> See A Word About Busted Pilots IDENTITY is so clearly a Jerry-Bruckheimer-for-CBS procedural that it comes as a shock to realize that it was neither produced by Bruckheimer nor developed for CBS.  In fact, Mark Gordon’s company produced the show for ABC Studios and the ABC network, which must have remembered at some point […]

  HAPPYLAND:  Tuesday 11PM on MTV – Worth A Look After years spent as far away from scripted series as it could get, MTV has been accumulating a tidy set of programming lately that caters to its target demo without pandering to it, including Teen Wolf and Finding Carter on the drama side, along with […]

  ELEMENTARY: Thursday 10PM on CBS -Potential DVR Alert ELEMENTARY has been given CBS’ showcase Thursday 10PM timeslot in the fall.  Perhaps surprisingly, it may deserve to be there. The series concept is… well, let’s just say it’s not complicated.  (Nor is it entirely original, since the BBC got there first a couple of years […]

  THE NEVERS:  Sunday 9PM on HBO The arrival of HBO’s THE NEVERS introduces a continuing series that’s also, in a sense, a limited one.  It was initially meant to be the latest original franchise from creator/auteur/showrunner Joss Whedon, the inventor of the Buffy The Vampire Slayer universe and director of the first two Avengers […]

  SEX&DRUGS&ROCK&ROLL:  Thursday 10PM on FX – If Nothing Else Is On… Denis Leary doesn’t have a world of range, and in his new comedy SEX&DRUGS&ROCK&ROLL, the aging never-quite-star he plays called Johnny Rock isn’t very different from Tommy Gavin, the fireman he played on Rescue Me.  (Leary created both shows, on Rescue Me working […]

  After 6 seasons, PARKS & RECREATION is still the most reliably lovable show on network television–maybe on all of TV.  No other series wears its heart on its sleeve as genuinely as Parks, and no ensemble provides more joyful fun than its cast.  The Season 6 finale, written by Co-Executive Producer Alan Yang and […]

  EXTANT:  Wednesday 9PM on CBS – If Nothing Else Is On… CBS’s EXTANT has been at the center of a Hollywood tentpole-sized marketing campaign for months, so it’s a bit disappointing to find that the show itself is just a moderately compelling hodgepodge of sci-fi motifs, without even the ambitious scale of the network’s […]

  Two weeks is too soon to be a trend, but it’s been heartening to see the 40th season of SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE rely more on original sketch ideas than franchise characters.  Of course, when building a weekly 90 minutes from original concepts, unevenness is very much a given, and that was certainly true of […]