> ENLIGHTENED – Mondays 9:30PM on HBO – If Nothing Else Is On… As a writer, Mike White is drawn to stories of delusion.  Even though their tones (and commerciality) are widely divergent, his screenplays from Chuck & Buck to The School of Rock, The Good Girl to Nacho Libre share protagonists who are firmly […]

  BLINDSPOT:  Monday 10PM on NBC – If Nothing Else Is On… NBC’s strategy this fall seems to be to play the deja vu card and hope for the best.  Heroes Reborn returns on Thursday as though its ratings hadn’t cratered into oblivion just 5 years ago, The Player feels like basic cable circa 1998, […]

A lot can happen between the creation of a TV pilot in the spring and the production of episodes for the regular season: a writing/producing team is hired, audience focus groups weigh in, networks and studios (which may have had their own turnover) give plenty of notes, helpful and otherwise, and critics begin to rear […]

  ABC, which passed on DEVIOUS MAIDS and allowed it to be picked up by corporate sibling Lifetime, is probably lucky the cable network only programs the show during the summer off-season.  Maids, which of course is the brainchild of Desperate Housewives creator Marc Cherry, has been zeroing in on what was once the Housewives […]

  It was an odd SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE all around tonight, starting with the fact that host Chris Hemworth was there to plug The Avengers:  The Age of Ultron, which won’t even open for 2 more months.  Hemsworth isn’t exactly known as a comic stylist, so although he had a few enjoyably goofy moments, the […]

  It was utterly on-brand for THE AMERICANS that the most electrifying sequence of its series finale was about four people talking to each other.  This was the epic confrontation six seasons in the making:  FBI agent Stan Beeman (Noah Emmerich) had finally, once and for all, discovered that his neighbors and supposed best friends […]

> A lot can happen between the creation of a TV pilot in the spring and the production of episodes for the regular season: a writing/producing team is hired, audience focus groups weigh in, networks and studios (which may have had their own turnover) give plenty of notes, helpful and otherwise, and critics begin to […]

> “Busted” pilots, for those who don’t know, are simply the ones not ordered by their commissioning networks to series.  We’re going to start taking a look at some of last year’s busted pilots here at THE SKED, so it’s worth saying a couple of things about them. First, not all busted pilots are terrible.  […]