GIRLS:  Sunday 9PM on HBO The newly Golden Globe-winning GIRLS has returned, despite all its intervening success and attention, with its messiness intact.  “Messy” is a relative term in the world of Girls, of course, because although the lives of its characters are in complete disarray, auteur Lena Dunham’s vision (carried out with writing partners […]

  I speak–clearly–not as a fan:  ENLIGHTENED was less unbearable in its second season than it was in its first. The show does have its fans, meager in number (fewer than 300,000 viewers watched the initial airings of recent episodes, and only around 100,000 of those were under 50–no doubt those numbers go up when […]

  Stripped of its period trappings and the fact that its heroine is named Carrie Bradshaw, THE CARRIE DIARIES is the most basic and least interesting of CW’s YA romances.  The season finale, like countless season finales set in high school before it, revolved around the junior prom, even though none of the characters ever […]

  Sometimes shows overthink their season finales, and that may have been the case with tonight’s HART OF DIXIE.  The show has gotten along quite well all season in its native Bluebell, Alabama, but for the finale series creator Leila Gerstein and fellow Executive Producer Len Goldstein broke the characters up into unfamiliar pairings and […]

  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 […]