MAJOR CRIMES:  Monday 9PM on TNT MAJOR CRIMES returned for its third season tonight with a grim but unremarkable hour.  The episode, written by Co-Executive Producer Michael Alaimo and directed by David McWhirter, tipped off its hand very early for anyone raised on cop procedurals:  when the wife and mother of a missing family […]

  STAR TREK: INTO DARKNESS:  Worth A Ticket – Another Satisfying Trip On the Enterprise J.J. Abrams and his Bad Robot cohorts, writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, did a bang-up job rejuvenating the Star Trek franchise in 2009, and their first next journey where many, many have gone before, the new STAR TREK: INTO […]

> WARNING:  If You Watch THE LEAGUE For Its Plot Revelations(?), Spoilers Below THE LEAGUE is no longer the best sitcom on TV that no one’s ever heard of.  The show has become consistently, increasingly popular, so much so that it’s no longer riding in the ratings on the coat-tails of its FX lead-in It’s […]

  THE WORLD TO COME (Bleecker Street – March 2):  Although the story is set in 1856, this is 2021, so it’s not hard to see where Mona Fastvold’s The World To Come is heading.  Ron Hansen and Jim Shepard’s script begins in the dead of winter, in the wilderness that was upstate New York […]

  BETRAYAL:  Sunday 10PM on ABC Previously… on BETRAYAL:  Sara Hanley (Hannah Ware), a Chicago photographer married to ambitious prosecutor Drew (Chris Johnson), has just launched a torrid affair with Jack McAllister (Stuart Townsend), himself the husband of Elaine (Wendy Moniz).  Meanwhile, Drew’s landed the biggest case of his career, a murder that may have […]

  ORPHAN BLACK is destined to be remembered more for the showcase it gave to the astonishing Tatiana Maslany than for its own narrative, although of course one couldn’t have existed without the other.  Series creators Graeme Manson and John Fawcett deserve credit not just for their tricky concept of a biological thriller that featured […]

  THE PASSAGE:  Monday 9PM on FOX FOX’s THE PASSAGE does to Justin Cronin’s intricate, elaborate trilogy of postapocalyptic thrillers what Hollywood has traditionally done with literary fiction, flattening the books in the most conventional way possible.  This wasn’t the original plan, or even the second:  Ridley Scott’s production company acquired Cronin’s books with the […]

> The sex jokes may have diminished over at Whitney, but they’re in full force on ARE YOU THERE, CHELSEA?.  In the first few minutes of tonight’s season finale, Chelsea (Laura Prepon) told her friends about a trip to Atlantic City:  “I got penetrated by a guy who made salt-water taffy.”  This was followed by […]