Check out our looks at the NBC and FOX fall line-ups. ABC’s 2016-17 season was a tale of two genres.  On the comedy side, things were relatively smooth, with American Housewife and Speechless painlessly integrated into the Tuesday and Wednesday line-ups, and The Goldbergs functioning well as the Wednesday night opener.  Dramas, though, were a disaster. All the new 1-hours […]

  THE MYSTERIES OF LAURA:  Wednesday 8PM on NBC THE FACTS:  Laura Diamond (Debra Messing) is an NYPD homicide detective who also has to juggle her responsibilities to her young twin sons and her issues with her estranged cop husband (Josh Lucas).  The series creator is Jeff Rake, a veteran writer/producer (everything from The Practice […]

  Come February, Thursday nights are going to feature an old-fashioned broadcast network slugfest, as ABC’s announcement that Scandal is moving to 9PM will put it squarely in the path of NBC’s The Blacklist when that series moves at midseason–may the best crazy plot twist-laden melodrama win.  The Scandal move is part of ABC’s new […]

  After last night’s atrocious 0.9/0.7 pairing, it was clear that the writing on the wall for NBC’s BAD JUDGE and A TO Z was scrawled in blood.  The network chose Halloween afternoon to announce the burials.  Those very few who enjoyed the shows needn’t start weeping just yet, though:  since The Blacklist was already […]

  NBC has little enough to brag about these days, so it’s understandable that the network would want to claim victory for its breakout drama THE BLACKLIST as quickly as possible.  There’s no practical benefit in renewing a series in December for the following fall, but after last night’s extremely impressive fall finale showing, with […]

  AMERICAN CRIME:  Sunday 9PM Midseason on ABC THE FACTS:  John Ridley, this year’s Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar winner for 12 Years A Slave, has written a serialized crime drama very specifically about race, in which a Latino teen is arrested for the murder of the son of Timothy Hutton and Felicity Huffman. WHAT IT’S […]

We’ve reached the broadcast networks’ Upfront Week… which used to be a lot more central to our television lives than it is now.  Ratings everywhere are down, and there’s no reason to think they’ve hit bottom, which has caused seismic changes in the ways networks make scheduling decisions.  Among other things, with revenues from on-air […]

  FOX may be in 4th place for the season, but it has the hot hand right now, with Spring blockbuster Empire and surprise success The Last Man On Earth livening up its season.  It’s trying to build on those with an aggressive Fall schedule (new shows are in ALL CAPS, new timeslots are in […]