Reviews

THE SKED SERIES FINALE REVIEW: “Fringe”

Posted January 19, 2013 by Mitch Salem

  The most paranormal thing about FRINGE, in the end, was that it actually survived 5 seasons on the air, as very possibly the lowest-rated series to be regularly renewed in the history of network television.  (Made possible by budget restrictions and Warner Bros Television’s willingness to accept sharply lowered license fees because of the […]

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Reviews

THE SKED Season Premiere Review: “Downton Abbey”

Posted January 6, 2014 by Mitch Salem

  DOWNTON ABBEY:  Sunday 9PM on PBS In its fourth season as the most successful regular series in PBS history, DOWNTON ABBEY operates as smoothly as a well-staffed ancestral estate.  Even though the larger subject of the series is the creeping spread of democracy into the centuries-old system of English aristocracy, which would eventually undermine […]

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Articles

THE SKED SEASON FINALE REVIEW: “Ringer”

Posted April 18, 2012 by Mitch Salem

> RINGER could have been a hell of a movie. It happens sometimes with TV shows.  Remember Daybreak, featuring Taye Diggs as a cop who had to relive the same day over and over again, Groundhog Day style, until he could solve the mystery and save his girlfriend?  It stared out with a nifty pilot, […]

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Archive

THE SHOWBUZZDAILY REVIEW: “Hugo”

Posted November 23, 2011 by Mitch Salem

  HUGO:  Worth A Ticket – If Only For the Visual Splendors   Paramount doesn’t have much choice but to market Martin Scorsese’s HUGO as a family movie:  it’s got a PG rating, a young boy and girl as the hero and heroine, a children’s book (“The Invention of Hugo Cabret” by Brian Selznick) as […]

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Pilot + 1

SHOWBUZZDAILY Series Premiere Review: “Beyond”

Posted January 1, 2017 by Mitch Salem

  BEYOND:  Monday 9PM on Freeform (Preview Tonight at 9PM), also available on VOD/streaming – Change the Channel Add BEYOND to the growing pile of genre shows that have failed at Freeform since Pretty Little Liars became the network’s signature series, joining Guilty, Twisted and Dead of Summer.  (Shadowhunters returns on Monday but with new […]

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Pilot Reports

SHOWBUZZDAILY Series Premiere Review: “Vice Principals”

Posted July 18, 2016 by Mitch Salem

  VICE PRINCIPALS:  Sunday 10:30PM on HBO – In the Queue Your feelings about HBO’s new VICE PRINCIPALS are likely to be determined by your instinctive reaction to the name Danny McBride.  For a decade now, since the indie movie The Foot-Fist Way, McBride and his writing/producing/directing partner Jody Hill have been turning out variations […]

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Pilot Reports

UPDATED–THE SKED PILOT REPORT: NBC’s “Animal Practice”

Posted August 13, 2012 by Mitch Salem

  ANIMAL PRACTICE: Wednesday 8PM starting 9/26 on NBC – Change The Channel UPDATE:  Tonight NBC aired the recast version of the ANIMAL PRACTICE pilot as a last-gasp grab for the attention of its Olympics audience.  Joanna Garcia Swisher now plays the female lead, the new boss of the show’s animal hospital and ex-girlfriend of […]

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Articles

SHOWBUZZDAILY NY THEATRE JOURNAL: “Seminar”

Posted February 22, 2012 by Mitch Salem

> There’s an inescapable irony in Theresa Rebeck’s play SEMINAR when the bilious novelist (Alan Rickman) who’s reluctantly teaching a group of aspiring young writers launches an attack on one of them by predicting that his “whorishness” will make him more suited for a life in Hollywood than one in the finer precincts of the […]

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