The sparse network summer season for scripted series kicked off tonight with ROOKIE BLUE, beginning that extreme rarity, a 3d season, where few original network dramas in summer even get to a Season 2. WHERE WE WERE:  Our heroine, 2d year Toronto police officer Andy McNally (Missy Peregrym), after a season and a […]

> Not Even For Free. There’s a key scene in the new SOUL SURFER where the one-armed teen surfer Bethany Hamilton, who’s had her other arm chewed off by a shark and who despairs of her career in competition, is in Thailand on a Christian mission to tend to tsunami survivors.  And these survivors, having […]

  The season finale (if it’s lucky) of TNT’s mediocre MURDER IN THE FIRST was rather sad, pallid proof that the powerhouse writer/producer Steven Bochco has been outstripped by the genre he helped invent, the serialized adult crime drama.  Murder In the First tried, sometimes painfully, to be newfangled, throwing in the latest in basic […]

  22 JULY (Netflix – October 10):  So many terrible things have happened in the world since July 22, 2011 that at least in the US, few even remember the horrific events that occurred in Oslo, Norway that day, when a single right-wing fanatic named Andres Behring Breivik gunned down 69 people, most of them […]

  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. […]

  Did we really need THE FLASH to go dark?  What had been the peppiest of CW’s DC/Berlanti-verse shows spent its 3rd season marked by existential angst, 22 episodes of Barry Allen’s (Grant Gustin) penance for having created “Flashpoint,” a parallel timeline where his mother and father survived.  Even after Barry reversed reality more or […]

  UNDER THE DOME:  Monday 10PM on CBS – Potential DVR Alert Much of CBS’s programming philosophy is built around the steady reliability of its reruns, so on the face of it, the Eye would seem least likely of the broadcast networks to make the summer’s biggest play with an expensive, top-level original series.  But […]

    STAR WARS EPISODE I:  THE PHANTOM MENACE 3D, to give it its fully identifying title, has the distinction of being the most successful movie ever made that is generally agreed to be terrible.  Over $900M in tickets have been sold for Phantom Menace since its opening in 1999 (that number will go over […]