a) "Mom"
I still stand by this defense of Chuck Lorre sitcoms I wrote a couple years ago, although I'll be the first to admit that his shows often wear thin. But I like 'em when they're as dark as primetime CBS will allow, and after the increasingly gentle, silly direction of his more recent productions, "The Big Bang Theory" and "Mike & Molly," this is refreshingly bleaker and more mean than "Two And A Half Men." Allison Janney certainly deserves a more top shelf show than this, but she's making the best of it and really owning the role.

b) "The Goldbergs"
This show is like "how do we do a nostalgic show about early '80s suburbia that has none of the nuance or magic of 'Freaks & Geeks'?" which was driven home in the episode that closed with a scene set to "Come Sail Away." Plus the Patton Oswalt narration is kinda wasted in its attempt to do a Daniel Stern "Wonder Years" thing. It's so close to being decent but just falls flat.

c) "The Crazy Ones"
Robin Williams in a David E. Kelley show really should be the most insufferably wacky thing ever, but this is surprisingly tolerable, if also not especially memorable or funny.

d) "Up Late with Alec Baldwin"
I've learned to compartmentalize between Alec Baldwin the awesome screen presence and Alec Baldwin the brooding rage-filled person, but then he went and got a chat show on MSNBC and I wasn't sure where that fell in the continuum and had to check it out. I'm not sure why him reminiscing with Debra Winger or whoever for an hour needs to be a TV show but I didn't mind it, it was kind of nice to see him out of character but a pleasant, conversational person.

e) "@midnight"
Much like Comedy Central used to experiment with the 11:30 slot after "The Daily Show" until something stuck, they're now earnestly trying to colonize 12 o'clock after "The Colbert Report," the latest attempt being, unpromisingly, a Twitter-themed live show hosted by Chris Hardwick. But Hardwick is at least kind of an ingratiatingly talentless Jimmy Fallon type who manages to make a show fun even when it isn't funny, and the show has at least one or two really funny comedians on the panel every night, so it's not bad to leave on if I don't think I'm gonna be up for very long after Colbert.

f) "The Pete Holmes Show"
Over on TBS, this is what they're toying with putting on after Conan, hosted by a former "Best Week Ever"/VH1 regular who just kind of has this face and voice that makes you want to hate the guy. Surprisingly, I found myself really liking the show, he laughs on camera a lot and general keeps the energy up, but says actually funny and clever things often enough to not be a Fallon/Hardwick-style empty calorie host.

g) "Adam Devine's House Party"
I like "Workaholics," and especially the weird energy Devine brings to the show, and the idea of doing a standup show where they just throw a house party and have comedians perform at it is kinda novel and cool in theory. In practice, though, there's a lot of half-assed sub-"Workaholics" scripted segments that come off like a shitty straight-to-DVD frat party movie.

h) "The Soup Investigates"
I still watch and love "The Soup" but I dunno what kind of terrible contract E! has Joel McHale in that they now have him host a 2nd show every week that is just some kind of terrible off-brand high concept variation on "The Soup" that isn't funny at all. It's not like this guy doesn't have other shit to do.

i) "American Horror Story: Coven"
The first episode of the first season of "American Horror Story" was so excruciatingly bad that I stayed away from the show for two years, even though it turned into an anthology thing with a different story every year. My wife wanted to check out this one, though, and so far it's pretty good. A lot of the creepy Southern gothic stuff is handled even more clumsily than on "True Blood," but it feels like they at least have a handle on the horror genre more than in that first episode that turned me off so much.

j) "The Eric Andre Show"
This show is kinda cool in just how far over the top it goes, but I dunno, it existing for a second season almost seems like a waste. Like, the format is so inherently repetitive as a parody of the tropes of talk shows that it ends up being kind of a mind-numbing limitation in and of itself.

k) "Key & Peele"
This show has really come into its own, to an even greater extent this year than it did last year, especially with the already famous "continental breakfast" sketch. I always get the sense watching the show, though, that I could never find these guys as funny as they find themselves, they're just having way too much fun, to the point that they can't tell when certain premises get run into the ground. In small doses, though, they can be pretty great.

l) "New Girl"
The whole thing with Damon Wayans, Jr. being in the pilot, and then jumping to "Happy Endings" and being replaced with Lamorne Morris has always cast this weird shadow over both shows -- they both fit incredibly well in those respective shows, but the whole thing just underlined their token status in the casting process. So it was kind of cool that as soon as "Happy Endings" was sadly canceled, Wayans stopped by "New Girl," for an episode where Taye Diggs also guested and was really funny, and you suddenly got a peak of what this show could be like if it wasn't just about white people and one token black guy, and it was kinda cool. There's some talk of Wayans staying on the show for a while, perhaps permanently, which would be fine with me.

m) "Sons of Anarchy"
This show continues to be just amazingly brutal, I feel like I watch it just to have my jaw drop from some incredibly violent, awful thing happening. I like how this season has kinda upended expectations, but switching from the Donal Logue storyline to the CCH Pounder one, with all this other stuff happening with Tara and Clay and the Irish. I'm curious if they're gonna set an end date for the show anytime soon, because it amazes me how they can seemingly write their way into a corner over and over and then write their way out of it with even more death and destruction.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 11, 2013 at 11:21 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.