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 […]

  TOP OF THE LAKE:  Monday 10PM on Sundance Channel There’s a scene in the second hour of TOP OF THE LAKE, the miniseries co-written (with Gerard Lee) and co-directed (with Garth Davis) by Jane Campion, the filmmaker behind The Piano, Holy Smoke, An Angel At My Table, Bright Star and other idiosyncratic art films, […]

  PERCEPTION:  Tuesday 10PM on TNT PERCEPTION was something of a bubble show last season, with 3.5M viewers and only an 0.6-0.8 rating most weeks in 18-49s, so TNT clearly realized that the show needed to invest in some therapy over the off-season. Tonight’s Season 2 premiere rejoined brilliant neuropsychiatrist and amateur detective Professor Daniel […]

  THE GOOD WIFE:  Sunday 9PM/9:30PM (depending on football) on CBS THE GOOD WIFE lost a step in an uneven fourth season that included botched characters (Kalinda’s husband, the friend/foe played by Maura Tierney) and a gubernatorial campaign that never caught dramatic fire.  But the finale set things up very nicely for Season 5, and the […]

  EPISODES:  Sunday 10:30PM on Showtime EPISODES, written from beginning to end by David Crane (a creator of Friends) and fellow sitcom vet Jeffrey Klarik, improved considerably in its second season, adding some shading to its original cartoon about a married pair of relative babes-in-the-woods British writer/producers corrupted by the comfort and thorough superficiality of […]

  FAKING IT:  Tuesday 10:30PM on MTV FAKING IT is intended as the companion piece to MTV’s hit scripted comedy Awkward., which serves as its lead-in, but on the basis of its pilot, it has nothing like the original comic voice of Lauren Iungerich’s show (of course, now that Iungerich has stepped away from Awkward., […]

  MASTERS OF SEX:  Sunday 10PM on Showtime MASTERS OF SEX was one of television’s best surprises last season.  Despite a title and premise–the groundbreaking study of human sexuality by Dr. William Masters and Virginia Johnson–that seemed to promise a pay-cable softcore version of history, Michelle Ashford’s series was so bracingly smart and emotionally complicated […]

  EYE CANDY:  Monday 10PM on MTV – If Nothing Else Is On… MTV has been on a good run with its scripted programming lately, including strong shows like Finding Carter and Faking It; even the now-canceled Happyland had its bright moments.  The new EYE CANDY, though, is extremely dumb stuff. The thriller is based […]