POLITICAL ANIMALS:  Sunday 10PM on USA – Potential DVR Alert   POLITICAL ANIMALS is a lot more Brothers & Sisters than it is The West Wing, which makes sense because it’s the work of Greg Berlanti, who took over as showrunner on B&S when show creator Jon Robin Baitz wasn’t giving ABC the soap […]

  CW’s good-humored not-Gilmore Girls small town romance HART OF DIXIE concluded its first season tonight with the same pleasant, likable, unthrilling touch it’s had since last fall. Hart isn’t really about plot–to the extent it works, it’s all about charm.  The series set up its central situation in the pilot:  go-getter New York doctor […]

  MOM:  Monday 9:30PM on CBS Previously… on MOM:  Christy (Anna Faris) is a recovering alcoholic single mom who has to cope with her own no-boundaries recovering addict single mother Bonnie (Allison Janney), as well as teen daughter Violet (Sadie Calvano) and son Roscoe (Blake Garrett Rosenthal).  Christy is just barely holding it together, and […]

> Disclaimer:  Network pilots now in circulation are not necessarily in the form that will air in the Fall.  Pilots are often reedited and rescored, and in some cases even recast or reshot.  So these critiques shouldn’t be taken as full TV pilot reviews, but rather as a guide to the general style and content […]

  BENCHED:  Tuesday 10:30PM on USA – If Nothing Else Is On… BENCHED, USA Network’s latest attempt to broaden its repertoire beyond its core of light-hearted procedurals, doesn’t have much of a pilot, but there’s some potential for growth.  The pilot, written by series co-creators Michaela Watkins (better known as an actress–she was the dippy […]

  MISTRESSES:  Monday 10PM on ABC There isn’t much mistressing going on in MISTRESSES at the dawn of the unapologetically frothy summer soap’s 4th season.  Having weathered the loss of marquee star Alyssa Milano’s Savi last year, the remaining lead characters Joss (Jes Macallan), Karen (Yunjin Kim) and April (Rochelle Aytes) are barely being transgressive […]

  GUILT:  Monday 9PM on Freeform – Change the Channel The network now known as Freeform is making it clear that, building on the success of ABC Family’s Pretty Little Liars, it intends to be a purveyor of YA genre tales.  Unfortunately, on the basis of Stitchers, Shadowhunters and the new Guilt, it’s hasn’t yet […]

  FOSSE/VERDON:  Tuesday 10PM on FX A pair of shadows loom over FX’s limited series FOSSE/VERDON.  One is the ultra-meta fact that its story has to some extent been told by Bob Fosse himself, in his barely fictionalized 1979 masterpiece All That Jazz, all about a chain-smoking, pill-popping, self-destructive womanizer who was also a brilliant […]