, based on the two-hour season premiere (Hour 1 written by Supervising Producer Matt Pitts and Producer Melissa Glenn; Hour 2 by Co-Executive […]