POWER:  Saturday 9PM on Starz Previously… on POWER:  James “Ghost” St. Patrick (Omari Hardwick) is secretly one of New York’s most successful narcotics distributors, as well as the owner of the hot new nightclub ironically named “Truth.”  Ghost’s wife Tasha (Naturi Naughton) and partner Tommy (Joseph Sikora) want him to concentrate on his drug […]

  FINDING CARTER:  Tuesday 10PM on MTV – Potential DVR Alert Most YA drama, in one way or another, is about the emotional dislocation of being a teen, and in recent years, the reigning trope has been to externalize the theme supernaturally:  the teen discovers that he/she is a vampire, an alien, a witch, a […]

  GOTHAM:  Monday 8PM on FOX – If Nothing Else Is On… PLAYERS:  Batman (and if we’re being honest, Christopher Nolan, even though he has nothing to do with this show).  Series creator Bruno Heller, who was also behind The Mentalist and HBO’s Rome.  Star Ben McKenzie, and a supporting cast headed by Donal Logue […]

  Two weeks is too soon to be a trend, but it’s been heartening to see the 40th season of SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE rely more on original sketch ideas than franchise characters.  Of course, when building a weekly 90 minutes from original concepts, unevenness is very much a given, and that was certainly true of […]

  MOM:  Thursday 8:30PM on CBS MOM is a grittier brand of sitcom than CBS’s usual variety.  It features three generations of teen moms, and its lead characters, Christy Plunkett (Anna Faris) and her mother Bonnie (Allison Janney), are recovering addicts and alcoholics.  The family members as often as not regard each other with outright […]

  GLEE:  Friday 9PM on FOX Among the many wrongheaded decisions made by FOX over the last several years, one was giving GLEE a two-year renewal–just as the bottom was starting to fall out of its ratings.  Last year, things went from bad to ghastly, not only in the ever-worsening ratings but creatively, as the […]

  SECRETS & LIES:  Sunday 9PM on ABC – If Nothing Else Is On… How much do you find yourself missing Gracepoint?  Not Broadchurch, mind you, the brooding and powerful BBC child-murder mystery (which is returning to BBCAmerica next week), but the flat US remake that came and went on FOX last fall?  ABC hopes […]

  SALEM:  Sunday 10PM on WGNAmerica SALEM, WGNAmerica’s first original scripted series, developed into an enjoyably gonzo exercise in old-time witchy horror during the course of its first season, more than willing to stretch the envelope of acceptable gore and sex on basic cable.  (The network’s follow-up, the prestige project Manhattan, was a much more […]