CROSSING LINES:  Sunday 10PM on NBC – If Nothing Else Is On… Television’s changing economics will probably lead to a lot more internationally financed co-productions as time goes on.  In terms of content, that means subject matter that can be sold worldwide even without an initial US network success, which may require iconic protagonists […]

  Chris Rock’s new movie Top Five is a breakthrough for him partly because in it, he finally manages to capture his stand-up comedy persona in a fully-fledged character.  It was too much to hope that SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE, where Rock had a more troubled time as a regular cast member than is generally remembered, […]

  THE DAILY SHOW WITH TREVOR NOAH:  Mon-Thurs 11PM on Comedy Central After one night of THE DAILY SHOW WITH TREVOR NOAH, we conclusively know this:  Comedy Central isn’t bleeping the word “shit” anymore.  It was a fairly big deal when the network let Jon Stewart liberally use the cattle-related version of the word as […]

6:30 We’ve arrived at that strangest phenomenon of awards season, the night when we collectively grant the 88 nonentities of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (none of them filmmakers, many of them not even critics, and some of them of dubious principle) meaningful sway over the Academy Awards.  That will be even more true this […]

DREDD, which kicked off the merrily disreputable Midnight Madness program at the Toronto Film Festival last night, isn’t much, but no one can say the director Pete Travis wasted his 3D budget. Things are constantly hovering, fluttering or–often–splattering in the foreground of the frame, and the images do a better job of suggesting visual depth […]

  You would have thought that if there was one SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE host who’d escape the cliche of a musical monologue, it would be Christoph Waltz, but you’d be wrong.  “Smile, Damn It, Smile” wasn’t even a funny song, an Austria gag without any teeth or edge.  (Although Taran Killian’s Casual Hitler was a […]

  Aided by a compatible WWE Smackdown lead-in and a red state-friendly storyline, SHOOTER has been a sturdy performer for USA, already renewed for a second summer season.  The series is low-ambition compared to USA’s Mr Robot or even Suits or Colony (or the awful Falling Water, for that matter), but series creator John Hlavin […]

  The first season of YELLOWSTONE was a feat of auteurship.  Every episode of the recently-rebooted Paramount Network’s prestige series was written and directed solely by series creator Taylor Sheridan, something not even David Lynch or Sam Esmail can claim.  The result was 10 hours of television that qualified, to an extent rarely seen, as […]