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 […]

  BLESS THIS MESS:  Tuesday 9:30PM on ABC The six-episode order ABC gave BLESS THIS HOUSE (after FOX had passed on the project) is about as small as any network show can get.  That doesn’t leave much time for series creators Lake Bell (who also stars and directed the pilot) and Elizabeth Meriwether to show […]

  LAST MAN STANDING:  Friday 8PM on ABC WHERE WE WERE:  In the home and workplace of Mike Baxter (Tim Allen).  Not just a man’s man but a sitcom dad’s sitcom dad, Mike argues the cause of hunting, fishing, and all other middle-class-straight-white-male pursuits in the vlogs he does for his sporting goods company, where […]

  HOOTEN & THE LADY:  Thursday 9PM on CW – Change the Channel Here’s an indicative moment from CW’s summer adventure series HOOTEN & THE LADY.  The disreputable treasure-hunter Hooten (Michael Landes), having just found out that his reluctant companion, assistant British Museum curator Alex (Olivia Lovibond), is an actual member of the British nobility, […]

  SINGLE PARENTS:  Wednesday 9:30PM on ABC ABC’s post-Modern Family Wednesday sitcom SINGLE PARENTS was created by Elizabeth Meriwether and JJ Philbin, respectively the creator and a senior writer/producer of New Girl (the pilot is credited to Philbin from a story by both of them), and it’s an attempt to extend that show’s brand of […]

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 […]

  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 […]

  THE ROYALS:  Sunday 10PM on E! THE ROYALS has been, if not much else, an effective demonstration of branding by E!.  Its first scripted series, recounting the antics of a fictional British royal family, fit in well with the network’s more established business of depicting the antics of the emptily wealthy in an unscripted […]