COMING THIS WEEK:  The New and Improved SHOWBUZZDAILY!     It’s a paradox of American pop culture of the moment that you can barely sell a movie ticket for anything that even smells like a western (Cowboys & Aliens and John Carter were the most recent to discover that), but the older […]

MADAGASCAR 3:  EUROPE’S MOST WANTED – Worth A Ticket – A Circus Indeed   There’s a certain luxury in being DreamWorks Animation.   Pixar gets the awards and the acclaim, but it’s also held to an impossibly high standard:  if Cars 2 had been a DreamWorks movie, it would have been considered a perfectly reasonable entertainment, […]

  EPISODES:  Sunday 10:30PM on Showtime   WHERE WE WERE:  Sean and Beverly Lincoln (Stephen Mangan and Tamsin Greig) are a married pair of British television writers who’ve had a modest success with a low-key comedy about a middle-aged teacher at a boys’ private school.  US TV executive Merc Lapidus (John Pankow) tells them that […]

  CHICAGO FIRE: Wednesday 10PM on NBC – Change the Channel Network television doesn’t come more dully generic than NBC’s “new” CHICAGO FIRE, a series that seems to be assembling itself out of old film clips even as you watch it.  In its time of need, NBC turned to one of its most prolific and […]

  RED WIDOW:  Midseason TBD on ABC – If Nothing Else Is On… Disclaimer: Network pilots now in circulation are not necessarily in the form that will air in the Fall. Pilots are often reedited and re-scored, and in some cases even recast or reshot. These critiques shouldn’t be taken as full pilot reviews, but […]

Stuart Blumberg’s first film as a director (his screenwriting credits include The Kids Are All Right), THANKS FOR SHARING, never quite manages to solve its own central problem:  how to make a sensitive and funny (and not harrowing) movie on the subject of sex addiction. We’ve had the harrowing version, of course, with Steve McQueen’s […]

  THE PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER:  Worth A Ticket – The Serious Side of Being a Teen We certainly don’t lack for stories about high school in our popular culture.  The CW and ABCFamily networks are almost entirely devoted to that brief, formative period (as is MTV when it does scripted shows like Awkward.). […]

A lot can happen between the creation of a TV pilot in the spring and the production of episodes for the regular season: a writing/producing team is hired, audience focus groups weigh in, networks and studios (which may have had their own turnover) give plenty of notes, helpful and otherwise, and critics begin to rear […]