TAKE TWO:  Thursday 10PM on ABC ABC’s TAKE TWO has an unusually classy set of auspices for a summer broadcast series.  Its co-creator is Andrew W. Marlowe, who gave the network its long-running hit Castle (his writing partner on the new show is Terri Edda Miller, a Castle writer/producer and also Mrs. Marlowe), and […]

  NOTORIOUS:  Thursday 9PM on ABC – Change the Channel Any viewer apt to complain about the over-the-top melodrama of Scandal should be forced to watch the pilot for Notorious, a supposed “drama” so consistently idiotic that it’s closer in tone to the self-mocking theatrics of Jane the Virgin.  As it happens, Notorious is filling […]

  WESTWORLD:  Sunday 9PM on HBO   With most other forms of new entertainment content sidelined for at least the next several weeks, television is likely to be even more at the center of our culture than it already is, and Season 3 of HBO’s WESTWORLD, with its dense mythology and high philosophical ambitions, seems […]

  90210:  Monday 8PM on CW WHERE WE WERE:  Mid car-crash.  A truck was plowing into Dixon (Tristan Wilds), in a way that would surely kill an actor in the middle of contract renegotiations.  Dixon’s love Adriana (Jessica Lowndes), singer and sometime alcoholic, drug addict and maniac, to whom Dixon was driving, had given up […]

  Whenever The Killing feels badly about how abused it gets for being a lame murder mystery dotted with time-wasting red herrings, it can look over at TWISTED to boost its morale.  With the help of the biggest lead-in ABCFamily has to offer in Pretty Little Liars, Twisted managed to keep its ratings decent enough […]

  MARRIED:  Thursday 10PM on FX – If Nothing Else Is On… Acrid indie comedy is FX’s brand, with shows like It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, The League, Legit and (although it transcends such categories) Louie.  The network has introduced a new pair for the summer, the first of which is Andrew Gurland’s MARRIED.  It’s on-brand, […]

  AGENTS OF SHIELD:  Tuesday 9PM on ABC It took most of its first season for AGENTS OF SHIELD to start becoming the show the synergy experts at Disney, Marvel and ABC desperately wanted it to be, and by then it had squandered most of the gaudy ratings that had greeted it last fall.  Only when the plotline of Captain America: […]

> 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 […]