Monday, July 9, 2012
TV Tonight: The Closer, Perception, Opening Act
Posted By Bill Frost on July 9, 2012, 3:25 PM
What's new on the idjit box tonight:
The Closer, Perception (TNT) Summer Premiere, Series Debut: Kyra Sedgwick is hanging up LAPD chief Brenda Lee Johnson’s thrift-chic outfits and Southern drawl after seven seasons of The Closer, the show that put TNT in the original-drama game—just like The Shield did for FX, ---minus the body count and drugs (Brenda Lee’s Los Angeles has no narcotics trade, apparently). The Closer made it possible for TNT to launch other excellent series like Leverage, middling fare like Rizzoli & Isles and Franklin & Bash, and some real WTF? calls like Hawthorne, Memphis Beat and the new Perception. Would you believe it, Eric McCormack (Will & Grace) as a brilliant-but-rumpled neuroscience professor/paranoid schizophrenic hired to work with the FBI? He’s Monk, he’s The Mentalist, he’s … The Monkalist?
Opening Act (E!) Series Debut: Reality-talent leech Nigel Lythgoe (American Idol, So You Think You Can Dance, the general decline of Western civilization) introduces his laziest “star-making” series yet. Get this: “Lythgoe and his A-List Artist Development Team [including Mary J. Blige and something called Antonina Armato] comb the Internet to find the Web’s most talented amateurs, then give them the once-in-a-lifetime chance to open for a top music superstar.” No judges, just cruising YouTube to stumble across some auto-tuned hayseed to warm up for equally “talented” “musical” acts like Nicki Minaj and LMFAO. If FX’s Brand X weren’t so firmly ensconced as The Worst New Show on Television, we’d have a contender here.
Also new tonight:
Burning Love (Yahoo.com); The Glass House, The
Bachelorette (ABC); Hell’s Kitchen,
MasterChef (Fox); The Secret Life of the American Teenager, Bunheads (ABC Family);
Pawn Stars (History); Gene Simmons’ Family Jewels (A&E); The Real Housewives of New York City (Bravo);
Cake Boss, Four Houses (TLC); Undercover Stings (Spike); Teen Wolf (MTV); Top Gear (BBC
America); The Bad Girls Club: Mexico (Oxygen); Eureka, Lost Girl (Syfy)
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