In the fall of its fifth season, THE WALKING DEAD has remained a ratings phenomenon like nothing else on television, and for much of this run of episodes, the always-uneven show deserved some of its wild success.  Showrunner Scott M. Gimple and overall Walking Dead honcho Robert Kirkman made unexpected pacing choices that kept […]

  STALKER:  Wednesday 10PM on CBS starting October 1 – Change the Channel PLAYERS:  Series creator Kevin Williamson, of The Following, The Vampire Diaries and Scream fame.  Stars Maggie Q and Dylan McDermott, and a supporting cast that includes Victor Rasuk, Mariana Klaveno and Elisabeth Rohm (the latter added in a recasting after the pilot […]

> In 2007, Julie Delpy wrote, directed and co-starred in 2 Days In Paris, a romantic comedy-drama featuring Adam Goldberg and herself as a couple who lived in NY and visited the title city for a tumultuous visit with her character Marie’s family.  Paris was only a moderate art-house success in the US ($4.4M), but […]

  MAGAZINE DREAMS:  The hype was accurate:  Jonathan Majors gives a titanic performance in Elijah Bynum’s Magazine Dreams.  Playing Killian, a roided-up amateur bodybuilder obsessed with achieving glory in that profession, Majors somehow manages to be both massive and delicate, prone to rage but also abjectly needy for acceptance or connection.  Majors never misjudges the […]

> Previously… On HOUSE OF LIES:  Marty Kaan (Don Cheadle) and his “pod” of associate management consultants (Kristen Bell, Ben Schwartz, Josh Lawson) travel the country, putting out fires for their high-powered clients while enjoying their lack of principles.   Episode 2:  The second episode, written by series creator Matthew Carnahan, suggests that House of Lies […]

> The Producers may have been both the best and worst thing ever to happen to Matthew Broderick.  He started his career in the mid-1980s as a fairly smooth, smart-aleck teen mouthpiece for Neil Simon in Brighton Beach Memoirs and John Hughes in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, but over the succeeding years, his persona for […]

  Donald Glover’s ATLANTA would have been unimaginable on a mainstream television outlet just a few years ago–let alone as a show that could achieve success in the ratings.  It’s very much a post-Louie series (both air on FX), with its disregard of typical TV format and structure, but even Louie, for all its brilliant […]

  In their teardown season as new showrunners of FEAR THE WALKING DEAD, Andrew Chambliss and Ian Goldberg didn’t solve all the problems inherent in the franchise, and the season was uneven, only partly for reasons of transition.  Still, they accomplished a lot, more or less creating a new series from the one that had […]