Watching Shonda Rhimes’ SCANDAL has more than once been likened to an addiction, and as with a drug, the danger is that users will build up a tolerance over time, requiring more and more to achieve the same high.  In the case of Scandal, that high is from endless, crazy, jaw-dropping, WTF plot twists.  […]

  SUPER FUN NIGHT:  Wednesday 9:30PM on ABC Previously… on SUPER FUN NIGHT:  Kimmie (series creator Rebel Wilson) and her BFFs Marika (Lauren Ash) and Helen-Alice (Liza Lapira) share a New York apartment and nonexistent romantic life.  One night each week, they go out to have adventures.  On the professional front, Kimmie is a lawyer […]

  CHICAGO FIRE:  Tuesday 10PM on NBC At a time when network programmers’ fingers are ever-jumpier on their cancellation buttons, NBC has done an unusually good job nurturing CHICAGO FIRE into a success.  The show, which mixes firefighting procedural plots with more serialized storylines, got a slow start, but it was noticeably boosted whenever it […]

  FOREVER:  Tuesday 10PM on ABC Previously… on FOREVER:  Henry Morgan (Ioan Gruffudd) is a New York medical examiner with a secret:  he’s been alive for 200 years.  It’s not that he can’t be killed, but when he is, his body instantly vanishes, only to pop up naked and alive in a nearby body of […]

  WILFRED:  Thursday 10PM on FX Thursday’s back-to-back double-episode Season 3 premiere of WILFRED provided a good picture of a show with, fittingly, a somewhat split personality, at times an existential, cosmic joke about the search for meaning in life and the nature of identity, and then again a rude comedy about a man’s friendship […]

  DEXTER:  Sunday 9PM on Showtime Here we are, once again at the outset of the declared final season for a long-lived, successfully distinctive TV series.  The conclusion of DEXTER won’t compare to the upcoming end of Breaking Bad later this summer (or to next year’s exit of Mad Men) in terms of passionate expectations, […]

  DESIGNATED SURVIVOR:  Wednesday 10PM on ABC – In the Queue ABC’s DESIGNATED SURVIVOR takes great pains to distinguish its version of Kiefer Sutherland from 24‘s Jack Bauer.  The show’s Tom Kirkman spends most of the pilot clad in a formless gray Cornell-insignia hoodie, and wearing horn-rim glasses.  Sutherland speaks in a diffident tone, and […]

    Even as the scripted drama business on the broadcast networks subsides into increasing irrelevance, new players arise who want to take part.  Dramas may not be cost-effective in the way that they once were, but they’re still an unmatched vehicle for branding–just ask AMC–and Netflix, Amazon and Hulu are among the entities who […]