House Rules (October 10; 8 to 9 p.m.; TBS) pits red, blue, and silver male-and-female teams against one another in the competitive remodeling of three dilapidated properties, with a weekly allowance for a specified makeover and rotating dinner parties for mutual spying.
Jeremiah (October 10; 10 to 11 p.m.; Showtime) adds Sean Astin to its cast for a second season of Luke Perry and Malcolm-Jamal Warner’s wandering around in J. Michael Straczynski’s postapocalyptic mindscape, where the only survivors of a killer virus were kids who hadn’t reached puberty. So everybody’s looking for both an antidote and a father. See Luke feel very bad indeed.
A Tale of Two Wives (October 11; 8 to 10 p.m.; Oxygen) stars Peter Gallagher as a psychiatrist and marriage counselor who commutes between New York and London and between two wives, romance novelist Cheryl Hines and piano teacher Dervla Kirwan. Of course, they find out, and do him so much semi-amusing dirt as to make a shambles of his very important Sigmund Freud lecture.
Warrior Queen (October 12; 9 to 10:30 p.m.; Channel 13) is not quite as ridiculous as it first appears, but neither is it a Masterpiece in anybody’s Theatre. Alex Kingston, who went from Moll Flanders to ER in a nanosecond, stars as Queen Boudica, who in the first century A.D. led the savage, Druid-worshiping tribes of Britain in a bloody revolt against the imperial Roman occupiers who had flogged her, raped her daughters, and enslaved her people. Andrew Davies rather than Tacitus is to be blamed for the lines spoken by Nero, but you’ll love the beheading.
Footsteps (October 12; 9 to 11 p.m.; CBS) sends Candice Bergen in the dead of night to a ghostly beach house to rethink her career as a suspense novelist, her breakdown-inducing fear of the lonely dark, and maybe even her marriage to Michael Murphy. She will be equally menaced by Bug Hall, a young fan who knows too much about her, and Bryan Brown, who is not the cop he says he is. By-the-numbers, but first-rate Bergen, graduating before our eyes from fragility to sarcasm to resourcefulness.