Fox’s newest problem-plagued hero is no Don Draper, but if he works at it, maybe he could be Jim Rockford.
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TV Tonight: Nashville
Remember when everyone knew that musicals did not work on TV? An age ago—three, maybe four years—it was common knowledge that TV audiences would reject dramas in which people burst into song as hopelessly implausible or …
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TV Tonight: Last Resort
A really good drama pilot is like a submarine. It’s densely packed, purposeful and efficient; there’s little wasted space or dead weight. Everything on board has to justify its existence and preferably serves multiple functions. …
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TV Tonight: The Neighbors Is Bad, But Not for the Reason You Might Think
ABC’s The Neighbors, which debuts tonight, is a sitcom about space aliens living in the suburbs. The Neighbors is a bad sitcom. But–and I think this is important to point out–The Neighbors is not a bad sitcom because it is …
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TV Tonight: Can Vegas Be The Good Wife in a Cowboy Hat?
As I say every time I write a Test Pilot preview of a new fall show over the summer, those posts are not final reviews, because the pilots of new series are often revised or recast before airing. But sometimes they’re not, nor do …
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TV Tonight: The Mindy Project, Ben and Kate
You can see why Fox picked The Mindy Project and Ben and Kate to launch together on Tuesday nights with New Girl. They’re both about young, single adults gettin’ by and lookin’ for love. They’re both somewhere on the …
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TV Tonight: Revolution
First things first: I do not care whether the premise of NBC’s Revolution—all electricity, even batteries, ceases functioning, and civilization collapses—is physically plausible. I don’t know how the catastrophe happened. It …
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TV Tonight: Guys With Kids
Nobody goes in intending to make a bad TV show. Not even Jimmy Fallon, a funny man, and the other producers of NBC’s Guys With Kids, which, let us get it out of the way, is a bad, bad TV show.
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TV Tonight: The New Normal
When I write my Test Pilot previews of new fall shows over the summer, I point out that they shouldn’t be taken as definitive reviews, because the pilots I see then can be reshot and recast before airing, or the show might evolve …
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TV Tonight: Anger Management
Anger Management is about a former baseball player whose career was ended by anger issues and who in turn became a therapist. Anger Management is about the motley group of ragers and court-remanded cases who meet for group …
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TV Tonight: Bristol Palin: Life’s a Tripp
Let’s forget for a moment—maybe you already have—that Bristol Palin’s mother ran for vice president in 2008 and has been a figure of occasional media attention since then. Let’s forget the whirlwind of attention surrounding …
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TV Tonight: Dallas Returns, 20 Years Later
In the original 1978–91 series of Dallas, J.R. Ewing (Larry Hagman) and his brother Bobby (Patrick Duffy) fought each other over the future of the family oil business. In TNT’s remake, they’re back, but now J.R.’s son John Ross …
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TV Tonight: Around the World in 80 Plates
I love Top Chef. I love–well, at least I have loved–The Amazing Race. Around the World in 80 Plates is, on the surface, Top Chef meets The Amazing Race. Twelve chefs start off in London, traveling every week from one …