COUGAR TOWN:  Tuesday 10PM on TBS To quote the eternal wisdom of the COUGAR TOWN opening title card, “Season Five?  Didn’t see that coming.”  The survival of Cougar Town isn’t quite as remarkable as Community‘s–it does, after all, star sitcom royalty Courteney Cox–but the show has had to reinvent itself twice to make it […]

  VEEP:  Sunday 10:30PM on HBO VEEP, television’s most scintillatingly vicious comedy, returned with a relatively mild Season 3 premiere by its standards.  Largely that was because the script, written by Supervising Producers Sean Grey and Will Smith (from a story also by series creator Armando Iannucci) and directed by Chris Addison, kept Vice President […]

  TAXI BROOKLYN:  Wednesday 10PM on NBC – Change the Channel NBC’s summer action comedy TAXI BROOKLYN has a remarkably full history for such a negligible project.  It started as a French movie hit in 1998, written and produced by Luc Besson, who’s now much better known here as the mastermind behind a slew of […]

  CW is treating Season 4 of HART OF DIXIE as carelessly as its characters tend to treat each other.  The show’s return has been delayed until midseason, moved to the nether reaches of Friday nights, and its order cut to 10 episodes, all of which suggests that although no one is saying so for […]

  RECOVERY ROAD:  Monday 9PM on Freeform (Episodes 1-3 available via VOD/streaming) – If Nothing Else Is On… If the idea of rebranding ABCFamily as Freeform was to escape the network’s flavor of earnest YA soap, the new RECOVERY ROAD didn’t get the memo.  It’s ABCF down to its toes, a super-sized Afterschool Special built […]

  TYRANT:  Wednesday 10PM on FX FX’s TYRANT has never been as incisive or daring as it could have been, given its incendiary setting in a fictional Middle Eastern nation on the brink of revolution, but it’s a survivor, back on the air for its third season.  After an unengaging initial run, the series remade […]

  TRIAL & ERROR:  Tuesday 9PM on NBC – If Nothing Else Is On… NBC’s TRIAL & ERROR is a cluttered joke-book of a sitcom that parodies true-crime docuseries like Making A Murderer and especially The Staircase.  As in the latter, the accused murderer, here named Larry Henderson (John Lithgow), is a figure of some […]

RAY DONOVAN:  Sunday 9PM on Showtime Showtime has been having an awful summer, marked by the abject failure of I’m Dying Up Here and Twin Peaks, an 18-hour stunt that is filling the tiniest of niches.  (The soon-to-return Episodes and Dice have never been blockbusters either.)  For deliverance, the network is turning to its own Monarch of Moroseness, the […]