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 BRAVE:  Monday 10PM on NBC – Change the Channel In the Age of Trump, and with younger audiences migrating to alternative delivery platforms, the broadcast networks are making a play–some might call it their last stand–for red-state viewers, who may not be premium customers as far as advertisers are concerned, but who show […]

  STATION 19:  Thursday 9PM on ABC – In the Queue STATION 19 probably marks the end of an era at ABC:  unless a pilot developed under her watch is picked up, it will be the last new Shonda Rhimes series at the network, as she moves on to her huge new deal at Netflix.  […]

  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 […]

> VEEP:  Sundays 10PM on HBO – Potential DVR Alert   Although of course it made all the sense in the world to precede tonight’s premiere of its new political comedy VEEP with the trailer for its upcoming political comedy-drama, Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom, in some ways HBO might have considered thinking twice.  Both Sorkin […]

  KING & MAXWELL:  Monday 10PM on TNT – Change the Channel Jon Tenney and Rebecca Romijn are an attractive, appealing pair of series leads, but they’re not enough to make the markedly sub-par new procedural KING & MAXWELL worth watching.  Even by TNT’s usually unadventurous summer standards, this is a show that never should […]

  Read All Our Fall Pilot Reports here and Midseason Pilot Reports here. BACK IN THE GAME:  Wednesday 8:30PM on ABC  – Worth A Look Unlike most of its characters, BACK IN THE GAME keeps its pitches pretty much in the strike zone, which in this case is a combination of The Bad News Bears […]

  DOLL & EM:  Wednesday 9PM on HBO – If Nothing Else Is On… HBO’s romance with quirky British comedies of discomfort (and with the look and feel of micro-budgeted indie film) continues with DOLL & EM.  It doesn’t hail from the Ricky Gervais team that gave the network Extras, Hello Ladies, Life’s Too Short […]