MANHATTAN LOVE STORY:  Tuesday 8:30PM on ABC starting September 30 – Change the Channel PLAYERS:  Series creator Jeff Lowell, who’s been a writer/producer on sitcoms going back to Cybill two decades ago, but who’s creating a series himself for the first time.  Stars Jake McDorman and Analeigh Tipton.  Pilot director Michael Fresco.  Brillstein Entertainment […]

  THIS IS WHERE I LEAVE YOU (Warners) – Opens September 19 – Worth A Ticket Jonathan Tropper’s very successful day job is writing seriocomic novels about families and romance that are distinguished by their male protagonists–the ground he trods is similar to Nick Hornby’s, but without quite matching Hornby’s freshness of approach or wit.  […]

  SURVIVOR’S REMORSE:  Saturday 9PM on Starz Because Starz only airs one scripted show at a given time, its identity tends to shift with whatever that series happens to be.  Recently it’s been fluctuating in an almost schizophrenic way between contemporary big-city stories and costume dramas:  from Boss to DaVinci’s Demons, from Power to Black Sails, and now […]

  2 BROKE GIRLS:  Monday 8PM on CBS 2 BROKE GIRLS is about as basic as sitcoms come.  Take two mismatched young women–Caroline (Beth Behrs), who’s tall, blonde and unable to believe she’s not rich anymore; and Max (Kat Dennings), a busty brunette with street smarts–turn them into enforced roommates and co-workers at a Brooklyn […]

  There was a distinct feeling in 2014 that movies–the business and art of mainstream American film–reached a kind of tipping point.  The industry seemed to collectively hit that moment in its flight when so much fuel has been burned that there’s no longer any realistic possibility of returning to home base. Trends that have […]

  ALLEGIANCE:  Thursday 10PM on NBC Previously… on ALLEGIANCE:  Alex O’Connor (Gavin Stenhouse) has an Unforgettable-level memory–if also a semi-Asperbergian inability to handle social intercourse–that have made him the CIA’s most brilliant analyst.  One thing he hasn’t figured out, though, is that his mother Katya (Hope Davis), father Mark (Scott Cohen) and sister Natalie (Margarita […]

  In its 4th season, the geist of GIRLS no longer seemed to be hitting the zeit the way it used to.  Ratings were down, and so was the sense of buzz.  Some of that was simply the fact that shows of the moment don’t stay that way forever, and HBO didn’t help by giving […]

  In its 6th season, THE GOOD WIFE continued to delightfully flout every depressing lesson the rest of network television tells us.  Under the remarkable stewardship of Robert and Michelle King, the series turns out seasons that are distinctive, moving, sharply funny, phenomenally intelligent and have an eye for the bigger moral and political picture, […]