DECEPTION:  Sunday 10PM on ABC – In the Queue For its newest trick, the House of Greg Berlanti presents a crime procedural so insubstantial it seems to disappear before your very eyes.  DECEPTION, created by Chris Fedak (co-creator of NBC’s vintage Chuck) mixes together tropes like a summer camp magic show:  the smug amateur […]

THE NIGHT SHIFT:  Monday 10PM on NBC THE NIGHT SHIFT was a workmanlike performer for NBC last summer, but its promotion to The Voice‘s lead-out on the network’s midseason schedule says more about the empty shelves at NBC than about the show itself, which remains a (very) sub-Grey’s Anatomy mix of surgery and romance. The […]

  ABC’s AMERICAN CRIME is Serious and Important, but how good is it?  John Ridley’s series takes on the biggest topics–all of them, it seems–from race to class to sexual orientation to school violence and the loss of privacy in the internet age, and not even Oscar-bait films wear a mantle of unrelieved misery quite […]

  ELEMENTARY:  Thursday 10PM on CBS For those of us mildly obsessed with BBC’s superlative Sherlock, it may have been unwise for CBS’s ELEMENTARY (which all concerned agree is not, legally, a knock-off) to bring its updated Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, in its Season 2 premiere, to London.  Kept on their separate continents, Jonny […]

  WEEDS:  Sunday 10PM on Showtime   WHERE WE WERE:  After a season largely concerned with a battle for supremacy in the New York drug trade, both within and outside the family, there seemed to be a moment of comparative serenity for Nancy Botwin (Mary Louise Parker) and her clan at the upstate enclave she’d […]

  MARRY ME:  Tuesday 9PM on NBC starting October 14 – If Nothing Else Is On… PLAYERS:  Series creator David Caspe, of the late and lamented Happy Endings.  Stars Casey Wilson and Ken Marino, but especially Wilson, because while starring in this comedy about an engaged couple, she’s engaged in real life to Caspe.  Pilot […]

        This summer, TNT is airing an ambitious slate of original programming, including the final season of its signature series The Closer, the launches of spinoff Major Crimes and new procedural Perception, a reboot of Dallas, new seasons of the elaborate Steven Spielberg production Falling Skies as well as Leverage and Rizzoli […]

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 […]