It was 12:45AM before Charlize Theron really had a highlight to call her own on tonight’s SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE, another instance of the show bringing on a bright talent and then not having them do very much.  Although Theron had her issues with the cue cards, as many movie stars on SNL do, she’s […]

  DOMINION:  Thursday 9PM on Syfy Previously… on DOMINION:  Following on the events of the movie Legion, in a post-apocalyptic Las Vegas, an enclave of surviving humans are protected by the Archangel Michael (Tom Wisdom) from the evil angels, led by his brother Gabriel (Carl Beukes), who killed most of mankind–which they believe they did […]

  RUSH:  Thursday 9PM on USA – Change the Channel USA Network is aiming for “edgy” with its new Thursday line-up, and so the pilot for RUSH begins with its antihero Will Rush (Tom Ellis) doing coke.  The twist?  When his lady friend goes into cardiac arrest, Will reveals himself as a brilliant physician who […]

  TEN DAYS IN THE VALLEY:  Sunday 10PM on ABC – Potential DVR Alert TEN DAYS IN THE VALLEY is very ABC, in a good way.  Created by Tassie Cameron, who co-created the network’s longtime summer hit Rookie Blue, it’s a purportedly closed-end mystery soap, about a successful TV-producer mother whose 8-year old daughter goes […]

  Cable’s USA Network has the reputation of being a place where procedurals basically repeat variations on the same episode over and over for years, until the series finally dies of old age.  That’s certainly the case with some of the network’s stalwarts like Psych and Burn Notice, but recently USA has shown a welcome […]

> THE HOUR:  Wednesday 10PM on BBCAmerica:  Potential DVR Alert Here’s what’s wrong with BBCAmerica. Don’t get me wrong:  it’s marvelous that BBCA exists to bring us shows like Luther, the original (and superior) Torchwood, the also original (and even more superior) Being Human, and now THE HOUR.  The problem is that a BBC “1-hour” […]

  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 […]

  ABC’s AMERICAN CRIME is Serious and Important, but how good is it?  John Ridley’s series takes on the biggest topics–all of them, it seems–from race to class to sexual orientation to school violence and the loss of privacy in the internet age, and not even Oscar-bait films wear a mantle of unrelieved misery quite […]