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What to watch on Thursday, March 28...

8pm, The CW
The Vampire Diaries
This has been quite the globe-trotting season so far: First Canada, then New York, and now... small-town Pennsylvania! That’s where Elena and Rebekah go Katherine-hunting in “American Gothic,” and where they bump into Elijah for good measure. Oh, he’s not interested in Katherine or the cure or any of that meshugas—he’s just there for the best damn antiquing east of the Alleghany.

SEASON 1 FINALE, 8:30pm & 9:30pm, NBC
1600 Penn
Hannah Simone tries to bring some of that hip New Girl cred to NBC when she guest-stars as an Andorran princess in tonight’s first outing, “Bursting the Bubble.” And Larry King tries to bring some of that hip “Hey remember in the ‘90s when Larry King was a fairly huge TV pundit?” cred when he guest-stars as Larry King in the second episode and season finale, “Marry Me, Baby,” in which the legality of the president’s marriage may be revealed as less than complete. Sounds like a never-to-be-resolved cliffhanger to me! Because the show is almost certainly going to be canceled, I mean. 

SEASON 3 FINALE, 9pm & 9:30pm, Fox
Raising Hope
Either Fox is pulling one seriously goofy scheduling move here—bringing a Tuesday sitcom out of hibernation on a different night and time for its season finale—or this is by far the most elaborate theme episode Glee has ever attempted. Well, the first half-hour, “Burt Mitzvah: The Musical,” does find Burt turning to song to get in touch with his newly discovered Jewish heritage. No word on whether the second episode, “Mother’s Day,” will offer Maw-Maw the spotlight aria she’s long dreamt of when the Chances visit her childhood home.

9pm, ABC
Grey’s Anatomy
The hospital is flooded with victims of a highway gas tanker explosion, and considering the episode is called “Can’t Fight This Feeling,” it will be a huge missed opportunity if that explosion wasn’t caused by a careening speedwagon. Elsewhere, former TV doctor and new ABC employee Sarah Chalke needs Meredith and Jo to determine the source of her child’s unusual malady.

10pm, ABC
Scandal
It’s Pope & Associates to the rescue when Hollis’s daughter is kidnapped and when David needs sanctuary from the ongoing danger pursuing him. Meanwhile in “Snake in the Garden,” Olivia and Jake’s dalliance heats up, Mellie lays down the law with Fitz, and Cyrus connives to win back the president’s favor.

10pm, FX
Archer
Okay, so a spy, a valet, and the Pope walk into a bar. Well, maybe. Hey, it could be part of Archer’s plan to stop an assassination attempt on the pontiff in “The Papal Chase,” with Woodhouse in tow to act as a decoy. It’s not like it’d be the first plan of Archer’s to entail entering a bar.

10:30pm, Comedy Central
Nathan For You
Nathan’s fear of womenfolk prompts him to date 10 of them at once in what’s either a disquieting kind of shock therapy or a potentially dynamite chorus line. Also, Nathan tries to “scare up” some business for a haunted house, and yes, I’ve just been sued by the Cryptkeeper for making that pun.

11pm, AMC
Immortalized
Dave Houser and a challenger square off in a competition centered on the theme “First Love.” Um. This is... this is still a show about taxidermy, right? Animals? Corpses? Things that maybe don’t fit so snugly or, shall we say, lawfully, with facets of romantic love? AMC, you are already on a short leash after last week. Don’t press your luck.

LATE-NITE:
– Gerard Butler on Chelsea Lately, 11pm, E!
– Author Denise Kiernan on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, 11pm, Comedy Central
– Author and pediatric endocrinologist Robert Lustig on The Colbert Report, 11:30pm, Comedy Central
– Kim Kardashian, Willie Geist, and Imagine Dragons on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, 11:35pm, NBC
– Dwayne Johnson, Saoirse Ronan, and Kendrick Lamar on Jimmy Kimmel Live, 11:35pm, ABC
– Tyler Perry, Nick Offerman, Thom Filicia, and Blake Shelton on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, 12:37am, NBC

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Emily Owens, M.D. S01E01: "Pilot"

Last night The CW premiered its new medical drama, Emily Owens, M.D. Only, I'm sure that when it was in development, everyone referred to it as "that Grey's Anatomy-like show with Meryl Streep's daughter." Emily Owens, M.D.'s pilot tried SO hard to mimic Grey's Anatomy, and its lack of originality really set it back. Overall I liked it, but I felt like it had more weaknesses than strengths.

First, the Grey's similarity. I'm sure network executives think this is a good thing, but for me, it's just lazy. Especially since Emily Owens, M.D. isn't just kind of of like Grey's; it borrows so much!

Granted, we've only seen one episode so far, but the cast is comprised mostly of young, attractive surgical interns, just like Grey's (at least when it first began). It would have been so simple for them to be any other type of doctor. The pilot featured multiple medical cases, all of which could have been plucked straight from an episode of Grey's: There was a little girl who collapsed, a daughter sick of caring for her elderly mother with dementia, and a man who claimed he'd been behind the wheel in a drunk-driving accident to save his goody-goody brother's political aspirations.

Then there's Emily Owens' level of sweetness; feel-good TV can still be good TV, but the pilot was a little too saccharine for my taste. The writing was weak at times, particularly Emily's speech to Will when she told him she liked him. Okay, she's been crushing on her colleague Will since they were in medical school, and one of the plots of the pilot involved Emily working up the nerve to tell him.

But when she did, she went way over the top, saying that when she watched him cut up a cadaver's heart, she thought, "He's holding my heart in his hands!" Please. I know this is something a girl like Emily might think, but who would say something like that in real life? I guess if I wanted to see real life I wouldn't be watching television, and but I expected more out of Emily's doomed love announcement.

Emily's relationship with her old high school bully, Cassandra, is also super cliché. Cassandra used to pick on her in high school, so when Emily realized Cassandra is now one of her fellow interns she was terrified... until Cassandra admitted that the reason she was mean to Emily in high school was that her little brother was very ill. Confronting your nemesis from high school has been done so many times. I was hoping the show could put an original spin on it, but "It turns out she's actually not that bad!" isn't particularly unique.

However, that's not to say the pilot didn't have strengths. There are a lot of little good things about the show, and one huge one: Mamie Gummer.

Gummer (who, yes, is Meryl Streep's daughter) is absolutely delightful. I want her to be my friend, I want to call her when I'm about to eat a whole pan of brownies and have her talk me down. She has the same glow as her mother, the one that makes you want to curl up with her on the couch with your head in her lap and listen to stories. Whether or not Emily Owens, M.D. goes on to be successful, I really hope Gummer gets more gigs after this. Or, you know, becomes my live-in companion. Either one is acceptable.

The show uses Gummer's superhuman charisma very well. In the little-girl plot, the girl insisted Emily be in the room during her surgery. With another actress, this might be hard to believe, or even ridiculous. Okay, it was still a little of both of those things, but with Gummer, I had a hard time buying that little girl wouldn't want Emily there for her surgery. I've never even met the woman, but if I found out I needed surgery tomorrow, I'd probably demand that Gummer-as-Emily show up for it. I can only imagine that in person she has some kind of aura that makes kittens and puppies follow her around as she auditions for ingenue roles.

Emily's friend, Tyra, could also turn out to be one of the show's strengths, depending on where the writers go with her character. I suspect that she's more than she seems, and that she was actually the one who stole Emily's pager (Emily assumed it was Cassandra). It was also pretty suspicious that Tyra warned Emily to watch out for the other interns right before offering to be her BFF. If Tyra turns out to be a maniacal backstabber I could be interested, but if she's just a nice girl then I'm bored. I hope the writers didn't think that making her a lesbian would automatically make her interesting.

In the end, Emily Owens' optimism, which does often come off as a sugar-overdose, could play in its favor. I've often found Grey's Anatomy to be pretty dark, but Emily Owens, comes off far more lighthearted. Sometimes you just want to snuggle up next to a warm fire when the world outside is dark and cold. Especially if Mamie Gummer is there to tell you stories.

QUESTIONS:

– What type of under-portrayed doctor do you want to see in a TV drama?

– Who do you think stole Emily's pager?

– Were there any other big strengths or weaknesses I missed?

– Will you be watching Episode 2?

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Alphas S02E05: "Gaslight"

There were lots of little things to like in last night's episode of Alphas, "Gaslight," mostly related to the show's big picture. But I was less enthused that "Gaslight" was a haunted-hospital episode that departed from the series' regular tone; it was basically an amateur horror movie, complete with plenty of blinking fluorescent bulbs. But in this "take the good with the bad" scenario, we can dismiss the bad (and really, it wasn't all THAT bad) as confined to the episode and not a sign that Alphas as a whole is in trouble. Just don't make it a habit, Alphas.

I'm a bad-news-first kind of guy, so let's start with the case of the week. "Gaslight" started off with an Alpha named Adam identifying his sister's body as she was stuffed into the wall cabinets of a hospital morgue. But as he was walking away, he heard sis call out and then twitched, freaked out a bit, and crawled along the walls trying to escape from some handsy hospital workers. It was immediately distressing as we were all like, "Excuse me, Alphas, but what exactly is going on here?" But what was clear to me was that someone was messing with Adam's mind. And as our team of Alphas investigated the hospital, things started messing with their minds, too.

I'm all for horror and Alphas giving it a shot, but I don't think the payoff (or lack thereof) was worth it. I'm sure that Adam was planted in the story to be a diversion and that we were supposed to believe he was somehow connected to all the mind tricks affecting Rachel, Gary, Bill, and Hicks, but I always saw Adam as another victim. In fact, there was so little forward progress with answers and so much attention on mind-f*ckery that these hallucinations lingered a bit too long. Alphas is normally great at moving things along, but the midsection of "Gaslight" ran in place and was more concerned with maintaining an already loose horror theme. I could have done with less being freaked out over Cameron's visions of his son and Gary locking Rosen out of the room where the real culprit was, and I would have loved more answers or more time spent on the explanation of the infrasound haunting. As far as I could tell, there was a comatose Alpha who was transmitting infrasound messages that scrambled the brains of Alphas, but not regular people. That's a pretty lousy Alpha ability, if you ask me.

However, what was revealed through these "hauntings" was pretty cool, especially with regard to Gary. Our favorite character saw visions of his old flame Anna, and coupled with Gary's visit to her way-too-late tombstone-unveiling, it had a much bigger emotional impact than the visions the others had (like keeping the memory of her alive through a bogus account that pays homage to her). And though it wasn't clearly explained whether these visions were of people the characters needed to confront, be afraid of, or help (Rosen's theory), it was interesting to see how Gary's manifestation of Anna compared to the others. Anna was almost a dream to Gary, while the others were nightmares. Hicks had visions of his son in trouble, Bill had to fight himself, and Rachel saw Nina at the bottom of a pool. That last one carries a lot of weight, given Rachel and Nina's current relationship status. Does Rachel, who shut out Nina, secretly long to save her? It's all open to interpretation, but it feels like that's what was going on because nothing was clearly explained.

What did work for me was the way the episode continued Alphas' commitment to deliver for its fans over the casual viewer. The continuation of Nina's story from last week's very strong episode showed a lot of respect for the character. Sometimes, especially with shows labeled "procedurals," there's a rush to bring things back to normal at the end of every episode, but Nina still has a lot of recovery to do and her relationship with the rest of the team is brittle at best. And it's not just about repairing her fractured friendships. Alphas is finding realistic ways to keep her in the loop, and Rosen has found good uses for her power (helping out Kat, helping him learn more about Stanton Parish) to keep her effectively separated from the more investigative portion of the team. Many shows have a problem with finding uses for all their characters and will sometimes force situations to validate characters, but Alphas doesn't.

The show even gave us a realistic heads-up for the next episode. Rosen discovered that the photic stimulators used in the hospital were made by August Medical, which he traced back to Stanton Parish. It's not clear what these photic stimulators do, but Rosen delighted Summer Glau fans everywhere when he asked Gary to call up Skyler (the machine whiz from last season) in hopes she can figure out why Parish has distributed these devices to 2,700 hospitals across the country.

"Gaslight" did touch on a lot of things Alphas does well and sufficiently took the next step in season-long plotting, but the self-contained case wasn't as sharp as others. Thankfully the cases aren't actually vital to the series, as its strengths are with its characters and the bigger story.

– Rachel's "I'm not a dog" probably got the biggest laugh from me, mostly because it was Rachel saying it, which made it that much funnier. But Hicks talking about black guys in horror movies was a close second.

– I do think the show did a nice job with the mood and atmosphere of horror, but it just went on a bit too long when it felt unnecessary.

– What kind of terrible memories is Kat going to unearth? I'm scared, guys!

– Oh, hi Lauren Holly (she played the senator)! You're looking... kinda old. Was Dumb & Dumber that long ago?

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