VICE PRINCIPALS:  Sunday 10:30PM on HBO – In the Queue Your feelings about HBO’s new VICE PRINCIPALS are likely to be determined by your instinctive reaction to the name Danny McBride.  For a decade now, since the indie movie The Foot-Fist Way, McBride and his writing/producing/directing partner Jody Hill have been turning out variations […]

  THE EXPANSE:  Tuesday 10PM on Syfy – If Nothing Else Is On… The one thing we can tell conclusively about Syfy’s new series THE EXPANSE from its first hour is that it’s in no hurry.  The hour, which aired as a special preview on Monday night before the series moves to its regular Tuesday […]

  THE NIGHTLY SHOW WITH LARRY WILMORE:  Mon-Thurs @11:30PM on Comedy Central When Stephen Colbert made his decision to leave Comedy Central and serve as David Letterman’s successor on CBS, replacing The Colbert Report with a new show hosted by Larry Wilmore was about as no-brainer as these things get.  Wilmore’s regular guest appearances on […]

  TRAINING DAY:  Thursday 10PM on CBS – Change the Channel If the idea that CBS, of all networks, could turn the dark, ruthless police drama TRAINING DAY into a TV series seemed counterintuitive–well, they haven’t.  There’s a show with that title on the network schedule, and the general outlines of the character dynamic and […]

>   See A Word About Busted Pilots We’ve gotten this far without using the word “ghastly” to describe any of the busted pilots from this year’s development season, but that streak is about to end.  HELP WANTED, which was produced by Warner Bros for NBC, is unaccountably bad.  Partly that’s a function of its […]

  BEN & KATE:  Tuesday 8:30PM on FOX – Worth A Look   However it may fare in the ratings, this fall’s FOX Tuesday schedule is a model lesson in what a smoothly engineered line-up looks like.  At 9:30PM, The Mindy Project is a perfect match with its lead-in New Girl, and at 8:30PM, the new BEN […]

  TURN:  Sunday 9PM on AMC – If Nothing Else is On… Unlike just about any other armed conflict in history, and for reasons that have never really been pinned down, the American Revolutionary War has rarely been a fertile source of drama either in the movies or on television.  Mel Gibson’s The Patriot was […]

> 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 […]