90210:  Monday 8PM on CW WHERE WE WERE:  Mid car-crash.  A truck was plowing into Dixon (Tristan Wilds), in a way that would surely kill an actor in the middle of contract renegotiations.  Dixon’s love Adriana (Jessica Lowndes), singer and sometime alcoholic, drug addict and maniac, to whom Dixon was driving, had given up […]

  WHITNEY:  Wednesday 8PM on NBC WHERE WE WERE:  Mostly in the apartment shared by Whitney (series creator Whitney Cummings) and her boyfriend Alex (Chris D’Elia), a longterm but unmarried couple who tend to hurl zingers at each other between embraces.  Her sitcom buddies are college chum Lily (Zoe Lister-Jones), who was engaged last year […]

  THIS IS 40 – Watch It At Home – Judd Apatow’s Midlife Crisis Comedy-Drama is Both Ambitious and Bland As Judd Apatow has matured as a filmmaker, he’s staked out a piece of territory that’s original but not necessarily workable:  he wants to be both the Paul Mazursky and the John Cassavetes of sitcom showrunners. Although […]

  SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE had a generally dispiriting start to the second half of its season, with an episode proving once again that just giving the writers some time off in no way guarantees that they’ll come back with better material.  The show used host Jennifer Lawrence in almost every sketch, and she did her […]

  MONDAY MORNINGS:  Monday 10PM on TNT – If Nothing Else is On… About 15 years ago, David E. Kelley was David Chase, Aaron Sorkin and Ryan Murphy combined.  Legendary for his ability to personally write most of the scripts for his multiple shows himself (in long-hand on legal pads, no less), Kelley was the […]

  FX’s THE AMERICANS has been, by a substantial margin, the best new show of this season.  And if tonight’s season finale was slightly less ambitious than we might have hoped in terms of delivering the shocking twists or cliffhangers that we now expect from our top serialized series, it still delivered an expert mix […]

  In contrast to last week’s Kristin Wiig-fest, tonight’s season finale of SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE didn’t give victory laps to all the franchise characters Bill Hader and Fred Armisen have contributed to the show over their 8 and 11 seasons.  (And, praise God, it didn’t give them both a last “The Californians” sketch.)  Instead, each […]

  THE FOSTERS:  Monday 9PM on ABCFamily For the most part, ABCFamily’s new THE FOSTERS takes a nicely low-key approach to material that could easily have been cloying or vapid (or both).  Our entry point into the story is Callie (Maia Mitchell), a troubled teen who, upon her release from juvie, is taken in by […]