Scott Cooper’s BLACK MASS is a beautifully put together and wonderfully acted true-life drama about Boston gangsters and the law, but it has a void at its center that holds it back from greatness.  That center isn’t occupied by JoOut ofhnny Depp or his character James “Whitey” Bulger (one used that nickname with him […]

  The breakout comedy star of 2015 is also an award-winning sketch comic and writer, so SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE could hardly do better than to have Amy Schumer as host for the 2d episode of the season.  For the most part, the show seemed to step up its game–even Weekend Update showed signs of a […]

  COOPER BARRETT’S GUIDE TO SURVIVING LIFE:  Sundays 8:30PM on FOX – Change the Channel The first network TV premiere of 2016 is FOX’s COOPER BARRETT’S GUIDE TO SURVIVING LIFE on Sunday (already available on various on-demand and streaming platforms)… and, well, it’s good that there’s still plenty of year yet to come. Cooper Barrett‘s […]

  BLINDSPOT has, in a sense, been coasting on the first five minutes of its pilot for an entire season.  That sequence was the most heavily hyped of summer 2015:  a bag dumped into the middle of Times Square turned out, when cautiously opened, to contain a gorgeous, naked amnesiac woman who would be known […]

  The final season of AMC’s HELL ON WHEELS was a sprawl, made worse by the network’s decision to play the season in two chunks separated by a year.  This last stretch of 7 episodes was particularly choppy.  One hour was a virtual two-hander for hero Cullen Bohannon (Anson Mount) and arch-foe The Swede (Christopher […]

  SLEEPY HOLLOW:  Friday 9PM on FOX FOX’s TV series version of SLEEPY HOLLOW is, of course, about a man who won’t stay dead, namely Ichabod Crane (Tom Mison), who died in the 18th century and was brought back in the 21st to hunt demons.  For the series itself, though, having been rebooted in its […]

  Vampires may live forever, but TV shows don’t, and tonight the coffin closed on THE VAMPIRE DIARIES, the pre-superhero champion of the then-fledgling CW network when it debuted 8 years ago.  In truth, the close of business was a season or two past due:  not only were the ratings way down from their peak, […]

  MR. MERCEDES:  Wednesday 8PM on Audience Network (DirecTV) – DVR Alert It’s been quite a week for the splintering of television.  FX announced that it, like AMC, would launch a pay version of its service, allowing viewers on certain platforms to watch its shows without commercials for a monthly fee.  Then Disney dropped a […]