EYE CANDY:  Monday 10PM on MTV – If Nothing Else Is On… MTV has been on a good run with its scripted programming lately, including strong shows like Finding Carter and Faking It; even the now-canceled Happyland had its bright moments.  The new EYE CANDY, though, is extremely dumb stuff. The thriller is based […]

  TOGETHERNESS:  Sunday 9:30PM on HBO – Potential DVR Alert With TOGETHERNESS, Mark and Jay Duplass join the pilgrimage of indie filmmakers to HBO, which now has a virtual Sundance Film Festival of its own every Sunday night with the new dramedy joining Girls and Looking.  Of the three, Togetherness appears on first glance 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 […]

  GLEE:  Friday 9PM on FOX Among the many wrongheaded decisions made by FOX over the last several years, one was giving GLEE a two-year renewal–just as the bottom was starting to fall out of its ratings.  Last year, things went from bad to ghastly, not only in the ever-worsening ratings but creatively, as the […]

  DOWNTON ABBEY – Sunday 9PM on PBS When it started airing 5 years ago, DOWNTON ABBEY was an artifact of nostalgia for a vanished era of British society, one Americans for all our proud egalitarianism have always eaten with a spoon.  Now it feels just as much like a time capsule into a different […]

  GALAVANT:  Sunday 8PM on ABC – If Nothing Else Is On… GALAVANT is one of the goofier network enterprises in recent memory.  It’s a fairy tale comedy-musical created by Dan Fogelman (whose resume covers everything from Crazy, Stupid, Love to Tangled to The Neighbors) that’s meant to be in the vein of The Princess Bride and […]

  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 […]

  THE NEWSROOM:  Sunday 9PM on HBO In the end, just about everyone seemed to be ambivalent about THE NEWSROOM, and that includes its auteur and shining star, Aaron Sorkin.  The Season 2 finale felt like it could well have wrapped up the series, and reportedly Sorkin had to be talked into returning for an […]