From HBO to PBS: What's Coming Up On TV This Spring

The holidays are over and that means so are the doldrums of television.  Finally, we TV addicts will get new episodes of favorite shows and premieres of a whole crop of new shows.  And as your intrepid TV watcher, I'm here to tell you about the shows I'll be excited to see debut on my flat screen.

New Shows

 

Smash is NBC attempt at reproducing the success of Glee, and they've recruited American Idol alum, Katherine McPhee to star.  It's about producers mounting a new Broadway show.  It's from the producer's of the film Chicago and also stars Debra Messing and Anjelica Houston. This has the potential to be a fabulous show, and if the writing lives up to the premise, NBC may finally have a hit on its hands.

Keifer Sutherland returns to Fox with a role that's very different from 24's Jack Bauer.  That of a father whose 11-year-old son is emotionally challenged and communicates with the world in a very unusual way in Touch.  The whole premise of the show and how the kid communicates through numbers and shows how people are interconnected all over the world is a little hard to describe, but I'm willing to give it a chance.  It co-stars Danny Glover.

Also on Fox is Alcatraz, the latest show from J.J. Abrams about a police detective who tracks a grisly modern day murder to an Alcatraz prisoner that died 30 years ago.  I said it was J.J. Abrams, didn't I?  And where J.J. goes, I follow.  The show stars Sarah Jones (pictured below), Sam Neill and Jorge Garcia.

 

The march of film stars turning to television in search of edgy drama and quality writing continues as the versatile Don Cheadle stars in Showtime's House of Lies, about less than ethical corporate consultants and their clients. Showtime is still basking in the glow of its masterful thriller, Homeland, which just concluded, and if House of Lies, which premiered this week, comes even close to that kind of quality, it'll be a grand show indeed.