BACK IN THE GAME:  Wednesday 8:30PM on ABC Previously… on BACK IN THE GAME:  Newly divorced Terry Gannon, Jr (Maggie Lawson), with her son Danny (Griffin Gluck), has little choice but to move back home with her father Terry Sr, better known as “The Cannon” (James Caan).  The Cannon was a baseball player and […]

  CARRIE:  Watch It At Home – Respectable But Uninspired Rebo The talented director Kimberley Peirce plays a losing game with her remake of Brian DePalma’s iconic 1976 CARRIE.  (In fairness to Peirce, it’s not clear how many of the creative shots she was calling; she signed on as a director-for-hire after struggling for years […]

  THE HUNGER GAMES: CATCHING FIRE:  Buy A Ticket – The Odds Remain in This Franchise’s Favor Gary Ross did a fine, gritty job as director and co-writer of the first Hunger Games adaptation, one especially attuned to the emotional arc of its emblematic heroine.  But minutes into the follow-up, THE HUNGER GAMES: CATCHING FIRE, […]

  The concept of a “finale” as an event calling for special plot revelations and narrative shockers is almost irrelevant to SCANDAL, where every episode brings massive twists.  This is a show, after all, set in a world where the sitting President and Vice President of the United States have now recently committed murder–and not […]

  HOUSE OF LIES:  Sunday 10PM on Showtime HOUSE OF LIES deserves some credit for nailing the Wolf of Wall Street vibe before there was a Wolf of Wall Street.  Marty Kaan (Don Cheadle) and his “pod” of business consultants have already spent 2 seasons merrily doing drugs, having inappropriate sex and swindling their own […]

  The post-apocalyptic sci-fi western, which once must have seemed revolutionary and innovative, is now (it dates back at least to 1975’s A Boy and His Dog) an established subgenre.  Jake Paltrow’s entry into the field, YOUNG ONES, was roundly panned at Sundance, possibly because of that familiarity, but it’s a reasonably ambitious and quite […]

  The only thing more boring than a typical Oscars is one without surprises, and the closest thing to a major upset this year turned out to be Disney’s loss in the Best Animated Short category.  (The studio almost instantly rebounded with the much more important Animated Feature prize for Frozen.)  All the conventional wisdom […]

  FAKING IT:  Tuesday 10:30PM on MTV FAKING IT is intended as the companion piece to MTV’s hit scripted comedy Awkward., which serves as its lead-in, but on the basis of its pilot, it has nothing like the original comic voice of Lauren Iungerich’s show (of course, now that Iungerich has stepped away from Awkward., […]