AMERICAN HORROR STORY – ASYLUM:  Wednesday 10PM on FX WHERE WE WERE:  Doesn’t matter.  It wasn’t clear until late in Season 1, but the gimmick of AMERICAN HORROR STORY is that each season will offer a completely new setting, storyline, and group of (mostly doomed) characters, although some of the actors return in new […]

  MISTRESSES:  Monday 10PM on ABC There isn’t much mistressing going on in MISTRESSES at the dawn of the unapologetically frothy summer soap’s 4th season.  Having weathered the loss of marquee star Alyssa Milano’s Savi last year, the remaining lead characters Joss (Jes Macallan), Karen (Yunjin Kim) and April (Rochelle Aytes) are barely being transgressive […]

  It’s Year 40 for SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE, and like many prosperous middle-aged citizens, SNL has no interest at all in shaking up its comfortable life.  Tonight’s season premiere could, with a few cast adjustments, have been the premiere of any season over the past decade.  Even though there were only two franchise sketches on […]

  Even though nothing particularly thrilling happened on this seventh season of ARMY WIVES, it was a crucial season for Lifetime’s veteran drama.  The show completed the reboot it had begun in Season 6, and assuming an 8th stanza on the way–which seems fairly likely–the only original Army Wife from the show that debuted in […]

  MERCY STREET:  Sunday 10PM on (many) PBS stations – Potential DVR Alert PBS isn’t accustomed to acting like a conventional “network,” and so it took the service until the very last episodes of Downton Abbey to do what any normal network would have done years ago:  use Downton as a platform to launch a […]

  RISE OF THE GUARDIANS:  Worth a Ticket – “The Avengers” as Holiday Fantasy RISE OF THE GUARDIANS doesn’t entirely look or feel like what we’ve come to expect from DreamWorks Animation.  Under Peter Ramsey’s direction (his first feature), the images have a burnished, almost pewter-tinted glow, a glint of long-forgotten memory, very different from […]

> 50/50:  Worth A Ticket –  A Genuinely Feel-Good Cancer Comedy With The Big C renewed for its third season on Showtime, the concept of a comedy getting laughs from the experiences of a cancer patient is no longer especially shocking, which means that the new 50/50 has to be judged on its comedy-drama merits, […]

  Often the SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE cast needs to prop up its weekly hosts, who are frequently performers unversed in live comedy (or comedy at all, or even performing at all), but that was hardly the case tonight, as Taraji P. Henson all but blew most of the regulars away, playing even the most routine […]