THE GOOD DOCTOR:  Monday 10PM on ABC – Change the Channel ABC’s THE GOOD DOCTOR arrives with some pedigree, being a medical series from David Shore, the creator of House, and starring Freddie Highmore, fresh off his remarkable turn on Bates Motel.  The pilot, though, suggests that there’s very little of note here. The […]

  For a while there, it seemed as though the finale of GRIMM was on a crusade to make sure the show could never be rebooted, massacring almost the entire regular cast one by one, which in an age where IP is more important than anything else would have been a fairly brave move.  But […]

  In its second season, Noah Hawley’s FX series LEGION largely became a delivery system for set-pieces.  Some of these sequences, to be sure, were dazzling:  Hawley has become a whiz with aspect ratios, split screens, stylized sets, skewed camera angles, eccentric music choices, and all manner of visual and aural devices–at one point, he […]

  There was a sequence late in the one and only season of VEGAS that suggested what the show could have been.  It wasn’t a big deal:  deputy sheriff Dixon Lamb (Taylor Handley) needed a favor from the entertainment director of one of the casinos (Enver Gjokaj), who’d only grant it if he got some […]

  THE STRAIN:  Sunday 10PM on FX Previously… on THE STRAIN:  A jet stops on the tarmac at JFK with–it appears–virtually all of its occupants mysteriously dead.  Missing from the cargo hold:  a huge, ornately carved box–sort of, um, like a coffin–filled with earth and with worms that squirm into human flesh.  CDC investigator Dr. […]

  Disclaimer:  Network pilots now in circulation are not necessarily in the form that will air in the Fall.  Pilots are often reedited and re-scored, and in some cases even recast or reshot.  These critiques shouldn’t be taken as full pilot reviews, but rather as a guide to the general style and content of the […]

  LIVING BIBLICALLY:  Monday 9:30PM on CBS – Change the Channel LIVING BIBLICALLY is a CBS sitcom for the Age of Trump, and like so many artifacts of this age, it may well thrill its target audience while causing others to shudder. Although inspired by a nonfiction book, Living Biblically is fully as hacky as […]

  The Matrix is one of the many pop culture properties that have influenced Noah Hawley’s LEGION, and Legion has been something of a matrix itself.  Behind its surface and around its edges, the shape of a much more conventional Marvel comic-book adventure story has lurked from the start, and with the final two episodes […]