FREQUENCY:  Wednesday 9PM on CW – Potential DVR Alert We still have ABC’s Time After Time and FOX’s half-hour Making History to come, but of the time-travel sagas we’ve seen so far, CW’s FREQUENCY accomplishes more with far fewer resources than NBC’s lavish Timeless.  While it’s not entirely clear how Jeremy Carver, a longtime […]

  BULL:  Tuesday 9PM on CBS – Change the Channel CBS’s BULL is, from its title down, almost completely insufferable.  Loosely inspired by the pre-TV professional life of Dr. Phil (billed here as “Dr. Phillip C. McGraw” for maximum pretentiousness), and co-created by McGraw and industry veteran Paul Attanasio (a co-creator of the great Homicide […]

  MAN SEEKING WOMAN:  Wednesday 10:30PM on FXX – If Nothing Else Is On… You know how on Family Guy a character will say “This is just like when________” or “You’re like________,” and there’s an instant cutaway to whatever the character was talking about, no matter how bizarre?  (An example from this past week:  Stewie […]

  GOLDEN BOY:  Friday 9PM on CBS (special previews on Tuesday 2/26 and 3/5) – Potential DVR Alert CBS tries to have its procedural cake and eat its serialization with GOLDEN BOY.  Think of it as How I Met Your Mother as a cop show:  the story is structured, by veteran procedural writer Nicholas Wootten […]

  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 […]

> See A Word About Busted Pilots FAMILY ALBUM was one of the more buzzed-about FOX pilots of this past development season, and although it’s not on the network’s announced schedule, Deadline reports that it’s in contention for midseason and will even shoot a second prototype episode.  So this isn’t so much a postmortem as […]

  HUNTERS:  Monday 10PM on Syfy – If Nothing Else Is On… HUNTERS has production values that suggest it’s intended as one of Syfy’s more A-level entries (it’s shot in Australia rather than Canada), but mostly its premiere hits B-movie beats.  Created by veteran TV writer/producer Natalie Chaidez, whose credits include everything from Heroes and […]

  Read All Our Fall Pilot Reports here and Midseason Pilot Reports here. CRISIS:  Sunday 10PM on NBC – If Nothing Else is On… Funny story.  Remember how last fall, there was a serialized thriller about a high-stakes political kidnapping in Washington whose victims included teens called Hostages that flopped badly?  NBC would prefer that […]