MASTERS OF SEX:  Sunday 10PM on Showtime – Potential DVR Alert After the macho angst of Ray Donovan and–notwithstanding its excellence–the heavy going of Homeland, Showtime smartly changes pace with MASTERS OF SEX, an engrossing, sexy and sometimes funny history based on the real lives of Dr. William Masters and Virginia Johnson, trailblazing sexuality […]

  ROSEWOOD:  Wednesday 8PM on FOX – If Nothing Else Is On… If there’s one overriding theme running through the network television premieres this fall, it’s their almost defiant lack of ambition.  The Big 4 may be watching their audiences erode and their advertising revenues shrink, they may be besieged by literally hundreds of other […]

  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 […]

  DYNASTY:  Wednesday 9PM on CW – In the Queue The new DYNASTY isn’t the fall’s worst new show, but it’s the most puzzling.  Was there really a surge of interest among CW’s 18-34 target demo for a revival of an ABC soap that went off the air 28 years ago?  The show has a […]

  RED WIDOW:  Sunday 10PM on ABC The “2-hour premiere” of RED WIDOW actually consisted of the pilot that was shot before last year’s upfronts, combined with the first regular episode (both halves written by series creator Melissa Rosenberg, with the pilot directed by Mark Pellington and episode 2 by Daniel Sackheim).  Watching the combination […]

  SWEETBITTER:  Sunday 8PM on Starz – In the Quene Starz’s SWEETBITTER is, with Vida, part of the network’s unusual run of back-to-back half-hour dramas, each of them with a short 6-episode order.  Both shows make use of indie tropes, with Vida on the “gritty estranged family that has to co-exist” end of the Sundance […]

> See A Word About Busted Pilots Not even the presence of Michael Chiklis and Elizabeth Perkins could make VINCE UNCENSORED endurable.   Deservedly consigned by CBS to its trash-bin, this isn’t one of those pilots you’ll be likely to hear about again.  The storyline of Vince Uncensored uses a contrivance to get to an […]

  DEFIANCE:  Monday 9PM on Syfy – Change the Channel Despite the prestige it earned with Battlestar Galactica, as a network Syfy has never fled from the tackiness of its genre (this is the home, after all, of Mansquito and Dinocroc), and its new series DEFIANCE is all latex make-up (it’s like we never got […]