AGENTS OF SHIELD:  Tuesday 8PM on ABC – Potential DVR Alert Even without any connection to the multi-billion-dollar entertainment monolith that is Marvel (and behind it, Disney), the arrival of a new TV series from Joss Whedon would be an event.  Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a bedrock not just of the TV […]

  THE COOL KIDS:  Friday 8:30PM on FOX One takeaway from FOX’s terrible new sitcom THE COOL KIDS is that Martin Mull is in a particularly ruinous rut.  Four years ago, he co-starred in FOX’s awful Dads, a quickly canceled clunker about naughty oldsters.  Now here he is back again in Cool Kids, which moves […]

  BLACK MONDAY:  Sunday 10PM on Showtime Showtime and Don Cheadle didn’t look far afield for their follow-up after 5 seasons of the network’s House of Lies.  In that series, Cheadle played a fast-talking, rule-breaking business consultant whiz, while in the new BLACK MONDAY… he plays a fast-talking, rule-breaking Wall Street whiz.  (For its part, […]

  VEGAS:  Tuesday 10PM on CBS – Potential DVR Alert VEGAS is CBS’s version of swinging for the fences, which is to say that it can also be seen as a neon-lit, gold-edged version of Longmire.  This time the widowed western lawman is Ralph Lamb, a real (although probably quite fictionalized) rancher who became a […]

  GIRLFRIENDS’ GUIDE TO DIVORCE:  Tuesday 10PM on Bravo – If Nothing Else Is On… Bravo has established a very successful brand for itself in the unscripted realm, notably with the Real Housewives franchise and its seemingly innumerable spin-offs, and now with GIRLFRIENDS’ GUIDE TO DIVORCE, the network is attempting to extend that brand to […]

  WITCHES OF EAST END:  Sunday 10PM on Lifetime – Potential DVR Alert The supernatural serial isn’t exactly a neglected genre on TV–this week alone brings the season debuts of American Horror Story and The Walking Dead, and The Originals and Sleepy Hollow have just gotten started–but based on its pilot, Lifetime’s new WITCHES OF […]

  FINDING CARTER:  Tuesday 10PM on MTV – Potential DVR Alert Most YA drama, in one way or another, is about the emotional dislocation of being a teen, and in recent years, the reigning trope has been to externalize the theme supernaturally:  the teen discovers that he/she is a vampire, an alien, a witch, a […]

> FALLING SKIES – Sundays 10PM on TNT – If Nothing Else Is On… Or:  how is FALLING SKIES not Terra Nova?  I’ve raved about FOX’s Fall dinosaur spectacle, and here’s another Steven Spielberg special-effects extravaganza, centered around a family trying to hold onto its identity and its life in a hair-raising environment–so what’s the […]