FAMILY TOOLS:  Wednesday 8:30PM on ABC A lot can happen between the creation of a TV pilot in the spring and the production of episodes for the regular season: a writing/producing team is hired, audience focus groups weigh in, networks and studios (which may have had their own turnover) give plenty of notes, helpful […]

  Sometimes shows overthink their season finales, and that may have been the case with tonight’s HART OF DIXIE.  The show has gotten along quite well all season in its native Bluebell, Alabama, but for the finale series creator Leila Gerstein and fellow Executive Producer Len Goldstein broke the characters up into unfamiliar pairings and […]

  RED WIDOW spent its season about two inches away from being a really enjoyable dark farce.  All the ingredients were there:  plotting that had a vague, circular logic but was basically nonsensical, and a cast of moronic characters so wrapped up in their own ignorance, selfishness and blind aggression that they constantly bumped into […]

  There was an inspired, unexpected piece of comedy toward the end of tonight’s SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE, although it was pretty lonely in the mostly bland context of the rest of the episode.  Early in the post-Update half-hour, host Zach Galifianakis did a sketch called “Darrell’s House,” where he played an intense guy named Darrell […]

  MARON:  Friday 10PM on IFC – If Nothing Else Is On… Everyone wants their Louie.  TV comedies built around fictional versions of real-life comics are nothing new–they go back to the days of Jack Benny and George Burns–and Larry David followed Seinfeld with his own notable success on Curb Your Enthusiasm.  But the near […]

  Here lies HAPPY ENDINGS, one of the funniest comedies on all of television–foully murdered by some of the worst scheduling moves in recent network memory.  ABC began the season by sending the show (along with Don’t Trust the B___ In Apt 23) on a virtual suicide run, competing head-to-head on Tuesdays with New Girl, […]

  Like the famous tortoise, PARKS & RECREATION has hung in there long enough to become the highest-rated (all-but-certainly) returning sitcom on NBC’s air.  That is, admittedly, a low bar, but it’s still a triumph for a show that’s been at risk of cancellation more or less since it came on the air.  Parks & […]

  IRON MAN 3:  Watch It At Home – Offbeat But Uneven Tentpole The last thing on earth that Shane Black, the co-writer (with Drew Pearce) and director of IRON MAN THREE (the way the credits spell it) seems to have wanted to make was an Iron Man movie, and that makes this third–or third […]