Summer Cable Sneak Peek: ‘Breaking Bad,’ ‘Wilfred,’ ‘True Blood,’ ‘Teen Wolf’ and Much More
Sundays, 9 p.m., HBO
Poor Sookie Stackhouse. When we last saw Louisiana's sexiest telepathic waitress, she was devastated to learn that her lover, Vampire Bill, had been ordered to seduce Sookie (Anna Paquin). It didn't matter that Bill (Paquin's husband, Stephen Moyer) had fallen in love with her – the betrayal was real. And so Sookie is poised to fall into the arms of Vampire Eric, played by Alexander Skarsgård.
If a love triangle between vampires and a small-town waitress sounds over-the-top, then you probably weren't one of the 11.8 million viewers who watched the True Blood Season Three finale. "It's easy to wonder, 'Oh, who is Sookie gonna pick?' " says Alan Ball, the show's creator. "I know it's female wish fulfillment, but it's also like, 'Well, who gets the prize?' All the vampires are going, 'She's mine, she's mine,' but why should she be anybody's? Why shouldn't they be hers? Why do men always get to make all the rules?"
Read the rest of Doree Shafrir's story here.
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‘Breaking Bad’
Sundays, 10 p.m., AMC
A familiar sense of anxiety and dread hangs over nearly every moment of the opening episode of the fourth season of Breaking Bad. Walter White, the one-time high school chemistry teacher turned crystal-meth cook, frantically tries to talk his way out of his own impending execution. His partner, Jesse Pinkman, is still in a state of shock, having just committed an unpardonable act of violence against a rival meth chef. Walter's disappearance has his crooked lawyer panicking and his wife driven to distraction. For the climax, we get yet another startling, brutal murder, choreographed with deadly precision like a psychopathic, blood-drenched ballet.
If the first three seasons of Breaking Bad firmly established the show as one of the grimmest sagas of our time, an ambitious bid to explore an American dream gone horribly wrong, then the opening salvo of Season Four is a wrenching promise to plunge even deeper into the morass. But the puzzling marvel of Breaking Bad is that it is at once both so bleak and yet so watchable. "I'm as surprised as anyone that this show resonates at all," says creator Vince Gilligan, who earned his producing stripes working on The X-Files. "I scratch my head sometimes. How does it even exist?"
Read the rest of Andrew Leonard's story here.
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‘Wilfred’
Thursdays, 10 p.m., FX
It's hard to describe Wilfred without sounding like you just gobbled an angel-dust fajita, but here goes: Elijah Wood makes friends with a talking dog owned by the girl next door. Nobody else can hear the dog talk except Wood. And he's played by a guy in a dog suit. When we first meet Wood, he's a depressed ex-lawyer at the end of his rope, sweating over drafts of his suicide note. But then he meets Wilfred, who seems like a normal dog to the rest of the world but appears to Wood as a motormouth hedonist with a human face who babbles like a canine Russell Brand. Wilfred gets him stoned and bonds with him over their mutual love of Dune, and before long, Wilfred's goading him into robbing a neighbor's house so they can crash his drug stash, proclaiming, "We're gonna need a bigger bong!" It's a remake of a hit Australian comedy, with Jason Gann reprising his role as the dog. There's some kind of Sigmund and the Sea Monsters-meets-Donnie Darko thing going on, with the whole imaginary-friend Mr. Snuffleupagus motif. It's a daring move for Wood, not to mention FX, but here's the weirdest part of it all: This is the funniest and trippiest of summer's new comedies even if you can smell the pot-soaked carpet in the writers' room.
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‘Falling Skies’
This lofty alien-invasion story from executive producer Steven Spielberg goes heavy on the special effects. But none of the movie magic can top Noah Wyle's beard. It makes him look like a preppy Chuck Norris. In other words, just the action hero to lead the human rebellion against the space invaders. The basic idea is War of the Worlds, but it's more like Battlestar Galactica with a side order of Red Dawn.
The "skitters," as the humans call the aliens, are nasty long-legged killing machines – a mix of Aliens and the bugs from Starship Troopers. As the story opens, they've got Earth under their control, turning human teens into packs of harness-wearing hypnotized zombies. Wyle is the mild-mannered history professor from Boston who helps fight them off, giving his fellow human soldiers inspirational pep talks about how they're like the Athenians fighting Sparta, or the Red Sox in the 2004 ALCS. "We don't have to kill them all," he says. "We just gotta kill enough of them. If we can make it too costly, too painful for them to stay, then they'll leave. They're wolves, we gotta be porcupines!" (Better porcupines than wolverines.)
The whole project has a Spielberg feel, with sensitive depictions of post-apocalyptic grief, and a hot doctor played by former Laker girl Moon Bloodgood. Not all the subplots work, and the bad-guy characters are eye-rollingly smarmy. But Wyle is likable enough to make you root for the human race anyway. ROB SHEFFIELD
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‘Louie’
Thursdays, 10:30 p.m., FX
What's going on in the next chapter of Louis C.K.'s life? Will he show off his radiant personality, like a little baldheaded sunbeam? Or will he just keep on being the misanthropic creep who shocked America into laughing at his problems last time?
The second season of Louie is more of a one-man-band show than ever – not only does he star, write and direct, he now edits the whole thing solo. That's right – he's gotten less sociable. Louie was always considered a comedian's comedian, too inside-baseball for mass appeal, but as a sitcom dad, he clearly struck a nerve with people. Nobody since Richard Pryor has made the life of a full-time comic look so depressing – it's a sordid business making people laugh, and it turns funny guys into monsters like this. ROB SHEFFIELD
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‘Whisker Wars’
Fridays, 11 p.m., IFC
At last: an in-depth look at the world of competitive bearding. The hairy gents of Beard Team USA are training for the world championships in Norway, where top beardsmen clash in categories like Imperial Moustache and Full Beard Freestyle. Their big star: Jack Passion, the defending champ, who was the first American to win Full Beard Natural. As he says, "That name is 'Jack Passion, World Beard Champion.' It's not 'Jack Passion, Awesome Guy With a Beard.' " He's also written The Facial Hair Handbook, which he calls "the cornerstone of my beard empire."
Whisker Wars is so funny you keep thinking it has to be some lost Will Ferrell movie, but it's a documentary series from the same producer who gave us Ice Road Truckers. These are some sublimely twisted characters – where else can you hear someone brag that he's the "Muhammad Ali of beards"? If you don't choke up when you hear the legendary Willi Chevalier recount how he lost three-quarters of his whiskers in a "tragic power-drill accident," you have no heart. Or maybe you just have no follicles. ROB SHEFFIELD
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‘Torchwood’
Fridays, 10 p.m., Starz
The long-running Doctor Who spinoff comes to America, bringing a crack team of time-traveling agents to Los Angeles. Their mission: Find out why the entire human race has stopped dying. And since this is Torchwood: Miracle Day, it probably involves sinister aliens. Like the first three seasons on the BBC, the American-themed quasi-reboot stars John Barrowman as the dashing Captain Jack Harkness, an omnisexual stud from the 51st century. He has some of his old crew, as well as a few new faces, but you don't have to know anything about Torchwood or Doctor Who to enjoy the science-fiction shenanigans and campy dialogue. There's also a brilliant star turn from Bill Pullman as a death-row psychopath who somehow survives his own lethal injection. ROB SHEFFIELD
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‘John Benjamin Has a Van’
Wednesdays, 10:30 p.m., Comedy Central
You may know comedian H. Jon Benjamin as the voice of Archer – he's one of the hardest-working voice actors in the business. He also has an uncanny resemblance to the Men's Wearhouse guy. ("You're going to like the way you look!") But his new Comedy Central series is a riotous mix of fake news and skits, produced by Funny or Die. Benjamin and his crew get in the van to roam America, staging pranks everywhere from the Mexican border to public bathrooms, where Benjamin tries to host the quiz show Cash Stall. He also interviews a war veteran with "pre-traumatic stress disorder" – he lost his voice screaming with fear in basic training. There's something ramshackle about the whole show, yet that just adds to the gestalt – if a gag bombs, you know there will be another equally obnoxious one in less than a minute. ROB SHEFFIELD
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‘Childrens Hospital’
Thursdays, midnight, Adult Swim
A group of children play soccer on the grass. Their ball rolls under a fence marked "Quicksand Farm." One of the girls whispers, "If you go get the ball, we'll let you play 'German soldier, girl prisoners' with us again." Before you know it, a little boy is sinking in quicksand, which means it's go time for the Childrens Hospital team. Rob Corddry's absurdist romp is one of the funniest and most morally indefensible shows out there, with a deep bench that includes Ken Marino, Megan Mullally, Henry Winkler and Corddry himself in terrifying clown makeup. Guest star: Sarah Silverman as Corddry's long-lost clown love, whom he left years ago, telling her, "I gotta travel the Earth and bring the healing power of laughter to children. Plus I really want to bang an Asian chick." For bonus laughs, there's the spinoff parody procedural, NTSF: SD: SUV:: – National Terrorism Strike Force: San Diego: Sport Utility Vehicle::. ROB SHEFFIELD
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‘Suits’
Thursdays, 10 p.m., USA
USA Network continues its stranglehold on breezy Eighties-style dramas about swaggering meatballs in designer threads. On this channel, you're never more than a few minutes away from some yuppie asshole putting on his shades and saying, "Let's do this." Suits is another show about Manhattan corporate lawyers, but with a bit of Fringe thrown in. Patrick J. Adams plays a stoner scam artist who never finished college but memorized all the legal books so he could make cash taking other people's law-school entrance exams. But he dreams of something bigger, so he joins a white-shoe law firm, where his new mentor Gabriel Macht walks around saying things like, "I'm not about caring. I'm about winning!" (Why can't he be about both? "I could explain it to you – but then I'd have to care about you." Snap!) Can a slick Harvard Law closer and a self-taught legal whiz team up to solve some tough cases? Can they make their own rules? Will they meet some hot-to-trot ladies? If you're a fan of the USA formula, you already know the answers. Not to mention most of the dialogue. ROB SHEFFIELD
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‘Burn Notice’
Thursdays, 9 p.m., USA
Nobody has better job security than a burned spy. It’s now the fifth season of Burn Notice, and they’re still trying to wipe this guy out? How hard would it be for the CIA assassins to slip some napalm into the Miami mousse supply? By now, even the terminally chill Jeffrey Donovan looks a little perplexed at it all. He's back in the CIA fold, but off the books, as a "civilian intelligence asset." That gives him carte blanche to pursue his private investigation of the evil conspiracy that targeted him. More importantly, it lets him keep dispensing his helpful-hint voice-overs about how to be a better spy. Donovan walks through one showdown after another, clearly giving even less of a crap than usual. And for this man, that’s a real achievement. ROB SHEFFIELD
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‘Teen Wolf’
Mondays, 10 p.m., MTV
How many times have you sat around watching your battered VHS tape of Teen Wolf and telling yourself, "Man, this movie was incredible. Michael J. Fox? A genius! But who is going to carry on his vision into the 21st century?" Finally, MTV has answered the call, remaking a comedy that nobody else would ever think needed a remake. The premise is Twilight with werewolves, with Tyler Posey as the high school loser who gets lycanthropic. The strange thing about Teen Wolf is how dark and serious it is, with nocturnal cinematography and labored attempts to build suspense – it's almost like they're trying to make a real horror movie here. But it can be affecting, since being a werewolf is always such an apt metaphor for the adolescent experience. Being in high school and being a beast with taboo blood-lust urges are basically the same thing. ROB SHEFFIELD
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‘Ice Loves Coco’
Sundays, 10:30 p.m., E!
E! Network's latest contribution to the "domestic-bliss reality show starring Playmates with asses the size of Escalades" genre stars Coco, the model who's married to Ice-T. These lovebirds are a fun couple – even for old-school hip-hop fans who fondly remember Ice's first wife, Darlene, from his album covers. This will no doubt end up as your Sunday-night-drinking companion of the summer. ROB SHEFFIELD
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