RAY DONOVAN:  Sunday 10PM on Showtime Previously… on RAY DONOVAN:  Ray (Liev Schreiber) is a Hollywood fixer who solves the daily difficulties and career-threatening scandals that trouble the lives of stars and senior executives.  He also has problems of his own.  His marriage to Abby (Paula Malcolmson) is troubled, partly because of his own […]

  KING:  Friday 10PM on Reelz – If Nothing Else Is On… One genre that’s never in short supply, even on summer TV, is the police procedural–in fact, during the summer months, even Canadian police procedurals seem to be just about everywhere.  Reelz has added another with the schedule-filler KING, an unobjectionable but hardly notable […]

  THE WAY, WAY BACK:  Watch It At Home – Modestly Engaging Coming-Of-Age Tale THE WAY, WAY BACK is one of the last real indie hopes for a original breakout hit this summer (it was a big buy out of Sundance, a $10M purchase by Fox Searchlight, the studio behind the Sundance smash Little Miss […]

  DESPICABLE ME 2:  Watch It At Home – Good-Hearted If Unexciting Sequel For the Kids Despicable Me was far from the most ambitious or striking animated feature of the last few years, but it was definitely cute.  It told the story of supervillain Gru (voiced by Steve Carell), a Scrooge type with an unplaceable […]

  THE LONE RANGER:  Not Even For Free – The Silver Bullet Is Self-Inflicted Disney’s reluctance to produce THE LONE RANGER is well-documented; the studio even shut down the production shortly before shooting was to begin in order to force producer Jerry Bruckheimer, producer/director Gore Verbinski and producer/star Johnny Depp to slim down the production […]

  UNDER THE DOME:  Monday 10PM on CBS Previously… on UNDER THE DOME:  Well, there’s a giant freaking dome.  One peaceful Sunday afternoon, it suddenly came down over Chester’s Mill, Maine, enveloping the town and imprisoning all who dwell within as though inside an inverted fishbowl.  They include hero-with-secrets Dale Barbara nee “Barbie” (Mike Vogel), […]

  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 […]

  SIBERIA:  Monday 10PM on NBC-Worth A Look SIBERIA holds onto its conceit for a very long time.  Until the closing minutes of tonight’s series premiere, the show presents itself as being what it’s pretending to be, which is the opening episode of a new reality series about a multinational group of contestants who are […]