RAISING HOPE:  Tuesday 8PM on FOX WHERE WE WERE:  The town of Natesville, where the Chance clan–Jimmy (Lucas Neff), mom Virginia (Martha Plimpton), dad Burt (Garret Dillahunt) and ancient Maw-Maw (Cloris Leachman)–indeed raise Jimmy’s daughter by a now (as far as we know) deceased death row inmate.  After a couple of seasons pining after […]

  BEAUTY & THE BEAST:  Monday 9PM on CW Referring to any CW series as a “bubble show” is sort of a misnomer, because with the exceptions of The Vampire Diaries, Arrow and Supernatural, everything the network airs is pretty much on the bubble.  Even though BEAUTY & THE BEAST seemed to have hit something […]

WILFRED – Thursday 10PM on FX   WHERE WE WERE:  Ryan (Elijah Wood) is a burnt-out young lawyer who’s quit his job and is in such a state of depression that he attempts suicide.  One day an attractive new neighbor, Jenna (Fiona Gubelmann) moves in next door with Wilfred, her Australian sheepdog.  Ryan has an […]

  PITCH:  Thursday 9PM on FOX – Potential DVR Alert Dan Fogelman is a busy man.  He’s not only the creator of This Is Us, which debuted strongly two nights ago, he’s also co-creator (with Rick Singer) of the buzzy PITCH.  And gues what, this pilot has a twist in its final moments too. The Pitch twist is the […]

  THE WALKING DEAD: WORLD BEYOND – Sunday 10PM on AMC Even as AMC announced the upcoming termination of the WALKING DEAD mothership after one more super-sized season, the network went all-in on the franchise, unveiling multiple new spin-offs.  The latest piece of the show’s expanded universe is THE WALKING DEAD: WORLD BEYOND, which is […]

  MAN SEEKING WOMAN:  Wednesday 10:30PM on FXX – If Nothing Else Is On… You know how on Family Guy a character will say “This is just like when________” or “You’re like________,” and there’s an instant cutaway to whatever the character was talking about, no matter how bizarre?  (An example from this past week:  Stewie […]

  UNDER THE DOME:  Monday 10PM on CBS – Potential DVR Alert Much of CBS’s programming philosophy is built around the steady reliability of its reruns, so on the face of it, the Eye would seem least likely of the broadcast networks to make the summer’s biggest play with an expensive, top-level original series.  But […]

  THE PASSAGE:  Monday 9PM on FOX FOX’s THE PASSAGE does to Justin Cronin’s intricate, elaborate trilogy of postapocalyptic thrillers what Hollywood has traditionally done with literary fiction, flattening the books in the most conventional way possible.  This wasn’t the original plan, or even the second:  Ridley Scott’s production company acquired Cronin’s books with the […]