GOTHAM:  Thursday 8PM on FOX Coming off its most satisfying season to date, the first where it seemed to have some control over its sprawl, GOTHAM has been given a new timeslot on Thursdays for its 4th season, and the subtitle “A Dark Knight.”  It is indeed creeping ever closer to the territory of […]

  COUNTERPART:  Sunday 9PM on Starz, starting 1/21/18 – In the Queue Tales of alternative earths are an increasingly popular form of fiction these days, possibly because our actual Earth is currently so difficult to handle.  Just as The Man In the High Castle runs the subgenre through tropes of old-time war movies, Starz’s new […]

  ROSWELL, NEW MEXICO – Tuesday 9PM on CW CW has gone back to its WB/UPN roots for ROSWELL, NEW MEXICO, a reboot and update of the Roswell series that debuted on the first of those networks in 1999, then moved to the other.  Once again, it’s a story of romance between an Earth woman […]

  AGENTS OF SHIELD has been given one more final season after the sixth that concluded tonight, and that will bring to an end an extended footnote to Marvel’s cultural domination of our moment.  Agents was the project most caught up in the territorial strife between Marvel Television and the increasingly all-powerful Marvel Cinematic Universe, […]

  REBEL:  Thursday 10PM on ABC Krista Vernoff is one of network TV’s most prized showrunners.  She’s successfully guided Shonda Rhimes’s Grey’s Anatomy into a remarkable 17th season of success (which will be extended further if the necessary deals are made), and when she took over Station 19, that show became an effective one-two punch […]

    On paper, THE SECRET CIRCLE seemed to have everything going for it.  It was a ready-made companion piece to CW’s one big hit The Vampire Diaries–produced by Vampire‘s Kevin Williamson, based on another series of books by Vampire author L.J. Smith.  The ensemble cast was led by Britt Robetrson, previously the personable star […]

  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 […]

> 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 […]