ELEMENTARY:  Thursday 10PM on CBS For those of us mildly obsessed with BBC’s superlative Sherlock, it may have been unwise for CBS’s ELEMENTARY (which all concerned agree is not, legally, a knock-off) to bring its updated Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, in its Season 2 premiere, to London.  Kept on their separate continents, Jonny […]

  SUPERGIRL undertook a journey this season more unusual than its own heroine’s passage from Krypton to Earth, transferring from CBS to CW.  It suffered little if any damage in the process–other than in the ratings, since CBS’s universe of viewers is far larger than the one at its new home.  Budgets were reportedly slashed, […]

  GOLDEN BOY:  Fridays 9PM on CBS A lot can happen between the creation of a TV pilot in the spring and the production of episodes for the regular season: a writing/producing team is hired, audience focus groups weigh in, networks and studios (which may have had their own turnover) give plenty of notes, helpful […]

  SEAN SAVES THE WORLD:  Thursday 9PM on NBC Previously… on SEAN SAVES THE WORLD:  When gay dad Sean’s (Sean Hayes) ex-wife moves out of town for a new job, Sean becomes single dad to 14-year old Ellie (Samantha Isler), and he tries to raise her while ducking his overbearing, boundary-less mother Lorna (Linda Lavin).  […]

  FRANKLIN & BASH made a few cosmetic changes for its third summer on TNT, but nothing to disrupt the show’s basic air of genial dishevelment.  The most high-profile move was bringing in Heather Locklear as new senior partner Rachel King in the show’s law firm of Infeld Daniels King, although once it had her, […]

  DO NO HARM: Thursday 10PM on NBC – If Nothing Else Is On… What is it with NBC and dual personalities?  Is the network trying to tell us something?  A couple of years ago it gave us My Own Worst Enemy, with Christian Slater as an ordinary family man who periodically transformed into a […]

  AMERICAN CRIME:  Wednesday 10PM on ABC AMERICAN CRIME‘s first season was, if not great network television, certainly ballsy.  John Ridley’s series took on race and class and religion to boot, and it was shot in a self-conscious “art film” way, with lengthy, intense close-ups, a measured pace, and a minimum of both music and […]

  TRIAL & ERROR:  Tuesday 9PM on NBC – If Nothing Else Is On… NBC’s TRIAL & ERROR is a cluttered joke-book of a sitcom that parodies true-crime docuseries like Making A Murderer and especially The Staircase.  As in the latter, the accused murderer, here named Larry Henderson (John Lithgow), is a figure of some […]