“Greatest American Dog”
Thursday 8pm, CBS
A couple years ago, Bravo aired a show called “Showdog Moms & Dads.” It followed the lives of aspiring pet entertainers and their talented canines, and it was spectacularly crazy, climaxing with a harried Hispanic woman explaining to the cameras that her ill-tempered pet Chihuahua kept biting her in the vagina. That has absolutely nothing to do with this new series, in which 12 owner/dog pairs compete for $250,000. The cast runs the gamut from a hot Christian farmer and his boxer to a retired pro snowboarder and his English pointer/border collie mix to a retired Elaine from “Seinfeld” impersonator (…really) and the mutt she refers to as “Bella Starlet.” I only bring up “Showdog” because, if we’re lucky, this will be even one-tenth as entertaining. But, given that it’s family-oriented and on CBS, I’m dubious. If there’s not even a mention of cooter-biting yip-yip dogs, what’s the point?
“Burn Notice”
Thursday 10pm, USA
TV’s best-looking cast gets even hotter, as Tricia Helfer—best known as the statuesque Cylon Six on “Battlestar Galactica”—comes on board as a mysterious new power player in this spy drama. Helfer’s model good looks should stand up well to chiseled series star Jeffrey Donovan and the luscious Gabrielle Anwar. (For those of you with broader tastes, B-movie king Bruce Campbell should ably fulfill any leather daddy fantasies, and Sharon Gless continues to keep those hardcore “Cagney & Lacey” fetishists hot and bothered since Tyne Daly has let herself go to pot.) The bad news is that Helfer reportedly won’t be seen much in the first half of Season 2 since she was previously committed. But expect at least her disembodied voice to keep Donovan’s Michael on his toes as he tries to discover who unceremoniously dumped him from the espionage game.
“Generation Kill”
Sunday 9pm, HBO
This new seven-part series about the Iraq War comes to us from David Simon, creator of HBO’s critically acclaimed, commercially ignored drama, “The Wire.” So you can expect that it will be a smart, layered, and soul-crushingly accurate depiction of the realities of Operation Enduring Fuck-Up…er, “Freedom.” The series adapts the book by Rolling Stone writer Evan Wright, who was embedded with the Marines of the First Recon Battalion during the first 40 days of the war, where they encountered supply shortages, a lack of strategic planning, and general U.S. incompetence. Adding additional authenticity, two of the Marines featured in the book served as consultants for the project, and a third plays himself. Take a gander at what you have wrought, America.
