>See A Word About Busted Pilots On paper, EXIT STRATEGY looked like one of the hot FOX pilots this past season, a high-profile (Ethan Hawke’s first TV project) espionage thriller in the vein of 24 that could inherit that show’s Monday night slot and its House lead-in.  It didn’t happen:  the network chose Terra Nova […]

>  See A Word About Busted Pilots Peter Tolan, who with Denis Leary created Rescue Me, knows something about the comedy that emerges when when men try to assert their masculinity in the most idiotic ways.  So you can understand why FOX developed COUNCIL OF DADS, which was meant to bring that kind of tone […]

> See A Word About Busted Pilots Not even the presence of Michael Chiklis and Elizabeth Perkins could make VINCE UNCENSORED endurable.   Deservedly consigned by CBS to its trash-bin, this isn’t one of those pilots you’ll be likely to hear about again.  The storyline of Vince Uncensored uses a contrivance to get to an […]

>   See A Word About Busted Pilots For the most part, actors only get one shot in a given pilot season.  Since the lion’s share of network pilots are produced during the same narrow Spring window–allowing them to be picked up and announced at the Upfronts in May–and since actors who play regular characters […]

> See A Word About Busted Pilots  The double meaning of “little” in the title of Fox’s busted sitcom pilot LITTLE IN COMMON is that the 3 couples at its center are brought together only because their respective kids all play on the same little league team.  That’s about it for cleverness, though, in this […]

>   See A Word About Busted Pilots We’ve gotten this far without using the word “ghastly” to describe any of the busted pilots from this year’s development season, but that streak is about to end.  HELP WANTED, which was produced by Warner Bros for NBC, is unaccountably bad.  Partly that’s a function of its […]

> See A Word About Busted Pilots  A MANN’S WORLD isn’t the usual run of busted pilot.  Produced by Warner Bros for consideration by NBC, it’s quite skillfully written and directed by Michael Patrick King, and it has a dramatic vision that sets it apart from mere failed genre efforts.  It also has a very […]

> See A Word About Busted Pilots IDENTITY is so clearly a Jerry-Bruckheimer-for-CBS procedural that it comes as a shock to realize that it was neither produced by Bruckheimer nor developed for CBS.  In fact, Mark Gordon’s company produced the show for ABC Studios and the ABC network, which must have remembered at some point […]