Even though nothing particularly thrilling happened on this seventh season of ARMY WIVES, it was a crucial season for Lifetime’s veteran drama.  The show completed the reboot it had begun in Season 6, and assuming an 8th stanza on the way–which seems fairly likely–the only original Army Wife from the show that debuted in […]

  Every year the Oscars flail around searching for a host, a theme, a tone–anything to make its annual 4 hours of primetime cohere instead of congeal–and every year THE TONY AWARDS make it look relatively easy.  This wasn’t a great year for Broadway–swamped with family- and tourist-friendly musical extravaganzas and star vehicles, its serious […]

  Starz’s DA VINCI’S DEMONS was unsatisfactory in just about every respect, all the way through to tonight’s Season 1 finale, a cluster of cliffhangers that resolved almost nothing.  Watching the end of Season 1, it was fairly clear that this had been envisioned and probably budgeted by Starz and its production partner the BBC […]

  THE PURGE:  Watch It At Home – Dopey, Violent Allegory Nevertheless Packs a Punch THE PURGE is heavy-handed, borderline reprehensible nonsense–but that’s not to say it doesn’t work.  James DeMonaco’s trim (85 minutes, including credits) thriller is set in 2022, when virtually all crime and unemployment has been wiped out in a newly-restored United […]

  GRACELAND:  Thursday 10PM on USA As we all know, if there’s one thing USA Network wants us to remember about itself, it’s that the network is a place where characters–which is to say the memorable kind– are welcome.  On first exposure, though, the only thing really distinctive about the network’s hugely-hyped new series GRACELAND […]

  BURN NOTICE:  Thursday 9PM on USA USA Network is beginning to clean its programming house, with tonight marking the beginning of the 7th and final season of BURN NOTICE (the exit of veteran Psych is expected not to be far behind), and the arrival of the new Graceland.  Burn Notice has been a stalwart […]

  THE INTERNSHIP:  Watch It At Home – No Search Engine Necessary To Predict the Plot Vince Vaughn has been playing his motormouth-with-a-heart-of-gold character pretty much non-stop since Swingers in 1996.  That’s 17 years of minimal variations on the same basic schtick.  It’s not that he can’t do anything else–he was quite good in a […]

MISTRESSES:  Monday 10PM on ABC – If Nothing Else Is On… These days, primetime soap operas usually try to be something else as well:  comedies (Desperate Housewives), musicals (Glee), thrillers (Revenge), medical dramas (Grey’s Anatomy) or legal (The Good Wife) or military (Army Wives), etc.  But MISTRESSES is an unapologetically flat-out soap, its title as […]