> See A Word About Busted Pilots  Deadline reported today that ABC Studios has signed Jesse Martin to a talent hold deal that, although it could end up with him being cast in a different ABCS project, is largely in place so he’ll be available for a redeveloped version of Marc Cherry’s HALLELUJAH pilot, for […]

  THE WHISPERS:  Monday 10PM on ABC Previously… on THE WHISPERS:  FBI psychologist Claire Bennigan (Lily Rabe) is put on the case of seemingly normal children who–responding to whispers from an imaginary “friend” named Drill who speaks to them through electricity–create booby-traps for use on their parents, hack into secret government databases and commit similar […]

  GRANDFATHERED:  Tuesday 8PM on FOX – If Nothing Else is On… GRANDFATHERED wins the fall’s Exactly What You Think It Is prize, awarded annually to the show that has absolutely no interest in surprising its audience or even momentarily giving it pause.  (The award is a statuette in the form of a viewer half-asleep […]

  THE WIZ LIVE was the smoothest, best-cast and best-sung yet of NBC’s annual Broadway musical pageants, although it had its own issues.  The network, and producers Neil Meron and Craig Zadan, made a demographic choice in picking The Wiz as their latest production.  Although a Broadway hit, The Wiz isn’t generally considered part of […]

  LUCIFER:  Monday 9PM on FOX – Change the Channel It’s fun to imagine the development meetings that preceded FOX’s order of the new procedural LUCIFER: Series Creator Tom Kapinos:  The Devil, Satan himself, is the show’s main character. FOX Executive:  Wow!  So what does he do? Kapinos:  He runs a nightclub, and he consults […]

  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 […]

> 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 […]

  Professional sports are so central to American culture, and so particularly critical to the television business, that it’s surprising the area had been largely ignored as the locale of a series until USA’s NECESSARY ROUGHNESS debuted.  Of course, since Roughness is a USA show, it’s mostly been content with superficial light drama, without any […]