> See A Word About Busted Pilots IDENTITY is so clearly a Jerry-Bruckheimer-for-CBS procedural that it comes as a shock to realize that it was neither produced by Bruckheimer nor developed for CBS.  In fact, Mark Gordon’s company produced the show for ABC Studios and the ABC network, which must have remembered at some point […]

  LAST RESORT: Thursday 8PM on ABC – Potential DVR Alert The strangest new show on any network this season may be LAST RESORT, created and written by the man behind The Shield, Shawn Ryan, with Karl Gajdusek. The problem with trying to evaluate LAST RESORT based on its fairly riveting pilot is that the […]

  LOW WINTER SUN:  Sunday 10PM on AMC – Potential DVR Alert It’s been more than a decade since The Shield introduced US television to not just corrupt, but murderous cops as protagonists, and–well, it feels like about 15 minutes since the last bleak serialized mystery (actually it was a few days ago, with the US premiere of Broadchurch), […]

  CHICAGO PD:  Wednesday 10PM on NBC – If Nothing Else Is On… This season, NBC went retro in a big way with its new series, from its Don’t you still love Michael J. Fox and Sean Hayes? comedies to its Doesn’t anyone remember Ironside? dramas (The Blacklist, of course, being the single exception), and […]

  FINDING CARTER:  Tuesday 10PM on MTV – Potential DVR Alert Most YA drama, in one way or another, is about the emotional dislocation of being a teen, and in recent years, the reigning trope has been to externalize the theme supernaturally:  the teen discovers that he/she is a vampire, an alien, a witch, a […]

  THE MCCARTHYS:  Thursday 9:30PM on CBS  – Change the Channel! PLAYERS:  Series creator Brian Gallivan, and because up till now he’s been a junior-level TV writer (on Happy Endings and Are You There, Chelsea?), showrunner Mike Sikowitz, a much more seasoned sitcom vet whose recent credits include Rules of Engagement and Welcome To the […]

  YOUNGER:  Tuesday 10PM on TV Land Although it’s a half-hour rather than an hour, TV Land’s new YOUNGER feels somewhat similar to VH1’s recent Hindsight.  Both are series versions of high concepts that might have been feature films starring, say, Sandra Bullock, a decade or so ago, and both revolve around women on the cusp […]

  LIMITLESS:  Tuesday 10PM on CBS – If Nothing Else Is On… LIMITLESS is the second new series in two days to reverse the basic point of the movie it’s based on and turn its premise into an excuse for a sci-fi tinged procedural. The CBS Limitless is as bland as FOX’s Minority Report, but […]