John Adams

MONDAY

Start fresh! That’s what ABC is begging its viewers to do tonight with Samantha Who? (9:30 p.m.). Its rookie run had been going swimmingly until the writers strike. Starring Christina Applegate and Melissa McCarthy (Sookie from the Gilmore Girls), the show returns in the midst of a heated battle for Monday nights.  read more »

All kinds of people are watching HBO’s seven-part miniseries John Adams, which airs its fifth installment, "Unite or Die," on Sunday night at 9 p.m. Some are HBO loyalists, who will try anything the network puts on the table at least once (even John From Cincinnati, the network’s most glorious failure). Others are people like my parents, who prefer the BBC and PBS and (at least in my dad’s case) war documentaries over edgier network fare. And still others are people more like myself: avid fans of the television, in general, who are bored out of their skulls wandering the post-writers'-strike wasteland of nighttime programming. Is everything on hiatus? Brothers and Sisters, we await your return!

Still, though many young people confess that they are watching the show, nobody seems to talk about it the way they talked about The Sopranos.  read more »