THE FOLLOWING:  Monday 9PM on FOX 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 […]

>   See A Word About Busted Pilots For the most part, actors only get one shot in a given pilot season.  Since the lion’s share of network pilots are produced during the same narrow Spring window–allowing them to be picked up and announced at the Upfronts in May–and since actors who play regular characters […]

  This was the first season of GAME OF THRONES A.N. (Ahead of the Novels), and we can’t know at this point how much series creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss were informed by what they know about the work novelist George R. R. Martin hasn’t yet published.  But Martin will be hard-pressed to come […]

  CULT:  Tuesday 9PM on CW – Change the Channel CW has had little good news this season apart from the arrival of Arrow, and it’s not helping itself by deciding to launch the new thriller CULT just as FOX has introduced its own somewhat similar The Following.  Comparisons are inevitable between the two shows […]

  While not as loudly buzzy as Girls, SILICON VALLEY has been far more popular, indeed HBO’s highest-performing new comedy in quite a while (the fact that it follows the massive Game of Thrones on the network’s line-up hasn’t hurt, of course). Unlike a lot of comedies, both network and cable, that need some time […]

  RECKLESS:  Sunday 9PM on CBS Previously… on RECKLESS:  In an ever-steamy version of Charleston, new City Attorney and general good old boy Roy Rayder (Cam Gigandet) constantly locks horns with Yankee lawyer Jamie Sawyer (Anna Wood).  One of her clients is ex-cop Lee Anne Marcus (Georgina Haig), who’s suing the department after being fired […]

  Before the final 2 weeks of its run, the word no one would ever have dreamed of attaching to TRUE BLOOD was “subdued”; it was the guilty pleasure HBO series that was loaded with sex and violence and got great ratings, but without the class of, say, Game of Thrones, and with no serious […]

  It may not be fair, but it’s awfully hard not to compare the second seasons of KILLING EVE directly with HBO’s Barry, since both were comedies-with-drama/dramas-with-comedy about hired killers that aired on virtually the same Sunday nights.  Many of us watched the latest installments of each series in the span of the same few hours.  […]