ONCE UPON A TIME:  Sunday 8PM on ABC The Season 3 premiere of ONCE UPON A TIME didn’t step foot in Storybrooke, nor did it feature any flashbacks to pre-curse incarnations of the protagonists.  Whether this was a one-time event for the premiere or a new template for the series is unclear, but the […]

  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 […]

  BREAKING BAD:  Sunday 10PM on AMC   WHERE WE WERE:  Gasping, probably.  Walter White (Bryan Cranston), the former New Mexico high school chemistry teacher who took to cooking meth as a way to pay off his family medical bills when he was diagnosed with lung cancer, has gradually moved from being a tourist in […]

  9-1-1:  Wednesday 9PM on FOX – Surprisingly Unsurprising Saying that FOX’s 9-1-1 is the Ryan Murphy team’s version of a Dick Wolf procedural makes it sound far more subversive and original than it actually is.  In fact, for the most part its opening hour is virtually indistinguishable from one of the cogs in Wolf’s wheel […]

  THE FOSTERS:  Monday 9PM on ABCFamily In its first half-season, THE FOSTERS pulled off a feat of considerable difficulty.  Its saga of multi-racial lesbian couple Stef (Teri Polo) and Lena (Sherri Saum) and their mixed brood of Stef’s biological son Brandon (David Lambert), adopted twins Jesus (Jake T. Austin) and Mariana (Cierra Ramirez), and […]

  DEXTER:  Sunday 9PM on Showtime WHERE WE WERE:  In a frozen instant of time, as Detective Debra Morgan (Jennifer Carpenter) watched her adopted brother Dexter (Michael C. Hall), a blood spatter expert on her own forensic investigative team, murder a man in cold blood. WHERE WE ARE:  That same moment.  And there was reason […]

  THE WALKING DEAD:  Sunday 9PM on AMC The Season 7 premiere of THE WALKING DEAD didn’t have a lot of goals.  The series managed somehow, in this age of spoiler culture and social media, to keep the off-camera victim of its Season 6 finale murder a mystery–no easy feat–and it had to pay off […]

  GIRLS:  Sunday 10PM on HBO GIRLS is coming off a notably rocky second season, one in which Lena Dunham seemed to take up and abandon narrative structures and tones with the same disregard for consequence that her characters often have with each other.  There were free-standing episodes stuck in the middle of serialized stories, […]