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 […]

  EXTANT:  Wednesday 9PM on CBS – If Nothing Else Is On… CBS’s EXTANT has been at the center of a Hollywood tentpole-sized marketing campaign for months, so it’s a bit disappointing to find that the show itself is just a moderately compelling hodgepodge of sci-fi motifs, without even the ambitious scale of the network’s […]

  MOONRISE KINGDOM:  Worth A Ticket – The Kingdom is Wes Anderson’s     Wes Anderson seemed to find the perfect vehicle for his particular form of brilliance with 2009’s stop-motion animated Fantastic Mr. Fox, a spectacularly designed, witty and surprisingly moving piece of jewel-like aritificiality.  Unfortunately, Mr. Fox wasn’t a success at the boxoffice […]

  VERONICA MARS:  Watch It At Home – Still a TV Show, For Better and Worse It was probably impossible for the movie of VERONICA MARS to live up to the story of how it came to be made.  That’s an epic, decade-long saga, which began when the TV series, critically praised but never a […]

  RESURRECTION:  Sunday 9PM on ABC American viewers have a seemingly endless fascination with the undead in all their various forms, and that extended to last season’s instant midseason hit RESURRECTION (although its ratings steadily declined throughout its run).  The show returned tonight for its second season, and as is often the case with it, […]

  IRONSIDE:  Wednesday 10PM on NBC Previously… on IRONSIDE:  NYPD Sergeant Robert Ironside (Blair Underwood), shot in the back and now in a wheelchair, has won the right to a hand-picked squad (Pablo Schreiber, Spencer Grammer, Neal Bledsoe) helping him to solve crimes, under the sometimes exasperated command of rule-bound Captain Rollins (Kenneth Choi).  Ironside […]

  MAN SEEKING WOMAN:  Wednesday 10:30PM on FXX – If Nothing Else Is On… You know how on Family Guy a character will say “This is just like when________” or “You’re like________,” and there’s an instant cutaway to whatever the character was talking about, no matter how bizarre?  (An example from this past week:  Stewie […]

  CHASING LIFE:  Tuesday 9PM on ABCFamily – Change the Channel ABCFamily is launching all its summer shows over the next week or two, so it appears to be luck rather than careful planning that’s resulted in its new CHASING LIFE, about a lovely young woman diagnosed with cancer, just a few days after the […]