> 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 […]

  The Season 2 finale of Agents of SHIELD was the show trying its very, very hardest–and still not hitting the mark.  A great deal of work has gone into rescuing Agents since it plummeted from the heights of its enormous hype-driven premiere in Fall 2013, and it’s certainly a better series now than it […]

  In its second season, Courtney Kemp Agboh’s POWER solidified its position as Starz’s biggest original hit, and it was a considerably better drama, too.  Partly that was because of Season 1’s weird structure, which played as 8 hours of prologue because the show’s two protagonists, drug trafficker Jamie “Ghost” St. Patrick (Omari Hardwick) and […]

  MACGYVER:  Friday 8PM on CBS – Change the Channel CBS’s reboot of the 30-year old MACGYVER was the fall’s problem child.  After picking up the series, the network didn’t just dump the original pilot, it fired the showrunner and most of the cast, virtually starting from scratch.  (The original showrunner, Paul Downs Colaizzo, retains […]

  DEVIOUS MAIDS:  Sunday 10PM on Lifetime – If Nothing Else Is On… Technically, DEVIOUS MINDS isn’t a spin-off of Desperate Housewives–there are no significant shared characters or storylines.  But Maids, like Housewives, hails from writer Marc Cherry, and it follows the Housewives tone and pattern so closely that it often feels like at any […]

  PSYCH:  Wednesday 10PM on USA It’s sort of fitting that PSYCH, a show now a little past its prime, kicked off its 8th and perhaps final season with a parody of late 1990s Guy Ritchie lad thrillers like Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels–movies even Ritchie doesn’t make anymore, now that he’s knee-deep in […]

    On paper, THE SECRET CIRCLE seemed to have everything going for it.  It was a ready-made companion piece to CW’s one big hit The Vampire Diaries–produced by Vampire‘s Kevin Williamson, based on another series of books by Vampire author L.J. Smith.  The ensemble cast was led by Britt Robetrson, previously the personable star […]

  DALLAS – Wednesday 9PM on TNT:  If Nothing Else Is On…   DALLAS is a gusher, all right.  TNT’s disinterment of the 1980s blockbuster soap is loaded with so many emptily portentous glares and melodramatic reaction shots that it might almost be a telenovela. In 1978, the year the original Dallas went on the […]