> Watch It At Home;  The thrills are so postmodern, they don’t seem to be happening in the theater. When the original Scream arrived in 1996, the slaughtering-the-teenagers genre was already old enough to drive; the first Friday the 13th had opened more than 16 years before.  The conventions of the form were as well-worn [...]

  It felt like 12:55AM for the entire last half-hour of tonight’s SNL, and that wasn’t a bad thing.  Every post-Update sketch had the kind of oddball conceptualism that’s usually reserved for the last minutes of the show, and while the sketches didn’t all work, they had more imagination and wit than just anything that [...]

> Disclaimer:  Network pilots now in circulation are not necessarily in the form that will air in the Fall.  Pilots are often reedited and rescored, and in some cases even recast or reshot.  So these critiques shouldn’t be taken as full reviews, but rather as a guide to the general style and content of the [...]

  The 2nd season of HELL ON WHEELS was different, and perhaps somewhat better, than its first.  (Behind the scenes, experienced producer John Shiban was brought on to showrun with series creators Joe and Tony Gayton.)  If the show manages to come back for a 3rd season, it appears that incarnation will be yet another [...]

  ZERO HOUR:  Thursday 8PM on ABC – Potential DVR Alert ZERO HOUR‘s pilot is an engaging piece of nonsense, but whether it can work as a continuing TV series is another question.  The premise is a DaVinci Code/National Treasure-ian tangle of Nazis, Rosicrucians, cloning, assassins, and bits and pieces of what seems to be [...]

REVOLUTION:  Monday 10PM on NBC – If Nothing Else Is On… REVOLUTION is Falling Skies without aliens, The Walking Dead without zombies, Jericho… well, actually it pretty much is Jericho.  We’ve all strolled down this post-apocalyptic road before (let’s not even try to count the number of movies set there), and based on its pilot, [...]

  If The Avengers were an episode of SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE, it might be something like the first hour of tonight’s show, a veritable all-star brigade of special guests and beloved characters presented for the celebratory return of Host Supreme Justin Timberlake (and the spottier last half-hour had its moments, too). SNL and Timberlake have [...]

DREDD, which kicked off the merrily disreputable Midnight Madness program at the Toronto Film Festival last night, isn’t much, but no one can say the director Pete Travis wasted his 3D budget. Things are constantly hovering, fluttering or–often–splattering in the foreground of the frame, and the images do a better job of suggesting visual depth [...]