Shivoncarla

AWKWARD - SEASON ONE

She navigates the sharky waters of high school, friends, mean cheerleaders, and cute boys with a snarky voice-over that makes her--and Awkward.--easy to fall in love with. However, the new co-actors or new storylines are taking the series into a more meaningful or funnier direction.

NO ORDINARY FAMILY - SEASON ONE

Ordinary is super at capturing a middle-class family suffering from self-imposed Kryptonite poisoning. What's different--and refreshing--about ABC's No Ordinary Family is that the efforts made to convince you that the Powells are normal, while entirely sincere, don't last long. Their supposed normalcy disintegrates into something more fun and potentially more compelling well before the pilot's end credits begin to roll.

ALL OF US - SEASON FOUR

I really enjoy watching All of Us on the CW 17. The combination of Duane Martin, LisaRaye, and Tony Rock is ingenius and makes for a well balanced cast. I give props to Will and Jada for writing this show and I believe it has staying power, if it was given another chance by the network. I believe that Duane Martin plays the character Robert to perfection. LisaRaye is convincing as an ex-wife. All of Us presents viewers with a widely felt experience that is difficult for all parties involved: divorce. However, all of Us shows us that it can be positive and civil, as well as humorous.

GOOSEBUMPS - SEASON FOUR

This show was one of the best, child-friendly horror shows. The unpredictability of the storylines, the young characters' frequent anti-social behavior, and the hazy line between fantasy and reality make this show iffy for kids. BUT, a good iffy.

MY MAD FAT DIARY - SEASON ONE

Reality TV is still tending towards the same old, same old: celebs locked in houses doing unspeakable things to each other in bathrooms, or stars chewing on duodenum in deserted parts of the world. But if you're looking for something that reflects actual reality – like the feeling you get in your gut when you look in the mirror – then watch My Mad Fat Diary, the teen drama now showing on E4.

Its central character Rae is as mad and fat as the title promises, but she's also kind and insecure and loyal and rude and over-dramatic and angry, all at the same time. She also loves Walnut Whips, without the walnuts. Where season one dealt largely with Rae's mental health problems, one area in which this second season triumphs is its gentle treatment of Rae's size. Her eating issues are explored with the revelation that she hasn't eaten in front of anyone but her mother in 10 years. Some of the symbolism is far from subtle – when Rae opens the doors to a forbidden cupboard of food to calm herself down, she takes six cans of beans to the face – but it's still a uniquely honest treatment of an unhealthy relationship with food.There's a reason why this show reads like the diary of a confused and angry teen read aloud – it is. But it also proves that you don't need to be going through puberty to laugh, cry, shout and wail in the space of 50 minutes.

GLUE - SEASON ONE

E4's Skins was always too good to be dismissed as teen TV and grown-ups sneak-watched it in their droves. The same is proving true of Glue, the new E4 series by former Skins writer Jack Thorne. It's just like The Archers only with better acting, more ketamine and a rural murder mystery to boot. Perfect for the right target audience, just not for me.

PREACHERS OF LA - SEASON ONE

The Lord works in mysterious ways and so, sometimes, does this reality show about six men who do the Lord’s work. We rarely see them in ministerial action, however. Instead we see them in the minidramas of daily life, prominently focused on the women in their lives.

TOWIE - SEASON ONE

Like me, you might have naively blundered into The Only Way Is Essex (by accidentally-on-purpose) in search of answers. The machinations of structured reality shows such as TOWIE have always been murky, with viewers never really knowing how much of anything is a setup, so watching an episode that deliberately stripped away a few levels of artifice seemed like it would be a fascinating experiment in curtain-peeking. Then it started and, like me, you might have instantly wondered what the hell you were thinking. If you havent watched it, there are barely any words to describe how awful TOWIE is. I'd suggest that you watch it on catchup, but I don't want to be billed for all the televisions and laptops that it'd make you destroy in a fit of frustration and despair. At heart, The Only Way is Essex is a show about identical-looking people making utterly pointless small talk in precisely the same disinterested monotone for an hour. Cast members endlessly rabbited over each other, entire scenes went by without any audible dialogue. Some scenes started with people looking offscreen for their cue from the floor manager, who was probably too busy drafting his resignation letter in his head to care. Most scenes would cut off mid-sentence, sometimes even mid-word. In one scene, two people did their best to work out whether they'd ever slept together or not. In another, two more people nattered about what they saw the other one do on the previous night's episode of The Only Way is Essex. Presumably the show ended with everyone who has ever been involved with The Only Way is Essex forming a circle around the Bafta they won last year and taking turns to urinate on it. I don't know... This is TOWIE.

YOUNGERS - SEASON ONE

The trouble with any drama about teenage life that's shown in a slot explicitly for teenagers is, ironically, that it's unlikely to end up resembling even the most banal experiences of its intended audience. For Youngers, E4's latest youth offering, the burden of pre-watershed tameness was made heavier by its emphatically "urban" south London setting. Not that I was expecting a bleak portrait of gang culture – this was meant to be comedy – but you need only to have been on a bus at the end of a school day to know that authentic teen exchanges rarely pan out without a few expletives. In Youngers, so much reality had to be excised it was hard to imagine the average 16-year-old being convinced.

THE VAMPIRE DIARIES - SEASON ONE

No, it's not Twilight--but it's not bad, either. The Vampire Diaries, The CW's new fang-gang drama, successfully hitches the sanguinary sexuality of the vampire ethos to the in-group/out-group dynamic of the teen soap.