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 […]

  HAPPYLAND:  Tuesday 11PM on MTV – Worth A Look After years spent as far away from scripted series as it could get, MTV has been accumulating a tidy set of programming lately that caters to its target demo without pandering to it, including Teen Wolf and Finding Carter on the drama side, along with […]

  NASHVILLE – Wednesday 10PM on ABC:  Potential DVR Alert ABC has become the network of soaps, and its big play in the genre for fall is NASHVILLE, which is inheriting Revenge‘s slot as the latter show gets promoted to Sundays.  The new drama is less instantly compelling than Revenge‘s pilot (there’s no mysterious shooting […]

  ALMOST FAMILY:  Wednesday 9PM on FOX Whether we like it or not, the strongest lead-in on broadcast television right now is The Masked Singer, which makes it somewhat surprising that FOX has given the precious slot afterward to the mess that ALMOST FAMILY appears to be.  Even more surprising is that the lead producer […]

  INTELLIGENCE:  Preview Tonight at 9PM, then Monday 10PM on CBS starting January 13 – If Nothing Else Is On… Gabriel Black (Josh Holloway), the hero of CBS’s midseason entry INTELLIGENCE, follows in the TV footsteps of Chuck and the autistic character from Alphas by having a brain directly wired into all electronic signals in […]

  THE WALKING DEAD: WORLD BEYOND – Sunday 10PM on AMC Even as AMC announced the upcoming termination of the WALKING DEAD mothership after one more super-sized season, the network went all-in on the franchise, unveiling multiple new spin-offs.  The latest piece of the show’s expanded universe is THE WALKING DEAD: WORLD BEYOND, which is […]

  Read All Our Fall Pilot Reports here and Midseason Pilot Reports here. RAKE:  Thursday 9PM on FOX starting Midseason TBD – Worth A Look FOX’s high-profile midseason dramedy RAKE wastes no time in establishing its protagonist Keegan Deene’s (Greg Kinnear) lovable-heel bona fides.  In the opening minutes, we see Key (as he’s called) with […]

  VEGAS:  Tuesday 10PM on CBS – Potential DVR Alert VEGAS is CBS’s version of swinging for the fences, which is to say that it can also be seen as a neon-lit, gold-edged version of Longmire.  This time the widowed western lawman is Ralph Lamb, a real (although probably quite fictionalized) rancher who became a […]