Your weekly guide to TV’s best and worst one-hour shows.
What better way to escape this world than heading to the alternate universes created by sci-fi series:
“Da Vinci’s Demons” (Friday, 9 p.m., Starz)
After Friday’s premiere, Mama wrote off this sci-fi show disguised as historical crime thriller as weird and nonsensical. Nonetheless, she got sucked into the next three preview episodes. Yes, it’s nonsensical, but if you were looking to Starz for history lessons, your educational outlook is dim at best. If you can accept that it is fictitious entertainment about a hottie mastermind named DaVinci (Tom Riley), you’ll enjoy it a lot more.
“Orphan Black” (Saturday, 9 p.m., BBC America)
In this fantastic new series bad girl Sarah (Tatiana Maslany) discovered last week the story behind her suicidal doppelganger: they’re clones. In addition to Sarah and dead cop Beth, there’s a deceased German copy, plus (living) soccer mom and convenient geek clones to explain all of this to Sarah and us. By the end of last week’s episode, we even had an evil, murderous clone who’s offing her duplicates. Combining the science fiction elements with the cop show dynamic — we know the seemingly traumatized Sarah/Beth is undermining the cases she’s working on — makes this sci-fi series worth staying home on a Saturday night.
“Defiance” (Monday, 9 p.m., Syfy)
In the unlikely setting of St. Louis, renamed Defiance, the post-war series combines the action-fighting elements of “Falling Skies,” the political scheming of “Battlestar Galactica” and the cultural conflicts of “Star Trek.” Mama’s not a big gamer, so she’s not sure how the online video game set in San Francisco will play into the TV series, but with complex stories, decent acting from stars Julie Benz and Grant Bowler, and some surprisingly good music thrown into the mix, you might reconsider spending more time in the Midwest.
“The Vampire Diaries” (Thursday, 8 p.m., CW)
Assuming that the number of high schools using the trendy vampire theme for their proms is pretty high, Mama thinks it’s only fitting that this fanged drama should throw its own big dance — and that unhinged Elena (Nina Dobrev) should attend hers with eternal paramour brothers Damon (Ian Somerhalder) and Stefan (Paul Wesley) — even if most of the actors playing high school kids in this show haven’t seen their teen years since the first “Twilight” movie. — Tiffany Wendeln Connors