The biggest surprise from CW wasn’t any one of its pilot orders–it was the decision to renew THE CARRIE DIARIES, a show that showed little ratings promise in its first season.  Apparently the explanation is that the series does very well on Hulu, and rates strongly with the younger segment of CW’s female demo.  […]

  CBS–because it’s CBS–doesn’t release trailers for its new series, but instead provides 3-4 minute behind-the-scenes featurettes.  These are about as informative as the puff pieces you’d find as an “extra” on a Hollywood DVD, and they’re even less reliable as a predictor of series quality than a real trailer would be.  So take them […]

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 has unveiled a set of schedules that will shift throughout the season–and even into Summer 2014.  Let’s take a look. FALL MONDAY 8PM:         Bones/Almost Human 9PM:         Sleepy Hollow FOX didn’t want to launch back-to-back new dramas in the fall, so Bones will set up Sleepy Hollow‘s debut until an unspecified (post-baseball) date in […]

  In a very unusual move, NBC has already made major changes in the fall schedule that it announced just 2 weeks ago.  In fact, it’s changed the centerpiece of that schedule, reversing the move of its breakout hit This Is Us to Thursdays, and leaving it instead on Tuesday.   As the chart indicates, This Is […]

  The CBS featurette for its new Monday 8:30PM comedy WE ARE MEN is at great pains to suggest that the cast–Chris Smith, Tony Shalhoub, Jerry O’Connell and Kal Penn, as divorcees who live in the same residential hotel–has as much fun together behind the camera as in front of it.  The bigger question is […]

  UPDATED with reactions to FOX trailers, which are available here:   The FOX fall schedule is a puzzlement. FOX seems to have done little to help itself with its fall 2016 line-up, leaving two of its weakest nights unimproved, and burying one of its highest-profile projects on low-rated Friday.  The network will be more […]

  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 […]