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., […]

  THE BOONDOCKS:  Monday 10:30PM on Adult Swim Aaron McGruder’s name is barely to be found in the credits for Season 4 of Adult Swim’s animated THE BOONDOCKS, absent as both a producer and writer (he retains a credit for his contribution to the show’s theme song), and since he was, unusually, not only the […]

  DEVIOUS MAIDS:  Sunday 10PM on Lifetime The comic soap DEVIOUS MAIDS, based on a Mexican telenovela, overcame a slow start to become a solid performer for Lifetime last season, rising 50% in total viewers between its premiere and the season finale.  With Army Wives done, Witches of East End only a modest success and […]

  SALEM:  Sunday 10PM on WGN America – If Nothing Else Is On… There’s more than vanity to the desire of just about every cable network to have at least one original scripted series (although that’s part of it).  There’s also a clear dollar and cents value to original scripted programming, which pays off in […]

  ORPHAN BLACK:  Saturday 9PM on BBCAmerica In an era of non-stop TV drama overhype, last season’s arrival of ORPHAN BLACK was that extreme rarity:  the real thing.  Even its network didn’t seem to know initially what it had on its hands, as BBCAmerica promoted the show, but reserved the bulk of its marketing resources […]

  MAD MEN:  Sunday 10PM on AMC Fresh episodes of MAD MEN will likely still be airing more than a year from now, so all the obituaries for the series that have been appearing lately run the risk of sounding like “Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead” when they’re repeated in 2015.  The only reason […]

  VEEP:  Sunday 10:30PM on HBO VEEP, television’s most scintillatingly vicious comedy, returned with a relatively mild Season 3 premiere by its standards.  Largely that was because the script, written by Supervising Producers Sean Grey and Will Smith (from a story also by series creator Armando Iannucci) and directed by Chris Addison, kept Vice President […]

  GAME OF THRONES:  Sunday 9PM on HBO GAME OF THRONES is such an assured, expert piece of work that it’s easy to forget how many rules of conventional TV storytelling it routinely violates.  It’s not just the teeming mass of central characters–so many that tonight’s Season 4 premiere wasn’t even able to visit all […]