THE PASSAGE:  Monday 9PM on FOX FOX’s THE PASSAGE does to Justin Cronin’s intricate, elaborate trilogy of postapocalyptic thrillers what Hollywood has traditionally done with literary fiction, flattening the books in the most conventional way possible.  This wasn’t the original plan, or even the second:  Ridley Scott’s production company acquired Cronin’s books with the […]

> 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 reviews, but rather as a guide to the general style and content of the […]

  GRANDFATHERED:  Tuesday 8PM on FOX – If Nothing Else is On… GRANDFATHERED wins the fall’s Exactly What You Think It Is prize, awarded annually to the show that has absolutely no interest in surprising its audience or even momentarily giving it pause.  (The award is a statuette in the form of a viewer half-asleep […]

  KRYPTON:  Wednesday 10PM on Syfy – Change the Channel With the engagingly odd exception of The Magicians, Syfy hasn’t had much luck with its big swings, and KRYPTON is unlikely to change that.  The network’s position for the last several years has been so strange as to be almost nightmarish:  in a pop culture […]

  GALAVANT:  Sunday 8PM on ABC – If Nothing Else Is On… GALAVANT is one of the goofier network enterprises in recent memory.  It’s a fairy tale comedy-musical created by Dan Fogelman (whose resume covers everything from Crazy, Stupid, Love to Tangled to The Neighbors) that’s meant to be in the vein of The Princess Bride and […]

> See A Word About Busted Pilots The word was that Stephen Gaghan’s pilot METRO was in serious consideration for NBC’s schedule until the very end (conventional wisdom has it that the final choice came down to Metro vs. Awake, and the latter made the cut).  That’s too bad:  the pilot is an impressive piece […]

  12 MONKEYS:  Friday 9PM on Syfy – If Nothing Else Is On… Last year, the writer/producer Noah Hawley miraculously inhabited Joel and Ethan Coen’s Fargo, creating something that was original and yet satisfyingly true to the vision of two of the most distinctive filmmakers around. Lightning doesn’t strike that way for Syfy’s 12 MONKEYS. The 1995 […]

  SILICON VALLEY:  Sunday 10PM on HBO – DVR Alert There’s no algorithm (yet) to predict compatibility between TV series, so we don’t know yet how SILICON VALLEY will fare in the ratings, or for that matter how its quality will hold up over time, but based on its pilot, it seems to be as […]