> If Arthur Schnitzler had only been a member of the WGA in 1900, when he wrote the play La Ronde, and he’d had the benefit of the format rights guild members receive today, he and his descendants would be very rich indeed.  Schnitzler’s concept, a series of sequences in which, initially, Person A meets […]

  BETTER CALL SAUL reminds us that a gripping tale about well-drawn characters can hold audiences even if it’s not the story they thought they wanted to see.  Although it’s an off-shoot of Breaking Bad, Saul rarely has high-octane action sequences to compare with Bad‘s.  Much of the time, it exists entirely outside conventional genre, […]

  THE MINDY PROJECT has spent much of its first season shambling toward what kind of show it wants to be, but its struggles have become progressively more entertaining to watch. Mindy started with an enormous amount of good will, thanks to its creator/star Mindy Kaling, the terrifically talented writer, comic and co-star of The […]

  Incivility, narcissism, oafishness, insensitivity and general offensiveness is rarely as breezily funny as it regularly is on THE LEAGUE, which finished its fifth season on the new FXX network tonight.  The semi-improvised show created by Jeff Schaffer and Jackie Marcus Schaeffer, who were credited with the scripts for both halves of the 2-part season […]

  Of all the titles in this year’s Sundance US Dramatic Competition line-up, none may have been more promising on paper than GOD’S POCKET.  Based on a novel by Pete Dexter, it marked the feature directing debut of the actor John Slattery, whose work behind the camera on Mad Men has produced some of the […]

  ROOKIE BLUE did a solid job of wrapping up its fourth season and setting up cliffhangers for Season 5 (already ordered) with last night’s episode.  Although the Grey’s Anatomy-with-guns police soap has never had the level of success as its medical forebear, it’s been a steady summer performer for ABC, and this season successfully saw it […]

  For a show perceived as standard medical soap, PRIVATE PRACTICE has gone through quite a few permutations in style and focus over its 5 seasons.   Conceived originally as a light-hearted spinoff to Grey’s Anatomy, built around Grey’s character Addison Montgomery (Kate Walsh), aka Derek’s first wife, the show tried to pull humor from […]