Magic was one ingredient that MAGIC CITY lacked, and so despite its not-insubstantial virtues, tonight’s Season 2 finale also marked its finish as a series.  The low-rated show was a passion project of its creator Mitch Glazer, built around his own childhood memories about mostly Jewish gangsters in the lavish Miami Beach hotels of […]

  SURVIVING JACK:  Thursday 9:30PM on FOX – Change the Channel SURVIVING JACK is a Mortifying Parent Sitcom, which isn’t much of a surprise, since it originated with Justin Halpern, who wrote the book that became the short-lived sitcom S#!* My Dad Says and also wrote the book I Suck At Girls, which inspired this […]

  SLEEPY HOLLOW:  Monday 9PM on FOX Previously… on SLEEPY HOLLOW:  Remember Ichabod Crane, from junior high reading lists?  Well, he’s back.  Really back, as in returned from the semi-dead state he’d been in since 1781, when he’d been (more or less) killed in battle after making the infamous Horseman headless, and then placed into […]

  TROPHY WIFE:  Tuesday 9:30PM on ABC Previously… on TROPHY WIFE:  Kate Harrison (Malin Akerman) is the cheerful, committed, trying-really-hard third wife of Pete (Bradley Whitford).  As such, she’s inherited both his previous spouses, scary Diane (Marcia Gay Harden) and New Age-y Jackie (Michaela Watkins), as well as their combined children:  Diane’s teens Warren (Ryan […]

  ONCE UPON A TIME IN WONDERLAND:  Thursday 8PM on ABC Previously… on ONCE UPON A TIME IN WONDERLAND:  In this revisionist spin on the classic tale, a Victorian-era young adult Alice (Sophie Lowe) has escaped from the asylum where her father kept her after hearing the wild tales of her childhood, and she’s headed […]

  Incivility, narcissism, oafishness, insensitivity and general offensiveness is rarely as breezily funny as it regularly is on THE LEAGUE, which finished its fifth season on the new FXX network tonight.  The semi-improvised show created by Jeff Schaffer and Jackie Marcus Schaeffer, who were credited with the scripts for both halves of the 2-part season […]

  It’s been an odd, spotty half-season for THE VAMPIRE DIARIES.  For one thing, it’s been more like two mini-seasons:  the story of all-powerful, unkillable vampire-witch-whatever Silas, which would have been expected to climax in the fall finale, abruptly ended 7 episodes into the season–which was too bad, because with Silas as its Stefanganger (Paul […]

  BANSHEE:  Friday 10PM on Cinemax Cinemax’s gonzo-grindhouse extravaganza BANSHEE is back for its second season, seeming to flow directly from the ids of sensitive rom-com/dram novelist Jonathan Tropper and his fellow series creator David Schickler. By Banshee standards, the season 2 premiere, written by Tropper and directed by Greg Yaitanes, was relatively sedate.  Mostly […]