When you itch your chin, wring your hands, scratch your nose or increase your swallowing, DR. CAL LEIGHTMAN knows you’re lying. And he doesn’t just think so – he knows so. Whether it be family, friends or complete strangers – he knows when they’re holding something back. More accurate than any polygraph test, he is a human lie detector.

Dr. Cal Leightman heads up a private agency contracted by the FBI, local police, law firms, corporations and private individuals when they’ve hit a roadblock on their searches for the truth. Joining him are the foremost experts in the field of behavioral psychology: DR. GILLIAN FOSTER is the doctor’s professional partner and intellectual counterpart, a master of deception equally comfortable with lying and concealing her emotions; the other is Dr. Leightman’s lead researcher WILL LOKER who says everything on his mind and seemingly lacks the ability to lie. RIA TORRES (Monica Raymund), the newest member of the team, uses her natural and uncanny ability to read body language to catch the clues that her professional partners miss.

After the first two episodes I am liking this show and have added a season pass to my Tivo. It seems like if you can figure out who is lying then the crime is solved but the show, not unlike real life, is more complicated than that. Some times the guilty people are telling the truth and the innocent people are lying. But just why and what they are lying about is the puzzle. This is a smart show.

The show is probably a closer match to X-Files since the main characters are FBI and other government agents dealing with strange situations related to “fringe” science. I found the characters of Special Agent Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv) and Peter Bishop (Joshua Jackson) to be intriguing enough to tune in again, but this show is not Lost and maybe not X-Files.

After the first minute of Lost I knew it was something different and that I was hooked. After one episode of Fringe I am not at the same place yet. It is certainly darker and more gross based on the pilot. As a fan of the arcane, so able to deal with complex plots, I find the science and plot of Fringe to be less believable. There was a virus that would either kill instantly or take a number of days depending on what would work better with the plot.

So my take so far on Fringe is that the show’s title is prophetic. I am not sure this will become a main stream hit.

The Return of Jezebel James is not Gilmore Girls. It is a hour long sitcom with a laugh track. There were a few funny jokes in the premiere episode like when Sarah Tompkins (Parker Posey) is trying to explain her job editing children’s books to a neighbor child. The child wants to know why she killed of a beloved character in a children’s book. “I didn’t make him die. I made him die quicker – and with a fancier font.”

Parker Posey and Lauren Ambrose (who plays her younger sister) both turned in unremarkable performances weighted down by a “comedy” with more yelling than laughing. We only kept watching a little longer to see how many more actors who had smaller parts in Gilmore Girls would show up. But even that was not enough to keep us watching to the end of the episode. The verdict on “The Return of Jezebel James” – return to sender. Amy Sherman-Palladino might want to leave this show off her resume. This show looked more like the work of Alan Smithee.