Your weekly guide to TV’s best and worst one-hour shows
Breaking the law this week:
“CSI: NY” (Friday, 9 p.m., CBS)
The “CSI” and “Law & Order” people should CC each other when scheduling episodes, as each feature elite private schools in their storylines this week. Over at CSI, Mark Moses (“Desperate Housewives’” Paul Young) guest stars as a teacher at the school where a student is murdered while studying for the SATs. On “Law & Order: SVU,” there’s a sex-abuse case at a school where the administrator, played by Charles Grodin, stonewalls the investigation.
“The Mentalist” (Sunday, 10:30 p.m., CBS)
Yet another rung in the long climb toward Jane’s (Simon Baker) final showdown with Red John, the man who murdered his wife and daughter. Malcolm McDowell returns as a Scientology-esque cult leader still indebted to Jane, who plans to break out former lover/Red John disciple Lorelei Martins (Emmanuelle Chriqui) in the hopes she’ll lead him to his Moby Dick.
“Castle” (Monday, 10 p.m., ABC)
The show does best when it avoids focusing on Castle (Nathan Fillion) and Beckett’s (Stana Katic) relationship, allowing their chemistry to bleed into the rest of the scenes instead. But they couldn’t resist the urge to do a whole “Meet the Parents” riff, which is attached to a plot where the couple also has to hide a murder witness.
“Covert Affairs” (Tuesday, 10 p.m., USA)
As we head into the third season finale of this once-respectable caper, Annie (Piper Perabo) has pretty much become a one-person spy force — and not a very good one — who makes her bosses resign out of despair because they couldn’t get her to show up to meetings instead of flying off on rogue missions with new BFF Eyal (Oded Fehr). Imagine the mayhem if our real spies caught an episode of this ridiculous show and started getting silly ideas about clandestine love affairs that could endanger national security.
“Criminal Minds” (Wednesday, 9 p.m., CBS)
This week, the BAU team races to rescue a school bus full of kids. Apparently, they couldn’t get puppies and kittens soon enough to maximize the emotional marketing potential of this eye-rolling plot.
“Sons of Anarchy” (Tuesday, 10 p.m., FX)
The Sons have their own brand of law and (dis)order, most of it involving a lot of blood. The victim of the week in the previous episode was some random prison nurse killed with a crucifix by Otto the psycho (played appropriately enough by scary series creator Kurt Sutter). The mayhem left more than another heap of carnage: now the once innocent, if gullible Tara (Maggie Siff) has been set up to be an accessory to murder.