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 […]

  FOX announced most of its midseason decisions today, and there were a few surprises.  Biggest was the reduction of AMERICAN IDOL‘s Thursday night results show to 30 minutes, with the new sitcom SURVIVING JACK at 8:30PM, and the Greg Kinnear vehicle RAKE following at 9PM.  We’ve come a long way from the days when […]

  CW had a successful season in 2014-15. launching the smash hit THE FLASH and the critical darling JANE THE VIRGIN.  There wasn’t reason to change much, and the network didn’t.  Here’s a look (new shows are in ALL CAPS, new timeslots are in italics): MONDAY 8PM:  CRAZY EX-GIRLFRIEND (trailer here) 9PM:  Jane the Virgin […]

  BACKSTROM:  Midseason TBD on FOX THE FACTS:  Rainn Wilson plays your basic difficult-but-brilliant homicide detective in a procedural based on a series of Swedish mystery novels, adapted for television by Hart Hanson, the creator of Bones.  Backstrom is grumpy and dismissive of his colleagues, and unhealthy in his eating, drinking and general living habits, […]

  THE NIGHT SHIFT:  Tuesday 10PM on NBC – Change the Channel It’s as though NBC and series creators Jeff Judah and Gabe Sachs (they were among the showrunners of the 90210 reboot, and wrote the first Diary of a Wimpy Kid movie) deliberately set out to make the least distinctive series possible with THE NIGHT […]

  Read All Our Fall Pilot Reports here and Midseason Pilot Reports here. US & THEM:  Midseason TBD on FOX – Potential DVR Alert   FOX’S midseason rom-com US & THEM features two of TV’s most huggable stars in Jason Ritter (recently of Parenthood–let’s all try to forget The Event) and Alexis Bledel (once and forever Rory […]

  MIXOLOGY:  Wednesday 9:30PM on ABC – Worth A Look MIXOLOGY is the most ambitious of ABC’s new comedies, although “ambitious” in this case means resembling one of those omnibus rom-com movies that simultaneously tell half a dozen stories, all turning out to be tangentially related to each other.  At its best, that subgenre is […]

  UPDATED with reactions to FOX trailers, which are available here:   The FOX fall schedule is a puzzlement. FOX seems to have done little to help itself with its fall 2016 line-up, leaving two of its weakest nights unimproved, and burying one of its highest-profile projects on low-rated Friday.  The network will be more […]