SCANDAL:  Thursday 10PM on ABC Sex is both currency and kryptonite on SCANDAL, a tool and a compulsion.  Shonda Rhimes’s series is coming off a genuinely phenomenal second season, one which saw its ratings rise by an incredible 50% between its season premiere and the finale, in which Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington) was outed […]

  SCANDAL is full of characters who take one step over the line of ethics and morality, sometimes for what they’ve convinced themselves are the best possible reasons, only to find themselves in a morass they can’t escape.  The same has come to be true of the series itself, which took its fatal step when […]

  WILL & GRACE:  Thursday 9PM on NBC Nothing and everything has changed since WILL & GRACE began its run on NBC in 1998, and departed in 2006.  Every effort has been made to duplicate the original series:  not only are Eric McCormack, Debra Messing, Sean Hayes and Megan Mullally back, along with series creators […]

  PITCH:  Thursday 9PM on FOX – Potential DVR Alert Dan Fogelman is a busy man.  He’s not only the creator of This Is Us, which debuted strongly two nights ago, he’s also co-creator (with Rick Singer) of the buzzy PITCH.  And gues what, this pilot has a twist in its final moments too. The Pitch twist is the […]

  Debates about what, if any, garments a television emperor has been wearing have rarely been as polarizing as the ones surrounding Showtime’s reboot of TWIN PEAKS, 25 years after the ABC original arrived in a blaze of glory only to be canceled a season later.  The emperor in this case was David Lynch (along […]

  BRAND X WITH RUSSELL BRAND:  Thursday 11PM on FX – Change the Channel Russell Brand has been more or less flailing around for the past several years, trying to find a place in American pop culture.  His introduction to most domestic audiences came with his role as the comically dissipated rock star in Forgetting […]

  NECESSARY ROUGHNESS:  Wednesday 10PM on USA Sometimes even a moderately successful sports team will decide to shake things up and change the line-up (just ask the Clippers, Nets and Grizzlies at the moment), and that time seems to have come for NECESSARY ROUGHNESS, which ushered in its third season tonight with a virtual reboot. […]

  TOGETHERNESS:  Sunday 10:30PM on HBO HBO pairs Jay and Mark Duplass’s TOGETHERNESS with Girls on Sunday nights, and in a way they make sense as companion pieces, since Togetherness concerns a screwed-up foursome at a later stage of their lives than Lena Dunham’s characters.  Togetherness, though, views its people with a more mature and […]