KING:  Friday 10PM on Reelz – If Nothing Else Is On… One genre that’s never in short supply, even on summer TV, is the police procedural–in fact, during the summer months, even Canadian police procedurals seem to be just about everywhere.  Reelz has added another with the schedule-filler KING, an unobjectionable but hardly notable […]

SUITS – Thursdays 10PM on USA   WHERE WE WERE:  On a precipice.  Mike Ross (Patrick J. Adams) was a hustler with limited formal education but a photographic memory.  He used his talents, among other things, to take tests for those who paid him–including the bar exam, which he passed many times.  Fate brought him […]

  UNDATEABLE:  Tuesday 9PM on NBC NBC made its position on the current state of broadcast network comedy fairly clear when it essentially chose UNDATEABLE over The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt this midseason.  Both shows were ordered and had produced their episodes, but the network shuffled the Tina Fey-produced Kimmy to Netflix (which appears to have […]

  I get it:  teen vampires, ick.  THE VAMPIRE DIARIES is never going to win a major Emmy–it’s never even going to win a Golden Globe.  But there isn’t a long-running show on television that hums along as smoothly, and this fourth season was no exception.  Under the guiding hand of co-creator/showrunner Julie Plec, Vampire […]

  AMERICAN CRIME:  Thursday 10PM on ABC – Potential DVR Alert Recently, the broadcast networks have started kicking the tires of what we think of as “cable” oriented programming, by which we mean serialized, darker, more emotionally ambiguous and less genre-bound stories that require serious attention from viewers.  This kind of programming is against broadcast TV’s […]

  BAD JUDGE:  Thursday 9PM on NBC Previously… on BAD JUDGE:  Rebecca Wright (Kate Walsh) is a hard-drinkin’, free-lovin’ gal–who also happens to be a tough Los Angeles judge.  Medical expert witness Gary (Ryan Hansen) is one of her bed partners, and she runs her court under the disapproving but bemused watch of Chief Judge […]

  ME, MYSELF & I:  Monday 9:30PM on CBS – In the Queue CBS’s ME, MYSELF & I is a gimmick sitcom, which CBS seems to regard as necessary for single camera comedies (see Life In Pieces, or don’t).  The high-concept here is more or less This Is Us with one-liners  As in the NBC […]

  CAMPING:  Sunday 10PM on HBO Although HBO’s new comedy CAMPING is set in the great outdoors, it has the dynamics of a filmed play.  The concept is simple:  throw a number of mismatched characters together in a confined area, and watch them rub each other the wrong way.  In this case, the occasion is […]