THE WALKING DEAD:  Sunday 9PM on AMC THE WALKING DEAD has never been prized for its subtlety, and it didn’t attempt any with the title of its crossroads Season 9 premiere:  “A New Beginning.”  Which it definitely was, as the first episode under new showrunner Angela Kang (who was promoted up through the writer/producer […]

  SCANDAL:  Thursday 9PM on ABC Sheer addictiveness is SCANDAL’s stock in trade, and although the Season 4 premiere had an absence of the show’s jaw-dropping plot twists, it was already awash in adrenaline and its trademark high-voltage monologues. The premiere, written by series creator Shonda Rhimes herself and directed by Tom Verica, mostly served […]

> If you haven’t heard (and if you haven’t–and you care–consider this a SPOILER ALERT), the 13th episode of AMC’s series THE KILLING, its season finale, concluded on Sunday night without answering the question of just who killed Rosie Larsen.  Since this was what the series purportedly set out to do, it’s provoked the kind […]

In its second season, John Logan’s gothic horror mash-up PENNY DREADFUL remained an elaborate conceit that pays off only from time to time.  Logan has gathered together a host of characters for his saga.  Some hail from classics of the genre:  Victor Frankenstein (Harry Treadaway), his Monster (Rory Kinnear), and the latter’s intended Bride (Billie […]

  BITTEN:  Monday 10PM on Syfy Syfy’s Canadian werewolf import BITTEN is noticeably low-rent.  Even its transformation sequences use as little CG as possible:  a morphing hand, a back becoming increasingly hairy, and voila, there’s the fake wolf. Although the show has a bit more sex then the Syfy norm, it gives off a very […]

  VERY GOOD GIRLS is set in contemporary Brooklyn, but it’s shot (by Bobby Bukowski) with the kind of gauzy glow that suggests a European perfume commercial.  It’s lovely to look at, but also mystifying and ultimately annoying, and that describes the movie too. Naomi Foner, who wrote and directed the film, makes her directing debut […]

  ARROW, CW’s successful new superhero action series, has found its own best secret identity as a quasi-soap, a fact imperfectly illustrated by tonight’s midseason finale. The tactic of conveying a comic book saga through soapiness isn’t a crazy one–the Spider-Man franchise, in both its recent incarnations, has been as much romance as spectacle, and […]

  The Sundance programmers, one has to assume, are big fans of TV’s Happy Endings.  Casey Wilson is part of that show’s wonderful ensemble, and one of its most reliably hilarious members.  The news that she was co-writing (with co-star June Diane Raphael) her own comedy vehicle must have seemed promising.  Yet at some point […]