PUBLIC MORALS:  Tuesday 10PM on TNT – Change the Channel Unless its pilot turns out to be misleading, PUBLIC MORALS looks to be fairly woeful stuff.  The show’s auteur–its star as well as the series creator, writer and director–is Edward Burns, who’s become the forgotten man of American indie film.  Burns’ The Brothers McMullen […]

  THE BLACKLIST:  Monday 10PM on NBC – If Nothing Else Is On… NBC has made it very clear that its top fall priority is the launch of the new Monday drama THE BLACKLIST.  The show has been given the network’s plum post-The Voice slot, and clearly, NBC sees the series as a more consistent […]

  MAGNUM, P.I.:  Monday 9PM on CBS As everyone knows, the 2018-19 CBS TV season has turned out to be the final one overseen by Les Moonves, the longtime network mogul ousted after allegations of sexual misconduct.  It’s fitting that the first new series of his last season is that definitive Moonves-ian object, a rebooted […]

  THE YOUNG POPE:  Sunday/Monday 9PM on HBO – DVR Alert The cinema-tization of television continues with HBO’s THE YOUNG POPE.  It’s been created and directed by the filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino, who made 2013’s Best Foreign Film Oscar winner The Great Beauty and followed it with the gorgeous but not quite coherent Truth.  Sorrentino is […]

  SCREAM:  Tuesday 10PM on MTV – If Nothing Else Is On… There aren’t a lot of sure things in Hollywood, but here’s one:  you can always make some money by gathering together a group of teens and killing them off one by one.  It’s been true since at least 1978’s Halloween (and its zillions […]

> 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 […]

  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 […]

  THE GOOD PLACE:  Thursday 8:30PM on NBC – In the Queue Originality, imagination and sheer strangeness are rare network TV commodities these days, so it seems fair to give NBC’s THE GOOD PLACE some time before deciding whether it’s actually, you know, good.  It’s the creation of Michael Schur, who gave us Parks & […]