NOTORIOUS:  Thursday 9PM on ABC – Change the Channel Any viewer apt to complain about the over-the-top melodrama of Scandal should be forced to watch the pilot for Notorious, a supposed “drama” so consistently idiotic that it’s closer in tone to the self-mocking theatrics of Jane the Virgin.  As it happens, Notorious is filling […]

  PURE GENIUS:  Thursday 10PM on CBS – Change the Channel One of the oddities of CBS’s medical drama PURE GENIUS is that its setting–a wildly overfunded institute that boasts the ultimate in cutting edge technology, regularly offers miracles to its patients, and is backed by an arrogant billionaire mastermind–would ordinarily be revealed as the […]

  SNOWFALL:  Wednesday 10PM on FX – In the Queue It used to make sense to judge a new TV series based on its pilot, because the pilot was a template of all the episodes that would follow.  In the serialized, bingeable TV era, though, an opening hour is often just an introduction to the […]

  KRYPTON:  Wednesday 10PM on Syfy – Change the Channel With the engagingly odd exception of The Magicians, Syfy hasn’t had much luck with its big swings, and KRYPTON is unlikely to change that.  The network’s position for the last several years has been so strange as to be almost nightmarish:  in a pop culture […]

  THE FOLLOWING:  Monday 9PM on FOX – DVR Alert We’ve been here before, perhaps most memorably in Red Dragon aka Manhunter:  the burned-out, injured, brilliantly intuitive FBI agent, called back to the field to go after his nemesis, a savage but erudite serial killer.  But even Thomas Harris didn’t invent that archetype, and Kevin […]

  RECKLESS:  Sunday 9PM on CBS – If Nothing Else Is On… In the Charleston of CBS’s summer potboiler RECKLESS, it seems like just about everyone is sleeping with everyone else, or wants to.  That absurdly overheated quality is the most likable thing about what’s otherwise a fairly conventional legal procedural, which comes from a […]

  CONVICTION:  Monday 10PM on ABC – Change the Channel It’s routine to refer to a procedural TV series as featuring a “case of the week,” but ABC’s CONVICTION takes it literally.  When former First Daughter and party girl Hayes Morrison (Hayley Atwell) is arrested for cocaine possession and blackmailed by NY’s politically ambitious DA […]

> See A Word About Busted Pilots  Deadline reported today that ABC Studios has signed Jesse Martin to a talent hold deal that, although it could end up with him being cast in a different ABCS project, is largely in place so he’ll be available for a redeveloped version of Marc Cherry’s HALLELUJAH pilot, for […]