THE BOOK THIEF:  Watch It At Home – A Nazi Germany Fairy Tale THE BOOK THIEF is about as heartwarming and easygoing as any story could be that’s narrated by Death and touched by the Holocaust.  That’s its strength and also its weakness; it’s history’s abyss as a singalong. Based on the acclaimed bestselling […]

  TREME:  Sunday 9PM on HBO You don’t need big ratings to be considered a success on HBO (just ask Lena Dunham), but generating buzz is essential.  That’s something TREME never did, despite a small hard core of enthusiastic fans that can sometimes drive that kind of attention.  Perhaps it was the downbeat setting of […]

  The hits just kept coming on tonight’s SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE, which packed a whole fall’s worth of glitz into the show’s final 90 minutes of 2013.  Technically, Jimmy Fallon was the host and Justin Timberlake was musical guest, but as anyone would have expected, the two were essentially a team–and if they weren’t enough […]

  Tonight’s footnote to SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE history was that it featured the debut of new cast member Sasheer Zamata, who is, not incidentally, an African-American woman–“not incidentally” only because her hiring came after a rather embarrassing amount of pressure, both internal and external, was applied to force Lorne Michaels to acknowledge that SNL was […]

  TWISTED:  Tuesday 9PM on ABCFamily TWISTED finally uncorked some revelations to kick off the back half of its first season, and it was about time.  The show’s summer episodes had spent far too long dithering around the same mysteries without any solution, coasting on its luck at having Pretty Little Liars as a lead-in.  […]

  THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL:  Worth A Ticket – Wes Anderson’s Latest Fancy Box Has Something Inside Where has the “Academy” 1.37:1 screen aspect ratio been all of Wes Anderson’s life?  One of Anderson’s visual motifs (some would say “fetishes”) is to photograph his actors enclosed in windows, doorways, or other pieces of production design, […]

  SILICON VALLEY:  Sunday 10PM on HBO – DVR Alert There’s no algorithm (yet) to predict compatibility between TV series, so we don’t know yet how SILICON VALLEY will fare in the ratings, or for that matter how its quality will hold up over time, but based on its pilot, it seems to be as […]

  The second season of BATES MOTEL has been two largely separate series, and one of them is well worth watching.  That’s the one about teenaged Norman Bates (Freddie Highmore), the sensitive and high-strung taxidermy enthusiast who is in the process of becoming a serial killer of women, and his relationship with his intemperate, unstable, […]