CALL ME KAT:  Thursday 9PM on FOX   There’s been widespread hope that a change in calendar pages would reverse the traumas of 2020, and that 2021 would bring in gusts of new air to blow away all that’s been awful in the world.  Sadly, the arrival of FOX’s CALL ME KAT, the first […]

  TURN:  Sunday 9PM on AMC – If Nothing Else is On… Unlike just about any other armed conflict in history, and for reasons that have never really been pinned down, the American Revolutionary War has rarely been a fertile source of drama either in the movies or on television.  Mel Gibson’s The Patriot was […]

  APB:  Monday 9PM on FOX – Change the Channel FOX’s APB is a zeitgeist show in the worst possible way.  No doubt when it was pitched and even produced, its central notion that inner-city crime could be cured only by an arrogant white billionaire was meant to invoke Tony Stark and Bruce Wayne, but […]

  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 […]

>   See A Word About Busted Pilots For the most part, actors only get one shot in a given pilot season.  Since the lion’s share of network pilots are produced during the same narrow Spring window–allowing them to be picked up and announced at the Upfronts in May–and since actors who play regular characters […]

  THE NEIGHBORHOOD:  Monday 8PM on CBS The opening half of CBS’s doubleheader of new Monday sitcoms has one joke to tell in its pilot, and it spends half an hour telling it over and over.  THE NEIGHBORHOOD is almost exclusively about the hilarity of a midwestern white family moving into a black Los Angeles […]

  BLOOD DRIVE:  Wednesday 10PM on Syfy – If Nothing Else Is On… Syfy is in the midst of a rebranding, the focal point of which seems to be a new font for its logo.  Creatively, if the premiere of BLOOD DRIVE is to be taken as a guide, the network intends its model to […]

  WANDAVISION:  Episodes 1 & 2 available now on Disney+, remaining episodes drop 12:01AM each Friday   WANDAVISION mixes the old and the new in ways both self-conscious and not.  COVID delays on other projects led to it becoming the first genuine piece of MCU content created for the small screen.  (Earlier series like Agents […]