Fox Sports 1, 8:00 p.m. ET
SERIES PREMIERE: With Empire on hiatus, Fox has found a clever way to both maintain the momentum of that hit family drama and squeeze additional revenue from its financial investment in major league baseball rights. This new limited spring series is a fast-paced, juicy prime-time soap opera about a veteran major league umpire, and his three grown sons, who are trying to work their way into the family business of calling strikes and balls. And watching them all carefully from her seat above the dugout is the outrageously emotional, and even more emotionally dressed, family matriarch, Cookie Monster. What keeps them together, despite all the fights and bad calls, is the love of the game. There’s no place like home… plate!
NBC, 9:00 p.m. ET
SERIES PREMIERE: Rainn Wilson hasn’t exactly set the world afire with Backstrom, his current (but not for much longer) Fox detective drama, so this new prequel series, aimed at his fan base who loved him in NBC’s version of The Office, is a much better bet. Better Write Dwight shows Wilson, in his character of Dwight Schrute, toiling at the job he had immediately before joining Steve Carell’s Michael Scott and company at that Scranton paper-goods company. His previous job was involved with paper, too: He worked for the Scranton Times-Tribute as an advice columnist, dispensing Schrute-like wisdom to all who wrote in, and to many who didn’t even bother. And be prepared, because this Office prequel introduces us to Dwight’s even odder older brother: a stay-at-home hoarder, played by David L. Lander (Squiggy from Laverne & Shirley), who believes everything he reads on the Internet. Even this…
FX, 10:00 p.m. ET
SERIES PREMIERE: FX has done so well with The Americans, it’s doubling down, presenting this new companion series, set in the present day, about American sleeper agents living in the former Soviet Union. There’s intrigue at the highest levels of government, including attempts to bug and influence the government’s inner circle as they invade the Ukraine, tolerate international sanctions, and act increasingly aggressive on the world stage. Based on the pilot, this is another quality series from a network that has invested strongly, and wisely, in well-written, complex TV dramas. In other words, FX, by Russian to present this overseas spy series, is Putin its money where its mouth is. If you tune to FX tonight at 10 ET, you’ll see The Americans – but if you run your TV through the Enigma code box converter (available at Radio Shack, but only if you act very, very quickly), you’ll be able to see this appropriately top-secret premiere episode.
Food Network, 10:30 p.m. ET
Last week, Comedy Central slipped in the premiere of a new series, Big Time in Hollywood, FL, almost unnoticed. It’s a shame, because that series, which continues tonight at 10:30 ET, is a very amusing, clever and ambitious new comedy series about wannabe filmmakers living in that patch of Florida real estate between Fort Lauderdale and Miami. It should be seen, and can, with its second episode presented tonight. But at the same time, on the Food Network, a counter-programming coup presents a one-shot special (well, even less than that, to be honest) with a similar title: Big Burger in Hollywood, FL. It’s about the tiny little Hollywood “restaurant” called Le Tub – more of a waterfront saloon, really, built mostly on boardwalk-type wooden planks and decorated with tubs, toilets and other detritus farmed from the water by the place’s environmentally-conscious owner. This little place, built decades ago on the site of a former gas station, looks out over the Intra-Coastal Waterway, and serves up a 13-ounce burger that GQ magazine, in 2006, identified as the No. 1 burger in the nation. (That’s no joke, though this Food Network special is.) And as good as that burger is, Le Tub’s French fries and key lime pie are better, and its seafood gumbo is the very, very best. No Fooling...
E!, 11:00 p.m. ET
SERIES PREMIERE: You’d think E! already has milked every possible moment of profitable TV programming opportunities from the Kardashian family, but we all know, in our heart of hearts, that’s far from the truth. I hate to think, in the next few years, what manner of reality-TV spinoffs this family, and this network, will collaborate to Jenner-ate. Meanwhile, by changing one letter in the title of one of the existing E! franchises, Keeping up with the Kardashians, this latest spinoff can zoom in, quote literally, on the primary asset of this inexplicably popular family franchise. In the winter 2014 issue of Paper magazine, Kim Kardashian bared all – and that was just on the cover (shown here, really), part of an intentionally provocative photo spread that was aimed to show off the celebrity’s most recognizable (and valuable?) feature. Butt I digress. The main point is that if Keeping Up with the Karshashians has been such a lucrative reality-TV franchise, why not present the undiluted version, and focus solely on The Karsdassians?
