ENLISTED:  Friday 9:30PM on FOX  – Change the Channel Not all goofy, barely-functional family sitcoms are alike, and although FOX has paired the new ENLISTED with Raising Hope on its Friday schedule, the two aren’t much of a match.  Raising Hope is a very smart comedy about people who aren’t necessarily rocket scientists, while […]

  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 […]

  FEAR THE WALKING DEAD:  Sunday 9PM on AMC – In the Queue The opening episode of FEAR THE WALKING DEAD was audacious as only a sure thing can be.  The new series is, of course, a spin-off of the fantastically successful The Walking Dead–even if it lost two-thirds of its parent show’s ratings, it […]

  CHICAGO FIRE: Wednesday 10PM on NBC – Change the Channel Network television doesn’t come more dully generic than NBC’s “new” CHICAGO FIRE, a series that seems to be assembling itself out of old film clips even as you watch it.  In its time of need, NBC turned to one of its most prolific and […]

  SELFIE:  Tuesday 8PM on ABC starting September 30 – If Nothing Else Is On… PLAYERS:  George Bernard Shaw.  (And Lerner & Loewe, whose My Fair Lady made Pygmalion into a fixture of pop culture.)  Series creator Emily Kapnek, of Suburgatory.  Stars John Cho and Karen Gillan.  Pilot director Julie Anne Robinson.  Warner Bros. Television. […]

  THE SHANNARA CHRONICLES:  Tuesday 10PM on MTV – If Nothing Else Is On… MTV is late to the YA fantasy-adventure party with THE SHANNARA CHRONICLES, so it doesn’t have the element of surprise going for it.  There’s no innovation here, either, because while the main source material, Terry Brooks’ 1982 novel “The Elfstones of […]

  FOSSE/VERDON:  Tuesday 10PM on FX A pair of shadows loom over FX’s limited series FOSSE/VERDON.  One is the ultra-meta fact that its story has to some extent been told by Bob Fosse himself, in his barely fictionalized 1979 masterpiece All That Jazz, all about a chain-smoking, pill-popping, self-destructive womanizer who was also a brilliant […]

  LIFE IN PIECES:  Monday 8:30PM on CBS – Change the Channel Two seasons ago, CBS gave us The Millers, which against all odds managed to take the talents of Will Arnett, Beau Bridges, Margo Martindale, J.B. Smoove and Jayma Mays (and that’s not even counting guest stars) and emerge with a show that was […]