Your weekly guide to TV’s best and worst one-hour shows
Law enforcement provides some arresting drama this week:
“Southland” (Wednesday, 10 p.m., TNT)
If you ever wonder why there aren’t any great cop shows like “NYPD Blue” left on the air, check out these LA cops. As the fifth season opens, the squad deals with more babies than bodies, but it quickly parks itself back onto the gritty streets. The action looks more like a police documentary, no one has any super powers of detecting the bad guys and it feels like all hell could break loose in any given scene. The show will keep you on edge until the very end, making this the series for cop-show lovers.
“Bones” (Monday, 8 p.m., Fox)
Brennan (Emily Deschanel) dies when a murderer infiltrates the Jeffersonian lab. Of course, if you think that her demise spells the end of a series, you haven’t watched much TV. If you think that it’s an excuse to launch of an out-of-body sequence in which the brainy scientist meets her mother and we learn why she turned into an emotional void, you could be a script writer for the predictable procedural.
“Justified” (Tuesday, 10 p.m., FX)
From snake bites to severed feet, this backwoods Kentucky series went for the gross-out factor this season. However, the marshal drama also returned to its roots and drew from its talented main cast for this season’s source of tension: Walton Goggins’ wonderfully villainous Boyd Crowder is back to causing trouble for his better half/worst enemy Raylan Givens, played by Timothy Olyphant, who next week gets to play buddy cop with his former “Deadwood” co-star Jim Beaver.
“Hawaii Five-0” (Monday, 10 p.m., CBS)
The Hawaiian crime fighters who should appeal to the young and pretty have finally found a guest star under 40 — in this case, perennial sci-fi hottie Summer Glau. But no worries that the show is trying to skew young, as the median age is balanced out by the island’s other visitor, Treat Williams, who has filled his dance card this season with guest-starring roles on “White Collar,” “Chicago Fire” and now as a private investigator on the tropical cop series.
“Castle” (Monday, 10 p.m., ABC)
Star Nathan Fillion reunites with “Firefly” cohort Gina Torres as he and Beckett (Stana Katic) investigate the murder of a “Real Housewives”-looking reality star. Yes, it may be the fluffiest of the detective series, but at least this show gets the joke.