FRANKLIN & BASH:  Wednesday 9PM on TNT Wednesdays have become series reclamation night on cable.  Last week we had Necessary Roughness adding John Stamos for a new series setting and a bit of zing; now FRANKLIN & BASH, reaching into the same bag of TV nostalgia, has brought Heather Locklear in as a regular.  […]

  TWISTED:  Tuesday 9PM on ABCFamily Previously… on TWISTED:  Danny Desai (Avan Jogia) served 5 years in jail after (as far as we know) strangling his aunt to death as an 11-year old.  Now he’s out, and his one-time best pals Jo (Madelaine Hasson) and Lacey (Kylie Bunbury) have–a little uneasily–resumed their friendships with him.  […]

  KING & MAXWELL:  Monday 10PM on TNT Previously… on KING & MAXWELL:  Sean King (Jon Tenney) and Michelle Maxwell (Rebecca Romjin) are disgraced former Secret Service agents (an assassination and a kidnapping happened on their respective watches) who’ve formed a partnership as DC-area private detectives.  They interact with straight-men FBI agents Rigby (Michael O’Keefe) […]

  TRUE BLOOD:  Sunday 9PM on HBO Although TRUE BLOOD shares with its HBO cousin Game of Thrones a predilection for high body count, sexual content and ratings, the two shows are very different.  Where Game is, in many ways, an exercise in elegant restraint, with climaxes carefully spaced out over years of storytelling, True […]

  There’s something inherently fascinating about the contortions that Lifetime, one of the squarest of cable networks, has to go through to balance the titillation factor of its hit series THE CLIENT LIST with what it seems to feel is a necessary moral counterweight.  This reached a peak in the most ludicrous episodes of the […]

  It’s impossible to discuss the season finale of NURSE JACKIE–or, as it turns out, its entire fifth season–without talking about its final minute, so I’ll skip to the next paragraph to ward off anyone who unwisely wandered into the SPOILER territory of a season finale review. Here we are.  The question is whether its […]

  MAGIC CITY:  Friday 9PM on Starz You’d have thought, after the low-rated, little-buzzed first season of MAGIC CITY, that both Starz and series creator Mitch Glazer would have recognized the series needed to return with some extra oomph for Season 2.  But it wasn’t to be found in tonight’s season premiere, and the result […]

  GRACELAND:  Thursday 10PM on USA Previously… on GRACELAND:  Mike Warren (Aaron Tveit) is a straight-out-of-the-academy FBI agent and the newcomer to a luxurious Malibu beachhouse that was seized by the government from a druglord (he was an Elvis fan), which now serves as both residence and base of operations for FBI, DEA and Customs […]