> Michael Mohan’s SAVE THE DATE, which premiered this afternoon at Sundance, doesn’t earn its points from an original premise. It concerns 2 divergent sisters, Sarah (Lizzy Caplan) and Beth (Alison Brie), but mostly Sarah. While Beth, the control-freak, is relentlessly planning her upcoming wedding to musician Andrew (Martin Starr), the commitment-phobic Sarah is about […]

  EMILY OWENS, MD: Tuesday 9PM on CW – If Nothing Else Is On… Say this for EMILY OWENS, MD:  it really makes you appreciate Shonda Rhimes.  The seeming ease with which Grey’s Anatomy mixes medical drama, soap opera, humor, sex and romance every week is tempting to take for granted, but really it’s a […]

  ABOUT A BOY:  Tuesday 9PM on NBC (Preview Tonight at 11:05PM) – If Nothing Else is On… ABOUT A BOY, which NBC will preview tonight at the close of Olympics coverage ahead of its regular timeslot premiere on Tuesday, has a daunting pedigree.  It’s based on the excellent 2002 Paul Weitz/Chris Weitz feature film […]

  BONNIE & CLYDE saved its most idiotic inspiration for the end.  Up until its last few minutes, the second half of the Lifetime/A&E/History miniseries was perhaps marginally better than its first (which we dealt with in yesterday’s review).  There was less chatty posthumous narration from Clyde (Emile Hirsch) this time around, a greater role […]

  THE NORMAL HEART:  Sunday 9PM on HBO – DVR Alert When Larry Kramer’s just-barely-semi-autobiographical THE NORMAL HEART was first written and performed in 1985, it was as “ripped from the headlines” as any episode of Law & Order, a furious, mournful expose about the AIDS crisis as it was happening just outside the theater […]

  WELCOME TO SWEDEN:  Thursday 9PM on NBC – Potential DVR Alert WELCOME TO SWEDEN has one of the more unusual provenances of any show on a US broadcast network.  It was commissioned by Swedish television, where it aired last spring–and which explains its heavy use of subtitled Swedish dialogue.  Although it includes some familiar […]

  Starz cut its losses quickly on FLESH AND BONE, which had been ordered as the first season of a continuing series, but was declared to be a finite miniseries before it had even started airing.  That late shift made tonight’s finale even more awkward and unsatisfying than it might have been, but Moira Walley-Beckett’s […]

  ABC’s AMERICAN CRIME is Serious and Important, but how good is it?  John Ridley’s series takes on the biggest topics–all of them, it seems–from race to class to sexual orientation to school violence and the loss of privacy in the internet age, and not even Oscar-bait films wear a mantle of unrelieved misery quite […]