Creative risk-taking should always be applauded, especially in the conservative world of network television, and tonight NBC (in the particular person of its President Robert Greenblatt) and Executive Producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron pushed all their chips to the center of the table for a massive live production of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s THE […]

  ZERO HOUR:  Thursday 8PM on ABC – Potential DVR Alert ZERO HOUR‘s pilot is an engaging piece of nonsense, but whether it can work as a continuing TV series is another question.  The premise is a DaVinci Code/National Treasure-ian tangle of Nazis, Rosicrucians, cloning, assassins, and bits and pieces of what seems to be […]

  For all that HBO’s WESTWORLD is deliberately obscure and oblique, one thing has become increasingly clear through the course of its second season:  series creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy expect viewers to decide for themselves what aspects of the show are features and which are bugs.  Most obviously, Westworld has no interest in […]

  SUPERGIRL:  Monday 8PM on CBS (premiere at 8:30PM tonight) – In the Queue SUPERGIRL is more thrilling as an experiment in network scheduling than as a TV show.  There’s nothing terribly wrong with the series itself, which comes from the Greg Berlanti factory of DC Comics adventures that’s already given us CW’s Arrow and The Flash, with […]

  The failures of HOSTAGES were many, and they separate into two dimensions.  One–the more important to CBS–was commercial; the show proved to be dead in the water from the night it premiered against the launch of The Blacklist.  Despite a summer of heavy promotion, NBC and James Spader wiped the floor with Hostages, and […]

  It felt like 12:55AM for the entire last half-hour of tonight’s SNL, and that wasn’t a bad thing.  Every post-Update sketch had the kind of oddball conceptualism that’s usually reserved for the last minutes of the show, and while the sketches didn’t all work, they had more imagination and wit than just anything that […]

  PRISON BREAK:  Tuesday 9PM on FOX – If Nothing Else Is On… Where was the clamor for a return of PRISON BREAK?  The show had pretty much run its course both critically and with viewers by the time it went off the air in 2009 after a 4-season run, and even at its peak […]

  MAGNUM, P.I.:  Monday 9PM on CBS As everyone knows, the 2018-19 CBS TV season has turned out to be the final one overseen by Les Moonves, the longtime network mogul ousted after allegations of sexual misconduct.  It’s fitting that the first new series of his last season is that definitive Moonves-ian object, a rebooted […]