Your weekly guide to TV’s best and worst one-hour shows.
The end is nigh for a few early-summer series:
“Hannibal” (Thursday, 10 p.m., NBC)
This series, like a fine wine or cured human liver, improved with age. Or maybe it just wore Mama down. Either way, she’s happy to know that this pre-“Silence of the Lambs” thriller is coming back. Bryan Fuller, who gave us the delightfully morbid “Pushing Daisies,” has managed to make the back story of cannibal Hannibal Lecter entertaining and thoughtful. From Hugh Dancy’s disturbed dreamer Will to Laurence Fishburne’s suspicious Jack, the cast is stellar, but of course the reason you’ll want a grisly dissection each week is Mads Mikkelsen’s Hannibal, who is scary and fascinating — and unlikely to be captured in tonight’s finale.
“Defiance” (Monday, 9 p.m., Syfy)
If you liked this sci-fi “CSI” in the beginning, but abandoned it because of its formulaic, predictable cases, this episode probably isn’t going to win you over. However, it does deliver a good twist. And with two episodes left before the finale, it’s worth tuning in just to check out the wedding veil Christine (Nicole Munoz) has to wear if she’s going to marry a Castithan — she and Alak (Jesse Rath) will finally tie the knot this week if their parents don’t kill each other before the ceremony can begin.
“Mad Men” (Sunday, 10 p.m., AMC)
Now that the only witness to his affair, daughter Sally (Kiernan Shipka), has been shipped off to boarding school, you’d think Don (Jon Hamm) would be perfectly content in this weekend’s sixth-season finale. But this is Don Draper, people, the man who can turn a Hawaiian vacation into an ad for suicide. If you’re peeved that Ted’s (Kevin Rahm) employees pushed Don’s crew off screen when the agencies combined this season, you can at least see more of the charming Ben Feldman, aka Ginsberg, who gets plenty of screen time when he guest stars as a tagalong TV producer on “Major Crimes” (Monday, 9 p.m., TNT).
“Warehouse 13” (Sunday, 10 p.m., AMC)
Three hours is a lot of time to devote to this mediocre sci-fi detective series, even if it does feature Anthony Head as the uber villain for the final three episodes of this half of the season. But for four seasons, this show hasn’t been able to commit to its “consequences” — everyone who has any kind of character development is eventually undone by some convenient explanation — so why would it start now? CCH Pounder should fire her agent for not allowing her character to stay dead. She deserved a better follow-up to “The Shield.”