TAKE TWO:  Thursday 10PM on ABC ABC’s TAKE TWO has an unusually classy set of auspices for a summer broadcast series.  Its co-creator is Andrew W. Marlowe, who gave the network its long-running hit Castle (his writing partner on the new show is Terri Edda Miller, a Castle writer/producer and also Mrs. Marlowe), and […]

  WHISKEY CAVALIER:  Wednesday 10PM on ABC ABC capped Oscar Night with a bit of dessert, very much a trifle:  a “sneak preview” of WHISKEY CAVALIER, which will officially premiere on Wednesday night with the same episode.  The genre is Romantic Intrigue Lite, very much in the tradition of Charade, one of the classics of […]

  AP BIO:  Thursday 9:30PM on NBC (regular run starts March 1) – Change the Channel Most of the braintrust behind NBC’s new sitcom AP BIO hails from Saturday Night Live, starting with series creator Mike O’Brien and including Executive Producers Lorne Michaels, Seth Meyers and Michael Shoemaker, so it’s not hard to see why the pilot […]

  DECEPTION:  Sunday 10PM on ABC – In the Queue For its newest trick, the House of Greg Berlanti presents a crime procedural so insubstantial it seems to disappear before your very eyes.  DECEPTION, created by Chris Fedak (co-creator of NBC’s vintage Chuck) mixes together tropes like a summer camp magic show:  the smug amateur […]

  HOMELAND:  Sunday 9PM on Showtime It’s been a bumpy ride for HOMELAND fans.  For its first season and a half, the series was as good as anything on the air, only to go off the rails for a like amount of time, as it tried with increasing desperation to accommodate the doomed romance of […]

  The world of television may have undergone a revolution over the past decade, but it hasn’t hit the continent of late-night network talk shows, which have introduced variations from their 1950s-era formats, but little meaningful change.  There is, every time, the (middle-aged white) guy who does a topical monologue, the desk (or pre-taped) piece, […]

  The cul de sac has moved south along the dial, but aside from that, there’s nothing very different about the TBS version of COUGAR TOWN, transported last night pretty much intact from its prior home on ABC.  (It’s possible that later episodes could show more of a shift, since although series co-creator and original […]

  SWEETBITTER:  Sunday 8PM on Starz – In the Quene Starz’s SWEETBITTER is, with Vida, part of the network’s unusual run of back-to-back half-hour dramas, each of them with a short 6-episode order.  Both shows make use of indie tropes, with Vida on the “gritty estranged family that has to co-exist” end of the Sundance […]