AGENTS OF SHIELD:  Tuesday 8PM on ABC Previously… on AGENTS OF SHIELD:  Remember The Avengers?  Well, this isn’t about them.  (Mostly.)  Agent Coulson (Clark Gregg) is a familiar face, but the rest of his squad is new:  pilot and general badass (her nickname is “The Cavalry”) Melinda May (Ming-Na Wen), slightly uptight soldier Grant […]

  THE TOMORROW PEOPLE:  Wednesday 9PM on CW Previously… on THE TOMORROW PEOPLE:  Stephen Jameson (Robbie Amell) is a teenager who also happens to be “homo superior,” aka one of The Tomorrow People.  Their powers include telekinesis, teleportation and telepathy, but because Stephen is The Chosen One–his long-vanished father was the mysterious Obi-Wan Kenobi of […]

  THE ORIGINALS and its creator/showrunner Julie Plec have been fearless about plunging viewers of the New Orleans-set supernatural soap into a veritable bayou of mythology.  We’re half a season in, and already swamped by vampires, werewolves, vampire/werewolf hybrids, an impossible unborn hybrid baby, a teen super-witch, an assortment of garden-variety witches, and the occasional […]

  PSYCH:  Wednesday 10PM on USA It’s sort of fitting that PSYCH, a show now a little past its prime, kicked off its 8th and perhaps final season with a parody of late 1990s Guy Ritchie lad thrillers like Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels–movies even Ritchie doesn’t make anymore, now that he’s knee-deep in […]

  FOX executives have been swearing to anyone who’ll listen that DADS improved greatly after its much-panned early episodes, so it seemed appropriate to check back in with the show on the occasion of its back-to-back season finale half-hours. And the answer is… no.  Dads ended the season just about as awful as it began, […]

  Once again, Starz has had to stand by and watch as other cable networks, not just its paycable competition HBO and Showtime, but smaller players like BBCAmerica and Sundance–and now even streaming services–get the original programming glory and attention it’s repeatedly tried to capture.  Despite an instant Season 2 renewal (standard practice for Starz), […]

  SILICON VALLEY:  Sunday 10PM on HBO Previously… on SILICON VALLEY:  Richard Hendrix (Thomas Middleditch) is a computer programmer with dreams of inventing the next big billion-dollar thing–and he may have actually done it, with an algorithm that allows for compression and duplication of video, music, etc without loss of quality.  Offered $10M for his […]

  The original CSI: CRIME SCENE INVESTIGATION turned the corner on its 14th season tonight, and at its age, the show has little interest in reinventing itself beyond the bare minimum.  The days when William L. Petersen starred and people like Jerry Stahl were writing dark-humored, sometimes transgressive episodes are long past, and after a […]