TV Rake

For those paying attention, Fox is currently in the bonus stage round of their annual contest “How Many Series Can We Cancel?” and they’ve now officially cut all ties with freshman comedies Dads, Enlisted, and Surviving Jack, along with first-year drama Rake.

Everything about Rake's first episode is fine, with potential for goodness — and possibly even greatness — down the line. But it doesn't quite get there in the first episode. Instead, "Serial Killer" feels like a case of TV deja vu, where everything seems a bit too familiar, as though we've seen all this before.

Being occasionally unlikeable but really good at his job worked well enough for Gregory House, which may be why Fox took a liking to Rake and ordered it to series, as the same description might apply to Greg Kinnear’s Keegan Deane, a brilliant lawyer, who’s also described as “frustratingly charming with zero filter.”

Believe it or not, we’re at the point in the year when the networks will start setting their January premiere dates. 2014 is not that far away, and for Fox, it marks the return of winter series American Idol and The Following, as well as the debut of new series Rake and Enlisted.

Among the new series headed for Fox during Midseason of next year is Peter Duncan's drama Rake and David Rosen's Us & Them. The trailer for Rake supports my theory that this is going to be a great role for Greg Kinnear. The series is a remake of an Australian drama and has Kinnear playing Keegan Dean, a criminal defense lawyer who's known to take on cases other attorneys might pass over.

After months of pilot orders and casting news, we're now starting to learn the fate of the pilots in development for the 2013-2014 season. Earlier, we shared word that NBC was passing on a number of pilots, including the modern-day Hatfields & McCoys drama, and tonight brings word of a number of pickups over at Fox, among which is the Sleepy Hollow drama from Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, as well as the robot-cop drama from Fringe's J.H. Wyman and J.J. Abrams, Almost Human.

Fox announced today that they've given a pilot order to a comedic drama based on a successful Australian series. Rake will star Greg Kinnear as a "brilliant, but self-destructive" criminal defense attorney. Peter Duncan, Peter Tolan and Michael Wimer are set to executive produce.