TRUTH BE TOLD:  Friday 8:30PM on NBC – Change the Channel Out of the pit that is the current state of NBC comedy crawls TRUTH BE TOLD, which was seemingly designed to make its lead-in, the mediocre Undateable, look like a television classic.  Its creator is DJ Nash, who last gave us the semiautobiographical […]

  BORDERTOWN:  Sunday 9:30PM on FOX – Change the Channel BORDERTOWN adds a light dusting of politics to its Seth MacFarlane factory settings.  Produced by MacFarlane, and created by Family Guy writer/producer Mark Hentemann (the writing credit on the pilot is shared with “La Cucaracha” cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz, but since Alcaraz is credited only as […]

  NEW AMSTERDAM:  Tuesday 10PM on NBC You can learn much of what you need to know about NBC’s medical procedural NEW AMSTERDAM from a bit of the David Schulner pilot script: DOCTOR 1:  Look–if you can’t help [name of patient] as a doctor, then just help her as a human being. DOCTOR 2:  Am […]

  In its second season, HBO’s SUCCESSION found an exquisite middle ground between Dallas and Shakespeare.  The show is still a somewhat rareified taste–it’s routinely been the lowest-rated show in the network’s current Sunday line-up–but as evidenced by its surprise writing Emmy a few weeks ago, its quality is recognized. The Season 2 finale, written […]

> 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 […]

WILFRED – Thursday 10PM on FX   WHERE WE WERE:  Ryan (Elijah Wood) is a burnt-out young lawyer who’s quit his job and is in such a state of depression that he attempts suicide.  One day an attractive new neighbor, Jenna (Fiona Gubelmann) moves in next door with Wilfred, her Australian sheepdog.  Ryan has an […]

  Watching the parade of Kristen Wiig’s Greatest Hits that marked her return to SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE as tonight’s host, you could be forgiven for wishing you missed her more.  For all her great talent, Wiig had become, by the time she left a year ago, a symbol of everything franchise-heavy and headpoundingly overdone on […]

  As bad as it is for a network when it launches a new series and no one shows up, in a way it has to be worse when the series premiere has a huge start–and then viewers drop away in droves once they’ve given it a try.  The first kind of failure may be […]