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 […]

  HUNTED:  Friday 10PM on Cinemax – Potential DVR Alert On the same night that coincidentally brought the season premiere of Nikita, we have a new series that treads similar ground, both centering on gorgeous, betrayed spies, although the tones of the two shows are very different.  In HUNTED, set and produced in Britain but […]

  How do you launch 90 minute of live television comedy less than 36 hours after one of the most awful crimes in American history?  SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE tried to finesse the moment by starting its telecast tonight with a children’s choir singing “Silent Night,” but there was nevertheless some unavoidable awkwardness when the show […]

  COMMUNITY:  Thursday 8PM on NBC In 1984, MGM released the movie 2010, which was a sequel to 1968’s classic 2001:  A Space Odyssey. 2010 had credentials to prove it was no mere rip-off:  it was based, like 2001, on a novel by Arthur C. Clarke, its characters and storylines related back to the original, […]

  Greg Garcia has made a successful niche for himself on network television as poet of the lower-middle-class, small-town, gently surrealist sitcom, first with My Name Is Earl and now with RAISING HOPE.  The only problem with Garcia’s type of show is that the constant requirement for more inventively conceptual, eccentric storylines can lead to […]

  THE BIG C: HEREAFTER – Monday 10PM on Showtime THE BIG C has spent a lot of time trying not to be the show it was supposed to be.  TV shows, much like people, tend to want to go on for as long as possible, so although Darlene Hunt’s dramedy began with Cathy Jamison […]

  As of this week, there’s just one CSI left standing on CBS, and after 13 years, it’s the original recipe.  Having survived the bump in its creative road a couple of seasons ago when the misguided hire of Laurence Fishburne was repaired with the arrivals of Ted Danson and Elisabeth Shue, the show has […]

  Every so often, a show comes along that makes you want to run up to random people in the street and yell “Why aren’t you watching this?”  right in their uncomprehending faces.  ORPHAN BLACK probably wasn’t–OK, wasn’t–the season’s best new show; The Americans, for one, was more layered and expertly crafted.  But Orphan, airing in […]