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 […]

  Unwise bargains were a staple of ONCE UPON A TIME from the very beginning, so it was sadly appropriate that series creators Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz entered into one themselves in order to convince ABC to order a 7th season for the show.  In return, the network demanded a slashed license fee, which […]

  KILLING EVE:  Sunday 8PM on AMC/BBCAmerica AMC very much wants KILLING EVE to be its next big thing.  The critical and awards-season darling spent its first season on the network’s subsidiary BBCAmerica service, but while the marketing for Season 2 still refers to it as “BBCAmerica’s”, all episodes are being simulcast on the parent […]

  MISS AMERICANA (Netflix – January 31):  There are certainly areas of Taylor Swift’s life that are carefully elided in MISS AMERICANA (her actor boyfriend’s face and name are absent, for example, and there’s no mention of Cats), and Lana Wilson’s documentary culminates in an inspirational push that is very much on-message with Swift’s latest […]

  In HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER, Carter Bays and Craig Thomas created an odd but appealing mix of traditional sitcom humor and conceptual originality (their upcoming FOX show The Goodwin Games looks like another unusual angle on the genre), and with comedy, as with drama, the thing about conceptual storytelling is that at some […]

    Even by CW standards–and this is a network where shows that could barely hold a slot in basic cable get renewed–THE LA COMPLEX is a clear flop, watched by about  2/10 of 1% of the 18-49 year old audience and less than half a million people in total. So although it’s been reported […]

> See A Word About Busted Pilots Remember the Sideways universe in the last season of Lost?  (I feel your pain; bear with me.)  In particular, remember the storyline where Sawyer and Miles were tough LA detectives, living out their version of a 1970s cop show?  Well, for Battlestar Galactica fans, there was almost a […]

> A lot can happen between the creation of a TV pilot in the spring and production of episodes for the regular season:  a writing/producing team is hired, audience focus groups weigh in, networks and studios (which may have had their own turnover in the off-season) give plenty of notes, both helpful and otherwise, and […]