David Boreanaz and Emily Deschanel
Bones saw a small boost for its big wedding.
The long-awaited episode drew 7.5 million viewers and a 2.1 in the adults 18-to-49 demographic Monday, up one tenth from last week.
NBC won the night with The Voice (13.4 million, 4.2), which fell three tenths, and The Blacklist (11.4 million, 3.0), which ...
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Jessica Lange
Send questions and comments to askmatt@tvguidemagazine.com and follow me on Twitter!
Question: I'm enjoying The Blacklist thus far and would watch it for James Spader's performance alone, but I'm also enjoying the stories as well. NBC is sticking to a formula that has worked before, albeit on a sister network. The intriguing loner, at odds with a government agency, solving the case of the week with the help of his associates, with a through story that's addressed for a few minutes at the start and end of each episode, just enough to keep the serial nature of the story going. Am I the only one who thinks that The Blacklist is Burn Notice with a network budget? If the show is successful, NBC will end up as an expensive version of USA Network. Not there's anything wrong with that. — Rick
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Federico Dordei and Kat Dennings
CBS saw some minor improvement with its revamped Monday lineup.
Airing behind How I Met Your Mother, which was flat with 8 million viewers and a 3.0 in the adults 18-to-49 demographic, 2 Broke Girls (7.9 million, 2.5) rose 9 percent from last week's ...
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Dylan McDermott
CBS' Monday lineup continues to struggle.
Hostages slid even further Monday to a dangerously low 5.2 million viewers and 1.2 in the adults 18-to-49 demographic, dropping 20 percent. Save for How I Met Your Mother (7.4 million, 2.9), the rest of CBS' comedies ...
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Nicole Beharie, Tom Mison
Question: So we had the first cancellation of the season with Lucky 7 after two showings. There are no tears from me as I never watched it. My question is: On what planet did anyone ever perceive this show's premise to be interesting or sustainable? Out of the hundreds of pilots, it is sometimes hard to believe someone at ABC thought this was one of the best. What do you think is next? — Rob
Matt Roush: Next for ABC, or next in the long annals of "what were they thinking" pilots? (That sound you hear is ABC kicking itself for not keeping Body of Proof around as a back-up, because for the time being, Scandal repeats will be airing in place of the unlucky 7.) To be fair, Lucky was based on a more successful British series, The Syndicate, but something clearly got lost in translation. (Same thing must have happened regarding ABC's equally mediocre Betrayal, based on a Dutch series and adapted by the same exec producer, who's batting 0 for 2 right now.) Your point about the sustainability of a pilot's premise is a good one, and comes up frequently when analyzing the failure of shows as disparate as last season's Last Resort and (though it may be premature) this season's Hostages — more on that one later. But from the moment many of us saw clips of Lucky 7 at last spring's upfront presentation, it felt like nothing we could imagine almost anyone would want to see. And we were right.
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Anna Faris
Until CBS stops going for Broke, it may be hard for Mom, one of the season's more promising and pungent new comedies, to get the break it, and the title character, deserves. What's happening to CBS on Monday with its once-dominant comedy lineup is a slow-fade version of the freefall NBC experienced with its Thursday lineup in the wake of Friends. Holding on to shows too long (How I Met Your Mother, which could have wrapped this whole thing way earlier), promoting shows too soon with too little to offer (the shrill and increasingly charmless 2 Broke Girls), making odd decisions like keeping the award-winning Mike & Molly on the shelf in favor of an insta-dud like the abysmal We Are Men, this is one of those rare nights when CBS's programming acumen has mostly crapped out. (Monday's loss is, of course, Thursday's gain, with former Monday anchors The Big Bang Theory and, to a lesser degree these days, the played-out Two and a Half Men helping get early sampling for newbies The Millers and The Crazy Ones.)
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James Spader and Megan Boone
Is Red the new black?
NBC has ordered an additional nine episodes of The Blacklist, making it the first freshman drama of the 2013-2014 season to get a full 22-episode season.
The Blacklist is centered on the unique working relationship between one of the...
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Megan Boone, James Spader
The Blacklist looks like it's on its way to the pickup list.
The NBC drama drew 12.1 million and a 3.6 in the adults 18-to-49 demographic Monday, slipping a mere 5 percent from last week's series premiere. Lead-in The Voice (14.2 million, 4.6) dropped 10 percent.
Fall TV Popularity Contest: Will you man up for We Are Men?
Fellow freshman series Sleepy Hollow (7.9 million, 3.0) also performed well ...
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We Are Men
Whatever the male species did to deserve the recent run of lousy comedies that neuter them into a bland, whiny pudding — the trajectory of Man Up through Guys With Kids to CBS's new and painfully bland smarm-com We Are Men (8:30/7:30c) — can I just collectively say on behalf of the entire gender: We're sorry! Haven't we suffered enough?
Apparently not, because Men hits new lows in bromance abuse, cheapening the whole idea of "band of brothers" with its soggy account of male bonding at an apartment complex for jilted and/or unhappily divorced losers. The new kid on the block, Carter (Chris Smith), is left at the altar in a reverse-Graduate gag that's the cleverest part of the pilot. Such a milquetoast he makes How I Met Your Mother mensch Ted Mosby seem as dangerous as Ted Bundy, Carter is adopted by an unappealing threesome that includes middle-aged horndog Frank (Tony Shalhoub, slumming), sad sack Gil (Kal Penn, who's almost as hilarious here as he was as a wet blanket during HIMYM's dark period, which means not at all) and arrogant Stuart, overplayed by Jerry O'Connell, who parades around shirtless in a rainbow of Speedos that flaunt what some might call manhood. But they would be wrong.
These Men of no certain age and character aren't so much bad influences as terribly unfunny company.
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Mom
Send questions and comments to askmatt@tvguidemagazine.com and follow me on Twitter!
Question: On your recommendation, I watched the first episode of Mom. Why do sitcoms insist on using these horrible laugh tracks still? I found it so distracting it took away from any viewing pleasure. I'll sample the show again because I really like the actors, but do you hate laugh tracks as much as I do? — Rob
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