The midseason finale of the purported romantic thriller BEAUTY & THE BEAST delivered almost all romance, no thrills, as it continues to have only a glancing relationship with its title. Plotting has been this show’s weak spot from the start, so the fact that its procedural crime-solving story of the week was underdeveloped to […]

  PREACHER:  Sunday 9PM on AMC – Potential DVR Alert It’s not quite clear what on earth AMC’s new PREACHER is after watching its pilot, but it’s certainly intriguing.  Based on a celebrated comic book series by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon, and widely considered unadaptable after several cycles of development hell over the years, […]

>   A lot can happen between the creation of a TV pilot in the spring and production of episodes for the regular season:  a writing/producing team is hired, audience focus groups weigh in, networks and studios (which may have had their own turnover in the off-season) give plenty of notes, both helpful and otherwise, […]

    STRAW DOGS:  Watch It At Home – Pointless In Every Way   Forget about the artistic comparisons, the insult to film history, and the lack of respect to a great filmmaker no longer with us.  There’s not even a commercial reason to remake Sam Peckinpah’s 1971 STRAW DOGS.  The title is virtually valueless […]

  SUITS didn’t have a winter season this year so much as it had the stub of its fall season, just 6 episodes that seemed to be what was left over from the real season after an overlong holiday break.  That scheduling glitch may have contributed to the general feeling of letdown that accompanied the […]

> Watch It At Home:  Morgan Spurlock’s latest doc is more stunt than revelation. If Michael Moore were a movie franchise, Morgan Spurlock would be the direct-to-video entry in the series.  Or maybe the one that adds cheesy 3D effects to squeeze out every last dollar.   Moore is, lord knows, self-aggrandizing and fond of the […]

  MURDER IN THE FIRST:  Monday 10PM on TNT Previously… on MURDER IN THE FIRST:  San Francisco homicide detectives Terry English (Taye Diggs) and Hildy Mulligan (Kathleen Robertson) are investigating two crimes connected to arrogant high-tech tycoon Erich Blunt (Tom Felton), the violent deaths of both his biological father and his former employee and lover.  […]

  No one could have known when POSE went into production that it would be Ryan Murphy’s last original series (created with Brad Falchuk and Steven Canals) for the Fox group of networks and studios, before his giant new Netflix deal kicked in.  Nevertheless, Pose has had a fitting tone of valedictory, of summing up […]