Read All Our Fall Pilot Reports here and Midseason Pilot Reports here. CRISIS:  Sunday 10PM on NBC – If Nothing Else is On… Funny story.  Remember how last fall, there was a serialized thriller about a high-stakes political kidnapping in Washington whose victims included teens called Hostages that flopped badly?  NBC would prefer that […]

  THE NEIGHBORS:  Friday 8:30PM on ABC THE NEIGHBORS was last season’s reminder that a pilot isn’t the final word on a series.  In fact, neither are the first several episodes.  It took a while for Dan Fogelman’s show to demonstrate that it was more than its inane premise and slapstick gags about aliens living […]

  It’s relatively unusual for a movie star to host SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE without having something to plug, but this week Bruce Willis took the lead for his first turn since the days of the original Die Hard in 1989.  Willis rarely gets the credit he deserves for the range of his roles (the Die […]

  GETTING ON:  Sunday 10PM on HBO Previously on… GETTING ON:  At a geriatric extended care ward in a Los Angeles hospital, Nurses Dawn (Alex Borstein) and Didi (Niecy Nash) attempt to cope with bureaucracy, their newly-transferred (read: demoted) physician in charge Dr. Jenna James (Laurie Metcalf), and the sheer weight of bureaucracy as they […]

  The unquestionable highlight of tonight’s SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE was brief but heartfelt:  the tail-end of Weekend Update, as Amy Poehler, Andy Samberg, Fred Armisen (wordlessly, as wandering sight-impaired former NY Governor David Paterson) and, inevitably, Bill Hader’s Stefon, all trooped in to bid farewell to co-anchor Seth Meyers on his way to take over […]

  THOSE WHO KILL:  Monday 10PM on A&E Previously… on THOSE WHO KILL:  Catherine Jensen (Chloe Sevigny) is a Pittsburgh homicide detective on the serial killer beat.  She has demons in her past, and so does Thomas Schaeffer (James D’Arcy), the forensic psychologist she takes on–against the wishes of her Captain, Frank Bisgaard (James Morrison)–as […]

  The short back “half” of SUITS’ Season 3 was surprisingly intense.  With only 6 episodes in play, the show stepped away from its usual super-complex litigations where everyone double-bluffs and triple-crosses everyone else on a weekly basis, and instead focused more deeply than usual on its central characters.  In particular, the series returned to […]

  In its second season, THE AMERICANS continued to be a expertly crafted saga of betrayals, both political and personal.  Tonight’s chilling season finale, written by series creator Joe Weisberg and his co-showrunner Joel Fields, and directed by Daniel Sackheim, brought all its themes together brilliantly, and set the stage for what should be an […]