There are certain inevitabilities at Sundance, apart from snow:  something will go wrong (after I waited on line for 2 hours on opening day, the box office discovered that it had lost one of my passes), and no matter how carefully one chooses one’s film selections, some of the hottest titles will be missed.  For […]

  Coming off its acclaimed, Emmy-winning production of Grease, FOX had the holiday live TV musical market cornered this year, NBC having opted out of its planned Bye Bye Birdie in favor of a Spring 2018 Jesus Christ Superstar.  FOX zigged a bit from past practices, choosing the recent (and short-lived) Broadway musical adaptation of […]

  RAY DONOVAN:  Sunday 9PM on Showtime When a car crashes into a Los Angeles wall in the Season 4 premiere of Showtime’s sizable if somewhat inexplicable hit RAY DONOVAN, it doesn’t just crash into a wall:  it crashes directly into a giant mural of the Virgin Mary.  That’s the way Ray Donovan rolls, its […]

  Here lies HAPPY ENDINGS, one of the funniest comedies on all of television–foully murdered by some of the worst scheduling moves in recent network memory.  ABC began the season by sending the show (along with Don’t Trust the B___ In Apt 23) on a virtual suicide run, competing head-to-head on Tuesdays with New Girl, […]

> BOSS:  Fridays 10PM on Starz – Potential DVR Alert BOSS is Starz’s bid to be taken seriously as a pay-TV producer of original programming.  Up until now, Starz has been both successful (Spartacus) and not-so successful (Camelot) in its original shows, but all of them have been somewhat junky–even Torchwood:  Miracle Day, with its […]

  In recent years, Cameron Crowe has had trouble keeping his scripts coherent even when they only have to last 2 hours.  It probably shouldn’t have come as a surprise that giving him 10 hours to play with was asking for trouble, and much of his Showtime series ROADIES has been unfocused and self-indulgent, a […]

> On Saturday night, HBO’s GAME CHANGE scored the network’s highest premiere rating for an original TV-movie in 8 years.  (As it always the case with HBO, the movie will be rebroadcast many times, as well as being available on HBO GO and other platforms.)  While there were certainly A list names associated with the […]

> Gus Van Sant has been making movies for 25 years, but Restless–apart from its technical polish–feels like the work of a Sundance newcomer. And one who’s been reading too much Salinger, while meanwhile wearing out his DVD of Harold and Maude. Restless is way beyond twee; its mega-tweeness is like a Transformers movie compared […]