THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT:  Tuesday 8:30PM on ABC THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT is ABC’s 9th family sitcom currently on the air (10th if you count the quasi-family of Single Parents), which puts it in a meta position not unlike its focal character Timmy Cleary (Jack Gore), the middle child of eight Catholic sons and […]

  ALL AMERICAN:  Wednesday 9PM on CW The ALL AMERICAN of CW’s pilot may or may not be fully representative of the series going forward, since creator and original showrunner April Blair is no longer involved with the production of the show, replaced by writer/producer Nkechi O. Carroll.  (The series is under the overall supervision–as […]

  FAKING IT:  Tuesday 10:30PM on MTV FAKING IT is intended as the companion piece to MTV’s hit scripted comedy Awkward., which serves as its lead-in, but on the basis of its pilot, it has nothing like the original comic voice of Lauren Iungerich’s show (of course, now that Iungerich has stepped away from Awkward., […]

  TOGETHERNESS:  Sunday 10:30PM on HBO HBO pairs Jay and Mark Duplass’s TOGETHERNESS with Girls on Sunday nights, and in a way they make sense as companion pieces, since Togetherness concerns a screwed-up foursome at a later stage of their lives than Lena Dunham’s characters.  Togetherness, though, views its people with a more mature and […]

  DEAD OF SUMMER:  Tuesday 9PM on Freeform – If Nothing Else Is On… Freeform’s DEAD OF SUMMER arrives with A-list auspices.  Two of its co-creators, Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz, are also the creators of Once Upon A Time (the remaining co-creator and series showrunner, Ian Goldberg, is a former Once writer/producer), and Horowitz […]

  Among the many, many places where cable has been eating the lunch of the broadcast networks is in the anarchic, shoestring-budgeted world of adult late-night comedy, much of it animated, where Adult Swim has been routinely beating the late-night talk shows in young demos with lunatics-running-the-asylum work like Robot Chicken, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, […]

  Viewers familiar with the original British HOUSE OF CARDS won’t be stunned by The Thing That Happens in the first episode of its Netflix second season, but it will start things off with a bang for those who aren’t.  Its timing represents a smart use by US series creator Beau Willimon and the other […]

  UNDER THE DOME:  Monday 10PM on CBS – Potential DVR Alert Much of CBS’s programming philosophy is built around the steady reliability of its reruns, so on the face of it, the Eye would seem least likely of the broadcast networks to make the summer’s biggest play with an expensive, top-level original series.  But […]