THE CONJURING:  Worth A Ticket – Retro Horror, In A Good Way Watching The Exorcist recently, for the first time in probably a decade, the most striking thing about it was its insistence on a palpable, sometimes documentary-like reality.  Director William Friedkin moved the film at a measured, even slow pace, only gradually raising […]

  Read All Our Fall Pilot Reports here and Midseason Pilot Reports here. SUPER FUN NIGHT:  Wednesday 9:30PM on ABC starting October 2 – If Nothing Else Is On… Anyone who’s seen Rebel Wilson confidently walk away with chunks of Pitch Perfect, Bachelorette or Bridesmaids knows that she’s a breakout comic talent, and possibly even […]

  LABOR DAY is a beautifully performed, well crafted Harlequin romance.  As such, it’s a shock coming from writer/director Jason Reitman (based on Joyce Maynard’s novel), one that goes in a completely different, far more earnest direction than the snap and wit of his Thank You For Smoking, Juno, Up In the Air or Young […]

  CHICAGO FIRE:  Tuesday 10PM on NBC At a time when network programmers’ fingers are ever-jumpier on their cancellation buttons, NBC has done an unusually good job nurturing CHICAGO FIRE into a success.  The show, which mixes firefighting procedural plots with more serialized storylines, got a slow start, but it was noticeably boosted whenever it […]

  THE VAMPIRE DIARIES:  Thursday 8PM on CW Walter White, that student of change, would enjoy this fifth season of THE VAMPIRE DIARIES.  Behind the camera, showrunner Julie Plec is now splitting her time with the Diaries spin-off The Originals, and is also an Executive Producer of The Tomorrow People; Executive Producer Caroline Dries wrote […]

  JA’MIE: PRIVATE SCHOOL GIRL:  Sunday 10:30PM on HBO – Change the Channel JA’MIE: PRIVATE SCHOOL GIRL belongs to that particular British Empire school of comedy in which the central joke is that a female character is played, very obviously, by a man in drag–not that the character is a man pretending to be a […]

  Improved isn’t the same as good, and the first half of REVENGE‘s third season has languished in the gulf between those two.  Under new showrunner Sunil Nayar (who replaced series creator Mike Kelley), Revenge has backed away from the extreme idiocy of last year’s The Initiative storyline, with its quasi-government conspiracies, its psychotic long-lost […]

  The Season 2 finale of TNT’s MAJOR CRIMES, intended to pay off the show’s one serialized storyline, about Rusty (Graham Patrick Martin), the teen ward of series protagonist LAPD Captain Sharon Raydor (Mary McDonnell) and witness to a murder committed by imprisoned serial killer and attorney Philip Stroh (who was originally introduced back in […]