Should You Watch It: Eh, why the heck not. Rhimes' shows, especially Grey's Anatomy, might grate on some people's nerves, but there's an undeniably appealing slickness and a verbal dexterity to them that at least keep them entertaining. We're a little tired out by consultant shows in the wake of Showtime's aggressively vulgar House of Lies, but this here is a little different. Think a (way) soapier version of the Eli Gold plotlines on The Good Wife. That could be kind of fun, right? At least after a few glasses of wine, anyway.
Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23 (4/11, 9:30pm, ABC)
What It Is: The perpetually misused Krysten Ritter plays the titular B in this single-camera sitcom, about a mean and kinda crazy girl and the unsuspecting roommate (Dreama Walker) who suffers at her hands. Dawson's Creek weeper James van der Beek shows up as himself, in a kind of Jennifer Grey in It's Like You Know homage, and, ABC hopes, hilarity ensues.
Should You Watch It: Well... This looks kind of annoying, doesn't it? With all the edgy dirty talk and whatnot? And how the B of course has to be ultimately not such a B at heart? We could eventually warm to this initially irksome-seeming show, like we did to Happy Endings and New Girl (yup, it's true, oops), but we're coming at this one pretty wary. Throw it in the Sunday OnDemand bin with Bent. Or just skip it outright.
Girls (4/15, 10:30pm, HBO)
What It Is: Youthquake indie darling Lena Dunham (Tiny Furniture) brings her hangdog sensibility to this Judd Apatow-produced show about a group of young post-college women trying to navigate love, life, and working in New York City. Dunham, the daughter of a prominent artist, is joined by Allison Williams, the daughter of NBC newsman Brian Williams, and Zosia Mamet, the daughter of celebrated playwright and filmmaker David Mamet. So... these girls know from hardship, huh?
Should You Watch It: If you at all overlap with this demographic, then probably yes. Just so you'll know what people are talking about. But if early twentysomethings living in Brooklyn seem like a foreign tribe of weirdos with whom you'd never likely interact, we don't think, based the early pilot we saw anyway, that this will teach you anything very authentic about them. The show can be very clever, but also groaningly self-indulgent and surprisingly unaware of itself. We may be a little too close to this one, age-wise and geographically, to assess it fairly, but either way we suspect it will be pretty polarizing. So, hm, yeah, maybe you should watch it no matter what. Just to say you did.
Veep (4/22, 10pm, HBO)
What It Is: Julia Louis-Dreyfus returns to television with this tale of a disgruntled Vice President of the United States from British political satirist Armando Iannucci. Louis-Dreyfus is joined by funny people Tony Hale and Matt Walsh, sexy person Reid Scott, and My Girl person Anna Chlumsky. A different version of this show was in development at ABC a while back, but that got scuttled and so it eventually landed at HBO, which was Iannucci's originally desired network. So, good for him.