WITCHES OF EAST END:  Sunday 9PM on Lifetime The marketing campaign for Season 2 of WITCHES OF EAST END has been working hard to create the impression of a darker, edgier show this time around.  Apart from the odd decision to shoot most of the season premiere in semi-darkness, though, the series appears to […]

  GIRLS:  Sunday 9PM on HBO Watching the Season 4 premiere of GIRLS on the same night as this year’s Golden Globes was a reminder of how quickly things move in today’s pop culture from being state-of-the-art, cutting-edge phenomena to… if not yesterday’s news, certainly farther back from the Twitterverse heat than tonight’s winners Transparent […]

  THE LAST SHIP:  Sunday 9PM on TNT THE LAST SHIP was one of last summer’s biggest cable hits, taking a premise that was technically post-apocalyptic sci-fi, in which most of the world has been annihilated by a plague, but staging it as a more or less contemporary military action adventure.  That’s an approach, modeled […]

  THE GOOD WIFE:  Sunday 9PM on CBS In the wasteland of this fall’s collection of lackluster network programming, THE GOOD WIFE is starting to seem less like an exception and more like a miracle.  (Even more so, since it lives on CBS.)  Robert and Michelle King’s series eased into its 7th season tonight as […]

  GIRLS:  Sunday 10PM on HBO We now know that the 6th and next season of Lena Dunham’s GIRLS will be its last, and the Season 5 premiere made clear that Dunham has little intention of making the show less polarizing than it’s been from the start. The episode, written and directed by Dunham, used […]

  VICE PRINCIPALS:  Sunday 10:30PM on HBO – In the Queue Your feelings about HBO’s new VICE PRINCIPALS are likely to be determined by your instinctive reaction to the name Danny McBride.  For a decade now, since the indie movie The Foot-Fist Way, McBride and his writing/producing/directing partner Jody Hill have been turning out variations […]

  NASHVILLE:  Thursday 9PM on CMT (returns January 5) It’s not clear how much of a signpost tonight’s “sneak peek” hour of NASHVILLE Season 5 will turn out to be.  It was the initial hour to air on new post-ABC home CMT (it will re-air as part of the official 2-hour season premiere next month), […]

  FAMOUS IN LOVE:  Tuesday 9PM on Freeform (full season also available via online/VOD) – Change the Channel On the basis of its opening hour, Freeform’s new FAMOUS IN LOVE is pretty woeful stuff.  It’s the latest version of America’s contribution to the fairy tale template, the one that tells of the gleam and oh-so-naughty […]