GAME OF THRONES:  Sunday 9PM on HBO That ineffable “It” that HBO referred to in the classic “It’s Not TV.  It’s HBO” ad campaign is now remarkably widespread, from FX to AMC, from Showtime to Netflix.  HBO for its part has had plenty of failures over the 14 years since The Sopranos established it […]

  To say that in its fifth and final season 90210 was running on fumes would be to disparage fumes.  The show, after a very bumpy start in which it ran through several developers and showrunners and tried far too hard to stoke memories of its Beverly Hills, 90210 forebear, settled in for a moderately entertaining […]

  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 […]

  BROOKLYN NINE-NINE:  Tuesday 8:30PM on FOX – Potential DVR Alert BROOKLYN NINE-NINE is the kind of sitcom that can go very right or extremely wrong:  an ensemble about kooky homicide detectives, anchored by former SNL-er Andy Samberg.  Happily, series creators Michael Schur and Dan Goor, both veterans of Parks & Recreation (Schur is its co-creator as […]

  THE LONE RANGER:  Not Even For Free – The Silver Bullet Is Self-Inflicted Disney’s reluctance to produce THE LONE RANGER is well-documented; the studio even shut down the production shortly before shooting was to begin in order to force producer Jerry Bruckheimer, producer/director Gore Verbinski and producer/star Johnny Depp to slim down the production […]

  UNFORGETTABLE:  Sunday 9PM on CBS – If Nothing Else Is On… You may already have forgotten UNFORGETTABLE.  It debuted in fall 2011 as one of CBS’s seemingly inexhaustible supply of procedurals, its particular gimmick being that heroine Detective Carrie Wells (Poppy Montgomery) has hyperthymesia, the ability to recall with absolute precision almost everything she’s […]

  There’s no cutesiness to be found in John Curran’s film TRACKS, a bracingly non-Disneyfied true-life nature tale.  In the mid-1970s, a young Australian woman named Robyn Davidson decided to walk across almost two thousand miles of desert to the Indian Ocean, accompanied for the most part by only a few camels and her faithful dog. […]

  PARKS & RECREATION:  Thursday 8PM on NBC PARKS & RECREATION had a much better time in London than Elementary.  The marvelous never-a-hit comedy, starting its improbable 6th season, brought most of the cast over for a full hour of the show’s trademark mix of crazy and heartfelt.  No one who wasn’t already in love […]