Photo by: Virginia Sherwood/Bravo

TV Tonight: Around the World in 80 Plates

What do you get when you cross Top Chef with The Amazing Race? Sadly, disappointed.

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TV Tonight: Scandal

ABC

Sleek, savvy and very, very talky, Scandal is, if not an absorbing political thriller, at least smart escapism. But like many politicians, it doesn’t trust its audience to deal with much subtlety.

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TV Tonight: Community-mentum?

Lewis Jacobs/NBC

I’m not going to tell you to watch Community tonight. Don’t take that to mean I don’t love the show. Instead, let me just give the Community fans a couple of pieces of encouraging news, for once.

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TV Tonight: Awake

Lewis Jacobs/NBC

This fascinating dual-life cop drama presents a twisty premise without being fatally confusing; and it tells a story of a man grieving two losses—his wife and his son, each in a different “reality”—while being hopeful, even uplifting.

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TV Tonight: The Loving Story

HBO

For Richard and Mildred Loving, their marriage was a pretty simple matter. They grew up in a small Virginia town where everyone pretty much knew everyone, fell in love (not without some obstacles; she found him “arrogant” at first) and got hitched. For the enforcers of Virginia’s anti-miscegenation laws, their marriage was also a simple [...]

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TV Tonight: The River

ABC/BOB D'AMICO

ABC’s mockumentary/shockumentary trip from hell (or rather, into hell) on the Amazon shows that, even when it comes to fiction, there’s nothing scarier than reality TV.

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TV Tonight: Touch

FOX

The part of me who wants networks to branch out from cop, lawyer and doctor dramas wants to praise Touch for trying something different. But the part of me who actually watched the pilot has to recognize that it is at least 50% hoo-hah.

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TV Tonight: The Sing-Off Sings Itself Off

Copyright Tuned In Jr. and Tuned In Jr. Jr.

The most important show on television, The Sing-Off, ends its first regular-season outing—and, if I’m to guess from the ratings, possibly its last—tonight with a live finale. As I wrote earlier, together with Top Chef it’s one of the only primetime shows we watch as a family with the Tuned In Jrs.; from it, they’ve [...]

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TV Tonight: Suburgatory

ABC

There are a lot of things that critics look when reviewing pilots: premise, plot, dialogue, chemistry between actors, directing and so on. To me the most important is an intangible that’s hard to put a finger on, but without which you don’t have a show worth watching: voice.

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TV Tonight: Fringe

FOX

A quick reminder that tonight is the return of Fringe, which more or less fully embraced the weirdness of its battle-between-the-mirror-universes story last season and lived to tell the tale. There’s not much I can say about tonight’s season premiere without spoiling where the show leaves the resolution of last season’s finale—in which Peter’s step [...]

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TV Tonight: Person of Interest

CBS

Particularly when you have only a pilot to go on, reviewing a new TV series can be more like describing a forked path, and guessing which way each turn could lead. This was how it was this year with, for instance, 2 Broke Girls, whose pilot could continue down a good path (suggested by the [...]

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ABC’s Revenge: Are You Ready for Some Class Warfare?

ABC

Earlier this week, President Obama put forward a deficit-reduction plan that, pointedly, involved raising taxes and closing loopholes for the wealthiest Americans. Republicans, as they often have when facing a proposal that picks on the richest, widely labeled the Obama plan “class warfare.” I’m interested to see how this argument plays out politically, because I [...]

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TV Tonight: 2 Broke Girls, Playboy Club

Playboy_HORIZ

Tonight brings the debuts of two network premieres, CBS’s 2 Broke Girls and NBC’s The Playboy Club, which I covered in my roundup in this week’s TIME of series focusing on female characters. It’s a busy season, and neither pilot has changed from their original versions in ways that would significantly shake my preview Test [...]

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TV Tonight: Season 7 of Sunny and an Archer Bonus

FX

Consider this more a public service announcement than a review (I’ve been too busy with fall pilots to get through all the screeners), but FX’s Thursday comedy block returns tonight, a week before NBC’s does. Starting off is It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia; in the premiere, Frank (Danny DeVito) falls for the tender ministrations of [...]

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Love to H8; Plus, My Fall Review Plans

I know it’s not really critically responsible to simply link to someone else’s review of a show and say, “What he said,” but I’m going to do that with Daniel Fienberg’s review of The CW’s H8R, starting tonight, because (1) I’m not doing a full-length review of every new show debuting over the next few [...]

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TV Tonight: Ringer

CW

When I previewed the pilot of The CW’s twin-noir thriller Ringer earlier this summer, I wanted to be charitable. Partly because, like many of you, I suspect, I loved Sarah Michelle Gellar in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But also because the pilot seemed more technically rough than most—a lot of awkward greenscreen and splitscreen effects [...]

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TV Tonight: Sons of Anarchy Goes Back to Cali

FX

The third season of Sons of Anarchy was, shall we say, divisive. The chief issue that divided fan from fan, critic from critic, and creator Kurt Sutter from people who criticized creator Kurt Sutter was the season’s long sojourn in Northern Ireland, where the abducted son of protagonist Jax Teller (Charlie Hunnam) was spirited away [...]

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TV Tonight: The Hour

AMC may have had a hell of a time figuring out whether to bring Mad Men back, for how much money and at what length, but other networks are not hesitating (despite the show’s relatively paltry ratings) to put their own versions of Mad Men on the air—or, at least, their own versions of social [...]

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TV Tonight 2: One Last Alarm Sounds for Rescue Me

Together with Damages, one more landmark cable drama returns this evening: Rescue Me, in which Denis Leary and Peter Tolan have confronted the aftermath of 9/11 with black comedy and/or comedic drama since 2004. I have mixed feelings about the series: for a couple of seasons it was a searing, fearless examination of loss and [...]

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TV Tonight: Torchwood: Miracle Day

I remember once watching a sketch* about an all-you-can-eat restaurant that hid a horrible secret: the diners were not allowed to eat all they wanted to, but rather forced to eat all they could physically hold. The premise of Torchwood: Miracle Day, the Americanization of the British Torchwood series that debuts tonight on Starz, is [...]