RED WIDOW spent its season about two inches away from being a really enjoyable dark farce.  All the ingredients were there:  plotting that had a vague, circular logic but was basically nonsensical, and a cast of moronic characters so wrapped up in their own ignorance, selfishness and blind aggression that they constantly bumped into […]

  The second season of NBC’s GRIMM was considerably more satisfying than its first, although it did show the strain of trying to establish a series mythology.  The season’s final episode (really, last week’s hour and this one formed a cohesive 2-hour finale), written by series co-creators David Greenwalt and Jim Kouf, and directed by […]

  Starz’s DA VINCI’S DEMONS was unsatisfactory in just about every respect, all the way through to tonight’s Season 1 finale, a cluster of cliffhangers that resolved almost nothing.  Watching the end of Season 1, it was fairly clear that this had been envisioned and probably budgeted by Starz and its production partner the BBC […]

  TURBO:  Watch It At Home – Nothing Supercharged About the Script If the new DreamWorks Animation release TURBO proves anything, it’s that even for the competition, there’s a special mystique about the films of Pixar.  (Until recently, anyway.)  Turbo painstakingly combines Ratatouille with the original Cars like the killer on The Bridge attaching American […]

  BREAKING BAD:  Sunday 9PM on AMC This is actually the back half of Breaking Bad‘s last season (AMC separated the 16 episodes into two parts for scheduling and budgetary reasons–namely, that actors, writers and other Guild members are entitled to automatic bumps in pay if and when a “new season” begins).  That may help […]

  DADS: Tuesday 8PM on FOX Previously… on DADS:  Video game company partners Eli and Warner (Seth Green and Giovanni Ribisi) are invaded by their respective fathers, David (Peter Riegert) and Crawford (Martin Mull).  The old guys move in, and in no time are driving their sons crazy.  Also around for the carnage:  Warner’s wife […]

  SUPER FUN NIGHT:  Wednesday 9:30PM on ABC – Change the Channel ABC’s decision to bury the original pilot for its Rebel Wilson vehicle SUPER FUN NIGHT isn’t unheard-of, but it’s certainly no mark of confidence–the pilot, after all, is what convinced them to order the series in the first place.  (For the record, our […]

  Although Starz was a co-financier of THE WHITE QUEEN, the show was produced by the BBC predominantly for a British audience, so it helped to have a working (or at least a Wikipedia) knowledge of 15th-century English history to get the most out of it.  For example, it would have been difficult to appreciate […]