ROOKIE BLUE:  Thursday 9PM on ABC It’s quite an accomplishment for a scripted summer series on one of the broadcast networks to last five seasons on the air, and the ABC/Canadian co-production ROOKIE BLUE is now so venerable that one of the plotlines in tonight’s Season 5 premiere had the character whose rookie year kicked off […]

  GAME OF THRONES:  Sunday 9PM on HBO There’s intrigue behind the cameras as well as in front of them on GAME OF THRONES these days.  Series creators/showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have let it be known that they want the show to end in a couple of seasons, while HBO would like this […]

  UNDATEABLE:  Tuesday 9PM on NBC NBC made its position on the current state of broadcast network comedy fairly clear when it essentially chose UNDATEABLE over The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt this midseason.  Both shows were ordered and had produced their episodes, but the network shuffled the Tina Fey-produced Kimmy to Netflix (which appears to have […]

  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 […]

  HOMELAND:  Sunday 9PM on Showtime The endgame has begun for Showtime’s HOMELAND–the reported plan is for next year’s Season 8 to be the last, although the network hasn’t confirmed that–and we’re past the point where it makes sense to bewail the fact that the series has never again equaled the heights of its first […]

  WHITNEY:  Wednesday 8PM on NBC WHERE WE WERE:  Mostly in the apartment shared by Whitney (series creator Whitney Cummings) and her boyfriend Alex (Chris D’Elia), a longterm but unmarried couple who tend to hurl zingers at each other between embraces.  Her sitcom buddies are college chum Lily (Zoe Lister-Jones), who was engaged last year […]

  JUSTIFIED:  Tuesday 10PM on FX JUSTIFIED is pure dark pleasure to watch.  Other cable series are more thematically or structurally ambitious (which is why Justified is unfairly ignored at awards time), but Graham Yost’s series, taking its cue from the late Elmore Leonard’s original prose, is utterly assured in its command not just of plotting […]

  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 […]