TROPHY WIFE:  Tuesday 9:30PM on ABC Previously… on TROPHY WIFE:  Kate Harrison (Malin Akerman) is the cheerful, committed, trying-really-hard third wife of Pete (Bradley Whitford).  As such, she’s inherited both his previous spouses, scary Diane (Marcia Gay Harden) and New Age-y Jackie (Michaela Watkins), as well as their combined children:  Diane’s teens Warren (Ryan […]

  THE NIGHT OF:  Sunday 9PM on HBO – DVR Alert “Noisy” is the byword of the television moment, and HBO makes noise as well as any programming service, whether its shows are laden with dragons, foul-mouthed politicians or coke-snorting record executives.  Every so often, though, the network demonstrates that it can also deliver unadorned […]

    The sparse network summer season for scripted series kicked off tonight with ROOKIE BLUE, beginning that extreme rarity, a 3d season, where few original network dramas in summer even get to a Season 2. WHERE WE WERE:  Our heroine, 2d year Toronto police officer Andy McNally (Missy Peregrym), after a season and a […]

  NIKITA:  Friday 9PM on CW Although the cast, crew and studio would no doubt have liked it to go longer, a 6-episode final season for NIKITA isn’t a bad thing.  From CW’s point of view, it fills in the gap between cycles of America’s Next Top Model and gives viewers closure, and with a […]

  HANNIBAL:  Friday 10PM on NBC With the exception of Twin Peaks, HANNIBAL may well be the strangest drama ever to air on a broadcast network.  Created for television by Bryan Fuller as a prequel in the Thomas Harris canon to Red Dragon, it mixes mannered, hushed, often extended dialogue sequences with loving, lingering scenes of […]

  THE VIKINGS:  Sunday 10PM on History Channel In its pilot, at least, THE VIKINGS, which marks History Channel’s first step into the world of continuing scripted drama after its massive success last year with the Hatfields and McCoys miniseries, is so rudimentary a piece of historical fiction that it might as well have been […]

  GRIMM aired its 12th and last episode of 2012 tonight, although NBC isn’t being specific about just when in 2013 it’s due to return with its remaining 10 hours.  The series has been markedly better in its second season that it was in its first, largely because although most episodes still feature a creature […]

  There was a scene in tonight’s Season 3 finale of SCANDAL where Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington) and Cyrus Beene (Jeff Perry) sat together after a shocking death and, in a manner that was remarkably low-key for this series, talked about the fact that they’d become such monsters that when the death occurred, their minds […]