VINYL:  Sunday 9PM on HBO – DVR Alert Even with an ever-increasing amount of new and emerging competition, for now at least there’s still nothing in television quite like an all-in, no-expense-spared HBO event, and the network’s rock & roll spectacle VINYL certainly qualifies.  It reunites Martin Scorsese with writer/executive producer Terence Winter, with […]

  Like many visitors to the Hamptons, REVENGE stayed too long at the party, and what had once been an amusingly twisted soap eventually became repetitious and silly.  The series would have been better served as an American Horror Story/True Detective type anthology that told its story and rebooted the next season.  As it was, […]

  The writing team of David Wain and Michael Showalter (Wain directs) certainly knew that THEY CAME TOGETHER would be far from the first parody of romantic comedy movies to come along.  Date Movie opened back in 2008, Friends With Benefits, although it had other fish to fry, featured a dead-on film-within-the-film satire that starred […]

> WANDERLUST:  Watch It At Home – Hippy Jokes Thawed Out From 1966 The new WANDERLUST demonstrates the strengths and limitations of amiability in movies.  Its stars, Jennifer Aniston and Paul Rudd, have made very profitable careers out of being professionally likable.  Unlike, say, Tom Hanks, who also began his career in light comedy but […]

  SAVAGES:  Watch It At Home – Great Book, OK Movie Don Winslow’s novel SAVAGES is one of the extraordinary reads of recent years.  The plot may sound unremarkable–a mini-war is waged between a couple of Orange County drug dealers and a Mexican cartel–but the words “gripping” and “page-turning” don’t do justice to Winslow’s prose, […]

    WE BOUGHT A ZOO:  Worth A Ticket – Cameron Crowe Pays His Dues and Keeps His Dignity   There’s a classic line in Albert Brooks’s incredibly prescient 1979 Real Life where Brooks, as the prototype of a reality-television director, tries to decide whether to do something unethical.  His rationalization for going ahead:  “What […]

> There are few opportunities left to tune in to NBC and bask in the glory of the network that used to be.  One that remains, though, is 30 ROCK, postponed this season to winter due to Tina Fey’s pregnancy but now back on Thursday nights. WHERE WE LEFT OFF:  Wacky, smart, mildly surreal, wickedly […]

  It’s easy to overlook the ingeniousness of Dan Fogelman’s THIS IS US, the season’s only broadcast network smash hit.  On its face, the show is a familiar, even old-fashioned family soap, in which the various members of a clan are constantly beset by romantic, professional or medical problems–The Fosters with older siblings.  But Fogelman’s […]