Let’s start with some honesty.  "Smash" is not a great TV show. At its Capezio-covered heart, it’s a soap opera with the usual tales of backstabbing, ambition and infidelity livened up with dance numbers and jazz hands. It should come as no surprise that drinks get thrown and marriages fall apart. 

The series revolves around getting a Marilyn Monroe musical to Broadway and tells stories we’ve seen plenty of times before -- the ingénue vs. the veteran, the lothario director, the ambitious producer.  But "Smash" is much more than those individual clichés. While it may not be a great TV show, it's a good TV show with...

It’s been awhile and the reason is … I’ve been a bender. Instead of a lost weekend, it’s been a few months of fade in’s and fade to black’s.

Lately, I’ve been mainlining movies by a few young stars -- and that’s all I want to watch. But doing that makes me feel like those Vietnam vets that decided to drop out of society and then emerged into a new world. While I’ve been OD’ing on iTunes and Netflix, apparently there’s a show on called "The Voice," there was an election but everything still looks the same, and a hurricane tore through my city, where a lot of things don’t look the same.

After staging a self-intervention that happened to occur when I ran out of things to watch, I decided to come clean in lieu of getting clean. These have been the objects of my addiction for the last...

So Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes are kaput. This is the way a Hollywood marriage ends – not with a bang but a whimper?

Isn’t there something disappointing about the non-reaction to a megawatt relationship ending especially when the inception of this union played out so dramatically in front of us?

Even those of you who couldn’t care less about celebrity relationships know exactly what I mean if I use the word couch in relation to Cruise and Holmes. How can anyone forget the whirlwind courtship montage -- the barrage of red carpet kisses, the proposal on top of the Eiffel Tower, the wedding at the Italian castle and of course, the most eagerly awaited (non Jolie-Pitt) birth of all time, baby Suri.

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I’ll admit it, I was worried. Were we going to be able to pick up where we left off? After all, a year and a half is a TV eternity.

After watching the first three episodes, I started to think that maybe things had changed. Could it be that the magic was gone and that four glorious seasons were all we were going to have together? But then I watched episodes four and five.

It’s not over. "Mad Men," I still love you.

There’s a certain pattern to Matthew Weiner’s approach – a slow, seemingly meandering build, a few tossed in surprises towards the middle and then a dramatic, almost rushed end to the season....