Heroes probably still sets the bar for disastrous second seasons of initially enjoyable TV shows, but this year’s REVENGE came uncomfortably close.  ABC more or less acknowledged that fact when it (in a genteel, corporate way) fired series creator and showrunner till now Mike Kelley from the upcoming Season 3 (fellow Executive Producer Sunil […]

  Watching the parade of Kristen Wiig’s Greatest Hits that marked her return to SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE as tonight’s host, you could be forgiven for wishing you missed her more.  For all her great talent, Wiig had become, by the time she left a year ago, a symbol of everything franchise-heavy and headpoundingly overdone on […]

  There was a sequence late in the one and only season of VEGAS that suggested what the show could have been.  It wasn’t a big deal:  deputy sheriff Dixon Lamb (Taylor Handley) needed a favor from the entertainment director of one of the casinos (Enver Gjokaj), who’d only grant it if he got some […]

  If there was a way to turn its premise into a TV series worth watching, TOUCH didn’t find it.  The show tried very different approaches in its two seasons, but FOX’s cancellation notice this week closed the door on any further tries. In its first season, Touch was built around the feel-good idea that […]

  The all-knowing Machine at the heart of PERSON OF INTEREST turned positively chatty in last night’s Season 2 finale, providing real-time advice and assistance via phone and text services to just about anyone who asked it nicely.  (If you didn’t care for numbers, it would help you out via musical tones.)   The Machine, […]

  THE GREAT GATSBY:  Watch It At Home – Moulin Gatsby Just for fun, let’s try to think of a worse match of filmmaker and material than Baz Luhrmann and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s THE GREAT GATSBY.  Judd Apatow’s Macbeth?  Woody Allen’s Lord of the Rings?  Michael Bay’s Remembrance of Things Past?  Jean-Luc Godard’s Shrek?  (Although […]

  Truth be told, Season 4 of COMMUNITY was probably closer to what NBC thought it was buying when it originally ordered the show than any of the seasons that preceded it.  Eccentric but not insular, offbeat but not off-putting, with a logical explanation for each seeming twist of surrealism and wrapped up whenever possible […]

  Which plotline really grabbed you in Season 4 of GLEE?  Was it Rachel’s (Lea Michele) one-episode pregnancy scare?  Her involvement (unwitting) with a male escort?  Was it the weeks of sullen silence between Mr. Schue (Matthew Morrison) and Finn (Cory Monteith) after Finn impulsively kissed Mr. Schue’s fiance Emma (Jayma Mays)?  Was it Blaine […]