Category: TV Reviews

If there’s one show I never expected to watch (let alone like) it’s Starz’s Spartacus. At the time this show premiered I thought it was just a 300 knock-off made to capitalize on a movie that I didn’t really like, and that it would be a pale shadow of HBO’s Rome (which is widely assumed…

Last week, something unprecedented happened: A cable company actually delivered a service that they didn’t have to. Comcast (and their OnDemand channel Xfinity) opened all premium cable channels to non-subscribers so that people could perform marathon viewings of, say, Dexter or Spartacus (review of it later today). There were even some basic cable and broadcast…

Tonight was a battle royale between not just The Governor and Rick, but between two ultra-nerd heavyweight shows: The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones (both of which have a rabid fan base that will tear the head off a man that says they’re not just as good as Mad Men or Breaking Bad). Game of Thrones…

I was a big fan of the previous Al Pacino/HBO biopic pairing, You Don’t Know Jack, which taught me more about the life of the infamous Dr. Jack Kevorkian than a thousand features on CNN could. BUT, sadly, lightening doesn’t strike in this for instance. This “biopic” deals exclusively with the infamous record-producer/weirdo’s court case…

Bates Motel…The latest evidence that people will tell any story as long as it’s not a new story. The idea that the teenage years of Psycho’s Norman Bates (a character that first became a part of pop culture in 1960…and hasn’t evolved or strengthened his reach on it since) would be fascinating to anyone has less to…

It’s an age-old question: girls vs. women, bubbly young girls vs. mature wizened women, HBO’s overrated but buzzy “Girls” vs. HBO’s underrated but struggling-to-avoid-cancellation “Enlightened,” about a woman trying to live a deeper, more meaningful life. As you can already tell, I’m firmly in the “Enlightened” camp, and yet things look pretty grim for the…

[I know this episode aired a couple weeks back, and the statute of interest has expired, so I’ll keep this brief.] Law and Order, Special Victims Unit, episode “Funny Valentine”…I found the recent and highly-publicized riff on the Chris Brown/Rihanna case to be exceptionally clever, and enjoyably melodramatic (was the acting good? No, but Chris…

Dallas…I’ve never seen a single episode of the original Dallas, but I’ll miss J.R. Ewing, who unquestionably made the first season of TNT’s reboot better and stole most of his scenes in the second season. Larry Hagman’s J.R. is a textbook example of a villain so iconic, he’s actually the hero. [Who would really want…

Fashion Star…All of the old problems (overstuffed episodes, noisy-as-hell runways that overpower the clothes, too many contestants for us to really keep track of them, routine picking of the wrong designer to go home, unhelpful advice from the mentors, etc.) are still there, but now they’ve added a couple. They’ve white-washed the gorgeous H &…

Celebrity Apprentice: F [Yep, it’s that simple] Red Widow: This new ABC drama (that stars Radha Mitchell as a crime family widow forced into the drug smuggling business after her husband is killed) gets caught between worlds as it’s not realistic enough to be gritty but not unrealistic enough to be fun. So far, there’s…

Seems like Kevin Hart is everywhere these days, and I’m not so sure that’s a bad thing. I don’t have strong opinions of him one way or the other, so I went into his latest projects with an entirely open mind…and I think they’re more successful than not. Saturday Night Live: It’s great to see…

AMC continued their bizarre scheduling patterns (like splitting up the final season of Breaking Bad by a year, and having more than a year pass between seasons of Mad Men) by having a half-season premiere of The Walking Dead after a nearly three month hiatus between the 8th and 9th episodes of season 3. I thought…

I watched 30 Rock the first night it aired, have seen every episode since, and it’s only fitting that I’d live-blog the series finale. It’s been a terrific run. 30 Rock is one of the few shows to expertly balance a great main cast (I’ll always wish Jane Krakowski had won an Emmy for the…