> A lot can happen between the creation of a TV pilot in the spring and 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 in the off-season) give plenty of notes, both helpful and otherwise, and […]

  A TO Z:  Thursday 9:30PM on NBC Previously… on A TO Z:  Dating website marketer Andrew (Ben Feldman) and lawyer Zelda (Cristin Milioti) have had their meet-cute, they’ve discovered that the office windows in their adjacent buildings overlook one another, so they can signal each other during their work-days, and now they’ve embarked on […]

  ONCE UPON A TIME:  Sunday 8PM on ABC WHERE WE WERE:  Watching a season finale that looked like it could end the series, as Emma Swan (Jennifer Morrison), AKA the daughter of Snow White/Mary Margaret Blanchard (Ginnifer Goodwin) and Prince Charming/David Nolan (Josh Dallas), gave her seemingly dead biological son Henry (Jared Gilmore) a […]

  UNDER THE DOME:  Thursday 10PM on CBS UNDER THE DOME has become increasingly dopey as it’s tried to justify its existence as a continuing drama after being launched as a limited series adaptation of Stephen King’s novel.  Tonight’s Season 3 premiere revealed some secrets, but with solutions that had apparently been hatched after the […]

  Pending the arrival of this week’s finale, Mike Newell’s 2005 HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE may be, on balance, the most satisfying of the series.  It combines first-rate moviemaking with one of J.K. Rowling’s most ingeniously constructed, emotionally rich stories–capped, of course, by the unveiling of Ralph Fiennes as the finally fully […]

  FINAL DESTINATION 5 – Watch It At Home:  Death Takes No Holiday   There’s only one thing worth mentioning in FINAL DESTINATION 5… and it’s the one thing I can’t talk about.  Let’s just say that if you’ve been a follower of the series all along, the filmmakers (whether it was screenwriter Eric Heisserer […]

  BELIEVE was one of the more regrettable failures of the 2013-14 broadcast season.  That wasn’t because of its premise (super-powered girl is pursued by evil scientists who want to weaponize her gifts, ho hum), but due to the involvement of the great Alfonso Cuaron as series co-creator.  But Believe was in trouble from the […]

  This was the first season of GAME OF THRONES A.N. (Ahead of the Novels), and we can’t know at this point how much series creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss were informed by what they know about the work novelist George R. R. Martin hasn’t yet published.  But Martin will be hard-pressed to come […]