MANHATTAN LOVE STORY:  Tuesday 8:30PM on ABC Previously… on MANHATTAN LOVE STORY:  Cynical, blase native New Yorker Peter (Jake McDorman) meets idealistic small-town girl Dana (Analeigh Tipton), a newcomer to town, through Peter’s sister-in-law Amy (Jade Catta-Preta), who’s also Dana’s sorority sister.  Peter and Dana couldn’t be more different, but, well, check the title.  […]

  THE BLACKLIST adequately completed the first act of its season’s mission with tonight’s fall finale–but the tough part is still to come.  NBC largely adopted a conservative schedule this season–a new sitcom after Tuesday’s The Voice and a couple more thrown away on Thursday, another fantasy thriller after Grimm, a third old-skewing procedural to […]

  GIRLS:  Sunday 9PM on HBO Watching the Season 4 premiere of GIRLS on the same night as this year’s Golden Globes was a reminder of how quickly things move in today’s pop culture from being state-of-the-art, cutting-edge phenomena to… if not yesterday’s news, certainly farther back from the Twitterverse heat than tonight’s winners Transparent […]

  THE GIRLFRIENDS’ GUIDE TO DIVORCE has made its way, at least somewhat, past a very shaky start–not so much in the ratings, which have remained mediocre (although steady enough for Bravo to declare its first scripted 1-hour a win and order another season), but dramatically.  At the start, Girlfriends pandered all too blatantly to […]

  Under showrunner Scott M. Gimple, this fifth season of THE WALKING DEAD became steadily better as drama than the series has ever been, drawing closer to deserving its phenomenal level of ratings as still (even after the arrival of Empire) TV’s biggest non-football success.  Gimple and his team have greatly improved the show’s eternal […]

  Watching Shonda Rhimes’ SCANDAL has more than once been likened to an addiction, and as with a drug, the danger is that users will build up a tolerance over time, requiring more and more to achieve the same high.  In the case of Scandal, that high is from endless, crazy, jaw-dropping, WTF plot twists.  […]

  The third season of ORPHAN BLACK was a step up from Season 2, although the show is still the victim of its plotting.  The main narrative for the season was set up in the Season 2 finale, with the discovery that along with the (mostly) female “Leda” clones, all played by Tatiana Maslany, there […]

  Natalie Portman certainly hasn’t made it easy for herself with her debut as a writer/director, A TALE OF LOVE AND DARKNESS.  The film, which premiered at Cannes (but tellingly, doesn’t yet have a US distributor) before its first North American screening at the Toronto Film Festival tonight, is a period piece shot almost entirely […]