> Disclaimer:  Network pilots now in circulation are not necessarily in the form that will air in the Fall.  Pilots are often reedited and rescored, and in some cases even recast or reshot.  So these critiques shouldn’t be taken as full TV pilot reviews, but rather as a guide to the general style and content […]

  VALOR:  Monday 9PM on CW – Change the Channel VALOR is the CW version of a military drama, which makes it markedly different from NBC’s The Brave and CBS’s SEAL Team.  For one thing, it’s significantly lacking in production values, even in its pilot, which would typically have a higher budget than regular series […]

  IMPASTOR:  Wednesday 10:30PM on TV Land – Change the Channel TV Land’s brand was built primarily as a repackager of vintage sitcoms, and when it entered the world of original content, it initially did so with shows that tried to duplicate their appeal:  basic multi-camera comedies like Hot In Cleveland and The Exes that starred former stars of […]

  THE DAILY SHOW WITH TREVOR NOAH:  Mon-Thurs 11PM on Comedy Central After one night of THE DAILY SHOW WITH TREVOR NOAH, we conclusively know this:  Comedy Central isn’t bleeping the word “shit” anymore.  It was a fairly big deal when the network let Jon Stewart liberally use the cattle-related version of the word as […]

  9JKL:  Monday 8:30PM on CBS – Change the Channel We usually do actors the favor of evaluating their work on a project separately from the quality of the project itself, willing to take their performances on their own terms.  But Mark Feuerstein doesn’t just star in the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad new […]

  TRUE DETECTIVE:  Sunday 9PM on HBO – DVR Alert It sometimes seems like brooding serial-killer thrillers are as plentiful on the New Television as multi-camera family sitcoms were on the Old.  TRUE DETECTIVE, though, gives the genre the HBO Deluxe treatment–premiering, no less, on the same night one of its stars, Matthew McConaughey, became […]

  AMERICAN HORROR STORY:  CULT – Tuesday 10PM on FX We find ourselves in boom times for killer clowns.  They’re the main vehicles for terror in the new installment of FX’s Ryan Murphy anthology AMERICAN HORROR STORY, dubbed CULT (including a cameo from Freak Show‘s Twisty), and one of the granddaddies of the genre, Stephen King’s […]

  THE LIBRARIANS:  Sunday 8PM on TNT – If Nothing Else Is On… TNT’s THE LIBRARIANS is a reboot, of a sort.  It’s based on a trio of Indiana Jones-ian original movies the network aired starting in 2004 (when it was more currently a knock-off of the National Treasure franchise), toplining Noah Wyle as a […]