> Disclaimer:  Network pilots now in circulation are not necessarily in the form that will air in the Fall.  Pilots are often reedited and rescored, and in some cases even recast or reshot.  So these critiques shouldn’t be taken as full reviews, but rather as a guide to the general style and content of the […]

  WELCOME TO SWEDEN:  Sunday 8PM on NBC WELCOME TO SWEDEN is a comedy so placid that one might need to hold up a mirror to its face to see if its breath can fog the glass, and NBC seems to be trying to keep its second season as secret as possible by shoving it […]

Tonight’s season finale of Lifetime’s very softcore (so soft it’s basically liquid) prostitution hit THE CLIENT LIST was more guilty than pleasure.  The hour, written by Producer Barbara Nance (from a story by Nance and star Jennifer Love Hewitt) and directed by Hewitt herself, was actually quite bewildering.  After last week’s climactic bombshell of Riley’s […]

  MTV’s FINDING CARTER is another high-concept series challenged by its concept losing some of its height.  The original impetus for the story was teenager Carter (Kathryn Prescott) being rescued from a kidnapping at the hands of Lori (Milena Govich) that Carter didn’t even know had happened, because Lori had taken her at the age […]

  It’s already been announced that next season will be the fifth and final one for TNT’s FALLING SKIES, and that seems best for all concerned.  The series, under new showrunner David Eick (probably best known as a producer, although not creator, of the rebooted Battlestar Galactica), took a wrong turn both creatively and in […]

> FOLLIES may be the strangest of all Broadway masterpieces; after 40 years, it’s still the most avant-garde work of Stephen Sondheim’s career. It’s easy enough to make the show sound linear:  set in 1971 (which was present-day when the musical was written), it takes place at a theatre that had, for some decades, housed […]

  THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD (Neon – TBD):  The Norwegian filmmaker Joachim Trier, despite being a subject of critical raves over the years, hasn’t penetrated the space where arthouse favorites become known to the mainstream.  (It didn’t help that his English-language debut Louder Than Bombs was a bust.) The Worst Person In the World, […]

  Something nagged at the first two seasons of CRAZY EX-GIRLFRIEND, and it’s right there in the title.  Rebecca Bunch (series co-creator Rachel Bloom) was lovable and hilarious, but she was also, well, unhinged.  Bloom and co-creator Aline Brosh McKenna largely played Rebecca’s manipulations and stalking, and the damage she did to other people’s lives […]