THE AMERICANS:  Wednesday 10PM on FX THE AMERICANS is coming off its first disappointing season, and the hope among fans was that it was attributable to the show receiving a final 2-season order, and showrunners Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields spending the first of those seasons indulging in such a long runway to the […]

  WATCHMEN:  Sunday 9PM on HBO The Damon Lindelof/HBO WATCHMEN provides a new wrinkle to the world of IP exploitation.  It’s not an adaptation of the classic Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons graphic novel (a la Zack Snyder’s all-too-reverent 2009 film) or even a reboot, but a newly conceived work that’s more like a spin-off or a […]

> CW’s biggest only hit THE VAMPIRE DIARIES returned to the schedule. WHERE WE LEFT OFF:  The painstakingly-mounted plot to once and for all kill Original Vampire Klaus (Joseph Morgan) failed when Stefan (Paul Wesley), realizing that Klaus had rigged things so that if any harm came to him, Stefan’s brother Damon (Ian Somerholder) would […]

  HELL ON WHEELS – Sunday 9PM on AMC WHERE WE WERE:  Building the transcontinental railroad.  Our antihero, former Confederate soldier Cullen Bohannon, joined the Union Pacific Railroad’s march to the west only because he was tracking down the Union soldiers who murdered his wife during the Civil War, and (mistakenly, it seems) believed the […]

  90210:  Monday 8PM on CW WHERE WE WERE:  Mid car-crash.  A truck was plowing into Dixon (Tristan Wilds), in a way that would surely kill an actor in the middle of contract renegotiations.  Dixon’s love Adriana (Jessica Lowndes), singer and sometime alcoholic, drug addict and maniac, to whom Dixon was driving, had given up […]

  ARMY WIVES:  Sunday 9PM on Lifetime Lifetime’s venerable ARMY WIVES returned for its seventh season tonight, but really this will be the 2.0 version of the show.  Most of the original cast is gone this season or minimized to recurring (only Catherine Bell, of the original core group of spouses, is returning as a […]

  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 […]

  ONCE UPON A TIME:  Sunday 8PM on ABC The Season 3 premiere of ONCE UPON A TIME didn’t step foot in Storybrooke, nor did it feature any flashbacks to pre-curse incarnations of the protagonists.  Whether this was a one-time event for the premiere or a new template for the series is unclear, but the […]