RAY DONOVAN:  Sunday 10PM on Showtime – Potential DVR Alert Ray Donovan (Liev Schreiber) is a fixer with plenty to fix.  Professionally, he’s sort of a lower-rent LA version of Scandal‘s Olivia Pope, employed by Hollywood agent Lee Drexler (Peter Jacobson) to do whatever’s necessary to clean up after Tinseltown’s celebrities and studio execs.  […]

  DALLAS:  Monday 9PM on TNT As TNT pushes its action-oriented “Boom” branding campaign (successfully with The Last Ship, not so much with Murder In the First nor apparently the new Legends), DALLAS seems more and more like a remnant not just of an earlier era of television, but of its own network’s past.  The […]

  ZOO:  Tuesday 9PM on CBS Viewers who enjoyed the first dumb season of CBS’s ZOO last summer–and there were quite a few of them–should have little quarrel with Season 2.  In fact, based on the two-hour season premiere (Hour 1 written by Supervising Producer Matt Pitts and Producer Melissa Glenn; Hour 2 by Co-Executive […]

> 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 […]

  PARTNERS: Monday 8:30PM on CBS – Worth A Look It’s impossible not to compare the new fall comedies PARTNERS on CBS and The New Normal on NBC.  Even though the CBS show is multi-camera and NBC’s is in single camera format, both are broad, sentimental comedies about what are essentially blended gay/straight families. New […]

  I’M DYING UP HERE certainly wasn’t the worst show of the summer, but it did make one wonder how it had made its way through the development process and onto Showtime’s air.  Series creator Dave Flebotte’s take on the nonfiction book by William Knoedelseder was almost defiantly uncommercial.  The book detailed the 1970s LA […]

  Barring unusual financial or political considerations, David E. Kelley’s MONDAY MORNINGS–which has had wretched ratings since its debut–aired its final episode on TNT with tonight’s technically season finale, so we won’t spend a lot of time poking around the body.  Returning to the show after its first month of episodes, hardly anything seemed to […]

  Despite an underwhelming season finale that favored sentiment over action until the closing seconds, THE LAST SHIP had a fairly smooth second voyage.  (The show, one of TNT’s highest-rated originals, has already been renewed for Season 3.)  Season 1 had ended, somewhat surprisingly, with the discovery of a cure for the virus that had […]