THE MIST:  Thursday 10PM on Spike – Change the Channel THE MIST is far from the most imaginative or robust of Stephen King’s works.  King has rarely been accused of too much concision, but he was only able to wring out enough material from this premise for a novella; the title conveys just about […]

  GOTHAM:  Thursday 8PM on FOX Coming off its most satisfying season to date, the first where it seemed to have some control over its sprawl, GOTHAM has been given a new timeslot on Thursdays for its 4th season, and the subtitle “A Dark Knight.”  It is indeed creeping ever closer to the territory of […]

  COUNTERPART:  Sunday 9PM on Starz, starting 1/21/18 – In the Queue Tales of alternative earths are an increasingly popular form of fiction these days, possibly because our actual Earth is currently so difficult to handle.  Just as The Man In the High Castle runs the subgenre through tropes of old-time war movies, Starz’s new […]

  ROSWELL, NEW MEXICO – Tuesday 9PM on CW CW has gone back to its WB/UPN roots for ROSWELL, NEW MEXICO, a reboot and update of the Roswell series that debuted on the first of those networks in 1999, then moved to the other.  Once again, it’s a story of romance between an Earth woman […]

  AGENTS OF SHIELD has been given one more final season after the sixth that concluded tonight, and that will bring to an end an extended footnote to Marvel’s cultural domination of our moment.  Agents was the project most caught up in the territorial strife between Marvel Television and the increasingly all-powerful Marvel Cinematic Universe, […]

  REBEL:  Thursday 10PM on ABC Krista Vernoff is one of network TV’s most prized showrunners.  She’s successfully guided Shonda Rhimes’s Grey’s Anatomy into a remarkable 17th season of success (which will be extended further if the necessary deals are made), and when she took over Station 19, that show became an effective one-two punch […]

  CW’s good-humored not-Gilmore Girls small town romance HART OF DIXIE concluded its first season tonight with the same pleasant, likable, unthrilling touch it’s had since last fall. Hart isn’t really about plot–to the extent it works, it’s all about charm.  The series set up its central situation in the pilot:  go-getter New York doctor […]

    It wasn’t so long ago that the announcement of an epic period love story starring Nicole Kidman and Clive Owen as war correspondent Martha Gellhorn and legendary novelist Ernest Hemingway, directed by Philip Kaufman, the man behind The Right Stuff, The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Henry & June, premiering at the Cannes […]