THE REAL O’NEALS:  Tuesday 8:30PM on ABC – Change the Channel Whatever its other ailments, over the past few years ABC has had an extraordinary run of diverse, smart family sitcoms,–an area where other networks have struggled badly–with Fresh Off The Boat, Black-ish and The Goldbergs building on Modern Family and The Middle.  (Even […]

  MINORITY REPORT:  Monday 9PM on FOX Previously… on MINORITY REPORT:  In 2065, 11 years after the events of Steven Spielberg’s film, the “precog” program, in which a trio of psychically gifted empaths were used to predict crimes that hadn’t been committed yet, allowing police to arrest the potential perpetrators before the fact, has been […]

  THE LIBRARIANS:  Sunday 8PM on TNT Previously… on THE LIBRARIANS:  In the long-term absence of head Librarian Flynn Carsen (Noah Wyle), a trio of apprentices preserve magical historical artifacts and keep the world safe from their use:  history/literature/mechanical genius Jacob Stone (Christian Kane), mathematical savant Cassandra Cillian (Lindy Booth), and master thief and hacker […]

  EMERALD CITY:  Friday 9PM on NBC – Change the Channel EMERALD CITY will make you wish you’d stayed in Kansas.  It’s a muddle of The Wizard of Oz, Mad Max, Game of Thrones (in their dreams) and that terrible Syfy updated version of Alice In Wonderland from a few years ago, and you’d think […]

  THE YOUNG POPE:  Sunday/Monday 9PM on HBO – DVR Alert The cinema-tization of television continues with HBO’s THE YOUNG POPE.  It’s been created and directed by the filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino, who made 2013’s Best Foreign Film Oscar winner The Great Beauty and followed it with the gorgeous but not quite coherent Truth.  Sorrentino is […]

  GREAT NEWS:  Tuesday 9PM on NBC – If Nothing Else Is On… NBC’s latest disposable sitcom GREAT NEWS hails from the House of Tina Fey, who serves as one of its Executive Producers.  Series creator Tracey Wigfield was a writer/producer on 30 Rock, and Great News, which is set behind-the-scenes at a local TV […]

  THE GOOD PLACE:  Thursday 8:30PM on NBC – In the Queue Originality, imagination and sheer strangeness are rare network TV commodities these days, so it seems fair to give NBC’s THE GOOD PLACE some time before deciding whether it’s actually, you know, good.  It’s the creation of Michael Schur, who gave us Parks & […]

> A lot can happen between the creation of a TV pilot in the spring and 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 in the off-season) give plenty of notes, both helpful and otherwise, and […]