Movies have the advantage over TV when it comes to telling gimmicky stories, because a movie only has to sustain the gimmick for 2 hours, and then it’s done.  YOUNGER could have been an effortless feature vehicle for [fill in the rom-com star blank], but after 12 half-hour episodes, the effort is already showing […]

  ROOKIE BLUE did a solid job of wrapping up its fourth season and setting up cliffhangers for Season 5 (already ordered) with last night’s episode.  Although the Grey’s Anatomy-with-guns police soap has never had the level of success as its medical forebear, it’s been a steady summer performer for ABC, and this season successfully saw it […]

HBO’s version of a summer drive-in movie is back. WHERE WE WERE:  In the midst of multiple cliffhangers.  Telepathic waitress and series heroine Sookie'(Anna Paquin) had just seen her best friend Tara (Rutina Wesley) get half her head blown off by werewolf Alcide’s (Joe Manganiello) girlfriend Debbie (Brit Morgan), which led Sookie to seize the […]

As an actor, James Franco often delivers performances that are packed in quotation marks, as though he’s an actor playing the role of an actor playing his role.  In I AM MICHAEL, however, he does serious, substantive work as Michael Glatze, a real-life one-time gay activist who became not just a fundamentalist Christian pastor, but a […]

  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 […]

  FRIENDS WITH BETTER LIVES:  Monday 8:30PM on CBS Previously… on FRIENDS WITH BETTER LIVES:  A half-dozen 30-ish friends hang out.  OB-GYN Bobby (Kevin Connolly) and Andi (Majandra Delfino) are married, and she’s expecting their second child; Jules (Brooklyn Decker) and Australian health-food restauranteur Lowell (Rick Donald) are newly engaged; Will (James Van Der Beek), […]

  2 BROKE GIRLS:  Monday 9PM on CBS WHERE WE WERE:  At a Brooklyn diner, where Max (Kat Dennings) is a loudmouth waitress from the streets, and Caroline (Beth Behrs) is a former Manhattan socialite, down on her luck since her father was arrested for Madoff-like swindles; in the logic of TV comedy, naturally the […]

  TRANCE:  Watch It At Home – Tricky But Unsatisfying Thriller From Danny Boyle TRANCE is both extremely clever and remarkably stupid.  I wish I could explain exactly how, but Danny Boyle’s thriller, written by John Hodge and Joe Ahearne, has the kind of story that piles reversals on twists on reveals, so there’s not […]