Season-4-Promotional-Image-the-vampire-diaries-tv-show-32007005-500-338.png THE VAMPIRE DIARIES:  Thursday 8PM on CW WHERE WE WERE:  Witnessing heroine Elena (Nina Dobrev) die and then un-die, a presumptive vampire-to-be. To vastly oversimplify a complex mythology, she’d been heading out of Mystic Falls with Matt (Zach Roerig), one of the other relatively few humans around, having made her choice of the vampiric […]

  Last year, the cop novel “The Whites” was published as the work of Harry Brandt–except that “Harry Brandt” was actually a pseudonym for Richard Price.  This seemed odd at first, because unlike, say, JK Rowling deciding to write detective stories, crime novels were already Richard Price’s bread and butter, in celebrated works of fiction […]

Here’s what Aaron Sorkin’s THE NEWSROOM is, for better and very often for worse:  a deadly serious, indeed doggedly self-righteous, primer on how news should be reported and, by extension, how America should be governed, that also includes a Sex and the City gag/salute/parody so moronically shameless that even the people who make the very […]

  MIDDLE OF NOWHERE, which won the Sundance US Dramatic Directing award for Ava DuVernay last night, is in no rush.  The films moves with deliberation as it establishes its leading character and her difficult situation:  Ruby (Emayatzy E. Corinealdi) isn’t a single mom, but she might as well be, with husband Derek (Omari Hardwick) […]

  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 […]

  Lorne Michaels has controlled the post-Tonight Show slot on NBC for more than 20 years (and with Jimmy Fallon’s ascension, he now has The Tonight Show in his portfolio as well), and for the third consecutive time, he’s pushed a Saturday Night Live veteran through that door with tonight’s debut of LATE NIGHT WITH […]

  “Are you kidding me?  It’s always the weird stuff that’s the best,” Lafayette (Nelsan Ellis) said at one point during tonight’s season finale of TRUE BLOOD–he was watching the birth of half-human/half-faerie quadruplets at the time–and that appears to be the case for the show’s many fans as well.  The hour had no shortage […]

    HATFIELDS & MCCOYS, already a blockbuster hit, kept its best and most compelling hours for last.  Although the conclusion of the 6-hour tale, directed throughout by Kevin Reynolds and with this installment written by Ted Mann and Ronald Parker, has its share of tense confrontations and large-scale action, it dwells more on the […]