MAGIC CITY:  Friday 9PM on Starz You’d have thought, after the low-rated, little-buzzed first season of MAGIC CITY, that both Starz and series creator Mitch Glazer would have recognized the series needed to return with some extra oomph for Season 2.  But it wasn’t to be found in tonight’s season premiere, and the result […]

  THE MORTAL INSTRUMENTS: CITY OF BONES –  Not Even For Free –  An Incoherent Compendium of YA Tropes THE MORTAL INSTRUMENTS: CITY OF BONES isn’t so much a movie as it is a mash-up.  They’re all here, crammed into 130 minutes of screen time–Twilight and Harry Potter and Buffy and True Blood and even […]

  ROOKIE BLUE did a solid job of wrapping up its fourth season and setting up cliffhangers for Season 5 (already ordered) with last night’s episode.  Although the Grey’s Anatomy-with-guns police soap has never had the level of success as its medical forebear, it’s been a steady summer performer for ABC, and this season successfully saw it […]

  ONCE UPON A TIME:  Sunday 8PM on ABC The Season 3 premiere of ONCE UPON A TIME didn’t step foot in Storybrooke, nor did it feature any flashbacks to pre-curse incarnations of the protagonists.  Whether this was a one-time event for the premiere or a new template for the series is unclear, but the […]

  IRONSIDE:  Wednesday 10PM on NBC Previously… on IRONSIDE:  NYPD Sergeant Robert Ironside (Blair Underwood), shot in the back and now in a wheelchair, has won the right to a hand-picked squad (Pablo Schreiber, Spencer Grammer, Neal Bledsoe) helping him to solve crimes, under the sometimes exasperated command of rule-bound Captain Rollins (Kenneth Choi).  Ironside […]

  INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS:  Buy A Ticket – 1960s Folk Music A La The Coens INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS, which screened as the Closing Night presentation of the AFI Film Festival in advance of its regular run next month, is Joel and Ethan Coen in their enigmatically allegorical mode, but unlike its more overtly stylized predecessors Barton […]

  MOB CITY:  Wednesday 9PM on TNT As a writer and director, Frank Darabont has never been in a hurry.  His The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, The Majestic and The Mist all run over 2 hours (Green Mile is over 3), and his initial season of The Walking Dead had as measured a pace […]

  BLACK SAILS:  Saturday 9PM on Starz – Worth A Look The pirate action-adventure BLACK SAILS is Starz’s latest attempt to swing for the fences with ambitious original programming and finally be taken as seriously as its pay cable brethren HBO and Showtime.  This project seems intended to split the difference between Starz’s successful, but […]