The all-knowing Machine at the heart of PERSON OF INTEREST turned positively chatty in last night’s Season 2 finale, providing real-time advice and assistance via phone and text services to just about anyone who asked it nicely.  (If you didn’t care for numbers, it would help you out via musical tones.)   The Machine, […]

  Rarely has a TV series crashed as quickly and completely as ABC’s RESURRECTION.  It premiered just 10 months ago with a 3.8 rating in the 18-49 demo, yet last week it managed only an 0.8 (actually up a tenth from the previous week).  In other words, 80% of the audience that was initially enthusiastic about […]

  DARK MATTER:  Friday 10PM on Syfy – Change the Channel You can easily imagine the first episode of Syfy’s new DARK MATTER as being the pitch that sold the series, and it also sounds like the start of a joke:  6 people and an android wake up on a spaceship…  (In fact, the show […]

  TREME:  Sunday 10PM on HBO   WHERE WE WERE:  New Orleans, of course, and hip-deep in the lives of a dozen struggling, striving, stubborn, idiosyncratic natives and recent arrivals.  These include the feckless trombonist Antoine Batiste (Wendell Pierce), who reluctantly supports himself and his family as a high school music teacher; radio DJ/composer/rapper/dreamer Davis […]

  It’s odd to think that the biggest hit on American television is centered around the flesh-eating undead, but enough about Fox News…  THE WALKING DEAD is a genuine television phenomenon, in more ways than one.  To begin with, it’s a staggering success, a cable series that routinely has larger audiences (in the 18-49 demographic, […]

> For a new play, WAR HORSE has strong movie connections.  The play is adapted for the stage by Nick Stafford from the 1982 novel by Michael Morpurgo, and that novel is also the basis of Steven Spielberg’s upcoming film, which will be in theatres for Christmas (the script for which is by Lee Hall […]

  THE BIG YEAR:  Watch It At Home – Very Small Pleasures   THE BIG YEAR is an amiable, good-natured comedy that’s so insubstantial it seems to fly out of your memory even as you’re watching it.  If it had been a low-budgeted indie that turned up at a film festival, it might have felt […]

  ROOKIE BLUE:  Thursday 9PM on ABC It’s quite an accomplishment for a scripted summer series on one of the broadcast networks to last five seasons on the air, and the ABC/Canadian co-production ROOKIE BLUE is now so venerable that one of the plotlines in tonight’s Season 5 premiere had the character whose rookie year kicked off […]