Rob Thomas and Dianne Ruggiero-Wright’s CW series IZOMBIE is a show that would benefit from a season order shorter than the 19 hours it had to deliver this year–and with its less than stellar ratings, that might be exactly what it gets next season. As it was, this season was overextended, with too many […]
Something unexpected has been going on in the first half of the fourth season of AMC’s franchise spin-off FEAR THE WALKING DEAD. Fear has always felt like a corporate calculation and a creative afterthought, unable to find a lasting identity as it roamed from being a Walking Dead prequel to being all too literally […]
THE ASTRONAUT WIVES CLUB never achieved much in the way of lift-off, and although ABC knew it was coming–there was a reason it was pushed to a summer run as the lead-in to Mistresses–the show’s flat quality must have initially taken the network by surprise. On paper, the show seemed like it was exactly […]
Creative risk-taking should always be applauded, especially in the conservative world of network television, and tonight NBC (in the particular person of its President Robert Greenblatt) and Executive Producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron pushed all their chips to the center of the table for a massive live production of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s THE […]
ZERO HOUR: Thursday 8PM on ABC – Potential DVR Alert ZERO HOUR‘s pilot is an engaging piece of nonsense, but whether it can work as a continuing TV series is another question. The premise is a DaVinci Code/National Treasure-ian tangle of Nazis, Rosicrucians, cloning, assassins, and bits and pieces of what seems to be […]
It felt like 12:55AM for the entire last half-hour of tonight’s SNL, and that wasn’t a bad thing. Every post-Update sketch had the kind of oddball conceptualism that’s usually reserved for the last minutes of the show, and while the sketches didn’t all work, they had more imagination and wit than just anything that […]
PRISON BREAK: Tuesday 9PM on FOX – If Nothing Else Is On… Where was the clamor for a return of PRISON BREAK? The show had pretty much run its course both critically and with viewers by the time it went off the air in 2009 after a 4-season run, and even at its peak […]
> 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 reviews, but rather as a guide to the general style and content of the […]