BAD TEACHER:  Thursday 9:30PM on CBS Previously… on BAD TEACHER:  As in the movie, Meredith (Ari Graynor in the Cameron Diaz role) is teaching grade school strictly as a way of meeting the rich fathers of her students, and otherwise devoting little effort to the job.  While she waits for Mr. Right Bank Account […]

  THE FOSTERS:  Monday 9PM on ABCFamily THE FOSTERS ended its first season on a near tidal wave of melodrama, and along the way it lost a great deal of the modest charm and believable emotions that had made it work in the first place.  Although tonight’s Season 2 premiere picked up on those storylines, […]

  SUBURGATORY:  Wednesday 9:30PM on ABC WHERE WE WERE:  Meeting Grandma.  In the season finale, having survived her first year in the titular Chatswin, Tessa (Jane Levy) met her long-absent mother’s mom–on Mother’s Day, no less.  Also, Tessa’s best friend Lisa (Allie Grant), who had spent most of the season thinking (hoping) that she’d been […]

  THE NORMAL HEART:  Sunday 9PM on HBO – DVR Alert When Larry Kramer’s just-barely-semi-autobiographical THE NORMAL HEART was first written and performed in 1985, it was as “ripped from the headlines” as any episode of Law & Order, a furious, mournful expose about the AIDS crisis as it was happening just outside the theater […]

  When football teams have a late game on Sunday and then have to play in the next Thursday night game, they sometimes blame a loss on the short week and limited practice.  Lorne Michaels and the SNL writing staff may want to rehearse those kinds of excuses after an underwhelming Thursday installment of the […]

  I’m not sure when THE NEIGHBORS started winning me over.  I dismissed the pilot as an overbroad, gimmicky, mostly witless rehash of 3d Rock From the Sun, but as quickly as an October episode where Zabvronian alien Jackie Joyner-Kersee (Toks Olagundoye), who usually speaks with a British accent that would put her in good […]

  DYNASTY:  Wednesday 9PM on CW – In the Queue The new DYNASTY isn’t the fall’s worst new show, but it’s the most puzzling.  Was there really a surge of interest among CW’s 18-34 target demo for a revival of an ABC soap that went off the air 28 years ago?  The show has a […]

VEEP has no particular interest in going anyplace, so its season finale tonight was more or less the same as any other episode.  This has made for a fun, but somewhat repetitive, ride over the show’s initial 8-episode season.  Every week Vice President Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) fails to accomplish anything at all, usually drilling […]