Grrl TV

One thing I’ve always said about TNT’s Saving Grace is that the show is very much an acquired taste. That’s the trait that kept me from liking the cop drama for more than a season, and once I forced myself to give it a second chance and sit through an entire episode, that’s the trait that also made it grow on me. Fortunately, Holly Hunter’s Grace Hanadarko and her familiar Oklahoma City Police Department colleagues are still chugging along on the fine line between irritating and gripping during tonight’s (June 16) Season Three premiere “We’re Already Here.”

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Film actress Jada Pinkett Smith both stars in and executive produces the medical drama HawthoRNe, TNT’s latest original series aimed at expanding the network’s reputation as an outlet for TV shows featuring strong and complicated female leads.
Smith plays the title character, Christina Hawthorne, the Chief Nursing Officer at Virginia’s Richmond Trinity Hospital. She’s also a recently widowed single mother of a difficult teenage daughter named Camille (Hannah Hodson) following her late husband’s death from cancer one year ago.

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TNT has a dramatic night of premieres in store for viewers today (June 16), and kicking it all off at 8pm ET is the basic-cable network’s first-ever unscripted series Wedding Day. The newcomer has prestigious backers — Mark Burnett Productions and DreamWorks Television — and a prominent pair of hosts, upscale event planner Alan Dunn and high-end wedding designer Diann Valentine, both of whom do much of their work in the extravagant and demanding celebrity world.
Since I’m not a fan of most reality shows, especially those that deal with romantic relationships, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Wedding Day …read more

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If my many recent blog posts on The Closer haven’t made it clear that the TNT show’s fifth season opens tonight at 9pm ET, let me publish one final reminder. After watching the premiere episode called “Products of Discovery” in advance, I have no trouble assuring viewers that the series is still in top form, despite the changes that TNT has advised are coming up this summer.
Tonight’s premiere features a particularly disturbing case involving the early-morning mass murder of four family members: mother Cynthia Rivera, her young children Lucia and Miguel Rivera, and her mother Diana Alvarez. As is standard …read more

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The second season of USA Network’s In Plain Sight kicks off tonight, April 19, at 10pm ET with the premiere episode “Gilted Lily.” When we last saw New Mexico-based U.S. Marshal Mary Shannon (Mary McCormack), she had just survived a brutal kidnapping and killed a man in the process of escaping.
In Plain Sight’s sophomore run picks up almost exactly where we left off. Mary is now on obligatory administrative leave, pending a psychological evaluation to determine if she’s fit to return to active duty. In the meantime, Mary’s exacerbating mother Jinx (Lesley Ann Warren) and sister Brandi …read more

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Episode: GhostOriginal Air Date: February 13, 2009
“Nothing is what it appears to be.”
That’s what Adelle DeWitt (Olivia Williams) tells Eliza Dushku’s character Caroline — not Echo — in the first scene of the first episode of Dollhouse. DeWitt seems to think Caroline is volunteering for whatever she has in mind for the next five years to help the young woman start anew afterwards with a “clean slate,” but reluctant Caroline feels she has no choice in the matter. Apparently, Caroline got into some kind of mess while trying to take her place in the world and make a …read more

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Episode: The Good WoundOriginal Air Date: February 13, 2009
The Sarah Connor Chronicles’s midseason return is another one of the series’ “quiet storm” episodes. Not a whole lot happens action-wise until near the end, when Shirley Manson’s Catherine Weaver goes all liquid-metal terminator on a warehouse-full of people’s butts and kills them dead. Or should I say slices and dices and stabs them dead and then blows them and the entire building up?
She’s angry, you see, because John Henry — eerier than ever as he plays with action figures and talks about all he’s learned surfing the Web to …read more

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True to the precedent set by Damages’ complicated and twisted first season, there’s so much going on during the second-season premiere “I Lied, Too,” I almost feel sorry for any viewers trying to jump in without having watched or at least read recaps of the first season.
Expected complexity aside, something still seems to be missing from Damages this time around: last season’s urgent (emphasis intended) sense of mystery that arose the moment bloody, dazed, and nearly naked Ellen Parsons appeared onscreen and meandered through the streets of Manhattan before winding up at a police station, where she was questioned by …read more

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Spoilers, Spoilers, Spoilers Ahead!
After watching last night’s “Hello, Goodbye, Amen” episode of 90210, I have to wonder if showrunners are serious about viewers believing Harry Wilson is intelligent enough to be the principal of an entire high school. If so, he’s got to be one of the dumbest administrators in the history of secondary education, too.
In short, here’s what happened on the episode, which takes place right after winter break at West Bev:
ANNIE
Suspicious Annie and her mother Debbie finally convince totally clueless Harry (He’s my son! I just know he is! I feel it in my gut!) …read more

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Lucky Time columnist James Poniewozik has seen the revamped pilot of the Joss Whedon and Eliza Dushku series Dollhouse, and he gives the premiere episode a fairly optimistic review.
Says the television writer of the screener he watched: “[T]he first episode … is well enough written to be absorbing. Writing a crime hour doesn’t seem like Whedon’s thing, but the episode is tight, suspenseful, with intriguing psychological twists and flashes of Whedonesque humor.”
Of course, that positive comes with a potential negative, namely that “Dollhouse as conceived (a heroine plays a different “person” every week) is less a series concept than an …read more

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