It remains a pop culture puzzle that Marvel can have such uninterrupted, unprecedented success as a producer of blockbuster movies, yet still not have cracked the code of TV, while DC, which is hurrying (perhaps too fast) to play catch-up on the big screen, is routinely turning out hit series for the small one.  (Well, […]

  THE GIRLFRIENDS’ GUIDE TO DIVORCE has made its way, at least somewhat, past a very shaky start–not so much in the ratings, which have remained mediocre (although steady enough for Bravo to declare its first scripted 1-hour a win and order another season), but dramatically.  At the start, Girlfriends pandered all too blatantly to […]

    BEING FLYNN:  Watch It At Home – Troubling Story That Doesn’t Go Deep Enough   There’s a scene in Paul Weitz’s new film BEING FLYNN where Jonathan Flynn (Robert DeNiro), the alcoholic, narcissistic, pitiful, self-destructive father of Nick (Paul Dano), reads to his son from a publisher’s rejection letter.  Jonathan sees himself as […]

  JACK THE GIANT SLAYER:  Watch It At Home – No Giants Here It’s been a dozen years since moviegoers took up residence in Middle Earth with the opening of the first Lord of the Rings film, and since the multi-billion dollar success of that franchise, Hollywood has refused to let us leave.  Apart from […]

  TRUE DETECTIVE:  Sunday 9PM on HBO – DVR Alert It sometimes seems like brooding serial-killer thrillers are as plentiful on the New Television as multi-camera family sitcoms were on the Old.  TRUE DETECTIVE, though, gives the genre the HBO Deluxe treatment–premiering, no less, on the same night one of its stars, Matthew McConaughey, became […]

  ROSEWOOD:  Wednesday 8PM on FOX – If Nothing Else Is On… If there’s one overriding theme running through the network television premieres this fall, it’s their almost defiant lack of ambition.  The Big 4 may be watching their audiences erode and their advertising revenues shrink, they may be besieged by literally hundreds of other […]

> FALLING SKIES – Sundays 10PM on TNT – If Nothing Else Is On… Or:  how is FALLING SKIES not Terra Nova?  I’ve raved about FOX’s Fall dinosaur spectacle, and here’s another Steven Spielberg special-effects extravaganza, centered around a family trying to hold onto its identity and its life in a hair-raising environment–so what’s the […]

  DRACULA:  Friday 10PM on NBC – If Nothing Else Is On… A century of vampire movies and TV shows has taught us that undead is by no means the same as lifeless, but NBC’s new excavation of DRACULA doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo.  Produced on a lavish scale (at least in the […]