KING:  Friday 10PM on Reelz – If Nothing Else Is On… One genre that’s never in short supply, even on summer TV, is the police procedural–in fact, during the summer months, even Canadian police procedurals seem to be just about everywhere.  Reelz has added another with the schedule-filler KING, an unobjectionable but hardly notable […]

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 […]

>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 of […]

  GREY’S ANATOMY:  Thursday 9PM on ABC In the miracle season of 2004-05, ABC launched three smash hits:  Desperate Housewives, Lost and GREY’S ANATOMY.  Ten seasons later, the only one still around is Grey’s, and its blockbuster days are past, with ratings last spring around a 3.0 that didn’t always carry its timeslot, and with […]

  90210:  Monday 8PM on CW WHERE WE WERE:  Mid car-crash.  A truck was plowing into Dixon (Tristan Wilds), in a way that would surely kill an actor in the middle of contract renegotiations.  Dixon’s love Adriana (Jessica Lowndes), singer and sometime alcoholic, drug addict and maniac, to whom Dixon was driving, had given up […]

  The first season of AMC’s INTO THE BADLANDS felt entirely predigested.  It was Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon by way of Game of Thrones by way of every post-apocalyptic Chosen One fantasy you’ve ever seen.  The Matrix was in the mix, and so was Star Wars, and Mad Max, and The Wizard of Oz, and […]

  With its endless governmental and quasi-governmental conspiracies and its sci-fi technology, NIKITA has always flirted with sheer silliness, and in its Season 3 finale the show went all the way.  Its ratings have also flirted with cancellation, and that came close to happening too:  the series will barely be coming back, for an as-yet […]

  AMERICAN GOTHIC:  Wednesday 10PM on CBS – Change the Channel Since even ABC is having trouble these days with its trademark soaps about melodrama, dark reveals and violence among close relations (The Family, Blood & Oil, the exhausted cancellation of Revenge), it’s not much of a surprise that CBS is completely out of its […]