Everyone on Stephen Falk’s FX comedy YOU’RE THE WORST is a wreck, and yet the pieces of the show have fallen together rather neatly.  The series isn’t so much an anti-rom-com as a kicking and screaming one, peopled by characters who, if they aren’t doing terrible things, do right ones for the worst possible […]

  YOUNGER:  Tuesday 10PM on TV Land Although it’s a half-hour rather than an hour, TV Land’s new YOUNGER feels somewhat similar to VH1’s recent Hindsight.  Both are series versions of high concepts that might have been feature films starring, say, Sandra Bullock, a decade or so ago, and both revolve around women on the cusp […]

  ROSEWOOD:  Wednesday 8PM on FOX Previously… on ROSEWOOD:  Although he appears to be bursting with good health, Dr. Beaumont Rosewood (Morris Chestnut) has enough congenital illnesses to fell the entire emergency room of Code Black, and they’ve affected him in two ways:  he has an easygoing desire to fully enjoy each day as if […]

  FALLING SKIES:  Sunday 10PM on TNT FALLING SKIES is, for TNT, the series Syfy needs and doesn’t seem to be able to pull off.  As futuristic adventure sagas go, there’s nothing innovative about it, or even stylish, and now that the original producers have departed, it’s no longer much interested in being an allegory.  […]

> It’s anyone’s guess why Francis Ford Coppola, at the age of 72, with some enduring cinema classics to his name, would decide to make a movie that’s a cross between a David Lynch retread, an old horror cheapie, and a hallucination.  What matters is that the resulting TWIXT is utterly dreadful, the worst film […]

  THIS IS 40 – Watch It At Home – Judd Apatow’s Midlife Crisis Comedy-Drama is Both Ambitious and Bland As Judd Apatow has matured as a filmmaker, he’s staked out a piece of territory that’s original but not necessarily workable:  he wants to be both the Paul Mazursky and the John Cassavetes of sitcom showrunners. Although […]

  HOW TO GET AWAY WITH MURDER is an edifice built on two foundations:  the acting of Viola Davis as the show’s brilliant and complex criminal attorney Annalise Keating, and the ability of series creator Peter Nowalk and his writing/producing staff to come up with compelling non-stop plot twists.  In Season 2, Davis as usual […]

  ABC’s NASHVILLE has reached the midpoint of its season as one of the better dramas on network television, and also one of the more frustrating.  Particularly galling is that it seems to falter worst at the things other, less interesting shows do with much less effort. Plotting, for example.  Within the show’s mostly parallel […]