DOWNTON ABBEY:  Sunday 9PM on PBS In its fourth season as the most successful regular series in PBS history, DOWNTON ABBEY operates as smoothly as a well-staffed ancestral estate.  Even though the larger subject of the series is the creeping spread of democracy into the centuries-old system of English aristocracy, which would eventually undermine […]

  Everyone in Banshee, Pennsylvania is a tortured soul, from its Mayor to its police officers to its waitresses and teens.  That’s what gives BANSHEE a weight that goes beyond its sheer awesomeness as an action series–although make no mistake, it so consistently hits so high a bar in its set-piece sequences that there’s nothing […]

  FAMILY TOOLS –  Wednesday 8:30PM on ABC – Change the Channel   J.K. Simmons is one of our national character actor treasures, but he tests the bounds of our willingness to follow him anywhere with FAMILY TOOLS, which is getting a last-minute run starting tonight. Tools is sitcom with a capital “sit.”  The rollicking […]

> Amid multiplying online reports, spearheaded by New York Magazine’s Vulture site, that Paramount’s SUPER 8 is tracking for a very soft opening this weekend at the box-office, the studio has decided to launch a “secret” (by which I mean “highly publicized“) pre-opening day:  the movie will now screen on Thursday in about 325 theaters […]

  HINDSIGHT has been a very pleasant rom-com-dram vehicle that probably didn’t generate enough in the way of buzz, and certainly didn’t score the ratings, to survive past its first season, notwithstanding its cliffhanger season finale.  (Its only real chance is if network VH1 decides to make a statement by backing its first scripted series no matter the […]

  Since this is posting before the West Coast airing ends, SPOILER ALERT. …although I’m not sure how much of a Spoiler it is when the Internet has been expecting it for weeks.  Perhaps the biggest surprise in the series finale of HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER was that series creators Carter Bays and Craig […]

  AMERICAN FICTION (Orion/MGM/Amazon – Nov. 17):  The Toronto People’s Choice Award has been something of a golden ticket to a Best Picture nomination over the years, and this year the prize went to Cord Jefferson’s directing debut American Fiction.  Jefferson’s script (based on the novel “Erasure” by Percival Everett) for the most part deftly toes […]

  MISS AMERICANA (Netflix – January 31):  There are certainly areas of Taylor Swift’s life that are carefully elided in MISS AMERICANA (her actor boyfriend’s face and name are absent, for example, and there’s no mention of Cats), and Lana Wilson’s documentary culminates in an inspirational push that is very much on-message with Swift’s latest […]