IZOMBIE:  Tuesday 9PM on CW Previously… on IZOMBIE:  Liv Moore (Rose McIver) was a go-getting Seattle hospital resident when she suffered an untimely death at a party on a boat, her arm slashed by a mysterious figure.  That hasn’t gotten her down, though:  an unusually sentient zombie, she’s taken a job at a morgue, […]

  NASHVILLE doesn’t make more than a gesture these days toward having very much to say about the music industry, or the place of country music in American culture.  It’s simply a soap, and often an effective one; with this week’s renewal, it’s reached the promised land of a 4th season on the air, buffered […]

  MISTRESSES:  Thursday 9PM on ABC MISTRESSES lost its marquee star this season, when Alyssa Milano declined to move with the show to its new (cheaper) Vancouver shooting location.  We’ll see what effect, if any, this has on the ratings, but in terms of the show’s substance, by Season 2 Milano wasn’t being featured more […]

  THE JIM GAFFIGAN SHOW:  Wednesday 10PM on TV Land (and Nick At Nite) Previously… on THE JIM GAFFIGAN SHOW:  Stand-up comic Jim (Jim Gaffigan) lives with wife Jeannie (Ashley Williams) and their 5 children in a crowded NY apartment–all elements to be found in Gaffigan’s stand-up act and comic memoirs.  Her best friend is […]

  MERCY STREET:  Sunday 10PM on (many) PBS stations – Potential DVR Alert PBS isn’t accustomed to acting like a conventional “network,” and so it took the service until the very last episodes of Downton Abbey to do what any normal network would have done years ago:  use Downton as a platform to launch a […]

  UNCLE BUCK:  Tuesday 9PM on ABC – Change the Channel ABC’s UNCLE BUCK is exactly what you’d expect from a network sitcom left on the shelf for the entire regular broadcast season, then unloaded two at a time during the summer.  As ABC sitcoms go, it is to Black-ish what Family Tools briefly was […]

  JACKIE (Fox Searchlight – December 9):  The most impressive film of the festival thus far is director Pablo Larrain’s jewel-like examination of the realities and artifices behind our perceptions of history, viewed through the prism of Jackie Kennedy, who is played by Natalie Portman in a performance that goes beyond (brilliant) impersonation to deliver […]

  DISOBEDIENCE (no distrib):  Sebastian Lelio’s adaptation (with Rebecca Landiewicz) of Naomi Alderman’s novel is one of the surprises of the festival.  It would be perfectly reasonable for the idea of Rachel McAdams as a Chassidic woman to bring back memories of Melanie Griffith in the camp classic A Stranger Among Us (and at least […]