Obviously, someone thought a television adaptation of The Witches of Eastwick was a good idea…twice.  This is the second time a pilot for the series has aired, and this time more than the pilot has landed on the schedule (Eastwick ABC 10 p.m. Wednesdays).  Bottom line:  it feels like a 1980s era show without any kitsch to offset the dated feeling.  Yawn…

Cougar Town (ABC 9:30 p.m. Wednesdays) might turn into a hit for Courteney Cox (and I do love Dan Byrd as her son along with a strong supporting cast of neighbors, co-workers, and an ex-husband), but I sense some predictability on the horizon.  I think the “boy toy” she met in the pilot will soon be traded for the “age appropriate” and newly divorced neighbor across the street.

I very nearly hated Trauma (NBC 9 p.m. Mondays).  It takes more than blaring music and frenetic editing to make action sequences exciting.  What’s needed is a context in terms of characters the audience cares about and storylines with more at stake than one colossal accident after another.  Trauma offers an unsatisfactory compromise:  melodramatic situations and dialogue that seem lifted from a soap opera while the narrative is complemented by an uninspired visual style.

While neither Trauma nor Mercy come close to my favorite medical drama ever, ER (I was a fan of the series through ups and downs until the final episode), but Mercy (NBC 8 p.m. Wednesdays) shows some promise.  Taylor Schilling plays a nurse who returns to a hospital job in New Jersey after a tour in Iraq, and her reentry is complicated by romantic conflicts with not one man but two.  I’m going to give Mercy a few more episodes to see how things unfold.  We’ll have to wait until Sunday to see how Three Rivers fares – this  medical drama  is set at an organ transplant unit.