DEFIANCE:  Friday 8PM on Syfy The second season of Syfy’s DEFIANCE was often jarringly different from its first, shifting from its initial post-apocalyptic-western procedural form to a heavily mythological storyline that broke up the central father-and-adoptive-alien-daughter relationship of Nolan (Grant Bowler) and Irisa (Stephanie Leonidas) for much of the season, while embracing a mystical […]

  BEAUTY & THE BEAST:  Thursday 8PM on CW BEAUTY & THE BEAST has been demoted about as far as a CW series can go, from its original mid-week, regular season perch to Fridays, and now to summer (after being off the air for 11 months) with a reduced order of 13 episodes.  The speculation […]

  The existence of the strikingly similar (in premise) Stitchers provides some perspective on the imagination and skill that’s gone into IZOMBIE.  Both shows involve young women who temporarily enter the minds of the recently dead to solve their murders, but iZombie is put together with consistent wit, intelligence and a strong sense of character. […]

  STITCHERS:  Tuesday 9PM on ABCFamily Previously… on STITCHERS:  Graduate student and science whiz Kirsten (Emma Ishta) has “temporal dysplasia,” a (fictional) condition in which she doesn’t experience the passage of time.  Somehow this has given her a robotic personality, but for unexplained reasons it also makes her the perfect candidate for the government’s Stitchers […]

  Movies have the advantage over TV when it comes to telling gimmicky stories, because a movie only has to sustain the gimmick for 2 hours, and then it’s done.  YOUNGER could have been an effortless feature vehicle for [fill in the rom-com star blank], but after 12 half-hour episodes, the effort is already showing […]

  THE WHISPERS:  Monday 10PM on ABC Previously… on THE WHISPERS:  FBI psychologist Claire Bennigan (Lily Rabe) is put on the case of seemingly normal children who–responding to whispers from an imaginary “friend” named Drill who speaks to them through electricity–create booby-traps for use on their parents, hack into secret government databases and commit similar […]

MURDER IN THE FIRST:  Monday 10PM on TNT Unloved by most critics and viewers, MURDER IN THE FIRST was lucky to have survived to a second season on TNT.  The return came with a fair amount of revamping, in the apparent hope that the series would be more of a companion piece with its lead-in Major […]

POWER:  Saturday 9PM on Starz POWER, like Empire, revolves around an African-American drug dealer who seeks respectability in the music business., but who will still commit murder when necessary to protect his interests.  Although the shows are quite different in tone–Power is presented more as a crime drama than a family soap, with drugs in […]