Read All Our Fall Pilot Reports here and Midseason Pilot Reports here. CRISIS: Sunday 10PM on NBC – If Nothing Else is On… Funny story. Remember how last fall, there was a serialized thriller about a high-stakes political kidnapping in Washington whose victims included teens called Hostages that flopped badly? NBC would prefer that […]
Earnest and low-key to a fault, Liza Johnson’s HATESHIP LOVESHIP might have felt more at home in the Narrative Competition at Sundance than in Toronto. It has a dramatic recessiveness, almost a passivity, for much of its length, that makes it hard to see just what kind of story it thinks it’s telling. Ultimately, though, it […]
MODERN FAMILY: Wednesday 9PM on ABC MODERN FAMILY has now won the Emmy Award for Best Comedy in each of its four years on the air, putting it one behind Frasier‘s record-setting pace. The TV Academy nominates smaller, more complex shows like Louie, Girls and Veep, but its heart is with Modern Family, and […]
Under new showrunner John Wirth, the third season of HELL ON WHEELS was on the whole uneven, and tonight’s season finale unfortunately wasn’t a very promising way for the bubble show to end its year. Wirth’s biggest change to Hell was to largely abandon the show’s original premise, which had Cullen Bohannan (Anson Mount) […]
DRACULA: Friday 10PM on NBC – If Nothing Else Is On… A century of vampire movies and TV shows has taught us that undead is by no means the same as lifeless, but NBC’s new excavation of DRACULA doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo. Produced on a lavish scale (at least in the […]
MAJOR CRIMES: Monday 9PM on TNT MAJOR CRIMES isn’t the kind of series to go for “game-changing” alterations, so the back half (actually 8 episodes) of its second season, which resumed tonight after a break since August, is only incrementally different from what aired last summer. The show is a straightforward procedural for the […]
After three seasons on the air, it seems fair to say that–paraphrasing Star Wars—Homeland isn’t the show we were looking for. That doesn’t make it a bad series, or an unentertaining one. But it’s not the successor to Mad Men and Breaking Bad in the pantheon of truly great television dramas that it at […]
BITTEN: Monday 10PM on Syfy Syfy’s Canadian werewolf import BITTEN is noticeably low-rent. Even its transformation sequences use as little CG as possible: a morphing hand, a back becoming increasingly hairy, and voila, there’s the fake wolf. Although the show has a bit more sex then the Syfy norm, it gives off a very […]