No season of Showtime’s HOMELAND ever came close to touching the wild highs of its first, an amazing concoction that managed to combine the tension of a great thriller with constant twists, impossible romance and psychological complexity.  The seven seasons that followed were varyingly up and down, the latter often marked by the apparent […]

  PENNY DREADFUL: CITY OF ANGELS:  Sunday 10PM on Showtime (available now via streaming/VOD) PENNY DREADFUL: CITY OF ANGELS is Showtime and John Logan’s not particularly promising attempt to turn his previous hit series into an anthology.  The two shows have little in common, at least initially, beyond the general historical horror genre and Logan’s […]

  BROKE:  Thursday 9:30PM on CBS Even brand-new episodes of CBS multicamera sitcoms can have a tendency to feel like reruns, and the network’s new midseason series BROKE brings that to the “but this is ridiculous” level.  Broke is built around virtually the same premise as NBC’s midseason sitcom Indebted.  (The two shows even air […]

  COUNCIL OF DADS – Regular episodes begin airing April 30 on NBC NBC isn’t trying to fool anyone with its hopes for COUNCIL OF DADS.  The network aired a “preview” of its pilot more than a month before the actual series premiere in order to pair it with the season finale of This Is […]

  The fourth season of NBC’s THIS IS US wasn’t a standout, relatively speaking, which in a way made the expertise of its execution more clear.  Even when it’s in second gear, Dan Fogelman’s series is constructed and acted so well that it holds its grip on viewers quite well  (This Is Us looked particularly […]

  WESTWORLD:  Sunday 9PM on HBO   With most other forms of new entertainment content sidelined for at least the next several weeks, television is likely to be even more at the center of our culture than it already is, and Season 3 of HBO’s WESTWORLD, with its dense mythology and high philosophical ambitions, seems […]

  SAVE YOURSELVES! (no distrib):  A moderately amusing sketch that doesn’t quite have the heft for feature length.  Writer/directors Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson satirize Brooklyn hipsters and sci-fi in their story of a couple, Jack (John Reynolds) and Su (Sunita Mani), who’ve decided to ditch their devices and spend a week in a […]

  SERGIO (Netflix – April 17):  Greg Barker’s film has an unusual pedigree.  Barker, up to this point a documentarian, directed a nonfiction version of the same story (and with the same title) in 2009, but decided that he wanted to explore the life of UN diplomat Sergio Vieira de Mello further in a way […]