NASHVILLE:  Wednesday 10PM on ABC NASHVILLE was last season’s biggest underachiever.  In the ratings, it hovered at a meager 1.6-1.8 despite beatable competition, and it would have been a bubble show if its songs (which are dynamite) hadn’t become hits on iTunes–and if ABC weren’t in such general disarray elsewhere.  Creatively, Callie Khouri’s series […]

  COMMUNITY:  Thursday 8PM on NBC A few days ago, the NY Times had a fascinating article about Pei-Shen Qian, an artist who is almost but not quite a forger.  He doesn’t duplicate actual paintings of the masters; instead, he paints new works with such precise adherence to their styles that (he claims) unbeknownst to […]

  TURN:  Sunday 9PM on AMC – If Nothing Else is On… Unlike just about any other armed conflict in history, and for reasons that have never really been pinned down, the American Revolutionary War has rarely been a fertile source of drama either in the movies or on television.  Mel Gibson’s The Patriot was […]

  TRUE BLOOD:  Sunday 9PM on HBO You don’t typically associate HBO with “guilty pleasure”–even its genre shows, from The Sopranos to Boardwalk Empire to Game of Thrones, have the weight of dramas determined to reinvent their forms–but TRUE BLOOD has been the exception.  An all-you-can-eat buffet of vampires, werewolves, sex, political satire, more sex, shapeshifters, witches, yet more sex, faeries, […]

  2 BROKE GIRLS:  Monday 8PM on CBS 2 BROKE GIRLS is about as basic as sitcoms come.  Take two mismatched young women–Caroline (Beth Behrs), who’s tall, blonde and unable to believe she’s not rich anymore; and Max (Kat Dennings), a busty brunette with street smarts–turn them into enforced roommates and co-workers at a Brooklyn […]

MURDER IN THE FIRST:  Monday 10PM on TNT Unloved by most critics and viewers, MURDER IN THE FIRST was lucky to have survived to a second season on TNT.  The return came with a fair amount of revamping, in the apparent hope that the series would be more of a companion piece with its lead-in Major […]

  THE CARMICHAEL SHOW:  Wednesday 9PM on NBC – If Nothing Else Is On… THE CARMICHAEL SHOW is the latest sitcom to be aired by NBC with a stealth run that suggests one of the network’s programming executives looked at another recently and asked “Do you even remember why we ordered this thing?” and got […]

  MERCY STREET:  Sunday 10PM on (many) PBS stations – Potential DVR Alert PBS isn’t accustomed to acting like a conventional “network,” and so it took the service until the very last episodes of Downton Abbey to do what any normal network would have done years ago:  use Downton as a platform to launch a […]