DR. KEN:  Friday 8:30PM on ABC – Change the Channel It’s going to be a neck and neck battle this fall between ABC’s DR KEN and NBC’s Truth Be Told (which will soon air directly against it) as to which takes the title of Fall’s Worst Sitcom.  Truth Be Told is tone-deaf and generally […]

  CODE BLACK:  Wednesday 10PM on CBS – Change the Channel CBS’s new CODE BLACK is a mini-film festival of medical show cliches.  It’s set in a notoriously busy emergency room at a Los Angeles hospital, which frequently reaches the point where the patients needing immediate treatment swamp the resources available to treat them–designated “Code […]

  THE GRINDER:  Tuesday 8:30PM on FOX – If Nothing Else Is On… THE GRINDER has something no other network sitcom this fall can claim:  an original, promising premise.  (It’s the execution that needs some work.)  Jared Paul and Andrew Mogel’s comedy gives us Dean Sanderson, Jr (Rob Lowe), longtime star of the primetime courtroom series […]

  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 […]

  THE DAILY SHOW WITH TREVOR NOAH:  Mon-Thurs 11PM on Comedy Central After one night of THE DAILY SHOW WITH TREVOR NOAH, we conclusively know this:  Comedy Central isn’t bleeping the word “shit” anymore.  It was a fairly big deal when the network let Jon Stewart liberally use the cattle-related version of the word as […]

  QUANTICO:  Sunday 10PM on ABC – In the Queue The first hour of ABC’s QUANTICO is a bit of a mess, but it’s one of the most slickly enjoyable of the network fall TV season.  Think of it as Shondaland meets Homeland, although Shonda Rhimes has nothing to do with it.  The series creator […]

  BLOOD & OIL:  Sunday 9PM on ABC – If Nothing Else Is On… ABC’s BLOOD & OIL, along with the same network’s midseason The Catch, holds the season’s crown for the most alterations inflicted on a series between pilot script and air.  It’s been recast and reshot in part, made its way through a […]

  THE PLAYER:  Thursday 10PM on NBC – Change the Channel How fond are you of grade-B basic cable action series?  Do you watch the anonymous movies your cable/satellite service piles on its pay-per-view schedule each week?  Do you remember Cannon Films, and are you nostalgic for its product?  Does it mean something to you […]