Nothing ever came up roses for SMASH, and tonight, after two misbegotten NBC seasons, on a holiday weekend buried against reruns and NASCAR, the show’s Broadway curtain came down for the last time.  The saddest thing about its passing, of course, is the enormous waste it represented:  of a truly distinctive setting and topic; […]

  MAN OF STEEL:  Watch It At Home – Another Guy In a Cape “Kneel before Zod!” the villain of that name roared in what’s probably the best-remembered piece of dialogue from Superman 2.  That line isn’t in the new MAN OF STEEL, but its filmmakers seem at times to have incorporated it into their attitude toward […]

  THE GOODWIN GAMES probably should have been a movie.  Its extremely high-concept premise–three estranged siblings come back to their hometown after their father’s death, forced to solve a series of posthumous games and puzzles in order to get his multi-million dollar inheritance, and meanwhile bond together as a family and become better human beings–could […]

  THE WOLVERINE:  Watch It At Home – The Clawed Superhero’s Latest is Distinctive But Unthrilling THE WOLVERINE, wanting to be both more and less than a typical superhero spectacle, demonstrates the perils of messing with the formula.  James Mangold’s film, with a script credited to Mark Bomback and Scott Frank, has the worthy aim […]

  THE WHITE QUEEN:  Saturday 9PM on Starz Previously… on THE WHITE QUEEN:  Lady Elizabeth Woodville (Rebecca Ferguson) was a widow with two children who captured the lust, and then the heart, of England’s King Edward IV (Max Irons) in 1465.  This was during the War of the Roses, a battle of British nobility for […]

  If there were no credits on the new comedy-drama YOU ARE HERE, it would almost be inconceivable that an audience member would imagine it coming from the typewriter of Matthew Weiner, the creator of Mad Men.  It’s not that You Are Here is unwatchably terrible, but that it’s merely OK in a familiar and hackneyed way that’s the […]

  GREY’S ANATOMY:  Thursday 9PM on ABC In the miracle season of 2004-05, ABC launched three smash hits:  Desperate Housewives, Lost and GREY’S ANATOMY.  Ten seasons later, the only one still around is Grey’s, and its blockbuster days are past, with ratings last spring around a 3.0 that didn’t always carry its timeslot, and with […]

  HELLO LADIES:  Sunday 10:30PM on HBO Previously… on HELLO LADIES:  Stephen (Stephen Merchant) is a British web designer who lives in LA, where he has a very nice house and two friends:  woeful, newly-separated Wade (Nate Torrence) and paraplegic ladies’ man Kives (Kevin Weisman).  What Stephen doesn’t have is any luck with women, which […]