The first season of Freeform’s Marvel series CLOAK & DAGGER was from the measured pace school of serialized TV drama.  Joe Pokaski’s saga was essentially 10 hours of origin story, tracing Tandy Bowen (Olivia Holt) and Tyrone Johnson (Aubrey Joseph) from teen outcasts to budding superheroes, with only scattered uses of their powers until […]

  THE WALKING DEAD:  Sunday 9PM on AMC THE WALKING DEAD has never been prized for its subtlety, and it didn’t attempt any with the title of its crossroads Season 9 premiere:  “A New Beginning.”  Which it definitely was, as the first episode under new showrunner Angela Kang (who was promoted up through the writer/producer […]

  Although its production studio MRC is seeking a stay of execution from another network or streaming service, it currently appears as though Starz’s Season 2 finale of COUNTERPART will be the last we see of the show, which is both a shame and less than a shock.  In an era where much of TV […]

  ON BECOMING A GOD IN CENTRAL FLORIDA:  Sunday 10PM on Showtime There’s an overlap between two of cable’s more high-profile new shows, which also happen to air against each other in the linear world.  Both HBO’s The Righteous Gemstones and Showtime’s ON BECOMING A GOD IN CENTRAL FLORIDA are dark comedies about pernicious American […]

  COUNCIL OF DADS – Regular episodes begin airing April 30 on NBC NBC isn’t trying to fool anyone with its hopes for COUNCIL OF DADS.  The network aired a “preview” of its pilot more than a month before the actual series premiere in order to pair it with the season finale of This Is […]

  THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN (Searchlight/Disney – October 21):  After a sojourn in America with 3 Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and Seven Psychopaths, Martin McDonagh returns to Ireland with the comic tragedy (or vice versa) The Banshees of Inisherin.  The setting is an island off the Irish coast in the 1920s, where Padraic (Colin Farrell) […]

  IN THE SUMMERS (no distrib):  The winner of the Jury Prize in the US Dramatic Competition is a somewhat prototypical Sundance drama.  Alessandra Lacorazza Samudio’s semi-autobiographical story depicts four summers over about a decade spent by Eve and Violeta, children of divorce (played by various actors, culminating with Sasha Calle and Lio Mehiel) with […]

> THE LORAX:  Not Even For Free – A Seussian Mess It may not be pretty, but surely it’s true–Credit must go where credit is due.  In this case, that means the Universal Pictures Marketing Department, which as it turns out has done a splendid job these last few weeks of hiding just how thoroughly […]