A Gifted Man is not a new show. I mean, it is a new show- a CBS Friday night experiment in unconventional procedural drama- but it adheres to a formula that’s been produced three notable times before. Wonderfalls, Joan of Arcadia and (most similarly) Eli Stone are all what I call “prophet shows”: client/case/patient-of-the-week agnostic […]
Whitney Cummings was not a name most of us knew before this TV season. Now, thanks to the annoying and ubiquitous ads for her eponymous new show Whitney, she feels like a familiar and annoying relative. Still, Cummings is the driving force behind not one, but two new shows starring women and about women, […]
I had a lot of goodwill going into the pilot episode of Up All Night. All three major stars of the show (Christina Applegate, Maya Rudolph and Will Arnett) are hard working, seriously funny actors who deserve a hit (especially after the disappointments too often suffered by them). And the premise was a fun twist […]
One of the worst promoted shows of the new fall TV season is Free Agents, a silly-looking, offensively marketed story about a workplace hookup. But even with a poster that “cleverly” hints a storeroom blowjobs, Free Agents snagged me with the promise of a weekly dose of the endlessly awesome Hank Azaria. The charmingly neurotic […]
Great pilots are hard to find in any genre (the recent Alphas was an exception). Great pilots for comedies- especially fairly generic comedies about twenty-somethings learning to deal with life and love- are really hard to find. Nearly every one I’ve seen over the past 5-10 years has been trying so desperately to distinguish itself […]
From the start, it’s kind of hard to peg down what kind of a show Alphas wants to be. It has whip-smart writing and glorious one liners (see Random Thoughts, at the end) that seem to lend themselves to a wisecracking action comedy. It has a complicated mythology filled with good, evil, and mind control, […]
Never one to shy away from TV shows ostensibly written for people about half my age, I approached the watching of MTV’s Awkward with a mixture of excitement and shame. I should be finally watching Breaking Bad or The Wire, not indulging in the newest output of teen angst-laden ridiculousness. However, about halfway through the […]
Now is that time of year in TV when news of what could be happening next year starts leaking out. It’s pilot season, a free-for-all of brilliant concepts and derivative sure-things battling it out for precious few primetime spots. My picks for the possible best of 2011’s fall season? In the top spot, obviously, it’s […]