GETTING ON:  Sunday 10PM on HBO Previously on… GETTING ON:  At a geriatric extended care ward in a Los Angeles hospital, Nurses Dawn (Alex Borstein) and Didi (Niecy Nash) attempt to cope with bureaucracy, their newly-transferred (read: demoted) physician in charge Dr. Jenna James (Laurie Metcalf), and the sheer weight of bureaucracy as they […]

  For all its gigantic, game-changing success, THE WALKING DEAD seems fated always to be a dramatically uneven series.  Under new showrunner Scott M. Gimple (who, contrary to previous practice, will keep his job in the already-ordered Season 5), the first half of Season 4 got off to a strong start, with an emphasis on […]

  FROZEN:  Buy A Ticket – Your Grin Won’t Melt Until It’s Time to Leave A curious shift has been occurring at Disney over the past few years.  Glamor child Pixar has been churning out second-hand blockbusters like Cars 2, Brave and Monsters University, while the comparatively overlooked Disney Animation unit (both are overseen by […]

  OLDBOY:  Watch It At Home – Spike Lee’s Graphic Remake Falls Flat In the course of his career, Spike Lee has made some violent movies, but he’s never gotten off on the bloodshed; he’s not a rapturous pulpist, like Quentin Tarantino or Brian DePalma in his prime.  To remake Chan-Wook Park’s cult classic OLDBOY, […]

  New showrunner Brad Kern (working with series creators Sherri Cooper and Jennifer Levin) has made plenty of changes to BEAUTY & THE BEAST, but mostly they haven’t been improvements.  The gothic romanticism of Season 1 (and every other rendition of the tale) has been largely gone, replaced by a colder action-movie aesthetic.  Season 2 […]

  The crises on HART OF DIXIE, perhaps the most amiable hour on network television, tend to be fairly low-intensity, and tonight’s midseason finale–a Hanukkah episode, of all things, not something you often see on a show where the main characters aren’t Jewish–was no exception.  The major dramatic development of the hour came when the […]

  MAJOR CRIMES:  Monday 9PM on TNT MAJOR CRIMES isn’t the kind of series to go for “game-changing” alterations, so the back half (actually 8 episodes) of its second season, which resumed tonight after a break since August, is only incrementally different from what aired last summer.  The show is a straightforward procedural for the […]

  It’s a continuing paradox that a show could have as many colorful characters, so terrific a cast, as much plot and incident and history (not to mention sex and violence) and visual style as BOARDWALK EMPIRE does and yet so often feel like homework.  It’s a pulpy series that sometimes lets its morose sense […]