TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY:  Worth A Ticket – An Epic of Betrayals   John LeCarre is (I guess one should say “arguably”) the greatest of all spy novelists, and his 1974 TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY is “arguably” his finest work.  Incredibly, the 1979 BBC miniseries adaptation lived up to the level of the novel, […]

  And so the curtain drops on the first season of SMASH, which may have set the all-time television speed record for going from shining beacon to punching bag.  Tonight’s season finale, written by now-deposed showrunner and series creator Theresa Rebeck and directed by Michael Morris, wasn’t the worst episode of the series, but it […]

  HELIX:  Friday 10PM on Syfy – If Nothing Else Is On… Just about every network, cable and broadcast, is in the science-fiction business these days in one way or another, and weirdly enough the only one that seems to have been left behind is Syfy, which has been waiting a long time for its […]

    THE MUPPETS:  Watch It At Home – Nonstop Cuteness   When it was announced that Disney’s new movie of THE MUPPETS (the Mouse House bought the entire franchise from Jim Henson’s company some years ago) was going to be written by Jason Segel and Nicholas Stoller, previously behind Forgetting Sarah Marshall (and Stoller […]

  HELL ON WHEELS – Saturday 9PM on AMC Season 3 brings an upwardly mobile turn for HELL ON WHEELS.  Hero Cullen Bohannon’s (Anson Mount) dark mission of vengeance for the death of his wife during the Civil War, which propelled the action for the show’s first two seasons, is apparently over, and by the […]

  As everyone knows by now, although ONCE UPON A TIME has been renewed for a 7th season, tonight’s 2-hour “Final Battle” episode marked the end of the series as we’ve known it.  Only 3 members of the core cast are returning–Lara Parrilla’s Regina, Robert Carlyle’s Rumplestiltskin, and Colin O’Donoghue’s Hook–and as we learned in […]

  THE LAST WORD (Bleecker Street):  Shirley MacLaine does the irascible codger thing.  She’s smart enough not to overplay the very familiar hand she’s been dealt by screenwriter Stuart Ross Fink and director Mark Pellington, but still there’s little here we haven’t seen many times before.  Harriet Lauler (MacLaine), while a holy terror to everyone […]

  THE GOODWIN GAMES:  Monday 8:30PM on FOX Previously… on THE GOODWIN GAMES:  After the death of their father Benjamin (Beau Bridges), his estranged children–type-A surgeon Henry (Scott Foley), underperformer Chloe (Becki Newton) and petty ex-con Jimmy (T.J. Miller)–discover that they’ll have to maneuver through a gauntlet of his specially designed games in order to […]