It would be easy enough to fill a Worst 10 list with low-budget “found footage” horror movies, and sadly not that much more difficult to fill one with earnest, badly-executed indies, but where’s the fun in that?  No, if we’re going to throw stones, let’s throw them through some expensive windows. WORST BIG BUDGET […]

  SLEEPY HOLLOW:  Monday 9PM on FOX Previously… on SLEEPY HOLLOW:  Remember Ichabod Crane, from junior high reading lists?  Well, he’s back.  Really back, as in returned from the semi-dead state he’d been in since 1781, when he’d been (more or less) killed in battle after making the infamous Horseman headless, and then placed into […]

  TO THE WONDER:  Malick Twirls and Twirls and Doesn’t Get Anywhere Terrence Malick’s last film The Tree of Life was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture; his new TO THE WONDER is receiving only a token theatrical release, with the bulk of its distribution through video-on-demand.  That’s a sign of the times, […]

  Ah yes… the clink of silver on fine china, the lords and ladies sitting down to dinner in their best evening dress, the barely perceptible rustle of servants smoothly executing their duties behind the scenes–it’s all back.  America’s favorite TV vacation destination (certainly more appealing than the Hamptons of ABC’s competing Revenge, a place […]

  NASHVILLE:  Thursday 9PM on CMT (returns January 5) It’s not clear how much of a signpost tonight’s “sneak peek” hour of NASHVILLE Season 5 will turn out to be.  It was the initial hour to air on new post-ABC home CMT (it will re-air as part of the official 2-hour season premiere next month), […]

  TNT has been burning through its old-line series like Major Crimes and The Librarians two episodes at a time in recent weeks, seemingly in a frenzy to get rid of them.  The network has put its muscle behind darker, more serialized and adult dramas, with mixed results:  Animal Kingdom and Claws are hits, while […]

> ALCATRAZ was a show–pardon the use of past tense:  the series still has a pulse, but recent ratings make it an increasing longshot for a repeat sentence–that just never found its groove.  Convoluted but obvious, original and yet impersonal, the show was rarely terrible and never essential. The series was, as they say, “troubled.”  […]

  GREY’S ANATOMY is no longer Shonda Rhimes’ brightest, shiniest toy, but in a way her skills as a producer are most evident in the way that her first hit hums along, now in its 2d decade on the air.  That’s incredibly difficult for a serialized drama, especially one that started off as being about […]