Some shows struggle in summer premieres

Along with a running commentary on the third season premiere of “White Collar” elsewhere, I took in the second season premiere of Piper Perabo’s CIA agent Annie Walker in “Covert Affairs.”

The main problem with this is that for spies their lives aren’t especially interesting. Annie has to approach an Estonian tennis player as an asset, but their intelligence is off and her coach is the assassin.

More to the point, I still have no idea what Sandhil Ramamurthy is meant to be doing on this show. He seems to be some sort of go-between for the intelligence agency heads, but in that they sneak around behind everyone’s back having sex with each other, he seems a bit redundant.

"Love Bites"

Speaking of random cast members from “Heroes,” Greg Grunberg is a person on the screen in NBC’s “Love Bites.” His character and his character’s wife have new sexual issues every week. This week they fantasize about other people while they are making love.

What’s going on in this show is there’s a common thread that meanders through a set of stories about couples dealing with issues. It opened this past week with Michelle Trachtenberg trying to hard and nearly losing cute guy she liked – I think he was the guy from “Reaper” and “Breaking In” (IMDB.com confirms that he is). She tries to just be friends with him but they’re both trying to be the most annoying “friends” possible, either to completely break up or to get back together. It’s hard to know.

They end up at a strip club where Michelle gets into the life of a stripper named Sapphire who put herself to school and has a complete how-to home repair course online which is referenced throughout the rest of the show as in the next story, a gay couple hosts the parents for their engagement brunch and the really-accepting mom is thrown while the not-so-accepting dad, played by Kurtwood Smith, is OK with it. Then in story number three, Greg – the gay couple’s neighbor – and his character’s wife have their fantasy storyline.

Honestly it’s like NBC said, “We don’t really have one good show so lets explore a bunch of little ones.” In any event, I don’t know that I’m really going to be tuning in to that one again. “Love Bites” airs at 10/9c Thursdays on NBC.

"Men of a Certain Age"

There was a stripper substory in this past week’s installment of “Men of a Certain Age,” up to its third season now on TNT. Wow, how time flies. Joe’s bookie is going to chemo so he wants to go to a strip club the night before. He gets one of the girls to give him a half-price lapdance when it turns out her dad is also suffering from colon cancer.

I think the storyline around Owen is the hardest to trace. A competitor wants to buy him out, he more or less decides he’s going to take the offer, and in the kind of decision-making that would give a lesser mortal whiplash, decides to stick it out at Thoreau Motors.

Mostly the Terry character is upsetting because he’s the first of them to be turning 50, and what with his girlfriend breaking up with him he is in a deep dark funk. He’s been doing so poorly at work the top salesman beats him up and leaves. Owen basically tells him to straighten up and fly right.

I will say I still enjoy this show. Some of the storylines are a little random – Joe’s son’s in a band, for instance, and one of Joe’s employees is illiterate, which is sad. But they’re all mostly taking it in the shorts from life and they’re mostly just trying to find moments of happiness where they can. New episodes of “Men of a Certain Age” premiere Wednesdays at 10/9c on TNT.

"Doctor Who"

The last installment of “Doctor Who” before the break aired Saturday and oh my goodness what an astonishing piece of television.

First, I think they sprung the pregnancy storyline with the right pacing: We can’t really focus on Amy taking part in adventures in time and space if we’re all worried about the bun in her oven. For all he loves children Steven Moffat has very little patience in terms of raising them. In “The Doctor’s Daughter” Jenny appeared out of nowhere. While for most people just raising a child to adulthood would be all the adventure they could need or have, it doesn’t make for great sci-fi which is why most such shows just skip over the bits where the child is developing and get on with it.

And in this case, the Doctor has been chasing Amy through the universe throughout her pregnancy, following a signal connecting the real Amy to the sort of flesh avatar aboard the TARDIS. Chasing down the infant Melody Pond to the interstellar nursery where Amy has been held in a sort of maternal statis all this time in the care of the Army of God. And oh yes, there is a plot twist that shakes the show to its foundations. But in the time before the series returns we have plenty of time to explore past episodes. Oh yes. All the time in the world.

"Teen Wolf"

MTV premiered “Teen Wolf” during the Movie awards last Sunday and you can check that out Mondays if you like. It’s mostly a werewolf story with terrible effects, and the general “Oh, hey, you know that time in your life where you’re changing physically and growing hair in unusual places? That means you’re a werewolf.” I don’t know that there’s an especially well-drawn character to be found on the screen and I don’t know why anyone would watch this but if it sounds like your cup of tea, new episodes premiere Mondays at 10/9c on MTV.

Coming up

Coming up, not much going on this week besides dancing, reality and reruns. We’ve got the series premiere of “The Nine Lives of Chloe King” Tuesday at 8/7c on ABC Family Channel. We’ve got the dual return of “Memphis Beat” and “Hawthorne” on TNT, which honestly I’m not sure we needed more of either of them but someone clearly disagrees. We had the premiere of “The Protector” on Lifetime Sunday and that encores several times throughout the week and I’ll have more to say about that one down the road.