There’s a reason why serialized dramas usually have some sort of “franchise” powering them:  a mystery to be solved, patients to be cured, a quest to be undertaken, etc.  Generating compelling stories on a weekly basis out of something like ordinary life can become awfully difficult, and a series can quickly turn mundane.  THE […]

  CHRONICLE – Worth A Ticket –  “Found Footage” That Deserves to Be Found   Over the past decade, audience hunger for “reality”–the word very much in quotation marks–has engulfed much of popular cultture, from YouTube videos to self-produced songs, from tweets to television series and even cable networks built around people playing manipulated versions […]

  GRACELAND:  Wednesday 10PM on USA GRACELAND is USA’s attempt to meld its jokey procedural sensibility (and that of series creator Jeff Eastin, who previously created White Collar for the network) to the kind of hipper, darker crime dramas that distinguish other cable networks.  The title refers to a seized drug dealer’s beachside house in […]

  TYRANT:  Wednesday 10PM on FX FX’s TYRANT has never been as incisive or daring as it could have been, given its incendiary setting in a fictional Middle Eastern nation on the brink of revolution, but it’s a survivor, back on the air for its third season.  After an unengaging initial run, the series remade […]

> LUCK – Sundays 9PM on HBO starting January 29 – Potential DVR Alert The TV auteur David Milch got rich by co-creating (with Steven Bochco) NYPD Blue, but he’s probably most beloved for creating Deadwood.  Deadwood, while never a giant hit–it ran only 36 episodes on HBO, and never had a proper ending–was a […]

    It was perfectly appropriate to dread the news that an athlete was hosting SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE–the show’s history abounds with deadly sports hosts like Michael Phelps and Tom Brady.  And in case that wasn’t enough pressure for tonight’s host Eli Manning, one of the rare exceptions to the rule was his own brother […]

> Or if the title were a Jeopardy answer, the question would be: what should writer/director Rodrigo Cortes have paid attention to, before he typed “The End” on his script Red Lights wouldn’t have been a festival movie even if it had been good. It’s no more than high-grade hokum (and not that high), and […]

  GRIMM:  Monday 9PM thru Sept 10; Friday 9PM starting Sept 14 on NBC – Worth A Look   WHERE WE WERE:  Meeting Mom.  Nick Burkhardt (David Giuntoli) is a Portland homicide detective who’s also a “Grimm,” with the hereditary ability to see the fairy tale monsters lurking within seemingly ordinary human beings, and the […]