I can see The Good Place and This Is Us developing their premises and worlds in such a way as to tell a lot of stories. Designated Survivor, on the other hand, has explicitly stated that there's an election coming in a year, and there's no way its lead character could get a major party nomination, much less win an…

Oh, FFS. Please at least tell me that MacGyver hemorrhaged viewers towards the end of the hour, because that was the most nondescript, tedious hour of television I've seen in some time.

Basically, MacGyver was The Doctor: kind, intelligent, genuinely interested in everyone he met, and possessed of a deep sense of responsibility and a desire to help when he encountered suffering or injustice. Turning him into a badass secret agent misses the point on almost every possible level.

Yeah, that's probably a big part of why his current career is so boring.

Bah. Pitch is by far the best network pilot I've seen so far (not saying the show will be great, but the pilot is the best-made and most compelling). It certainly deserved to do better than Notorious, This Is Us, or even Designated Survivor (which also has a good pilot, but which, unlike Pitch, doesn't give you the…

The Notorious pilot gives off the unmistakable whiff of having been written by someone who thinks that there's a cookbook for writing Shondaland-style shows, and that if you just replicate a few tropes, success will be guaranteed. It's almost offensively derivative, and I'm not surprised that fans of Rhimes's shows…

It was a lousy pilot and I probably won't bother with the rest of the show, but I was really annoyed by the complete lack of commentary on the ethics of what the characters are doing - or rather, the lack of same. A news producer colluding with a lawyer to spin a murder investigation in a way that helps his client? …

It really makes you question the show's commitment to Sparkle Motion.

So is the show just going to ignore the fact that Asher mowed down a woman with his car last season? I mean, I know that this is that kind of show, but that was a seriously dark turn. At least with Frank and Bonny, subsequent episodes suggested that there was something seriously wrong with them. Asher just seems…

That's precisely the point, though. Part of the reason that Connor has such a non-reaction to what Oliver did is that he's done so much worse, and that in his mind, being with Oliver - and being a faithful and supportive boyfriend, even in the face of something as inexcusable as Oliver's lie - is how he achieves…

Pratt (who compensates by doing an impression of Harrison Ford)

Yeah, I'm assuming that we're going to find out the cosmology of the show's afterlife is more complicated than initially suggested. Or, at least, I'm hoping that we will, because at the moment its argument for being a show about self-improvement and learning to be a good person is pretty thin.

I don't know if I'd go so far as to say angry, but having watched the pilot last night, I'm certainly bewildered at all the good reviews that This is Us has gotten from TV reviewers whose judgement I had otherwise learned to respect.

It's kind of amazing to me that back in his Dark Angel days he actually managed to play a character who earnest, idealistic, and self-sacrificing. Because yes, "slappable" is totally the adjective I'd apply to him today.

Isn't it a thing on cop shows that people are waiting to "get their twenty"? There are professions where you retire (or at least have the option to retire) relatively early, and I think policeman is one of them, especially if you haven't climbed the ranks into an administrative position. It doesn't seem unlikely to…

Counterpoint: JJ is by far the best MCU television series, and very near the top of MCU properties in general.

OK, I've decided: I'm swapping Timeless out and putting This is Us in. So my final ballot is:

I had a nasty cold this weekend (and let me tell you, a cold in 30C weather is really not fun) so spent most of it plonked on my sofa, watching whatever was banked on my TV - it would have been really convenient if the TV season had started a week earlier. I finally got around to watching the new Roots, which was…

I've been thinking of making some changes, but I'm not sure what. I think Timeless is a bad choice - it's probably going to do well enough to start with that it'll get a quick renewal, even if it later hemorrhages ratings. But I'm really not certain what to replace it with - I've already picked all the new shows that…

See also the claim Mary Shelley didn't write Frankenstein and/or that Percy Bysshe Shelley did significant rewrites of it. Even though we have Mary's original drafts and revisions in her handwriting (including Percy's notes in his own hand, which while influential, don't rise to the level of co-authorship), and that…