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 […]

  NECESSARY ROUGHNESS:  Wednesday 10PM on USA Sometimes even a moderately successful sports team will decide to shake things up and change the line-up (just ask the Clippers, Nets and Grizzlies at the moment), and that time seems to have come for NECESSARY ROUGHNESS, which ushered in its third season tonight with a virtual reboot. […]

  TWISTED:  Tuesday 9PM on ABCFamily – If Nothing Else Is On… ABCFamily’s TWISTED has an arresting premise.  11-year old Danny Desai was arrested and convicting for strangling his aunt to death while she was babysitting him and his two best friends Jo and Lacey.  (The crime is committed off-screen and out of Jo and […]

  MAJOR CRIMES:  Monday 9PM on TNT MAJOR CRIMES, TNT’s spin-off of The Closer, will always have a weakness at its center, caused by the odd decision to build the show around the character of Sharon Raydor (Mary McDonnell), the not very likable or interesting LAPD detective who’d originally been introduced as an officious internal […]

  FALLING SKIES:  Sunday 10PM on TNT FALLING SKIES is, for TNT, the series Syfy needs and doesn’t seem to be able to pull off.  As futuristic adventure sagas go, there’s nothing innovative about it, or even stylish, and now that the original producers have departed, it’s no longer much interested in being an allegory.  […]

  GRACELAND:  Thursday 10PM on USA As we all know, if there’s one thing USA Network wants us to remember about itself, it’s that the network is a place where characters–which is to say the memorable kind– are welcome.  On first exposure, though, the only thing really distinctive about the network’s hugely-hyped new series GRACELAND […]

  BURN NOTICE:  Thursday 9PM on USA USA Network is beginning to clean its programming house, with tonight marking the beginning of the 7th and final season of BURN NOTICE (the exit of veteran Psych is expected not to be far behind), and the arrival of the new Graceland.  Burn Notice has been a stalwart […]

  THE FOSTERS:  Monday 9PM on ABCFamily For the most part, ABCFamily’s new THE FOSTERS takes a nicely low-key approach to material that could easily have been cloying or vapid (or both).  Our entry point into the story is Callie (Maia Mitchell), a troubled teen who, upon her release from juvie, is taken in by […]