> A lot can happen between the creation of a TV pilot in the spring and the production of episodes for the regular season: a writing/producing team is hired, audience focus groups weigh in, networks and studios (which may have had their own turnover) give plenty of notes, helpful and otherwise, and critics begin to […]

>   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 […]

> On Saturday night, HBO’s GAME CHANGE scored the network’s highest premiere rating for an original TV-movie in 8 years.  (As it always the case with HBO, the movie will be rebroadcast many times, as well as being available on HBO GO and other platforms.)  While there were certainly A list names associated with the […]

  ON THE ROAD – Worth A Ticket – Kerouac’s Classic Is Beautiful and Atmospheric But Lacks Urgency ON THE ROAD, as a novel and now as a film adaptation, is so enmeshed with the mythology of the real-life people and events it thinly fictionalizes and with the many works, both documentary and fiction, it’s […]

  RED 2:  Watch It At Home – Less Fizz in the Drink This Time The first RED was a disarming surprise, a rom-com action adventure about retired but very lethal spies as bubbly as it was explosive.  It made almost $200M at the worldwide box office, and while that’s not quite Expendables money ($274M […]

> The networks have proclaimed their Fall schedules, the new series have been (partially) unveiled, so… what now?  What will actually be worth watching when network TV comes back to life in a few months?  SHOWBUZZDAILY is here to help you out.  The good news is that since virtually all TV series are available these […]

  GAME OF THRONES:  Sunday 9PM on HBO There’s intrigue behind the cameras as well as in front of them on GAME OF THRONES these days.  Series creators/showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have let it be known that they want the show to end in a couple of seasons, while HBO would like this […]

  TNT’s MAJOR CRIMES, like its predecessor The Closer, belongs to the “procedural-plus” subgenre, with a crime to be solved every week combined with a secondary amount of continuing serialized plot.  However, there was very little of the “plus” to be found in tonight’s season finale (really a half-season finale, with the show scheduled to resume […]