POWER:  Saturday 9PM on Starz After its long respite in the past with the likes of The White Queen, Da Vinci’s Demons, Dancing On the Edge and Magic City, Starz returns to the 21st Century with the new POWER, a drama so contemporary that it boasts (as he’s billed) Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson among […]

  THE ODD COUPLE:  Thursday 8:30PM on CBS – If Nothing Else Is On… As Chandler Bing might say:  Could there be a more CBS show than a reboot of a 45-year old multicamera sit-com, with a star 10 years from his last hit?  If the network’s new version of THE ODD COUPLE works, maybe […]

  ROADIES:  Sunday 10PM on Showtime – In the Queue Showtime’s ROADIES is the first small-screen project from Cameron Crowe (he wrote and directed the pilot, and is showrunner with My So Called-Life‘s Winnie Holzman), and it’s very much a distillation of everything that makes his filmmaking exhilarating and frustrating.  There’s the wholehearted affection he […]

  MIDNIGHT, TEXAS:  Monday 10PM on NBC – Change the Channel NBC’s summer series MIDNIGHT, TEXAS is a horror, all right.  It’s based on novels by True Blood author Charlaine Harris, and the idea was plainly to do a broadcast network version of HBO’s hit.  But even if Midnight had been any good, the idea […]

  HERE AND NOW:  Sunday 9PM on HBO – In the Queue HERE AND NOW is sort of the Alan Ball/HBO version of The Fosters, which means that its characters are a generation older, it has a lot of sex, a lot of talk, and a lot of angst, and there’s a mystical “mystery” element. […]

  NANCY DREW:  Wednesday 9PM on CW Although NANCY DREW doesn’t hail from CW’s go-to producer Greg Berlanti (its showrunners are Gossip Girl‘s Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage, who created the show with Noga Landau), the series is clearly meant to follow in the path of Berlanti’s Riverdale as an “adult” (i.e., sexualized and violent) […]

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

> See A Word About Busted Pilots We round out our survey of some of the more notable busted pilots of the season with the distinctive POE, produced by Warner Bros Television for ABC and written by Chris Hollier (a former writer for Kyle XY).  Unfortunately, this pilot stands for the proposition that “distinctive” doesn’t […]