Only in the world of RAY DONOVAN would a season’s (more or less) happy ending commence with the chainsaw dismemberment of corpses, but that’s Showtime’s twisted family saga.  The headline of Season 6 was the show’s relocation from Los Angeles to New York, which hardly seemed affect its DNA at all.  In fact, at […]

> A lot can happen between the creation of a TV pilot in the spring and production of episodes for the regular season:  a writing/producing team is hired, audience focus groups weigh in, networks and studios (which may have had their own turnover in the off-season) give plenty of notes, both helpful and otherwise, and […]

  SILICON VALLEY:  Sunday 10PM on HBO Previously… on SILICON VALLEY:  Richard Hendrix (Thomas Middleditch) is a computer programmer with dreams of inventing the next big billion-dollar thing–and he may have actually done it, with an algorithm that allows for compression and duplication of video, music, etc without loss of quality.  Offered $10M for his […]

  DEFIANCE never really got much momentum going in its first season, and although there were quite a few major developments in tonight’s season finale, events clearly meant to be shattering and dramatic, it all felt rushed and a little desperate to set the stage for next year.  (Despite unexceptional ratings, the series has already […]

  BROADCHURCH – Wednesday 10PM on BBCAmerica One of the first things shown in the Season 3 premiere of BROADCHURCH is a looming close-up of a tear rolling down a crime victim’s face, so we know little has changed in that perpetually brooding Dorset town.  However, while Season 2 of Chris Chubnall’s series was a direct […]

  John Ridley’s ABC anthology series AMERICAN CRIME has always worn its sackcloth and ashes in plain sight, but Season 3 was especially brutal.  It was eight hours of unceasing human misery, enough to make the insides curdle of even the most earnest devotee of serious TV drama.  Understandably, viewers fled, pushing the show’s ratings […]

  Showtime’s EPISODES has improved markedly from its first season, which mostly invited viewers to join British television writers Sean and Beverly Lincoln (Stephen Mangan and Tamsin Greig) as they turned their noses up at the woeful idiocy of American TV comedy and its practitioners.  (It was a subject series creators David Crane and Jeffrey […]

  THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL:  Worth A Ticket – Wes Anderson’s Latest Fancy Box Has Something Inside Where has the “Academy” 1.37:1 screen aspect ratio been all of Wes Anderson’s life?  One of Anderson’s visual motifs (some would say “fetishes”) is to photograph his actors enclosed in windows, doorways, or other pieces of production design, […]