ROOKIE BLUE:  Thursday 9PM on ABC It’s quite an accomplishment for a scripted summer series on one of the broadcast networks to last five seasons on the air, and the ABC/Canadian co-production ROOKIE BLUE is now so venerable that one of the plotlines in tonight’s Season 5 premiere had the character whose rookie year kicked off […]

  THE STRAIN:  Sunday 10PM on FX – Potential DVR Alert Although capable of finer things (notably his Oscar-winning Pan’s Labyrinth), the expert filmmaker Guillermo del Toro is one of those directors–you could call them Tarantinians–with a deep fondness for neo-schlock.  It’s resulted in projects like the Hellboy series, and also Pacific Rim, where del […]

  CHASING LIFE, which aired its not-quite-half season finale tonight, could better have been titled What Not To Do If You Get Cancer.  That, in itself, isn’t a criticism:  a story about a narcissistic idiot who gets sick and does absolutely everything wrong once she finds out about it is a perfectly valid subject for […]

  MADAM SECRETARY:  Sunday 8PM on CBS Previously… on MADAM SECRETARY:  Elizabeth McCord (Tea Leoni), a college professor and prior to that a crack CIA analyst, is asked by her former CIA boss, now President of the United States Conrad Dalton (recurring guest star Keith Carradine) to become his Secretary of State after the death […]

  THE AFFAIR:  Sunday 10PM on Showtime Previously… on THE AFFAIR:  Several years from now, Noah (Dominic West) and Alison (Ruth Wilson) sit in police interrogation rooms and separately recount, in connection with a crime we don’t yet know about, the story of their relationship in ways that shade the events differently and sometimes outright […]

  THE HOBBIT:  THE BATTLE OF THE FIVE ARMIES – Watch It At Home – The Best of the Hobbit Trilogy Is Still Just Its Tallest Dwarf It’s hard to get around the sad fact that Peter Jackson’s THE HOBBIT trilogy has diminished the stature of his great Lord of the Rings series.  It’s all […]

  THE BRONZE is an entertaining but standard-issue R-rated American comedy, equal parts Bad Teacher and any Danny McBride vehicle, which makes one wonder what it’s doing in the Dramatic Competition line-up at the Sundance Film Festival.  (McBride’s breakout movie The Foot Fist Way also premiered at Sundance, but in the more genre-oriented Midnight section.)  Another similarity to […]

  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 […]