THE BRIDGE:  Wednesday 10PM on FX – DVR Alert FX has assumed a leadership role in the development of serious, ambitious TV drama over the past decade (The Shield, Rescue Me, The Americans), and with its new series THE BRIDGE, it takes on its largest canvas to date.  The Bridge, which is based on […]

  HAPPYLAND:  Tuesday 11PM on MTV – Worth A Look After years spent as far away from scripted series as it could get, MTV has been accumulating a tidy set of programming lately that caters to its target demo without pandering to it, including Teen Wolf and Finding Carter on the drama side, along with […]

  THE WALKING DEAD:  Sunday 9PM on AMC THE WALKING DEAD has never been prized for its subtlety, and it didn’t attempt any with the title of its crossroads Season 9 premiere:  “A New Beginning.”  Which it definitely was, as the first episode under new showrunner Angela Kang (who was promoted up through the writer/producer […]

  AFTER EARTH:  Not Even For Free – The Smith Family In Outer Space In AFTER EARTH, Will Smith plays Cypher Raige, an emotionally austere father who withholds affection from his son because of his doubt that the boy is capable of walking in his own celebrated footsteps.  It’s such a bizarre decision for a […]

  Watching the parade of Kristen Wiig’s Greatest Hits that marked her return to SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE as tonight’s host, you could be forgiven for wishing you missed her more.  For all her great talent, Wiig had become, by the time she left a year ago, a symbol of everything franchise-heavy and headpoundingly overdone on […]

> Disclaimer:  Network pilots now in circulation are not necessarily in the form that will air in the Fall.  Pilots are often reedited and rescored, and in some cases even recast or reshot.  So these critiques shouldn’t be taken as full TV pilot reviews, but rather as a guide to the general style and content […]

  CW’s THE 100 has set its bar fairly high fover the years, and on those terms, Season 5 wasn’t quite up to par.  The central crisis–our protagonists had to face off against a pack of vicious thawed-out convicts–was uncomfortably close to a Direct-to-VOD premise, and the climactic arrival of yet another nuclear holocaust struck […]

  TURN:  Sunday 9PM on AMC – If Nothing Else is On… Unlike just about any other armed conflict in history, and for reasons that have never really been pinned down, the American Revolutionary War has rarely been a fertile source of drama either in the movies or on television.  Mel Gibson’s The Patriot was […]