Season-4-Promotional-Image-the-vampire-diaries-tv-show-32007005-500-338.png THE VAMPIRE DIARIES:  Thursday 8PM on CW WHERE WE WERE:  Witnessing heroine Elena (Nina Dobrev) die and then un-die, a presumptive vampire-to-be. To vastly oversimplify a complex mythology, she’d been heading out of Mystic Falls with Matt (Zach Roerig), one of the other relatively few humans around, having made her choice of the vampiric […]

  9-1-1:  Wednesday 9PM on FOX – Surprisingly Unsurprising Saying that FOX’s 9-1-1 is the Ryan Murphy team’s version of a Dick Wolf procedural makes it sound far more subversive and original than it actually is.  In fact, for the most part its opening hour is virtually indistinguishable from one of the cogs in Wolf’s wheel […]

  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 […]

  AMERICAN HORROR STORY – COVEN:  Wednesday 10PM on FX Caged and tortured slaves, mid-coitus spontaneous brain aneurisms and gang rape aside, the COVEN season of AMERICAN HORROR STORY was relatively restrained in its start, at least compared to other AHS seasons.  There appears to be one basic story being told, and all the mythology […]

  THE WALKING DEAD:  Sunday 9PM on AMC WHERE WE WERE:  Finally leaving the farm owned by Herschel (Scott Wilson), where for most of a becalmed season, there had been at least as much soul-searching as zombie killing, much of the philosophizing having to do with whether pregnant Lori (Sarah Wayne Callies) should bring a […]

IZOMBIE:  Tuesday 9PM on CW – Potential DVR Alert Rob Thomas and Diane Ruggiero-Wright’s clever IZOMBIE (based on a DC comic) brings back from the dead something very close to the premise of ABC’s lamented Pushing Daisies.  In that fantastical show, the hero had the magical ability to bring corpses back from the dead, but […]

  HOMELAND:  Sunday 9PM on Showtime The obsessive charts are back up on Carrie Mathison’s living room wall, and while that may not be good news for Carrie, it’s great for the rest of us.  After a divisive second season that turned too much on 24-style action and Abu Nazir’s tortuous plan to make Nicholas […]

  Read All Our Fall Pilot Reports here and Midseason Pilot Reports here. LUCKY 7:  Tuesday 10PM on ABC – If Nothing Else Is On… LUCKY 7 doesn’t feel like a jackpot.  Although its premise pilot doesn’t necessarily give a clear idea of what the series will be, the seemingly irresistible plot hook–a half-dozen ordinary […]