THE FOSTERS:  Monday 9PM on ABCFamily THE FOSTERS ended its first season on a near tidal wave of melodrama, and along the way it lost a great deal of the modest charm and believable emotions that had made it work in the first place.  Although tonight’s Season 2 premiere picked up on those storylines, […]

  WELCOME TO SWEDEN:  Sunday 8PM on NBC WELCOME TO SWEDEN is a comedy so placid that one might need to hold up a mirror to its face to see if its breath can fog the glass, and NBC seems to be trying to keep its second season as secret as possible by shoving it […]

  THE BIG C: HEREAFTER – Monday 10PM on Showtime THE BIG C has spent a lot of time trying not to be the show it was supposed to be.  TV shows, much like people, tend to want to go on for as long as possible, so although Darlene Hunt’s dramedy began with Cathy Jamison […]

  GLEE:  Thursday 9PM on FOX It was announced a while back that GLEE will wait until its third episode, after its previously planned 2-part salute to The Beatles, to deal with the passing of Cory Monteith and the absence of his character Finn.  Nevertheless, it was hard not to feel as though Lea Michele’s […]

  WHITNEY:  Wednesday 8PM on NBC WHERE WE WERE:  Mostly in the apartment shared by Whitney (series creator Whitney Cummings) and her boyfriend Alex (Chris D’Elia), a longterm but unmarried couple who tend to hurl zingers at each other between embraces.  Her sitcom buddies are college chum Lily (Zoe Lister-Jones), who was engaged last year […]

  BRAND X WITH RUSSELL BRAND:  Thursday 11PM on FX – Change the Channel Russell Brand has been more or less flailing around for the past several years, trying to find a place in American pop culture.  His introduction to most domestic audiences came with his role as the comically dissipated rock star in Forgetting […]

  BLACK SAILS:  Saturday 9PM on Starz – Worth A Look The pirate action-adventure BLACK SAILS is Starz’s latest attempt to swing for the fences with ambitious original programming and finally be taken as seriously as its pay cable brethren HBO and Showtime.  This project seems intended to split the difference between Starz’s successful, but […]

  TURN: WASHINGTON’S SPIES:  Monday 10PM on AMC After its initial season concluded, the reruns of AMC’s Revolutionary War drama TURN acquired the subtitle WASHINGTON’S SPIES, presumably in recognition of the fact that the original title conveyed absolutely nothing about what the show was about.  There was the hope that this signaled a Season 2 […]