AGENTS OF SHIELD:  Tuesday 9PM on ABC It took most of its first season for AGENTS OF SHIELD to start becoming the show the synergy experts at Disney, Marvel and ABC desperately wanted it to be, and by then it had squandered most of the gaudy ratings that had greeted it last fall.  Only when the plotline of Captain America: […]

  HAPPYLAND:  Tuesday 11PM on MTV – Worth A Look After years spent as far away from scripted series as it could get, MTV has been accumulating a tidy set of programming lately that caters to its target demo without pandering to it, including Teen Wolf and Finding Carter on the drama side, along with […]

  MODERN FAMILY:  Wednesday 9PM on ABC MODERN FAMILY has now won the Emmy Award for Best Comedy in each of its four years on the air, putting it one behind Frasier‘s record-setting pace.  The TV Academy nominates smaller, more complex shows like Louie, Girls and Veep, but its heart is with Modern Family, and […]

  PSYCH:  Wednesday 10PM on USA It’s sort of fitting that PSYCH, a show now a little past its prime, kicked off its 8th and perhaps final season with a parody of late 1990s Guy Ritchie lad thrillers like Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels–movies even Ritchie doesn’t make anymore, now that he’s knee-deep in […]

  FEAR THE WALKING DEAD:  Sunday 9PM on AMC AMC’s eccentric decision to keep its Walking Dead assembly line going with a not-quite-prequel has become even more so in Season 2, which places the Season 1 survivors on a yacht owned by one of them, the rich and enigmatic Strand (Colman Domingo), hovering off the […]

  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 […]

  THE LAST SHIP:  Sunday 9PM on TNT THE LAST SHIP was one of last summer’s biggest cable hits, taking a premise that was technically post-apocalyptic sci-fi, in which most of the world has been annihilated by a plague, but staging it as a more or less contemporary military action adventure.  That’s an approach, modeled […]

  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 […]