LES MISERABLES – Worth A Ticket – One Day More Finally Arrives In light of some of the early reactions, perhaps the most important thing to note about LES MISERABLES the film is that it is, in fact, the film of Les Miserables–and so, yes, bombastic voices raised in song and unfettered melodrama are the order of the day. […]

  SMASH:  Tuesday 10PM on NBC The intermission that began last May is over, and what SMASH desperately wants you to know isn’t just a second season but a full-fledged Version 2.0 kicks off with the self-aware lyric “I know I’ve kept you waiting/I know I’ve made you mad.”  In an attempt to get the […]

  Considering what a deeply strange series WILFRED was–even for the wilds, eventually, of FXX–tonight’s series finale provided a surprising amount of closure.  The more-or-less comedy began as a raunchy riff on “man’s best friend” stories about guys and their dogs, based on an Australian format and starring Jason Gann, who’d co-created and starred in […]

  TRUTH BE TOLD:  Friday 8:30PM on NBC – Change the Channel Out of the pit that is the current state of NBC comedy crawls TRUTH BE TOLD, which was seemingly designed to make its lead-in, the mediocre Undateable, look like a television classic.  Its creator is DJ Nash, who last gave us the semiautobiographical […]

  BORDERTOWN:  Sunday 9:30PM on FOX – Change the Channel BORDERTOWN adds a light dusting of politics to its Seth MacFarlane factory settings.  Produced by MacFarlane, and created by Family Guy writer/producer Mark Hentemann (the writing credit on the pilot is shared with “La Cucaracha” cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz, but since Alcaraz is credited only as […]

  WAYWARD PINES:  Wednesday 9PM on FOX WAYWARD PINES was never intended to be a continuing series, especially once FOX dumped what was once intended as a prestige project from Executive Producer M. Night Shyamalan into its summer line-up.  But these days, networks can’t afford to leave ratings on the table, and once Wayward proved […]

  CHARMED:  Sunday 9PM on CW CW’s reboot of CHARMED wants to be a lighthearted supernatural romp, but it also seeks to push as many topical buttons as it possibly can.  So while the basic story of a trio of young women witches provides a built-in tale of female empowerment, the new pilot also comes […]

  No season of Showtime’s HOMELAND ever came close to touching the wild highs of its first, an amazing concoction that managed to combine the tension of a great thriller with constant twists, impossible romance and psychological complexity.  The seven seasons that followed were varyingly up and down, the latter often marked by the apparent […]