WILDLIFE (no distrib):  If you’ve ever felt sorry for youngsters who are cordoned off from their parents’ difficult relationships, and then blindsided by the consequences, Paul Dano’s directing debut advises that pity should really be reserved for those children who know all too much about what’s going on.  Dano’s austere and disturbing drama isn’t […]

  AGENTS OF SHIELD – Friday 9PM on ABC It’s hard to believe that only 5 seasons ago, when ABC’s AGENTS OF SHIELD arrived on the air, the idea of a superhero TV series still seemed somewhat new and cool.  At that point, it was joined only by Arrow, in the era before CW was […]

  FINAL DESTINATION 5 – Watch It At Home:  Death Takes No Holiday   There’s only one thing worth mentioning in FINAL DESTINATION 5… and it’s the one thing I can’t talk about.  Let’s just say that if you’ve been a follower of the series all along, the filmmakers (whether it was screenwriter Eric Heisserer […]

  SCANDAL is full of characters who take one step over the line of ethics and morality, sometimes for what they’ve convinced themselves are the best possible reasons, only to find themselves in a morass they can’t escape.  The same has come to be true of the series itself, which took its fatal step when […]

  THE ASSETS:  Thursday 10PM on ABC – Change the Channel It’s easy enough to see why ABC would like to be in the spy-TV business.  Homeland, whatever its flaws, is a major hit, and The Americans, while not as sizable, has been a critical success and buzz magnet.  The novels of John Le Carre […]

  MACGYVER:  Friday 8PM on CBS – Change the Channel CBS’s reboot of the 30-year old MACGYVER was the fall’s problem child.  After picking up the series, the network didn’t just dump the original pilot, it fired the showrunner and most of the cast, virtually starting from scratch.  (The original showrunner, Paul Downs Colaizzo, retains […]

  DARK SHADOWS:  Watch it At Home – Loving Detail Isn’t Enough   DARK SHADOWS is one of the most confounding big-budget movies of recent years.  When Tim Burton (and his muse, Johnny Depp, one of the film’s producers as well as its star) announced that their next project would be a revisit to the […]

  PLAYING HOUSE:  Tuesday 10PM on USA – If Nothing Else Is On… Created by and starring real-life best friends Jessica St. Clair and Lennon Parham, PLAYING HOUSE is, as sisterhood comedies created by and starring real-life best friends go, less edged and genuine than HBO’s recent Doll & Em (which was the work of […]