You can take a time-travel journey back to 20th-century network television with LAW & ORDER: SVU, the last remnant of Dick Wolf’s once-behemoth franchise.  Visiting the show for the first time since last fall reveals a few small surprises–Detective Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) has acquired a boyfriend–but for the most part, SVU is very […]

  TWISTED:  Tuesday 9PM on ABCFamily – If Nothing Else Is On… ABCFamily’s TWISTED has an arresting premise.  11-year old Danny Desai was arrested and convicting for strangling his aunt to death while she was babysitting him and his two best friends Jo and Lacey.  (The crime is committed off-screen and out of Jo and […]

  THE CRAZY ONES:  Thursday 9PM on CBS starting Sept. 26 – Worth A Look Well, we know David E. Kelley has been watching Mad Men.  A key scene in the pilot for his new comedy THE CRAZY ONES, which is set at an ad agency, has the show’s protagonist Simon Roberts (Robin Williams) giving […]

  ENLISTED:  Friday 9:30PM on FOX  – Change the Channel Not all goofy, barely-functional family sitcoms are alike, and although FOX has paired the new ENLISTED with Raising Hope on its Friday schedule, the two aren’t much of a match.  Raising Hope is a very smart comedy about people who aren’t necessarily rocket scientists, while […]

  Even among procedurals, ABC’s Canadian summer series MOTIVE was a bare-bones example of the genre–it was virtually abstract.  The show had a single gimmick:  at the start of each episode, the killer and victim were identified, so in theory the only mystery was why this person killed that one.  (Sometimes, as in the first […]

  PARENTHOOD:  Thursday 10PM on NBC PARENTHOOD, like Parks & Recreation, is one of NBC’s little engines that could, chugging along to a fourth season despite mediocre ratings.  (And last night’s series-low-tying 1.6 in its Thursday night debut won’t help any.)  Whatever the network may consider its failings from a bottom-line point of view, creatively it […]

  BEAUTY & THE BEAST:  Monday 9PM on CW Referring to any CW series as a “bubble show” is sort of a misnomer, because with the exceptions of The Vampire Diaries, Arrow and Supernatural, everything the network airs is pretty much on the bubble.  Even though BEAUTY & THE BEAST seemed to have hit something […]

  Incivility, narcissism, oafishness, insensitivity and general offensiveness is rarely as breezily funny as it regularly is on THE LEAGUE, which finished its fifth season on the new FXX network tonight.  The semi-improvised show created by Jeff Schaffer and Jackie Marcus Schaeffer, who were credited with the scripts for both halves of the 2-part season […]