STALKER:  Wednesday 10PM on CBS Previously… on STALKER:  Lieutenant Beth Davis (Maggie Q) runs the Threat Assessment Unit of the LAPD, with a staff that includes Detectives Janice Lawrence (Mariana Klaveno) and Ben Caldwell (Victor Rasuk).  Their job is to investigate stalking incidents and protect victims from the more dangerous offenders.  The squad newcomer […]

  MANHATTAN LOVE STORY:  Tuesday 8:30PM on ABC Previously… on MANHATTAN LOVE STORY:  Cynical, blase native New Yorker Peter (Jake McDorman) meets idealistic small-town girl Dana (Analeigh Tipton), a newcomer to town, through Peter’s sister-in-law Amy (Jade Catta-Preta), who’s also Dana’s sorority sister.  Peter and Dana couldn’t be more different, but, well, check the title.  […]

  SELFIE:  Tuesday 8PM on ABC Previously… on SELFIE:  Any resemblance to characters created by George Bernard Shaw and musicalized by Lerner & Loewe couldn’t be more intentional, as exacting, exasperated pharmaceutical PR branding expert Henry Higgs (John Cho) undertakes to turn sales rep Eliza Dooley (Karen Gillan) into the modern equivalent of a well-bred […]

  THE ORIGINALS:  Monday 8PM on CW THE ORIGINALS, that gloomier and more gothic cousin of The Vampire Diaries, essentially revolves around an endless turf war, the territory at issue being New Orleans.  (The show itself shoots in Georgia rather than the Big Easy for financial reasons, which limits it to mostly verbal celebrations of […]

  HOMELAND:  Sunday 9PM on Showtime Everyone knew that the fourth season of HOMELAND was going to be fundamentally different–the question was how.  Seasons 1-3 relied, for better and then for worse, on the dynamic between CIA agent Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) and her target/lover/obsession Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis) as its central story engine, and […]

  There’s a reason why B-movies aren’t 13 hours long, and that was demonstrated by THE STRAIN, a well-crafted horror thriller that nevertheless succumbed to monotony before its first season (it’s already been renewed for another) came to an end tonight. Although The Strain is based on a series of graphic novels by the filmmaker […]

  MULANEY:  Sunday 9:30PM on FOX – Change the Channel MULANEY arrives with a fair amount of goodwill.  It’s a multicamera sitcom modeled after Seinfeld, and produced by Lorne Michaels.  Its creator/star, John Mulaney, is one of the relatively few SNL writers to have achieved some measure of fame for himself, mostly thanks to his […]

  Two weeks is too soon to be a trend, but it’s been heartening to see the 40th season of SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE rely more on original sketch ideas than franchise characters.  Of course, when building a weekly 90 minutes from original concepts, unevenness is very much a given, and that was certainly true of […]