Read All Our Fall Pilot Reports here and Midseason Pilot Reports here. LUCKY 7:  Tuesday 10PM on ABC – If Nothing Else Is On… LUCKY 7 doesn’t feel like a jackpot.  Although its premise pilot doesn’t necessarily give a clear idea of what the series will be, the seemingly irresistible plot hook–a half-dozen ordinary […]

  BALLERS:  Sunday 9PM on HBO – Change the Channel BALLERS is alarmingly ramshackle by HBO standards.  Of course, it’s got enough A-list lineage to justify it getting on the air several times over, with genuine movie star Dwayne Johnson in the lead, and most of the Entourage production team attached, including Mark Wahlberg, this […]

  DESIGNATED SURVIVOR:  Wednesday 10PM on ABC – In the Queue ABC’s DESIGNATED SURVIVOR takes great pains to distinguish its version of Kiefer Sutherland from 24‘s Jack Bauer.  The show’s Tom Kirkman spends most of the pilot clad in a formless gray Cornell-insignia hoodie, and wearing horn-rim glasses.  Sutherland speaks in a diffident tone, and […]

  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 […]

  MARON:  Friday 10PM on IFC – If Nothing Else Is On… Everyone wants their Louie.  TV comedies built around fictional versions of real-life comics are nothing new–they go back to the days of Jack Benny and George Burns–and Larry David followed Seinfeld with his own notable success on Curb Your Enthusiasm.  But the near […]

  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 […]

  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 […]

  THE PLAYER:  Thursday 10PM on NBC – Change the Channel How fond are you of grade-B basic cable action series?  Do you watch the anonymous movies your cable/satellite service piles on its pay-per-view schedule each week?  Do you remember Cannon Films, and are you nostalgic for its product?  Does it mean something to you […]