MISS AMERICANA (Netflix – January 31):  There are certainly areas of Taylor Swift’s life that are carefully elided in MISS AMERICANA (her actor boyfriend’s face and name are absent, for example, and there’s no mention of Cats), and Lana Wilson’s documentary culminates in an inspirational push that is very much on-message with Swift’s latest […]

  PUNCTURE:  Worth A Ticket – A Bracingly Dark Ride   No one is going to see PUNCTURE in theaters, and that’s a shame, because unaccountably, it’s one of the best pictures around.  “Unaccountably,” because this is a film that doesn’t even seem to know there’s a radar to fly below:  although it contains an […]

  POWER:  Sunday 9PM on Starz Although Starz has embraced the classy Outlander as the face of its original programming, recently giving it a 2-season renewal, the network’s bread and butter is Courtney A. Kemp’s  hip-hop crime saga POWER, which is by far its highest-rated original.  This season, Starz is using the 3rd stanza of […]

  THE GIRLFRIENDS’ GUIDE TO DIVORCE has made its way, at least somewhat, past a very shaky start–not so much in the ratings, which have remained mediocre (although steady enough for Bravo to declare its first scripted 1-hour a win and order another season), but dramatically.  At the start, Girlfriends pandered all too blatantly to […]

  THE CHI:  Sunday 10PM on Showtime – More Mean Streets Showtime’s THE CHI is geographically close enough to the Chicago of its veteran hit Shameless that its characters could bump into Gallaghers at any given moment, but series creator Lena Waithe is influenced more by the work of David Simon, and not so much […]

  THE MILLERS:  Monday 8:30PM on CBS THE MILLERS is about to enter dangerous territory. Last season, the series was the very definition of a “timeslot hit.”  It lost half of its Big Bang Theory lead-in each week, but Big Bang‘s ratings were so enormous that even 50% of them counted as a success.  This […]

  Watching Shonda Rhimes’ SCANDAL has more than once been likened to an addiction, and as with a drug, the danger is that users will build up a tolerance over time, requiring more and more to achieve the same high.  In the case of Scandal, that high is from endless, crazy, jaw-dropping, WTF plot twists.  […]

  CROSSBONES:  Friday 10PM on NBC – Potential DVR Alert Viewers of Starz’s Black Sails will find much that’s familiar in NBC’s summer pirate adventure CROSSBONES.  We’re back in the Caribbean, this time in the early 18th century, and there’s a powerful pirate king, a dangerous newcomer who saves his skin by memorizing a secret […]