DEFIANCE:  Monday 9PM on Syfy – Change the Channel Despite the prestige it earned with Battlestar Galactica, as a network Syfy has never fled from the tackiness of its genre (this is the home, after all, of Mansquito and Dinocroc), and its new series DEFIANCE is all latex make-up (it’s like we never got […]

  CODE BLACK:  Wednesday 10PM on CBS – Change the Channel CBS’s new CODE BLACK is a mini-film festival of medical show cliches.  It’s set in a notoriously busy emergency room at a Los Angeles hospital, which frequently reaches the point where the patients needing immediate treatment swamp the resources available to treat them–designated “Code […]

  WYNONNA EARP:  Friday 10PM on Syfy – Change the Channel Syfy has recently been trying to burnish its schlocky image with some more ambitious projects, most notably the time-travel thriller 12 Monkeys and The Magicians, a show with plenty of flaws but also lots of imagination.  The network’s economics, though, probably demand that a […]

  DEVIOUS MAIDS:  Sunday 10PM on Lifetime – If Nothing Else Is On… Technically, DEVIOUS MINDS isn’t a spin-off of Desperate Housewives–there are no significant shared characters or storylines.  But Maids, like Housewives, hails from writer Marc Cherry, and it follows the Housewives tone and pattern so closely that it often feels like at any […]

  PARTNERS: Monday 8:30PM on CBS – Worth A Look It’s impossible not to compare the new fall comedies PARTNERS on CBS and The New Normal on NBC.  Even though the CBS show is multi-camera and NBC’s is in single camera format, both are broad, sentimental comedies about what are essentially blended gay/straight families. New […]

  ARROW: Wednesday 8PM on CW – If Nothing Else Is On It’s Comic-Con week in San Diego, and while we here don’t participate in that particular hullabaloo (waiting for hours just to see a trailer that’s instantly put on the web?  No, thanks), there’s some good coverage here.  What does seem appropriate is to […]

  GRACEPOINT:  Thursday 9PM on FOX starting October 2 – Potential DVR Alert PLAYERS:  Broadchurch, the wildly successful limited (and now continuing) British TV series, of which Gracepoint is a remake.  Broadchurch returnees, including series creator Chris Chibnall, director James Strong and star David Tennant.  A cast surrounding Tennant that includes Anna Gunn, Nick Nolte, […]

and MR. ROBINSON:  Wednesday 9PM on NBC – Change the Channel NBC has been making a specialty of what might be called “stealth comedy.”  The network throws a short order of sitcom episodes on the air two at a time, apparently in an effort to be rid of the shows as quickly as possible.  The […]