TV Guru

HBO turns the James M. Cain novel/Joan Crawford movie “Mildred Pierce” into a prestige project: a five-part miniseries starring Kate Winslet as a beleaguered mom-turned-businesswoman in the 1930s (Sunday, 8 p.m.). The story is your basic trashy melodrama, but director Todd Haynes treats it with misguided tastefulness. The pace is slow (I smell Emmys), the palette is muted (I smell Emmys), and Winslet plays her part with excruciating earnestness (boy, do I smell Emmys). In part one, we watch Mildred trudge from divorce to job-hunting, trying to preserve her dignity during the Great Depression. The costume department seems to be…

“Dancing with the Stars” (Monday, 7 p.m., ABC) had always been a silly showcase for bad dancing. But last season, it took an ugly turn. Sarah Palin’s daughter Bristol joined the competition (even though the title includes the word “stars”) and proceeded to touch off a civil war in the United States. Unaccountably, Bristol kept advancing to the next round, despite her clunky moves and her relatively poor assessments from the judges. Tea Party supporters were allegedly stuffing the ballot box, while Democrats (and even some conservatives with aesthetic standards) cried foul. Bristol only intensified the crisis with her divisive…

You will be tempted to bypass “Best Player” (Saturday, 7 p.m.) because it is a kids’ movie on Nickelodeon. Do not, I repeat do not, make this mistake. The tale of an overgrown videogame champion (Jerry Trainor) attempting to undercut his embarrassingly young and female rival (Jennette McCurdy) is one of the funniest things I’ve seen on TV this season. It features expert farce, a pitch-perfect satire of the gaming world, and a deliciously awkward romance. The latter includes such classic lines as: “I love her so much I could barf my heart out.” Trainor’s Quincy is a twentysomething slacker…

“America’s Next Great Restaurant” (Sunday, 7 p.m., NBC) is a brilliant concept for a reality series, and it’s also brilliantly executed. It searches for entrepreneurs who have a viable scheme for a “fast-casual” restaurant – in other words, the next Chipotle – and takes them through the steps for making their dream a reality. They will hire chefs, design graphics, operate their own food trucks, etc. Guiding them through this process are four articulate judges with experience in the field, including Chipotle founder Steve Ells and chef Bobby Flay. In a clever twist, the judges are also the investors who…

For once, I feel like the gods are with me on Oscar night (Sunday, 7 p.m., ABC). I think Christopher Nolan is an overrated director, and he got shut out of the Best Director category for Inception. The overrated Black Swan and The Social Network also got their share of snubs. On the other hand, I’m delighted with the abundance of nominations for The King’s Speech and True Grit, along with the shout-outs for less commercial projects such as Blue Valentine, Winter’s Bone and The Kids Are All Right. And it’s good to see Toy Story 3 in the Best…

In the spin-off “Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior” (Wednesday, 9 p.m., CBS), an elite team of FBI agents use unlikely behavioral analysis to catch unlikely psychopaths. Forest Whitaker sets the tone as team leader Sam Cooper: grim determination. So grim that it makes the original “Criminal Minds” look like a salsa dance-off. Would it kill “Suspect Behavior” to vary this tone every once in a while? Couldn’t they, say, throw in some humor? Or rage? Or personality? “Let’s not indulge our anger here,” Sam says in his eternally hushed voice, as the weekly psycho runs rampant. No, please, be our guest…

Matthew Perry created one of the all-time great TV characters during his stint on “Friends,” a nervous schlub who compensated for his deficiencies with razor-sharp wisecracks. Perry has tried to peddle the same character in several productions since then, but he’s never found a context that fits him the way “Friends” did. “Mr. Sunshine” (Wednesday, 8:30 p.m., ABC) continues the losing streak. Maybe “losing streak” is too strong a phrase. The new sitcom isn’t terrible, but it’s also not terribly good so far. Perry plays the boss of an arena, overseeing events that range from circuses to hockey games. There’s…

True to its name, “The Chicago Code” serves up the Windy City on a platter. Everything feels authentic in this new cop series (Monday, 8 p.m., Fox), starting with settings that range from posh skyscraper offices to cruddy vacant lots. Then there’s the pervasive corruption that everyone takes for granted – everyone except Teresa Colvin (Jennifer Beals). A whiz-kid promoted to the city’s top cop, Teresa is fearless in taking on both dirty police officers and dirty politicians, including a string-pulling alderman (Delroy Lindo). She finds a kindred spirit in her former partner, Jarek Wysocki (Jason Clarke), a White Sox-loving…

We now live in a hyper-ironic world, but “The Lost Valentine” (Sunday, 8 p.m., CBS) comes from some other world entirely. This Hallmark Hall of Fame production tells the unapologetically sappy story of a woman named Caroline (Betty White) who lost her Navy pilot husband to World War II and, every Valentine’s Day since, has made a pilgrimage to the train station where they last parted. A TV journalist (Jennifer Love Hewitt) picks up on the story, in the process falling in love with Caroline’s wholesome grandson (Sean Faris). This is the kind of movie where everything is wholesome. In…

The Kardashian sisters are taking over our country, and we’re just letting it happen. I don’t mean to point fingers, because I’m just as complicit as everyone else. The Kardashians emerged on the national scene as a stunningly irrelevant reality-TV family from Los Angeles. But those were the devil-may-care days of 2007, so we let it pass. Slowly, the Kardashian sisters began showing up everywhere, from awards shows to talk shows to commercials, despite having no talent and nothing to say. Did we sit up and pay attention when E! premiered “Kourtney & Khloe Take Miami,” even though the title…