> It takes about an hour, but Nicholas McCarthy’s THE PACT, which premiered in the Park City At Midnight section at Sundance, eventually turns out to have a neat twist up its sleeve, one that switches the movie from haunted house horror to an entirely different subgenre of thriller.  And after that, a solid reel […]

  EUREKA, while never a breakout hit, was a sturdy performer for 5 years on Syfy–and one of the increasingly small number of shows on its air that was actually science-fiction, as opposed to superhero fantasy, horror, reality, paranormal thriller, or whatever else the network is trying to use to broaden its brand (while actually […]

  SCORPION:  Monday 9PM on CBS starting – Worth A Look PLAYERS:  The real-life hacker Walter O’Brien, on whose adventures Scorpion is (very loosely) based–and who is also an Executive Producer on the show.  Series creator Nick Santora, who created Breakout Kings and was a writer/producer on Prison Break.  Pilot director Justin Lin.  An ensemble […]

  THE WOLF OF WALL STREET:  Buy A Ticket – Scorsese’s Boisterous Epic of Bottomless Greed The key sequence in Martin Scorsese’s THE WOLF OF WALL STREET arrives about 2 hours into its 3-hour length.  (No meaningful spoilers here.)  The resoundingly crooked financier Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his equally bent sidekick Donnie Azoff (Jonah […]

  FRANKLIN & BASH made a few cosmetic changes for its third summer on TNT, but nothing to disrupt the show’s basic air of genial dishevelment.  The most high-profile move was bringing in Heather Locklear as new senior partner Rachel King in the show’s law firm of Infeld Daniels King, although once it had her, […]

  LAST MAN STANDING:  Friday 8PM on ABC If your heart beats faster when you hear the retro sound of a voice saying “Last Man Standing Is Recorded Before A Live Studio Audience,” then to paraphrase Jeff Foxworthy, you just may be the audience for Last Man Standing.  It’s found a smallish but loyal crowd […]

  The past two seasons of FALLING SKIES have been something of a wreck, all the way through to tonight’s flat finale, and with its ratings echoing the show’s title, it’s hard to regard the show’s departure with much beyond relief.  Under showrunner David Eick, Season 4 featured a spectacularly wrongheaded series of plotlines that […]

  UNDATEABLE:  Thursday 9PM on NBC – Change the Channel UNDATEABLE, whose episodes NBC is burning off two at a time on summer Thursday nights, may not be quite bad enough to earn the obvious “unwatchable” or “unbearable” labels its title seems to demand–not at the tail end of a season in which NBC gave […]