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 […]

  RIZZOLI & ISLES:  Tuesday 9PM on TNT TNT set the last cornerstone of its extensive but unambitious summer schedule in place with tonight’s return of RIZZOLI & ISLES, one of the network’s mainstays, now back for its 4th season.  Like Bones, R&I is a relationship show that finds the time to solve a weekly murder, […]

  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 […]

  COPPER:  Sunday 10PM on BBCAmerica A tale of two low-rated series:  BBCAmerica’s two original scripted dramas COPPER and Orphan Black had comparable ratings in their first seasons.  Copper garnered a higher number of older fans (600K total viewers even after its initially higher-rated first few episodes, compared to just 3-400K for Orphan Black–which in […]

  CROSSING LINES:  Sunday 10PM on NBC – If Nothing Else Is On… Television’s changing economics will probably lead to a lot more internationally financed co-productions as time goes on.  In terms of content, that means subject matter that can be sold worldwide even without an initial US network success, which may require iconic protagonists […]

  WILFRED:  Thursday 10PM on FX Thursday’s back-to-back double-episode Season 3 premiere of WILFRED provided a good picture of a show with, fittingly, a somewhat split personality, at times an existential, cosmic joke about the search for meaning in life and the nature of identity, and then again a rude comedy about a man’s friendship […]

  FRANKLIN & BASH:  Wednesday 9PM on TNT Wednesdays have become series reclamation night on cable.  Last week we had Necessary Roughness adding John Stamos for a new series setting and a bit of zing; now FRANKLIN & BASH, reaching into the same bag of TV nostalgia, has brought Heather Locklear in as a regular.  […]

  TRUE BLOOD:  Sunday 9PM on HBO Although TRUE BLOOD shares with its HBO cousin Game of Thrones a predilection for high body count, sexual content and ratings, the two shows are very different.  Where Game is, in many ways, an exercise in elegant restraint, with climaxes carefully spaced out over years of storytelling, True […]