Which plotline really grabbed you in Season 4 of GLEE?  Was it Rachel’s (Lea Michele) one-episode pregnancy scare?  Her involvement (unwitting) with a male escort?  Was it the weeks of sullen silence between Mr. Schue (Matthew Morrison) and Finn (Cory Monteith) after Finn impulsively kissed Mr. Schue’s fiance Emma (Jayma Mays)?  Was it Blaine […]

  Visually, this season of BREAKING BAD has been typified by shots of Walter White’s looming, shaven, gleaming skull.  A bald pate may not have received this much loving camera attention since Brando’s in Apocalypse Now, and in tonight’s season finale, it was featured again, most notably in the great shot as Heisenberg fastened his […]

  MAD MEN:  Sunday 10PM on AMC And still–there’s MAD MEN.  Even in an era of unparalleled TV drama, nothing else on the air is quite like Matthew Weiner’s masterwork, a TV series that simply isn’t playing the same game as all the rest.  “When you bring me something like this, it looks like cowardice,” Peggy […]

  ON THE ROAD – Worth A Ticket – Kerouac’s Classic Is Beautiful and Atmospheric But Lacks Urgency ON THE ROAD, as a novel and now as a film adaptation, is so enmeshed with the mythology of the real-life people and events it thinly fictionalizes and with the many works, both documentary and fiction, it’s […]

> This week UP ALL NIGHT was promoted to NBC’s version of the big leagues, where many felt it belonged from the start.  It’s switched places with Whitney and been given the benefit of The Office, NBC’s one genuine lead-in, for the Thursday 9:30PM slot.   Let’s take a look at whether it merits the […]

> It’s not all that unusual for a situation comedy to change directions in the midst of its initial season and emerge a different, and better, show:  The Office and Parks & Recreation both took that journey (the US Office was trying too hard at first to ape the Ricky Gervais original, and Parks was […]

  LIVING BIBLICALLY:  Monday 9:30PM on CBS – Change the Channel LIVING BIBLICALLY is a CBS sitcom for the Age of Trump, and like so many artifacts of this age, it may well thrill its target audience while causing others to shudder. Although inspired by a nonfiction book, Living Biblically is fully as hacky as […]

  The headlines have all been in PERSON OF INTEREST‘s favor this past season.  As stories of massive worldwide surveillance by the NSA and other agencies have continued to surface, what not so long ago looked like a CBS entry into sci-fi has taken on the feel of just slightly exaggerated reality.  The series itself […]