GIRLS:  Sunday 10PM on HBO As HBO’s GIRLS begins its 6th and final season, it somehow feels older than it actually is.  That’s the way it is with television now:  the revolutionary can become the familiar in a blink.  It had already felt, with the arrival of half-hours like Atlanta, Better Things and Insecure, […]

  YOUNGER:  Wednesday 10PM on TV Land TV Land’s flagship original series YOUNGER began to shake itself up at the end of Season 3, and the Season 4 premiere fruitfully continued that process.  Stories about Big Secrets, whether they’re being kept by superheroes or 40-year old publishing employees pretending to be in their 20s, reach […]

Game WISDOM OF THE CROWD:  Sunday 8PM on CBS – Change the Channel CBS’s WISDOM OF THE CROWD is for the people who thought the problem with FOX’s canceled APB was that it didn’t star Jeremy Piven.  Once again we have a high-tech billionaire who decides to privatize crimefighting after someone close to him is […]

  GRAND HOTEL:  Monday 10PM on ABC ABC’s cardboard summer soap GRAND HOTEL is set at a resort hotel in Miami that isn’t as much fun as the one in Jane the Virgin.  This one has a standard-issue set of crises:  the hotel is bankrupt, its owner Santiago Mendoza (Demian Bichir) in debt to shady […]

> Creatively, last night’s season finale of BREAKING BAD was extraordinary in almost every way (how long till the final 16 episodes start airing?).  In the ratings, according to TV By the Numbers it did quite well, but not quite up to the mark of its season premiere (around a 0.9 rating as opposed to […]

  COVERT AFFAIRS:  Tuesday 10PM on USA   WHERE WE WERE:  At the CIA, where Annie Walker (Piper Perabo), the young, beautiful languages expert who supposedly works for the Smithsonian, is actually an agent.  (She met a guy on the beach while on vacation… it’s not worth getting into.)  Specifically, Annie works in the Domestic […]

  THE GOOD WIFE:  Sunday 9PM on CBS WHERE WE WERE: Waiting for Kalinda’s door to open.  She (Archie Panjabi) was calmly waiting inside with a gun, waiting for her former husband, a man who even Kalinda thinks is dangerous.  It was the end of a long, somewhat meandering season highlighted, so to speak, by […]

  MAGIC CITY:  Friday 9PM on Starz You’d have thought, after the low-rated, little-buzzed first season of MAGIC CITY, that both Starz and series creator Mitch Glazer would have recognized the series needed to return with some extra oomph for Season 2.  But it wasn’t to be found in tonight’s season premiere, and the result […]