Things unraveled quickly for A&E in 2014, which is looking to The Returned, about dead people who suddenly reappear in a small town, to resurrect its ratings this year. The show is based on the French series, and the pilot is almost a shot-for-shot reaction of it. But executive producer Carlton Cuse swears that will change, as I wrote at Adweek:

“While we start in a similar place, the show is fairly distinctively different by the end of the season,” said Cuse. “We felt like there was a way to take the show and over time, make it something that was very distinctly our own.” Cuse added that while “there’s a small, fervent audience that watched the French show,” an even larger American audience did not.

Of course, that’s the same thing producers said last summer about Gracepoint, Fox’s adaptation of the British drama Broadchurch, which flopped last fall.

Can Dead People Resurrect A&E’s Ratings?

The post Can Dead People Resurrect A&E’s Ratings? appeared first on TV & Not TV.

Like everyone I know, and more than 1.4 million others around the world, I’m hopefully addicted to the podcast Serial, fall’s most riveting show. (Episode 9 is less than 24 hours away!) As I wrote at Quartz,

It’s also captured our imagination in a way no TV show has done this fall, and has the kind of deafening buzz and rabid fan base that any series would kill for. The unlikely global phenomenon is also the strongest proof in years that taut, weekly storytelling trumps the increasingly-popular binge-watching method that Netflix helped pioneer.

While my own tweets occasionally flourish and become stories, in this case I was inspired by a tweet from someone else, Veep actor Timothy Simons:

The success of @serial is a pretty stellar argument against the idea of releasing all eps of a tv show at once.

— Timothy Simons (@timothycsimons) November 6, 2014

That crystallized something I’d been thinking about myself, and gave me the perfect opportunity to finally write the anti-binging story (at least when it comes watching TV’s best shows) that I’ve been mulling for months.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go back to counting down the minutes until Episode 9 of Serial drops!

Sorry, Netflix: Serial Proves That the Best Shows Shouldn’t Be Binged On

The post Sorry, Netflix: Serial Proves That the Best Shows Shouldn’t Be Binged On appeared first on TV & Not TV.

I’m very excited to begin contributing to Adweek, as they look to expand their TV coverage online. My first story for them is something that I’ve wanted to write for more than a year: a look at the worst TV time slots on television, the ones that have been radioactive for years on end, and manage to bring about the end of almost every show that is aired there.

I looked back at several years of TV schedule grids, and pulled together this collection of TV’s equivalent of death row.

Abandon hope, all ye who are scheduled here:

TV’s 10 Worst Time Slots: Can Any Show Survive?

The post TV’s 10 Worst Time Slots: Can Any Show Survive? appeared first on TV & Not TV.