SCANDAL has been having a barn-burner of a Season 2, emerging as a pulpier, crazier Homeland (not that Homeland hasn’t been pretty crazy the last couple of weeks), a DC-set melodrama where everybody is lying to someone.  It’s culminated for now in a midseason finale that kept the machinery of twists and schemes humming. […]

  THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY – Watch It At Home – A Long, Slow Trek Through Middle-Earth As a devotee of the Tolkien canon, Peter Jackson is obviously responsive to sage words of wisdom and well-worn adages.  Here’s one he should have considered:  Quit While You’re Ahead.  But first, let’s talk about HFR. The […]

  ARROW, CW’s successful new superhero action series, has found its own best secret identity as a quasi-soap, a fact imperfectly illustrated by tonight’s midseason finale. The tactic of conveying a comic book saga through soapiness isn’t a crazy one–the Spider-Man franchise, in both its recent incarnations, has been as much romance as spectacle, and […]

  ZERO DARK THIRTY:  Worth A Ticket – The Year’s Most Gripping Thriller Is True You already know how ZERO DARK THIRTY ends.  You knew how All the President’s Men ended, too, and Apollo 13 and Titanic.  Great drama doesn’t require M. Night Shyamalan-esque surprise endings, or twisty, tricky narrative structure.  Sometimes the most satisfying […]

  Some smart shifts in emphasis have left HART OF DIXIE in fine shape as it reaches the midpoint of its second season, changes that were evident in tonight’s midseason finale, written by series creator Leila Gerstein and directed by Patrick Norris. Season 1 of Hart was essentially Gilmore Girls meets “Southern Exposure,” the travails […]

  It felt like 12:55AM for the entire last half-hour of tonight’s SNL, and that wasn’t a bad thing.  Every post-Update sketch had the kind of oddball conceptualism that’s usually reserved for the last minutes of the show, and while the sketches didn’t all work, they had more imagination and wit than just anything that […]

  For reasons sociologists can ponder, we happen to be at a great moment for spy stories.  Last year’s remake of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, the superb Homeland (barring last week’s speed-bump episode) and the upcoming Zero Dark Thirty, the reconstruction of the fossilized bones of James Bond into the triumphant Skyfall–you can hardly take […]

  PLAYING FOR KEEPS:  Not At Any Price – All Penalty, No Kick Has any actor more thoroughly wasted his 15 minutes in the Hollywood spotlight than Gerard Butler?  Since he hit with 300 half a dozen years ago, he’s churned out PS I Love You, Nim’s Island, RocknRolla, The Ugly Truth, Gamer, Law Abiding […]