DARK MATTER:  Friday 10PM on Syfy Previously… on DARK MATTER:  A half-dozen people (plus an android) wake up in deep space, and find their memories wiped out.  However, their bodies retain sense memories of serious fighting, piloting and other skills.  They discover that before they were put into hypersleep, they were vicious mercenaries, working […]

  After two seasons on the air, WILFRED remains the most confounding show on television–which presumably is just as its makers want it.  The season finale, written by the developer of the US version of the series, David Zuckerman (from a story by Zuckerman and Scott Prendergast) and directed by house director Randall Einhorn, had […]

> FALLING SKIES – Sundays 10PM on TNT – If Nothing Else Is On… Or:  how is FALLING SKIES not Terra Nova?  I’ve raved about FOX’s Fall dinosaur spectacle, and here’s another Steven Spielberg special-effects extravaganza, centered around a family trying to hold onto its identity and its life in a hair-raising environment–so what’s the […]

  It was all so cute when it started… David Yates’ 2009 HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE is surprisingly funny at times–surprising, because in all other ways the film was, up to that point, by far the grimmest entry in the series.  It’s curiously structured:  part romantic comedy, complete with love potions and pining […]

  AMERICAN CRIME:  Thursday 10PM on ABC – Potential DVR Alert Recently, the broadcast networks have started kicking the tires of what we think of as “cable” oriented programming, by which we mean serialized, darker, more emotionally ambiguous and less genre-bound stories that require serious attention from viewers.  This kind of programming is against broadcast TV’s […]

  HER SMELL (no distrib – TBD):  Writer-director Alex Ross Perry (The Color Wheel, Listen Up Philip) is a fan of invective, and the punk rocker Becky Something (Elizabeth Moss), when she’s in the full flower of her moderate success, lets it fly in a way that even Natalie Portman in Vox Lux would find […]

  DEFIANCE:  Friday 8PM on Syfy The second season of Syfy’s DEFIANCE was often jarringly different from its first, shifting from its initial post-apocalyptic-western procedural form to a heavily mythological storyline that broke up the central father-and-adoptive-alien-daughter relationship of Nolan (Grant Bowler) and Irisa (Stephanie Leonidas) for much of the season, while embracing a mystical […]

  After 4 seasons as a smash hit, MODERN FAMILY isn’t too concerned with creating forward momentum.  The show is better at what it does than just about anything else on television; the ratings may be down, but so are everyone’s; in short, it ain’t broke.  If that makes for a season that’s more pleasant […]