PERSON OF INTEREST:  Thursday 9PM on CBS WHERE WE WERE:  Watching Harold Finch (Michael Emerson), the secretive billionaire creator of the super-surveillance system that keeps tabs on all potential criminals and victims in the country, being kidnapped by the woman calling herself Caroline Turing (Amy Acker), who manipulated Finch’s system to make it appear […]

  ZOO:  Tuesday 9PM on CBS Viewers who enjoyed the first dumb season of CBS’s ZOO last summer–and there were quite a few of them–should have little quarrel with Season 2.  In fact, based on the two-hour season premiere (Hour 1 written by Supervising Producer Matt Pitts and Producer Melissa Glenn; Hour 2 by Co-Executive […]

  NIKITA:  Friday 9PM on CW WHERE WE WERE:  Vanquishing Division.  Percy is finally, truly dead, Amanda is gone, and Nikita (Maggie Q) and her cohorts–lover and now fiance Michael (Shane West), protege Alex (Lyndsy Fonseca), hacker Birkhoff (Aaron Stanford), the more bureaucratic Ryan (Noah Bean), as well as Sonya (Lyndie Greenwood), who had worked […]

  THE FOSTERS:  Monday 9PM on ABCFamily In its first half-season, THE FOSTERS pulled off a feat of considerable difficulty.  Its saga of multi-racial lesbian couple Stef (Teri Polo) and Lena (Sherri Saum) and their mixed brood of Stef’s biological son Brandon (David Lambert), adopted twins Jesus (Jake T. Austin) and Mariana (Cierra Ramirez), and […]

  THE KNICK:  Friday 10PM on Cinemax Even at a time of unprecedented quality on television, when the complaint is that there’s just too much good content to watch, Cinemax’s THE KNICK was something special last season.  It served as a reminder that in the right hands, a story that sounds initially unpromising–the saga of […]

  TRUE BLOOD:  Sunday 9PM on HBO You don’t typically associate HBO with “guilty pleasure”–even its genre shows, from The Sopranos to Boardwalk Empire to Game of Thrones, have the weight of dramas determined to reinvent their forms–but TRUE BLOOD has been the exception.  An all-you-can-eat buffet of vampires, werewolves, sex, political satire, more sex, shapeshifters, witches, yet more sex, faeries, […]

  THIS IS US:  Tuesday 9PM on NBC Last season, THIS IS US was the artisanal brewery of network TV.  It didn’t fit into any of the conventional franchise genres, which made it feel hand-crafted and special.  Instead, it mixed the old-fashioned sentiment of a family soap with state of the art trickery derived from […]

  PREACHER:  Monday 9PM on AMC Think of PREACHER as American Gods without the aspirations to greatness.  Both shows detail the gory interactions between (more or less) ordinary humans and supernatural beings; both tackle religion as an integral part of their pulp action; both feature jet-black humor.  Under Bryan Fuller’s supervision, though, Gods is painterly […]