THE BRIDGE:  Wednesday 10PM on FX – DVR Alert FX has assumed a leadership role in the development of serious, ambitious TV drama over the past decade (The Shield, Rescue Me, The Americans), and with its new series THE BRIDGE, it takes on its largest canvas to date.  The Bridge, which is based on […]

  WELCOME TO SWEDEN:  Thursday 9PM on NBC – Potential DVR Alert WELCOME TO SWEDEN has one of the more unusual provenances of any show on a US broadcast network.  It was commissioned by Swedish television, where it aired last spring–and which explains its heavy use of subtitled Swedish dialogue.  Although it includes some familiar […]

  KILLJOYS is, along with Dark Matter, one of the ultra-cheap scripted pieces that Syfy runs on Friday nights.  (Defiance, which airs with them, is a somewhat more ambitious enterprise.)  The grubby aesthetics of the two Canadian imports are so similar that it’s no surprise there’s been talk about a crossover between their universes–assuming both are […]

  The original, Las Vegas-set CSI didn’t just spawn a mini-industry of its own spin-offs, but it can fairly lay claim to being one of the most influential shows of its generation, more or less inventing the subgenre of high-tech procedural that’s populated every network over the years since it began.  The series rose from […]

  FEAR THE WALKING DEAD:  Sunday 9PM on AMC AMC’s eccentric decision to keep its Walking Dead assembly line going with a not-quite-prequel has become even more so in Season 2, which places the Season 1 survivors on a yacht owned by one of them, the rich and enigmatic Strand (Colman Domingo), hovering off the […]

  9JKL:  Monday 8:30PM on CBS – Change the Channel We usually do actors the favor of evaluating their work on a project separately from the quality of the project itself, willing to take their performances on their own terms.  But Mark Feuerstein doesn’t just star in the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad new […]

  In their teardown season as new showrunners of FEAR THE WALKING DEAD, Andrew Chambliss and Ian Goldberg didn’t solve all the problems inherent in the franchise, and the season was uneven, only partly for reasons of transition.  Still, they accomplished a lot, more or less creating a new series from the one that had […]

> 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 […]