MACGYVER:  Friday 8PM on CBS – Change the Channel CBS’s reboot of the 30-year old MACGYVER was the fall’s problem child.  After picking up the series, the network didn’t just dump the original pilot, it fired the showrunner and most of the cast, virtually starting from scratch.  (The original showrunner, Paul Downs Colaizzo, retains […]

  THE PASSAGE:  Monday 9PM on FOX FOX’s THE PASSAGE does to Justin Cronin’s intricate, elaborate trilogy of postapocalyptic thrillers what Hollywood has traditionally done with literary fiction, flattening the books in the most conventional way possible.  This wasn’t the original plan, or even the second:  Ridley Scott’s production company acquired Cronin’s books with the […]

  DOUBT:  Wednesday 10PM on CBS – If Nothing Else Is On… As highly prized as the talents of Shonda Rhimes are, it takes the continuing line of her failed imitators to remind us just how difficult it is to duplicate her touch.  Conviction and Notorious are two tries that went splat earlier this season, […]

  THE COOL KIDS:  Friday 8:30PM on FOX One takeaway from FOX’s terrible new sitcom THE COOL KIDS is that Martin Mull is in a particularly ruinous rut.  Four years ago, he co-starred in FOX’s awful Dads, a quickly canceled clunker about naughty oldsters.  Now here he is back again in Cool Kids, which moves […]

  THE JIM GAFFIGAN SHOW:  Wednesday 10PM on TV Land – If Nothing Else Is On… Doofus dads are a staple of TV sitcoms, and THE JIM GAFFIGAN SHOW is an affable addition to the canon.  Gaffigan has made a modest industry out of recounting his life as a stand-up comic squeezed with his wife […]

  Read All Our Fall Pilot Reports here. THE TOMORROW PEOPLE:  Wednesday 9PM on CW – If Nothing Else Is On… THE TOMORROW PEOPLE is CW sticking with the CW playbook.  The word “rip-off” may be a strong label for a show whose concept dates back to a British TV series that began in 1973, but […]

  THE MAYOR:  Tuesday 9:30PM on ABC – Worth A Click The premise for ABC’s breezy THE MAYOR is wall-to-wall gimmick, in a likable way.  Courtney Rose (Brandon Micheal Hall) is a young aspiring rapper in the small town of Fort Gray, CA who decides to get himself some publicity by declaring his candidacy for […]

  THE GRINDER:  Tuesday 8:30PM on FOX – If Nothing Else Is On… THE GRINDER has something no other network sitcom this fall can claim:  an original, promising premise.  (It’s the execution that needs some work.)  Jared Paul and Andrew Mogel’s comedy gives us Dean Sanderson, Jr (Rob Lowe), longtime star of the primetime courtroom series […]