And wouldn’t YOU flip out if the grown-up you met your parents 35 years ago, back when they were about your current age? That’s what happened to Our Hero, Det. Sam Tyler, on the most recent episode of “Life on Mars,” ABC’s top-flight (though ratings-challenged) sci-fi cop show.

The installment opened with a scene set in [...]

Yes, he’s still dead, and yes, he’s still on the show. Don’t get wrong: As I’ve written a zillion times, I’ve loved Jeffrey Dean Morgan for years (see my late 1990s interview with him at jdmorgan.net/a_pg01.php). But enough is enough with his returning to Izzie as a corporeal being and only she can see him. [...]

There are hostage situations and there are hostage situations. Last week’s—on “Tuesday’s Dead”—was quite unusual in that, in at least Sam’s mind, his life as a non-hostage at a Manhattan hospital was on the line. It all started one morning in the squad room, when he answered a phone and it was his 2008 mother, [...]

What sharks? The ones that seem to be circling around this once-original medical series. First there was the Callie/Hahn romance, in which Callie explored her sexuality as a possible lesbian or bisexual. The whole debacle seemed to be conjured up just for shock effect and just ended up getting Brooke Smith (Hahn) fired from the [...]

Actor Isaiah Washington, who played Dr. Preston Burke on the popular medical show, would return to the ABC series if asked. That’s according to an article in the latest “TV Guide,” with Kiefer Sutherland on the cover.

The impetus for the “TVG” Q&A was the firing of actress Brooke Smith, who played gay doc Erica Hahn. [...]

It was a horrible day for Dr. Mark “McSteamy” Sloan on last week’s episode. The poor man-whore was crushed by his failure to, at McDreamy’s request, get Cristina in bed so she would stop constantly palling around with Meredith.  At the end of the day, when Sloan told Yang he’d been flirting with her all [...]

The Big Apple got rotten to the core during the most recent episode, “Things to Do in New York When You Think You’re Dead” (a play on the title of the 1995 feature film “Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead”). After a 9-year-old black girl, Keisha, dies from a fall from a roof, [...]

In October 30’s “Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadows?”, Sam was understandably freaked out and blown away when he met his mother, Rose, in 1973. “Sammy” was only about 4 years old back then, and his mama was, out of financial desperation, mixed up with local Mob guy Nick Profaci and [...]

On October 30’s “Life During Wartime,” the writers of the popular medical show addressed the controversial topic of the medical community’s practice of experimenting on live animals. Both sides were given airtime about the subject when Dr. Hunt, Seattle Grace’s new head of the trauma unit, had the second-year residents and the interns use [...]

You know how “Life on Mars” asks us to believe that it takes place in 1973? Well, I’m going to ask the same kind of thing of you. Please pretend that it’s October 23, the day after the airing of “My Maharishi is Bigger Than Your Maharishi.” Cool? Thanks!

Sam got a kick out of seeing [...]

In last Thursday’s “There’s No ‘I’ in Team,” Dr. Wonderful, aka, Dr. McDreamy/Derek Shepherd, certainly had brass cajones by taking all the glory and credit for his and Meredith’s successful clinical trial, especially when it was blared on the cover of the latest issue of the national medical journal “Annals of American Neurosurgery.” Then he [...]

Callie is exploring a new world now that she and Hahn, at the latter’s request, have started dating. Our sexy Latina has never gotten in bed with a woman and is scared to death, especially about exploring another woman below the waist. But Callie felt better after talking with Bailey, who is (yea!) back to [...]

I’m loving this show! In the second ep, called “The real Adventures of the Unreal Sam Tyler,” Sam dove into  solving a string of fatal robberies at a check-cashing store. This, after he decided that until he finds out how he jumped from 2008 to 1973, he’s going to do what he does best: catch [...]

In “Here Comes the Flood,” not the show’s most enthralling episode, a pipe burst at the hospital. The water wasn’t that much of a huge deal except to reveal, while Mr. O’Brien was on the operating table, that patient he had an unexpected tumor in his abdomen.

As for the usually ditsy Lexie, she, through intense [...]

Finally — a broadcast-TV show whose premise contains more than a shred of originality.

OK, so “Life on Mars,” which debuted last night on ABC, is derived from a British show of the same name, but that’s far enough from Hollywood for me. Jason O’Mara headlines as Sam Tyler, a present-day NYPD detective who, after getting [...]

It’s time (10 p.m., Oct. 9) again to say hello to another rip-off from the British. (What–we Yanks have lost our creative mojo?) But if this Americanization is anything like our good ones (“All in the Family,” “Friends” and “The Office”) rather than our crummy ones (“Coupling,” “Viva Laughlin”), then we’re all in for a [...]

One of America’s favorite medical shows got off to a fine season start with a two-hour show that focused on the doctors as well as some patients. In “Dream a Little Dream of Me,” the wonderful Bernadette Peters, Mariette Hartley and Kathy Baker starred in the riveting storyline involving three women and their husbands, all [...]

At least that’s what it seems like now, as the medical dramedy goes into its fifth season. There will be a new major character and lots of romance when the new season kicks off with a two-hour premiere on September 25. “I’m all about the love this year,” creator Shonda Rhimes wrote in “TV Guide.”

The [...]

In the show’s penultimate episode, “Surprise!”, Bruce dipped his toe further into his smoldering relationship with his coworker Melinda and found  out that he has more in conversational common—“Hey, how ’bout those Cubs?”—with her than he does with his wife, Susan. Then the louse lied to Susan that he had to return to his office [...]

As the summer of ‘76 winds down on this randy CBS series, the characters’ lives are taking alternate directions. Roger goes to a shrink and confesses that he thinks he’s in love with Susan. “I feel alive when I’m around her,” he says. (If I were married to deadbeat Janet, I’d feel alive when I [...]