THE VIKINGS: Sunday 10PM on History Channel In its pilot, at least, THE VIKINGS, which marks History Channel’s first step into the world of continuing scripted drama after its massive success last year with the Hatfields and McCoys miniseries, is so rudimentary a piece of historical fiction that it might as well have been […]
EUPHORIA: Sunday 10PM on HBO HBO’s new teen transgression drama EUPHORIA is produced by the indie studio A24, and for those who frequent what’s left of the American indie landscape, most notably the films that come out of Sundance, Euphoria is less revolutionary than it presents itself as being. The drugs- and porn-saturated world […]
Read All Our Fall Pilot Reports here. THE GOLDBERGS: Tuesday 9PM on ABC – Change the Channel THE GOLDBERGS is startlingly bad. ABC’s most highly-touted new sitcom of the fall is inspired by series creator Adam F. Goldberg’s memories of growing up in the 1980s, and fragments of his own home videotapes at the […]
DEFIANCE: Monday 9PM on Syfy – Change the Channel Despite the prestige it earned with Battlestar Galactica, as a network Syfy has never fled from the tackiness of its genre (this is the home, after all, of Mansquito and Dinocroc), and its new series DEFIANCE is all latex make-up (it’s like we never got […]
> See A Word About Busted Pilots The word was that Stephen Gaghan’s pilot METRO was in serious consideration for NBC’s schedule until the very end (conventional wisdom has it that the final choice came down to Metro vs. Awake, and the latter made the cut). That’s too bad: the pilot is an impressive piece […]
CONSTANTINE: Friday 10PM on NBC starting October 24 – If Nothing Else is On… (but also Incomplete) PLAYERS: DC Comics. Series creators Daniel Cerrone (a showrunner, although not creator, of Dexter) and David S. Goyer (of DaVinci’s Demons and the Dark Knight movies). Pilot director Neil Marshall, who’s best known for directing the “Blackwater” episode […]
PERCEPTION: Monday 10PM on TNT – Change the Channel A man stands on a chair in the middle of a police station, earphones fastened to his head, and frantically conducts the symphony he’s listening to. Yes, we’re in Eccentric Genius Detective Territory, Psychiatric Disturbance Subdivision, aka Monk-Land. The new series PERCEPTION is essentially […]
BLINDSPOT: Monday 10PM on NBC – If Nothing Else Is On… NBC’s strategy this fall seems to be to play the deja vu card and hope for the best. Heroes Reborn returns on Thursday as though its ratings hadn’t cratered into oblivion just 5 years ago, The Player feels like basic cable circa 1998, […]