Over the course of its season, NBC’s SHADES OF BLUE muddled its way from being a broadcast network-lite version of a gritty cable cop drama to a more conventional heist thriller.  It was flawed in both contexts, but more able to carry its weight as the latter. The series, created by Adi Hasak, was […]

  THE KNICK:  Friday 10PM on Cinemax – DVR Alert It’s yet another measure of where television is these days in relation to movies that Steven Soderbergh, the main figure behind Cinemax’s new historical medical drama THE KNICK, found his ambitions too big for the big screen.  Soderbergh is now “retired,” which has turned out […]

  Professional sports are so central to American culture, and so particularly critical to the television business, that it’s surprising the area had been largely ignored as the locale of a series until USA’s NECESSARY ROUGHNESS debuted.  Of course, since Roughness is a USA show, it’s mostly been content with superficial light drama, without any […]

  POLITICAL ANIMALS: Sunday 10PM on USA 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 […]

  The hits just kept coming on tonight’s SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE, which packed a whole fall’s worth of glitz into the show’s final 90 minutes of 2013.  Technically, Jimmy Fallon was the host and Justin Timberlake was musical guest, but as anyone would have expected, the two were essentially a team–and if they weren’t enough […]

  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 […]

  No one could seriously imagine that the TV remake of ROSEMARY’S BABY would come close to Roman Polanski’s 1968 masterpiece, so let’s get the obvious over with in a single paragraph.  (The amazing thing, really, is that it’s lasted this long without an inferior reboot being made, although there was an awful 1976 made-for-TV […]

  ANIMAL PRACTICE: Wednesday 8PM starting 9/26 on NBC – Change The Channel UPDATE:  Tonight NBC aired the recast version of the ANIMAL PRACTICE pilot as a last-gasp grab for the attention of its Olympics audience.  Joanna Garcia Swisher now plays the female lead, the new boss of the show’s animal hospital and ex-girlfriend of […]