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This year's fall pilot season is shaping up to be rather muted.  Which, to be fair, is an improvement on the dreck of previous years, but also not much to talk about.  It probably tells you all need to know about the fall pilots of 2016 that there are two different time travel shows--Timeless and Frequency--and neither of them are worth saying anything about.  Nevertheless, here are a few series,

This week has seen the first inklings of the new TV season, as the US networks start trotting out shows in the hopes of success, legitimacy, or even the tiniest bit of attention.  And yet here I am, still talking about some of the shows of summer.  This is partly because, as we've all more or less accepted, network shows just aren't where it's at anymore, and there isn't that much to say about

It took ten days (all year!) but I'm finally done with the backlog of TV that I let build up over December while I was busy with other things.  And once again, all of these shows, good and bad, are infinitely more interesting than what the networks were cranking out in the fall.  Though it must be said that along with these miniseries and SyFy series, I also watched several network pilots--such

I didn't write anything about the fall TV season this (last) year, because frankly, it was too dismal and boring to write anything about, and anything I could have said would have just joined the chorus of thinkpieces lamenting the networks' inability to produce anything resembling worthwhile new shows.  But here we are in winter, with the network shows on break or just coming out of it, and

After a profoundly lackluster fall pilot season, the networks and cable channels seem to be pulling out all the stops for the midseason.  Just about every odd, high-concept, genre-ish series on the roster seems to have been held back for January, and if the resulting shows aren't always good, they're at least interesting to think and write about.  Not covered at length in this post, but still

Well, here we are at the end of another fall TV season.  There are still a few stragglers who will be making their bows in November, but for the most part the networks have delivered their bounty and it is... not great.  Of all the shows I've written about, the only ones I'm still watching are The Flash and How to Get Away With Murder (though the latter is already beginning to wear me down, its

After a bunch of dramas, our second batch of new shows is made up almost entirely of comedies.  I don't tend to review comedies in these round-ups, because much more than dramas they need the time to build up their world and characters before you can really get a sense of what they're capable of (think back to almost any classic comedy of the last two decades and I think you'll find that the

Well, here we are again.  As has become traditional, the US networks scheduled a boatload of new shows for the week of Rosh HaShana (happy 5775 to those of you celebrating!), which is very convenient as it gave me some time to wade through the deluge.  As usual, there are some shows I just don't have much to say about--I don't need several hundred words to say that Scorpion is awful and dumb, and

The original plan was for this post to go up a month or so ago, when all of these shows were really at the pilot phase or just a bit after it.  But with one thing and another, here we are already at summer's doorstep (and thus, at the doorstep of the summer pilot season), and some of the new shows I'm about to write about have already wrapped up their debut seasons.  Still, there's a lot here to

The pilots of winter continue to pour in, and I think we can identify a trend: fall is when the respectable doctor and lawyer shows premiere; winter is when TV puts on fancy dress.  This latest bunch of shows includes fantasy, thrillers, science fiction, and lots of weirdness.  Not all of it works, unsurprisingly--in the time between starting this post and publishing it, the most rancid of the

It's long past the point where new shows are a fall thing--long past the point, in fact, where I ought to have been making this sort of review a quarterly business.  But somehow this winter season seems particularly fecund, possibly as a result of the fall's disappointing crop, possibly because British TV seems to take the end of the year as its time to launch new shows, which means this report

We're coming near to the end of what has been a singularly unimpressive pilot season.  Progress report on the shows I've stuck with: Revolution has so far failed to ignite and if it doesn't within the next few weeks I'll probably ditch it.  Vegas's second episode bored me, so it's been dropped.  Elementary, on the other hand, had a strong second episode that deepened the two main characters, but

Well, that was a long week and a half of new TV, and with not much to show for it in the end.  These write-ups represent a small minority of the new shows to premiere this fall--I haven't said anything about the season's new comedies, which run the gamut from terrible (Partners), to underwhelming (Ben and Kate, The Mindy Project), to competent but uninspiring (Go On, Animal Practice), to bizarre

Well, here we are again, in fall pilot season.  As has become traditional, we have a drizzle of new shows this week, followed by a deluge next week, so for now I'm fresh and energized enough to write quite a bit about each new show.  By next week, I suspect, I'll be a little more punchy. The Mob Doctor - I try not to be one of those people who assume that cable television is inherently superior

Well, here we are again.  Summer seems to have flown past and now the fall pilots are upon us, this year in a flood of new shows that nevertheless doesn't seem to have yielded too many winners yet.  Even leaving out the genuine turkeys (Whitney, The Playboy Club, Unforgettable), there aren't yet any shows that I'm genuinely excited by, and only a few whose pilots have left me intrigued. Ringer -