HOOTEN & THE LADY:  Thursday 9PM on CW – Change the Channel Here’s an indicative moment from CW’s summer adventure series HOOTEN & THE LADY.  The disreputable treasure-hunter Hooten (Michael Landes), having just found out that his reluctant companion, assistant British Museum curator Alex (Olivia Lovibond), is an actual member of the British nobility, […]

  VINYL:  Sunday 9PM on HBO – DVR Alert Even with an ever-increasing amount of new and emerging competition, for now at least there’s still nothing in television quite like an all-in, no-expense-spared HBO event, and the network’s rock & roll spectacle VINYL certainly qualifies.  It reunites Martin Scorsese with writer/executive producer Terence Winter, with […]

  POLITICAL ANIMALS:  Sunday 10PM on USA – Potential DVR Alert   POLITICAL ANIMALS is a lot more Brothers & Sisters than it is The West Wing, which makes sense because it’s the work of Greg Berlanti, who took over as showrunner on B&S when show creator Jon Robin Baitz wasn’t giving ABC the soap […]

  RAY DONOVAN:  Sunday 10PM on Showtime – Potential DVR Alert Ray Donovan (Liev Schreiber) is a fixer with plenty to fix.  Professionally, he’s sort of a lower-rent LA version of Scandal‘s Olivia Pope, employed by Hollywood agent Lee Drexler (Peter Jacobson) to do whatever’s necessary to clean up after Tinseltown’s celebrities and studio execs.  […]

  THE STRAIN:  Sunday 10PM on FX – Potential DVR Alert Although capable of finer things (notably his Oscar-winning Pan’s Labyrinth), the expert filmmaker Guillermo del Toro is one of those directors–you could call them Tarantinians–with a deep fondness for neo-schlock.  It’s resulted in projects like the Hellboy series, and also Pacific Rim, where del […]

  MAJOR CRIMES:  Monday 9PM on TNT – If Nothing Else Is On…   As soon as plans for the Closer spin-off MAJOR CRIMES were announced, the central question was always how a series could work whose main protagonist was going to be Internal Affairs Capt. Sharon Raydor (Mary McDonnell), the least likable, most humorless […]

  NOTORIOUS:  Thursday 9PM on ABC – Change the Channel Any viewer apt to complain about the over-the-top melodrama of Scandal should be forced to watch the pilot for Notorious, a supposed “drama” so consistently idiotic that it’s closer in tone to the self-mocking theatrics of Jane the Virgin.  As it happens, Notorious is filling […]

  RECTIFY:  Monday 10PM on Sundance Channel (2-hour premiere at 9PM on April 22) Taking a leaf from the Hollywood studio playbook, Sundance Channel is promoting its new series RECTIFY as being “from the producers of Breaking Bad,” and it’s even airing reruns of the AMC series alongside Rectify episodes to reinforce the connection.  While […]