FALLING SKIES told a somewhat different story this season under showrunner Remi Aubuchon than it had in its first two years, and the changes worked fairly well for the most part.  Tom Mason (Noah Wyle) and his plucky band of rebels against the evil alien Espheni, instead of roaming the east coast, were based […]

  MIND GAMES:  Tuesday 10PM on ABC – If Nothing Else Is On… The creator of ABC’s midseason MIND GAMES, Kyle Killen, was the man behind Lone Star and Awake (as well as the movie The Beaver), so he doesn’t lack in fertile imagination.  What he hasn’t had, however, is any commercial success whatsoever, and […]

  THE NEIGHBORS:  Friday 8:30PM on ABC THE NEIGHBORS was last season’s reminder that a pilot isn’t the final word on a series.  In fact, neither are the first several episodes.  It took a while for Dan Fogelman’s show to demonstrate that it was more than its inane premise and slapstick gags about aliens living […]

  ONCE UPON A TIME IN WONDERLAND:  Thursday 8PM on ABC – Worth A Look ABC ordered ONCE UPON A TIME IN WONDERLAND to series on the basis of a 20-minute presentation, which was then expanded to one-hour (with commercials) length for tonight’s series premiere.  That may explain why the initial section of the premiere, […]

  The formulaic TV sitcom plot can be summed up like this:  the protagonist has some understandable goal, but says or does the worst possible thing to achieve it, causing chaos–yet things work out OK in the end, and the character learns a valuable lesson.  In recent years, the traditional rules of TV comedy (and […]

  For its fall finale (the show is taking a relatively brief break, returning on January 7), AGENTS OF SHIELD turned to its continuing storylines, such as they are.  The script by Co-Producer Shalisha Francis, directed by Holly Dale, went back to the pilot and its story of the Centipede project, which has recurred in […]

  PSYCH:  Wednesday 10PM on USA It’s sort of fitting that PSYCH, a show now a little past its prime, kicked off its 8th and perhaps final season with a parody of late 1990s Guy Ritchie lad thrillers like Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels–movies even Ritchie doesn’t make anymore, now that he’s knee-deep in […]

  Back when Stanley Kubrick still planned to direct the film that became AI: Artificial Intelligence, he famously toyed with the idea of shooting it bit by bit over a period of years, so that the young protagonist would literally age on screen.  Now Richard Linklater, the most unKubrickian of filmmakers, has done exactly that with BOYHOOD, […]