BLACK AND WHITE – no current US distributor or release date – Not Even For Free BLACK AND WHITE was reportedly drawn from events in its writer/director Mike Bender’s own life, which makes it remarkable, on some bizarro level, that every single element of Binder’s script feels false and contrived.  Binder has been a […]

  BLACK-ISH:  Wednesday 9:30PM on ABC Previously… on BLACK-ISH:  Dre Anderson is a successful ad agency executive who lives well with his lovely anesthesiologist wife Rainbow (Tracee Ellis Ross), teen children Junior (Marcus Scribner) and Zoey (Yara Shahidi), younger twins Jack (Miles Brown) and Diane (Marsai Martin), and moderately cantankerous Pops (Laurence Fishburne).  Dre’s one […]

  THE 100:  Wednesday 9PM on CW THE 100 started as almost defiantly derivative of every post-apocalyptic, dystopian YA fantasy around (plus more than a little Lost, Battlestar Galactica and Lord of the Flies), but it proved to be a surprisingly sturdy piece of storytelling over the course of its season.  Series creator Jason Rothenberg […]

  Amy Adams was the host of 2014’s final new SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE, but although she performed enthusiastsically, the show was dominated by surprise guests and by the pre-tape team, which contributed a couple of gems to the episode.  One was a mock commercial for a new Asian-American doll, which drolly illustrated how paranoid and […]

  BETTER CALL SAUL:  Monday 10PM on AMC – Potential DVR Alert Spin-offs used to be an regular part of the TV landscape, even for the most celebrated shows–Norman Lear created a virtual tree of comedies originating with All In the Family, from Maude and The Jeffersons to Archie Bunker’s Place and Good Times, and […]

IZOMBIE:  Tuesday 9PM on CW – Potential DVR Alert Rob Thomas and Diane Ruggiero-Wright’s clever IZOMBIE (based on a DC comic) brings back from the dead something very close to the premise of ABC’s lamented Pushing Daisies.  In that fantastical show, the hero had the magical ability to bring corpses back from the dead, but […]

  It would have been nice if Reese Witherspoon had shown triumphant comic chops on tonight’s SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE, in the face of her terrible new movie comedy Hot Pursuit, but although she was a poised and enthusiastic host, it was just another uneven SNL. Witherspoon was mostly an observer for the funniest bit of […]

  DEFIANCE:  Friday 8PM on Syfy The second season of Syfy’s DEFIANCE was often jarringly different from its first, shifting from its initial post-apocalyptic-western procedural form to a heavily mythological storyline that broke up the central father-and-adoptive-alien-daughter relationship of Nolan (Grant Bowler) and Irisa (Stephanie Leonidas) for much of the season, while embracing a mystical […]