The renovations on Season 3 of NECESSARY ROUGHNESS worked out quite well.  The series jettisoned its original setting and much of its supporting cast, moving Dr. Dani Santino (Callie Thorne) from her job as in-house therapist to the NY Hawks football team to the high-powered V3 talent agency run by new regular (for this […]

  LAW & ORDER: SPECIAL VICTIMS UNIT – Wednesday 10PM on NBC SVU began its 15th season with an atypically dark, serialized episode that served as a showcase for star Mariska Hargitay.  It picked up from the Season 14 finale, in which Detective Olivia Benson (Hargitay) was captured by a sadistic rapist and murderer played […]

  SCANDAL:  Thursday 10PM on ABC Sex is both currency and kryptonite on SCANDAL, a tool and a compulsion.  Shonda Rhimes’s series is coming off a genuinely phenomenal second season, one which saw its ratings rise by an incredible 50% between its season premiere and the finale, in which Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington) was outed […]

  Edward Norton, a very fine actor who’s shown occasional comic chops, is the oddest choice to host SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE in recent memory.  It’s been a long, long time since he was anywhere near the forefront of the pop culture zeitgeist, and he didn’t even have anything new to plug this week.  It would […]

  How much guitar string does NASHVILLE have left?  Last night’s fall finale had a 1.4 rating in 18-49s, half a point below last season’s–which was already considered a major disappointment.  When you’re already below a 2, half a point is critically important, and at some point, the revenues ABC/Disney get from Nashville iTunes sales […]

  GIRLS:  Sunday 10PM on HBO GIRLS is coming off a notably rocky second season, one in which Lena Dunham seemed to take up and abandon narrative structures and tones with the same disregard for consequence that her characters often have with each other.  There were free-standing episodes stuck in the middle of serialized stories, […]

  STAR-CROSSED – Monday 8PM on CW Previously… on STAR-CROSSED:  10 years ago, a spaceship full of Atrians crash-landed outside Baton Rouge, and little earthling Emery met little Atrian Roman.  The pair bonded, but were forcibly separated (Emery thought Roman was killed), with the Atrians rounded up and sent to a ghetto-like area called the […]

  BROOKLYN NINE-NINE kicked off the beginning of the end of the 2013-14 network television season tonight, the first full-season series to reach its finale, so it’s time to start making some summarizing judgments about the year in television.  Brooklyn was the best of the fall’s comedy pilots, and unlike some of its brethren (Hostages […]