Best-bets for July 22: New and (very) old comedy

1) “Corporate” (shown here) season-opener, 10:30 p.m., Comedy Central. Two delightful TV take-offs propel this half-hour. One is a sci-fi show that tries too hard, with sudden plot twists. The other is a kids’ cartoon that doesn’t try at all; it just keeps singing “pickles for breakfast.” Now that they own some TV shows, these fictional people try a corporate approach: Just survey viewers and give them what they want. It’s a flawed plan, they learn: Good TV is often much more – giving us what we didn’t know we wanted. Read more…

1) “Corporate” (shown here) season-opener, 10:30 p.m., Comedy Central. Two delightful TV take-offs propel this half-hour. One is a sci-fi show that tries too hard, with sudden plot twists. The other is a kids’ cartoon that doesn’t try at all; it just keeps singing “pickles for breakfast.” Now that they own some TV shows, these fictional people try a corporate approach: Just survey viewers and give them what they want. It’s a flawed plan, they learn: Good TV is often much more – giving us what we didn’t know we wanted.

2) “United We Fall,” 8 p.m., ABC. This debuted last week with two episodes, both fairly entertaining. Funny (if uneven) scripts were handled neatly by director Mark Cendrowski (“Big Bang Theory”) and a skilled cast, with Will Sasso and Lisa Vidal as harried parents and Jane Curtin as his disapproving mother. Tonight, the parents reluctantly have a date night, leaving grandma in charge.

3) “The 100,” 8 p.m., CW. Here’s a rerun of an episode that aired just two weeks ago. That seems odd, but it’s a fairly good one, beautifully filmed. And it may be an important one, as the pilot for a possible prequel series. Clarke storms in to rescue her friends … then gets a history lesson going back 97 years, to the survivors of the apocalypse. Iola Evans, an impressive actress with little film experience, stars.

4) “The Shop Around the Corner” (1940), 8-10 p.m. ET, Turner Classic Movies. On Friday, PBS reruns “She Loves Me,” the vibrant musical. First, here’s an early version of the same story. In 1937, a Hungarian play had two people feuding at work, unaware they were each other’s romantic pen pals. That became this comedy, with James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan. It also became two movie musicals (plus inspiring “You’ve Got Mail”) and a musical that has reached Broadway three times.

5) “Agents of SHIELD,” 10 p.m., ABC. Don’t you hate it when you get stuck in a time trap, forever reliving past mistakes? That happens to Coulson and Daisy tonight. With their damaged time-ship racing toward disaster, they try to find an answer … while re-seeing the mistakes that got them there.

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