Articles

THE SKED’S BUSTED PILOT THEATRE: “Hail Mary”

Posted July 22, 2011 by Mitch Salem

> See A Word About Busted Pilots If it’s a procedural, this must be CBS.  HAIL MARY was one of the pilots that had initial buzz around town, and it boasted a casting coup with Minnie Driver in the lead (her first network show after doing The Riches for FX), but it’s not hard to […]

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Pilot Reports

THE SKED SERIES PREMIERE REVIEW: “Under the Dome”

Posted June 25, 2013 by Mitch Salem

  UNDER THE DOME:  Monday 10PM on CBS – Potential DVR Alert Much of CBS’s programming philosophy is built around the steady reliability of its reruns, so on the face of it, the Eye would seem least likely of the broadcast networks to make the summer’s biggest play with an expensive, top-level original series.  But […]

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Articles

THE SKED’S BUSTED PILOT THEATRE: “Help Wanted”

Posted August 26, 2011 by Mitch Salem

>   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 […]

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Articles

THE SKED’S BUSTED PILOT THEATRE: “Weekends At Bellevue”

Posted August 3, 2011 by Mitch Salem

> See A Word About Busted Pilots It was widely rumored in the weeks before the networks announced their new schedules at the Upfronts that WEEKENDS AT BELLEVUE was destined to hit the air on FOX.  In fact, even its timeslot was supposedly set:  Mondays at 9PM, following House, where it would serve as a […]

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Pilot + 1

SHOWBUZZDAILY Series Premiere Review: “The Good Place”

Posted September 20, 2016 by Mitch Salem

  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 & […]

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Pilot Reports

SHOWBUZZDAILY Series Premiere Review: “Snowfall”

Posted July 6, 2017 by Mitch Salem

  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 […]

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Articles

THE SKED’S BUSTED PILOT THEATRE: “Poe”

Posted September 2, 2011 by Mitch Salem

> 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 […]

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Articles

PREMIERING TONIGHT – THE SKED PILOT REPORT: ABC’s “Nashville”

Posted October 10, 2012 by Mitch Salem

  NASHVILLE – Wednesday 10PM on ABC:  Potential DVR Alert ABC has become the network of soaps, and its big play in the genre for fall is NASHVILLE, which is inheriting Revenge‘s slot as the latter show gets promoted to Sundays.  The new drama is less instantly compelling than Revenge‘s pilot (there’s no mysterious shooting […]

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