Season-4-Promotional-Image-the-vampire-diaries-tv-show-32007005-500-338.png THE VAMPIRE DIARIES:  Thursday 8PM on CW WHERE WE WERE:  Witnessing heroine Elena (Nina Dobrev) die and then un-die, a presumptive vampire-to-be. To vastly oversimplify a complex mythology, she’d been heading out of Mystic Falls with Matt (Zach Roerig), one of the other relatively few humans around, having made her choice of the vampiric […]

  TYRANT:  Tuesday 10PM on FX Season 1 of TYRANT was a mess.  It was rebooted and somewhat restaffed after the pilot was shot, and then continued to be changed on the fly, making for a series that seemed to shift tone and direction every few episodes.  The ratings weren’t much above terrible (although they […]

  HUNTERS:  Monday 10PM on Syfy – If Nothing Else Is On… HUNTERS has production values that suggest it’s intended as one of Syfy’s more A-level entries (it’s shot in Australia rather than Canada), but mostly its premiere hits B-movie beats.  Created by veteran TV writer/producer Natalie Chaidez, whose credits include everything from Heroes and […]

  KILLJOYS:  Friday 9PM on Syfy – If Nothing Else Is On… KILLJOYS is yet another sparse, grungy Syfy Canadian cheapie, although it has a bit of B-movie verve.  It concerns a pair of galactic bounty hunters, the beauteous yet deadly Dutch (Hannah John-Kamen) and her more easygoing junior partner John (Aaron Ashmore).  They work […]

  THE PURGE:  Tuesday 10PM on USA THE PURGE movie franchise has made a fortune by working both sides of the ideological street.  On the one hand, it professes to condemn the near-future dystopia it depicts, in which an authoritarian government flushes the pipes of America by allowing 12 hours of nearly unrestricted violence without […]

  WHITE COLLAR:  Tuesday 9PM on USA   WHERE WE WERE:  Watching Neal Caffrey (Matt Bomer) and his closest crony Mozzie (Willie Garson) fly away.  Neal is a con man, art thief and forger let out of jail (with an ankle bracelet) to be an FBI consultant, in the care of Agent Peter Burke (Tim […]

  GIRLS:  Sunday 10PM on HBO GIRLS is coming off a notably rocky second season, one in which Lena Dunham seemed to take up and abandon narrative structures and tones with the same disregard for consequence that her characters often have with each other.  There were free-standing episodes stuck in the middle of serialized stories, […]

  THE EXPANSE:  Tuesday 10PM on Syfy – If Nothing Else Is On… The one thing we can tell conclusively about Syfy’s new series THE EXPANSE from its first hour is that it’s in no hurry.  The hour, which aired as a special preview on Monday night before the series moves to its regular Tuesday […]