This was a Toronto Film Festival unlike any other, and not just because I “attended” it from the laptop in my house.  Toronto has become an important stop on the road to the Academy Awards, with 9 of the past 10 Best Picture winners premiering or screening there.  (Birdman was the exception.)  But no […]

  TRANSPLANT:  Tuesday 10PM on NBC A great many shows that we consider “American television” are actually produced in Canada, thanks to favorable tax credits and currency exchange rates.  The creators of these shows and most of the more familiar stars may hail from the US, but the rest of the cast and behind-the-scenes personnel […]

  The borders between “movies” and “television” were already beginning to buckle pre-pandemic, thanks to Netflix and the desire of studios to release their product on as many simultaneous platforms as possible.  Now, of course, we’ve been 4 months without movie theaters, and the most optimistic view is that wide openings are still weeks if […]

  HBO’s RUN turned out to be a treatise on the limitations of the elevator pitch.  Everything about the show that could be described between the lobby of an office building and, say, its 20th floor (let’s assume the occupants were socially distanced) seemed irresistible.  The premise:  a pair of onetime lovers follow through on […]

  Do Westworld‘s creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy have free will?  This third season of HBO’s was supposed to be fundamentally different from the first two, and certainly things changed in some key ways.  The action was set almost entirely in the “real world” and not the titular park, there were important new characters […]

  No season of Showtime’s HOMELAND ever came close to touching the wild highs of its first, an amazing concoction that managed to combine the tension of a great thriller with constant twists, impossible romance and psychological complexity.  The seven seasons that followed were varyingly up and down, the latter often marked by the apparent […]

  PENNY DREADFUL: CITY OF ANGELS:  Sunday 10PM on Showtime (available now via streaming/VOD) PENNY DREADFUL: CITY OF ANGELS is Showtime and John Logan’s not particularly promising attempt to turn his previous hit series into an anthology.  The two shows have little in common, at least initially, beyond the general historical horror genre and Logan’s […]

  BROKE:  Thursday 9:30PM on CBS Even brand-new episodes of CBS multicamera sitcoms can have a tendency to feel like reruns, and the network’s new midseason series BROKE brings that to the “but this is ridiculous” level.  Broke is built around virtually the same premise as NBC’s midseason sitcom Indebted.  (The two shows even air […]