COMMUNITY:  Thursday 8PM on NBC A few days ago, the NY Times had a fascinating article about Pei-Shen Qian, an artist who is almost but not quite a forger.  He doesn’t duplicate actual paintings of the masters; instead, he paints new works with such precise adherence to their styles that (he claims) unbeknownst to […]

  The trouble with trying to recommend THE ONE I LOVE , written by Justin Lader and directed by Charlie McDowell, is that it’s impossible to describe how clever, surprising and intriguing it turns out to be without giving up its secrets.  It begins straightforwardly–so much so, in fact, that you might need to restrain an “Ah, […]

  House of Cards Season 2 Eps 1-3 Review Here. Eps 4-7 Review Here. At the three-quarters mark, this season of HOUSE OF CARDS has a somewhat different feel, not just from the English original but from the initial Netflix season.  While the series may never give Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey) an antagonist who can […]

  RESURRECTION:  Sunday 9PM on ABC Previously… on RESURRECTION:  8-year old Jacob Langston (Landon Giminez) wakes up one morning in a Chinese rice paddy–32 years after he died in Arcadia, Missouri.  That’s a mystery, and so are the circumstances of his death, which occurred when he plunged into the local river after his aunt, contrary […]

  It seemed that with experienced SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE host Seth Rogen returning to the show for his third visit tonight, SNL had a fair chance of continuing its mini-streak of worthwhile episodes after the Louis C.K. and Anna Kendrick outings, but no such luck.  Although the night didn’t live up to Rogen’s monologue promise […]

  MOTIVE:  Wednesday 10PM on ABC Welcome to summer network TV. The broadcast networks talk a good game about the new 12-months-a-year world of television–and to its credit, CBS has been relatively ambitious with Under the Dome and this summer’s Extant, a sci-fi thriller starring Halle Berry–but for the most part, once May sweeps end, […]

  BELIEVE was one of the more regrettable failures of the 2013-14 broadcast season.  That wasn’t because of its premise (super-powered girl is pursued by evil scientists who want to weaponize her gifts, ho hum), but due to the involvement of the great Alfonso Cuaron as series co-creator.  But Believe was in trouble from the […]

  FINDING CARTER:  Tuesday 10PM on MTV – Potential DVR Alert Most YA drama, in one way or another, is about the emotional dislocation of being a teen, and in recent years, the reigning trope has been to externalize the theme supernaturally:  the teen discovers that he/she is a vampire, an alien, a witch, a […]