Comic crumbs were hard to come by on tonight’s mostly dreadful SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE.  It’s a particular disappointment because after two episodes struggling with non-comedy hosts Adam Levine and Justin Bieber, the show had a definite uptick with the slyly funny Christoph Waltz, and this time the host was Kevin Hart, who’s proven his […]

  GOSSIP GIRL:  Monday 9PM on CW WHERE WE WERE:  Blair (Leighton Meester) with Chuck (Ed Westwick), and then not.  Serena (Blake Lively) with Dan (Penn Badgley), and then not.  Mix, then repeat.  Other things happened:  Serena was Gossip Girl for a while, but that didn’t turn out well for anyone–particularly the show.  Nate (Chace […]

> Oren Moverman’s first film as a director, The Messenger, was a beautifully contained, emotionally detailed story about soldiers assigned to deliver tragic news to the families of the deceased.  In his new film RAMPART, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival, Moverman is more ambitious and, unfortunately, a victim of the sophomore jinx. This […]

  COUNTERPART:  Sunday 9PM on Starz, starting 1/21/18 – In the Queue Tales of alternative earths are an increasingly popular form of fiction these days, possibly because our actual Earth is currently so difficult to handle.  Just as The Man In the High Castle runs the subgenre through tropes of old-time war movies, Starz’s new […]

  ATLANTA:  Wednesday 10PM on FX Season 1 of Donald Glover’s FX series ATLANTA was, among other things, a show that went in so many directions after its premiere that judging it from its opening half-hour proved to be foolhardy.  The same may very well be true for Season 2, so we’ll deal briefly with […]

  ARROW: Wednesday 8PM on CW – If Nothing Else Is On It’s Comic-Con week in San Diego, and while we here don’t participate in that particular hullabaloo (waiting for hours just to see a trailer that’s instantly put on the web?  No, thanks), there’s some good coverage here.  What does seem appropriate is to […]

  ZERO HOUR:  Thursday 8PM on ABC – Potential DVR Alert ZERO HOUR‘s pilot is an engaging piece of nonsense, but whether it can work as a continuing TV series is another question.  The premise is a DaVinci Code/National Treasure-ian tangle of Nazis, Rosicrucians, cloning, assassins, and bits and pieces of what seems to be […]

> But first–a nod to the sly marketing department at AMC, which cleverly lampooned its own predicament of trying to persuade at least some of the hordes of WALKING DEAD fans to stay tuned to the network next week for a very different show.  The result was a pair of lighthearted promos for Mad Men […]