HELL ON WHEELS – Sunday 9PM on AMC WHERE WE WERE:  Building the transcontinental railroad.  Our antihero, former Confederate soldier Cullen Bohannon, joined the Union Pacific Railroad’s march to the west only because he was tracking down the Union soldiers who murdered his wife during the Civil War, and (mistakenly, it seems) believed the […]

  A return to COMMON LAW for its season finale didn’t show any appreciable improvement from its unimpressive early episodes.  Standards at USA Network aren’t exactly at the level of Sunday night on HBO, but Common Law is below par even for USA, a mix of very routine cop show with shticky comedy that’s only […]

  THE BOURNE LEGACY:  Watch It At Home – Not Up To the Real Bournes THE BOURNE LEGACY has been concocted with a combination of ingenuity and desperation.  It exists because Universal–a studio dangerously light on action and fantasy movie franchises in an era where those are at the dead center of the business–couldn’t afford […]

  The title of tonight’s season finale of DALLAS was “Revelations,” but really it had only one reveal worthy of a SPOILER ALERT, and even that one was increasingly guessable as the hour went on, for anyone attentive to the opening cast credits. Yes, it turned out, implausibly but in keeping with the demands of […]

  NEXT CALLER:  TBD Midseason on NBC – Change the Channel If you were going to do a satire about network television in the vein of Episodes, one that required a show-within-the-show to illustrate how hackneyed and witless a TV sitcom could be, you might well make it about a burned-out, sexist–but secretly sensitive–radio shock […]

  Disclaimer:  Network pilots now in circulation are not necessarily in the form that will air in the Fall.  Pilots are often reedited and re-scored, and in some cases even recast or reshot.  These critiques shouldn’t be taken as full pilot reviews, but rather as a guide to the general style and content of the […]

  THE CAMPAIGN:  Not At Any Price – Abstain THE CAMPAIGN, like many a politician before it, tries to be all things to all people, and winds up delivering almost nothing. There was reason to be hopeful about The Campaign, mostly because its director, Jay Roach, seemed to embody exactly the mix the movie was […]

  TOTAL RECALL:  Watch It At Home – Unmemorable TOTAL RECALL isn’t the worst picture of the summer, and probably won’t be the biggest flop, but it may be the most unnecessary waste of everyone’s time.  Paul Verhoeven’s 1990 Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle, while no masterpiece, had lots of Verhoeven’s oddball streak of pulp surrealism and […]