Within the first two minutes of its midseason premiere tonight, BUNHEADS featured a Harold Clurman gag. For those not up on their celebrated left-wing Depression-era theatre directors, Clurman was–well, yeah. (This particular gag took place in a kitchen perfectly constructed in miniature–including working electricity–in a cardboard box.) I’m going to go out on a […]
THE BIG C: HEREAFTER – Monday 10PM on Showtime THE BIG C has spent a lot of time trying not to be the show it was supposed to be. TV shows, much like people, tend to want to go on for as long as possible, so although Darlene Hunt’s dramedy began with Cathy Jamison […]
Among the many, many places where cable has been eating the lunch of the broadcast networks is in the anarchic, shoestring-budgeted world of adult late-night comedy, much of it animated, where Adult Swim has been routinely beating the late-night talk shows in young demos with lunatics-running-the-asylum work like Robot Chicken, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, […]
AMERICAN HORROR STORY – COVEN: Wednesday 10PM on FX Caged and tortured slaves, mid-coitus spontaneous brain aneurisms and gang rape aside, the COVEN season of AMERICAN HORROR STORY was relatively restrained in its start, at least compared to other AHS seasons. There appears to be one basic story being told, and all the mythology […]
BLACK SAILS: Saturday 9PM on Starz – Worth A Look The pirate action-adventure BLACK SAILS is Starz’s latest attempt to swing for the fences with ambitious original programming and finally be taken as seriously as its pay cable brethren HBO and Showtime. This project seems intended to split the difference between Starz’s successful, but […]
CROSSBONES: Friday 10PM on NBC – Potential DVR Alert Viewers of Starz’s Black Sails will find much that’s familiar in NBC’s summer pirate adventure CROSSBONES. We’re back in the Caribbean, this time in the early 18th century, and there’s a powerful pirate king, a dangerous newcomer who saves his skin by memorizing a secret […]
GREY’S ANATOMY: Thursday 8PM on ABC The occasional misguided NY Times profile aside, it’s a good time to be Shonda Rhimes. With an entire night of ABC’s primetime real estate put into her care, she’s achieved a level of renown and celebrity few TV writer/producers have had–not even her fellow 3-series moguls, Dick Wolf […]
FINDING CARTER: Tuesday 10PM on MTV FINDING CARTER was one of last year’s genuine surprises. Showing up on MTV, of all places, it rose past its contrived premise–teen Carter (Kathryn Prescott) finds out that Lori (Milena Govich), the mother she’s grown up with, is actually the woman who kidnapped her as a child, and […]