> Although nothing is likely to be official until May, the odds are that PAN AM is heading into its final landing.  The series received a short back order from ABC, and will be off the air after February, when Good Christian Bitches (or whatever they’re calling it this week) will take its Sunday 10PM […]

    BOSS:  Friday 10PM on Starz WHERE WE WERE:  In a state of depression.  By the end of last season, Chicago Mayor Tom Kane (Kelsey Grammer) had systematically murdered, driven away, destroyed and/or humiliated anyone who even looked like they might get in his way.  Among the victims:   (now-deceased) closest aide Ezra Stone […]

Season-4-Promotional-Image-the-vampire-diaries-tv-show-32007005-500-338.png THE VAMPIRE DIARIES:  Thursday 8PM on CW WHERE WE WERE:  Witnessing heroine Elena (Nina Dobrev) die and then un-die, a presumptive vampire-to-be. To vastly oversimplify a complex mythology, she’d been heading out of Mystic Falls with Matt (Zach Roerig), one of the other relatively few humans around, having made her choice of the vampiric […]

  TOP OF THE LAKE:  Monday 10PM on Sundance Channel There’s a scene in the second hour of TOP OF THE LAKE, the miniseries co-written (with Gerard Lee) and co-directed (with Garth Davis) by Jane Campion, the filmmaker behind The Piano, Holy Smoke, An Angel At My Table, Bright Star and other idiosyncratic art films, […]

  PERCEPTION:  Tuesday 10PM on TNT PERCEPTION was something of a bubble show last season, with 3.5M viewers and only an 0.6-0.8 rating most weeks in 18-49s, so TNT clearly realized that the show needed to invest in some therapy over the off-season. Tonight’s Season 2 premiere rejoined brilliant neuropsychiatrist and amateur detective Professor Daniel […]

  THE GOOD WIFE:  Sunday 9PM/9:30PM (depending on football) on CBS THE GOOD WIFE lost a step in an uneven fourth season that included botched characters (Kalinda’s husband, the friend/foe played by Maura Tierney) and a gubernatorial campaign that never caught dramatic fire.  But the finale set things up very nicely for Season 5, and the […]

  EPISODES:  Sunday 10:30PM on Showtime EPISODES, written from beginning to end by David Crane (a creator of Friends) and fellow sitcom vet Jeffrey Klarik, improved considerably in its second season, adding some shading to its original cartoon about a married pair of relative babes-in-the-woods British writer/producers corrupted by the comfort and thorough superficiality of […]

  FAKING IT:  Tuesday 10:30PM on MTV FAKING IT is intended as the companion piece to MTV’s hit scripted comedy Awkward., which serves as its lead-in, but on the basis of its pilot, it has nothing like the original comic voice of Lauren Iungerich’s show (of course, now that Iungerich has stepped away from Awkward., […]