MARON:  Friday 10PM on IFC – If Nothing Else Is On… Everyone wants their Louie.  TV comedies built around fictional versions of real-life comics are nothing new–they go back to the days of Jack Benny and George Burns–and Larry David followed Seinfeld with his own notable success on Curb Your Enthusiasm.  But the near […]

  TRUE BLOOD:  Sunday 9PM on HBO Although TRUE BLOOD shares with its HBO cousin Game of Thrones a predilection for high body count, sexual content and ratings, the two shows are very different.  Where Game is, in many ways, an exercise in elegant restraint, with climaxes carefully spaced out over years of storytelling, True […]

  In its short (7 episode) first season, DON’T TRUST THE B___ IN APT 23 hasn’t yet proven itself the equal of Happy Endings, the show it replaced in ABC’s prime post-Modern Family timeslot.  However, the show has enough going for it to be a funny, entertaining ride (and besides, it took Happy most of […]

  THE AFFAIR:  Sunday 10PM on Showtime Previously… on THE AFFAIR:  Several years from now, Noah (Dominic West) and Alison (Ruth Wilson) sit in police interrogation rooms and separately recount, in connection with a crime we don’t yet know about, the story of their relationship in ways that shade the events differently and sometimes outright […]

  A couple of Sundances ago, the actress/writer/producer Brit Marling was a festival darling, with two acclaimed pictures unveiled the same week.  In the end, while both Another Earth and Sound of My Voice received distribution, neither found much of a mainstream audience.  (Marling’s also established an acting career that included a very good turn in last year’s Arbitrage.) […]

  ICE AGE:  CONTINENTAL DRIFT – Watch It At Home – The CSI of Family Franchises Does Its Thing   You know what the fabulous Peter Dinklage never gets to do on Game of Thrones?  Sing!  That’s remedied in the new 3D animated ICE AGE:  CONTINENTAL DRIFT, where as the voice of monkey pirate Captain […]

  No season of Showtime’s HOMELAND ever came close to touching the wild highs of its first, an amazing concoction that managed to combine the tension of a great thriller with constant twists, impossible romance and psychological complexity.  The seven seasons that followed were varyingly up and down, the latter often marked by the apparent […]

  SCANDAL:  Thursday 9PM on ABC How tough is Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington), newly minted as both Chief of Staff to President Mellie Grant (Bellamy Young), and head of secret intelligence and torture bureau B613?  As Season 7 of SCANDAL has it, Olivia is so tough that when she has Huck (Guillermo Diaz) train a […]