THE MINDY PROJECT: Tuesday 9:30PM on FOX – DVR Alert Companion shows don’t come more perfectly designed than FOX’s THE MINDY PROJECT.  When FOX launched New Girl last fall, it became an instant hit, with a quirky, likable heroine in Zooey Deschanel, a very strong supporting cast, and a sophisticated, urban tone.  it’s […]

  BEN & KATE:  Tuesday 8:30PM on FOX – Worth A Look   However it may fare in the ratings, this fall’s FOX Tuesday schedule is a model lesson in what a smoothly engineered line-up looks like.  At 9:30PM, The Mindy Project is a perfect match with its lead-in New Girl, and at 8:30PM, the new BEN […]

  2 BROKE GIRLS:  Monday 9PM on CBS WHERE WE WERE:  At a Brooklyn diner, where Max (Kat Dennings) is a loudmouth waitress from the streets, and Caroline (Beth Behrs) is a former Manhattan socialite, down on her luck since her father was arrested for Madoff-like swindles; in the logic of TV comedy, naturally the […]

A lot can happen between the creation of a TV pilot in the spring and the production of episodes for the regular season: a writing/producing team is hired, audience focus groups weigh in, networks and studios (which may have had their own turnover) give plenty of notes, helpful and otherwise, and critics begin to rear […]

  PARTNERS: Monday 8:30PM on CBS – Worth A Look It’s impossible not to compare the new fall comedies PARTNERS on CBS and The New Normal on NBC.  Even though the CBS show is multi-camera and NBC’s is in single camera format, both are broad, sentimental comedies about what are essentially blended gay/straight families. New […]

  TREME:  Sunday 10PM on HBO   WHERE WE WERE:  New Orleans, of course, and hip-deep in the lives of a dozen struggling, striving, stubborn, idiosyncratic natives and recent arrivals.  These include the feckless trombonist Antoine Batiste (Wendell Pierce), who reluctantly supports himself and his family as a high school music teacher; radio DJ/composer/rapper/dreamer Davis […]

  For an election season SNL, tonight’s episode was oddly lightweight–possibly because the show had exhausted its political material for the week in Thursday’s Update special.  Aside from Weekend Update, the only trace of presidential politics tonight came in two fairly blah, one-note pre-taped fake commercials, one about the thickheadedness of voters who haven’t yet made up […]

  THE PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER:  Worth A Ticket – The Serious Side of Being a Teen We certainly don’t lack for stories about high school in our popular culture.  The CW and ABCFamily networks are almost entirely devoted to that brief, formative period (as is MTV when it does scripted shows like Awkward.). […]