The allegory is piled on so thickly in Yorgos Lanthimos’ THE LOBSTER that after a while, it’s not clear just what the underlying subject is supposed to be.  Lanthimos is a cult-favorite filmmaker (the cult mostly consists of critics and film festival selection committee members) whose arresting Dogtooth was an unlikely Best Foreign Film […]

  RAY DONOVAN:  Sunday 9PM on Showtime When a car crashes into a Los Angeles wall in the Season 4 premiere of Showtime’s sizable if somewhat inexplicable hit RAY DONOVAN, it doesn’t just crash into a wall:  it crashes directly into a giant mural of the Virgin Mary.  That’s the way Ray Donovan rolls, its […]

  “Interactive TV” is a phrase that’s been used many times in many contexts over the years, and HBO’s WESTWORLD provided a new way to look at the concept.  The first season of Westworld was–more than Lost, more than Mr. Robot, even going back all the way to The Prisoner–an unprecedentedly elaborate series of puzzles.  […]

  DOUBT:  Wednesday 10PM on CBS – If Nothing Else Is On… As highly prized as the talents of Shonda Rhimes are, it takes the continuing line of her failed imitators to remind us just how difficult it is to duplicate her touch.  Conviction and Notorious are two tries that went splat earlier this season, […]

  As everyone knows by now, although ONCE UPON A TIME has been renewed for a 7th season, tonight’s 2-hour “Final Battle” episode marked the end of the series as we’ve known it.  Only 3 members of the core cast are returning–Lara Parrilla’s Regina, Robert Carlyle’s Rumplestiltskin, and Colin O’Donoghue’s Hook–and as we learned in […]

  WILL:  Monday 9PM on TNT – If Nothing Else Is On… TNT’s WILL, a gloss on the early life of William Shakespeare (and an unacknowledged one on the movie Shakespeare In Love), would seem like an extreme oddity if we hadn’t just had ABC’s Romeo & Juliet gloss Still Star-Crossed, which has already been sent […]

  THE GOOD PLACE:  Thursday 8:30PM on NBC starting 9/28 The Season 1 finale of NBC’s THE GOOD PLACE was a tough act to follow.  Michael Schur’s series pulled off the plot twist of the season, which turned out on further examination to have been hiding in plain sight all along.  We learned (2016-17 spoiler […]

  HAPPY! – Wednesday 10PM on Syfy – In the Queue HAPPY! counts as one of Syfy’s infrequent big swings, although its ultra-violent grunge aesthetic gives it a look and feel that isn’t all that different from the network’s usual diet of micro-budgeted co-productions.  This one, though, has a name star in Christopher Meloni, and […]