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 […]

  THE VAMPIRE DIARIES:  Thursday 8PM on CW Walter White, that student of change, would enjoy this fifth season of THE VAMPIRE DIARIES.  Behind the camera, showrunner Julie Plec is now splitting her time with the Diaries spin-off The Originals, and is also an Executive Producer of The Tomorrow People; Executive Producer Caroline Dries wrote […]

  HOMELAND:  Sunday 9PM on Showtime Everyone knew that the fourth season of HOMELAND was going to be fundamentally different–the question was how.  Seasons 1-3 relied, for better and then for worse, on the dynamic between CIA agent Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) and her target/lover/obsession Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis) as its central story engine, and […]

  BURN NOTICE:  Thursday 9PM on USA USA Network is beginning to clean its programming house, with tonight marking the beginning of the 7th and final season of BURN NOTICE (the exit of veteran Psych is expected not to be far behind), and the arrival of the new Graceland.  Burn Notice has been a stalwart […]

  SMASH:  Tuesday 10PM on NBC The intermission that began last May is over, and what SMASH desperately wants you to know isn’t just a second season but a full-fledged Version 2.0 kicks off with the self-aware lyric “I know I’ve kept you waiting/I know I’ve made you mad.”  In an attempt to get the […]

  DOUBT:  Wednesday 10PM on CBS – If Nothing Else Is On… As highly prized as the talents of Shonda Rhimes are, it takes the continuing line of her failed imitators to remind us just how difficult it is to duplicate her touch.  Conviction and Notorious are two tries that went splat earlier this season, […]

HBO’s version of a summer drive-in movie is back. WHERE WE WERE:  In the midst of multiple cliffhangers.  Telepathic waitress and series heroine Sookie'(Anna Paquin) had just seen her best friend Tara (Rutina Wesley) get half her head blown off by werewolf Alcide’s (Joe Manganiello) girlfriend Debbie (Brit Morgan), which led Sookie to seize the […]

  SILICON VALLEY:  Sunday 10PM on HBO – DVR Alert There’s no algorithm (yet) to predict compatibility between TV series, so we don’t know yet how SILICON VALLEY will fare in the ratings, or for that matter how its quality will hold up over time, but based on its pilot, it seems to be as […]