Every fan of HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER came into tonight’s Season 9 premiere knowing three things.  This will be not just the ninth, but the final season of the series; last season’s finale introduced us, at long last, to the still-unnamed Mother (new regular Cristin Milioti); and the entire season will take place […]

  LUCKY 7:  Tuesday 10PM on ABC Previously… on LUCKY 7:  In a Queens, NY auto shop, (almost) all the employees have just hit a $45M lottery jackpot.  However, that hasn’t made their problems go away.  Brothers Matt (Matt Long) and Nicky (Stephen Louis Grush), both in need of money before their win was announced […]

  Although Starz was a co-financier of THE WHITE QUEEN, the show was produced by the BBC predominantly for a British audience, so it helped to have a working (or at least a Wikipedia) knowledge of 15th-century English history to get the most out of it.  For example, it would have been difficult to appreciate […]

  There were more cameo stars in the first 15 minutes of tonight’s SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE than regular cast members, and since SNL has enough regulars for a small city, that’s saying something.  It all got Paul Rudd’s third stint as host off to an energized start, which the show predictably proceeded to dribble away […]

  THE ASSETS:  Thursday 10PM on ABC Previously… on THE ASSETS:  In 1980s Washington, the hunt is on for a CIA agent who’s actually a mole for the KGB.  But there’s no mystery for viewers, who know that the double agent is Aldrich Ames (Paul Rhys).  The agent who doesn’t know, and has been tasked […]

  House of Cards Season 2 Eps 1-3 Review Here. A 13-hour season may be a bit too much free rein for HOUSE OF CARDS US series creator Beau Willimon, who is enthralled by the intricately devious strategems of politics, but lacks Aaron Sorkin’s genius for condensing them into bite-sized, easily comprehensible capsules.  So the […]

  Showtime’s EPISODES has improved markedly from its first season, which mostly invited viewers to join British television writers Sean and Beverly Lincoln (Stephen Mangan and Tamsin Greig) as they turned their noses up at the woeful idiocy of American TV comedy and its practitioners.  (It was a subject series creators David Crane and Jeffrey […]

  You couldn’t tell it from the ratings, which were if anything more dismal than ever, or from tonight’s somewhat disappointing season finale, but the return of Founding Genius Dan Harmon rejuvenated COMMUNITY‘s fifth season.  It wasn’t that last year’s replacement team had done a shameful job–they worked hard to provide the same species of […]