Best-bets for Aug. 18: a surge of new shows

1) “House Calls With Dr. Phil” debut, 9 p.m., CBS. For five weeks, “Love Island” dominated the schedule. Now that it’s finished, CBS has lots of room to play with. It’s pulling reruns off the shelf and inserting three new hours – two tonight and one Friday. This one has Phil McGraw (shown here) visiting families, starting in Utah, where a teen hasn’t spoken to her father (living in the same house) in years. Read more…

1) “House Calls With Dr. Phil” debut, 9 p.m., CBS. For five weeks, “Love Island” dominated the schedule. Now that it’s finished, CBS has lots of room to play with. It’s pulling reruns off the shelf and inserting three new hours – two tonight and one Friday. This one has Phil McGraw (shown here) visiting families, starting in Utah, where a teen hasn’t spoken to her father (living in the same house) in years.

2) “FBI Declassified” season-opener, 10 p.m., CBS. This show debuted last fall, when CBS was finding clever ways to fill the COVID gap. For five weeks, Alana De La Garza (“FBI”) narrated true stories from the FBI’s past, researched by the news division. Now it gets an end-of-summer run.

3) “Awkwafina is Nora From Queens” season-opener, 10 amd 10:30 p.m., Comedy Central. Awkwafina is a movie star now, getting praise and awards for “Crazy Rich Asians,” “Ocean’s Eight” and “The Farewell.” Before that, she was Nora Lum, growing up with her widowed father and his parents. This fictional version has BD Wong as her dad and Bowen Yang of “Saturday Night Live” as her cousin. She’s a saleslady, with odd twists; in the second episode, that includes time-travel to 2003.

4) “Good Trouble,” 10 p.m., Freeform. This is a particularly rough hour, with tough things happening to Alice, Malika, Mariana and Callie. “Good Trouble” is a well-made show, but it does have a tendency to pile things on. Worse, it now has two characters with identical sins – having an affair with a boss, but failing to tell her co-workers.

5) “Chicago P.D.,” 10 p.m., NBC. Yes, this is a rerun, going against lots of new 10 p.m. shows (including ABC’s “Superstar,” profiling Kobe Bryant). But it’s a good one, starting with Nicole Ari Parker as Samantha Miller, a police reformer. When her son needs help, she turns to Voight. That builds into an intense and well-crafted story that continues next week.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.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