MIND GAMES: Tuesday 10PM on ABC – If Nothing Else Is On… The creator of ABC’s midseason MIND GAMES, Kyle Killen, was the man behind Lone Star and Awake (as well as the movie The Beaver), so he doesn’t lack in fertile imagination. What he hasn’t had, however, is any commercial success whatsoever, and […]
12 MONKEYS: Friday 9PM on Syfy – If Nothing Else Is On… Last year, the writer/producer Noah Hawley miraculously inhabited Joel and Ethan Coen’s Fargo, creating something that was original and yet satisfyingly true to the vision of two of the most distinctive filmmakers around. Lightning doesn’t strike that way for Syfy’s 12 MONKEYS. The 1995 […]
THE MOB DOCTOR: Monday 9PM on FOX – Worth A Look THE MOB DOCTOR may be the busiest pilot of the season. The idea hatched by creators Josh Berman and Rob Wright (previously of Drop Dead Diva and a host of crime shows, including Bones and Crossing Jordan) is to graft a thriller […]
THE EXORCIST: Friday 9PM on FOX – Potential DVR Alert Like Noah Hawley’s ongoing take on Fargo, the new FOX version of THE EXORCIST, created for television by Jeremy Slater (one of the unhappy group credited for the script of last year’s awful Fantastic Four reboot) wisely uses the underlying material as inspiration for […]
SCREAM QUEENS: Tuesday 9PM on FOX – Change the Channel SCREAM QUEENS could have been more accurately titled “Ryan Murphy Presents,” in the manner of the old Alfred Hitchcock show, because it’s essentially his own salute to his favorite tropes and styles. As Bill Hader’s Stefon might say, it has everything: Glee, American Horror […]
Back in 2000, the rapid-fire fizzy dialogue of Gilmore Girls prompted some to spread an utterly unfounded rumor that Amy Sherman-Palladino, its creator and chief writer, didn’t actually exist, and that Girls was really being written by Aaron Sorkin. This was wrong in every possible way, of course, including the fact that Sorkin was […]
BLACK SAILS: Saturday 9PM on Starz – Worth A Look The pirate action-adventure BLACK SAILS is Starz’s latest attempt to swing for the fences with ambitious original programming and finally be taken as seriously as its pay cable brethren HBO and Showtime. This project seems intended to split the difference between Starz’s successful, but […]
PARTNERS: Monday 8:30PM on CBS – Worth A Look It’s impossible not to compare the new fall comedies PARTNERS on CBS and The New Normal on NBC. Even though the CBS show is multi-camera and NBC’s is in single camera format, both are broad, sentimental comedies about what are essentially blended gay/straight families. New […]