Best bets for May 9: A season-end for “Mom,” a series-end (almost) for “Big Bang”

1) “Mom” season finale (9 p.m.) and “The Big Bang Theory” (8 p.m.), CBS. Most of the attention goes to next week’s series finale for “Big Bang,” TV’s best comedy. (Tonight, Leonard’s mom arrives with deceptive sweetness and Stuart and his girlfriend overstay their welcome.) But let’s not overlook “Mom,” another terrific comedy. CBS hints that Bonnie and Adam might elope. Read more…

1) “Mom” season finale (9 p.m.) and “The Big Bang Theory” (8 p.m.), CBS. Most of the attention goes to next week’s series finale for “Big Bang,” TV’s best comedy. (Tonight, Leonard’s mom arrives with deceptive sweetness and Stuart and his girlfriend overstay their welcome.) But let’s not overlook “Mom,” another terrific comedy. CBS hints that Bonnie and Adam might elope.

2) Paradise Hotel” season-opener, 8-10 p.m., Fox. Back in 2003, Fox was at its friskiest. It already had “Temptation Island” and would soon add “Who’s Your Daddy?”; love and paternity were reality-show fodder. So this show had 11 singles trying to pair up. Each episode, someone was eliminated and a new person was added. The show spread to 18 other countries, but sputtered in the U.S. It waited five years for is second season, then 11 more for this third seasaon, with Fox saying it was “ahead of its time.”

3) “iZombie,” 8 p.m., CW. Last week’s season-opener was oddly humorless, as officials tried to solve a crime – a zombie attack on a driver – that left no body. Now that case is solved quite neatly … and the humor returns with Liv munching the brains of a fitness buff. It’s a pretty good episode, with a bonus: For the first time in a decade, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is playing someone other than himself.

4) “Better Things,” 10 p.m., FX. In the first couple seasons of this quietly terrific show, Frankie was often the overlooked middle child. But now she’s become someone worth listening too. Tonight, alongside a couple so-so stories, she’s in a slam-poetry event, filled with great teen talent.

5) “State of the Union,” 10 p.m. ET, Sundance. Each night, this gets 10 clever minutes out of just two people, as they wait for their marriage-therapy session. But tonight, they bump into a couple they know; the result adds a dandy detour to a show that mixes subtle doses of humor and character quirks.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *