SECRETS AND LIES:  Midseason TBD on ABC THE FACTS:  Another ABC murder soap, this one starring Ryan Phillippe as a man who finds the body of a neighbor’s child in the woods, KaDee Strickland as his wife, and Juliette Lewis as the homicide detective who thinks he’s the killer.  It’s based on an Australian […]

  The network averages for last week are significant because they represent a full week of sweeps programming, which means reruns were at a minimum and some stunting (although not a tremendous amount of it: a Chicago Fire/PD crossover here, the IHeartRadio Music Awards there) boosted the numbers.  In other words, barring really big events […]

  CBS doesn’t typically cultivate daring in its fall schedules, but this year it’s making one exception.  Here’s a quick look (new shows are in ALL CAPS, new timeslots are in italics): MONDAY Sept-Oct 8PM:  The Big Bang Theory 8:30PM:  LIFE IN PIECES Nov 8PM:  SUPERGIRL 9PM:  Scorpion 10PM:  NCIS: LA Running Supergirl against Gotham isn’t as […]

  THE MCCARTHYS:  Thursday 9:30PM on CBS THE FACTS:  Ronnie McCarthy (Jake Lacy) is part of a lovingly smothering Boston Irish-Catholic family, who are just fine with him being gay but embarrass him at every turn anyway.  The series was created by Brian Gallivan, a relative newbie, so the showrunner will be Mike Sikowitz, of […]

  Welcome to Upfronts week, when the broadcast networks (or what’s left of them) announce their Fall schedules and attempt to generate billions of dollars worth of excitement from advertisers.  It’s harder than ever to authoritatively analyze the thought process that goes into a broadcaster’s cancellation, renewal and pick-up decisions, because network ad revenues directly […]

  From a predicting point of view, Sunday is sort of an anti-climactic end to our week of fall TV ratings forecasts, since the winner is obvious and there are few changes from last fall.  (See our more interesting predictions for Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)   Still, here’s how we–that being former head of […]

  Previous NBC pick-ups are here and here. If Las Vegas took futures bets on TV shows the way it does on football teams, you could have cashed a nice ticket today on the proposition that when all was said and done, COMMUNITY would be (but for Parks & Recreation) the last NBC sitcom standing.  […]

  All this week, we’ve been giving you our predicted fall network ratings for Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Sunday.  Let’s wind up our week of forecasts with an overview of how the fall is likely to go for each of the networks in summary.  We don’t see any precipitous drops, although we also […]