PERCEPTION:  Tuesday 10PM on TNT PERCEPTION was something of a bubble show last season, with 3.5M viewers and only an 0.6-0.8 rating most weeks in 18-49s, so TNT clearly realized that the show needed to invest in some therapy over the off-season. Tonight’s Season 2 premiere rejoined brilliant neuropsychiatrist and amateur detective Professor Daniel […]

  RIZZOLI & ISLES:  Tuesday 9PM on TNT TNT set the last cornerstone of its extensive but unambitious summer schedule in place with tonight’s return of RIZZOLI & ISLES, one of the network’s mainstays, now back for its 4th season.  Like Bones, R&I is a relationship show that finds the time to solve a weekly murder, […]

  WHITE HOUSE DOWN:  Worth A Ticket – Things Go “Boom”; We Go “Yay” WHITE HOUSE DOWN is wondrously stupid, so merrily, spectacularly idiotic that it washes the taste of Olympus Has Fallen and its grim mediocrity right out of your mouth.  Even though the threat of nuclear annihilation is waved around, and many random […]

  UNDER THE DOME:  Monday 10PM on CBS – Potential DVR Alert Much of CBS’s programming philosophy is built around the steady reliability of its reruns, so on the face of it, the Eye would seem least likely of the broadcast networks to make the summer’s biggest play with an expensive, top-level original series.  But […]

  There was hardly a moment in Season 6 of MAD MEN when Don Draper (Jon Hamm) seemed to feel comfortable in his own skin.  Oh sure, he could gather up some venom when he had the chance to cut colleague Ted Chaough (Kevin Rahm) off at the knees, he could massage a pitch (sometimes) […]

  COPPER:  Sunday 10PM on BBCAmerica A tale of two low-rated series:  BBCAmerica’s two original scripted dramas COPPER and Orphan Black had comparable ratings in their first seasons.  Copper garnered a higher number of older fans (600K total viewers even after its initially higher-rated first few episodes, compared to just 3-400K for Orphan Black–which in […]

  No show enjoys running around in circles more than VEEP.  Armando Ianucci’s political sitcom glories in Vice-President Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and her staff of venal incompetents mistakenly navigating through 180, 360 and often 720 or more degrees of spin every week, usually managing to slam into whatever iceberg they’ve most been trying to […]

  DEVIOUS MAIDS:  Sunday 10PM on Lifetime – If Nothing Else Is On… Technically, DEVIOUS MINDS isn’t a spin-off of Desperate Housewives–there are no significant shared characters or storylines.  But Maids, like Housewives, hails from writer Marc Cherry, and it follows the Housewives tone and pattern so closely that it often feels like at any […]