For Better or Werts : TV Worth Watching

DOWNLOAD THIS: Free pilot episodes

Current freebies on iTunes and Amazon.com include a couple of fun new shows that both critics and audiences seem to agree on.

Mark Valley's new comic-book joyride Human Target is gratis at Amazon, for both watching and downloading. And the outrageously action-packed pilot (seen Sunday on Fox) features Battlestar Galactica fave Tricia Helfer as the would-be murder victim Valley protects by turning himself into the title character. [Fox photo above.]

Life Unexpected (which premiered Monday on The CW) was unexpectedly liked by most critics. The pilot hour about a teen girl finally meeting her birth mom (responsible community leader) and birth dad (footloose slacker) is a free download at iTunes.

1 Comments

Neil said:

Re: Life Unexpected: What am I missing here?

Back in November, I was in Vegas and wandered into a place called "Television City" where new programs are screened for ad hoc focus groups, who then fill out a questionnaire. That day they were screening the second episode of Life Unexpected.

I'll grant you that a male in his late 50's isn't the CW's target demo, but I found this show trite, the characters cliched, the writing hackneyed and almost amateurish, basically a mess of a program. I didn't believe for a moment that any of these characters could be real people. The only time I got even a little interested was in their brief scenes inside a radio studio, but then I've always been a radio geek, and it says something when the most interesting character is an Electro-Voice microphone.

If this program finds success, NBC should hire me to be a contrary indicator of what will succeed on network TV. (Though "success" and "network TV" are very relative terms on the CW.)

January 21, 2010 1:45 PM

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Diane Werts has been glued to the tube since she can remember, growing up in a household where the TV came on first thing in the morning and stayed on till bedtime and beyond. She worked for the USA Film Festival, then for The Dallas Morning News writing about everything from Shakespeare to macrame art to rock music (and has the hearing loss to prove it). She moved to New York's Newsday to edit their glossy TV magazine, then returned to writing about television, specializing in its stranger permutations. She's a past president of the Television Critics Association.

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