“Rectify,” a new series about a Georgia man who is freed after 19 years on death row, traces the history of the Sundance Channel in reverse. For about an episode and a quarter, it’s very good television. But over the rest of its six-episode first season it resembles nothing so much as a bad indie film, the kind of slow and tepid bummer that used to fill Sundance’s late nights and afternoons when it was a full-time movie channel. James Minchin III/Sundance Channel Rectify Aden Young stars in this new series on Sundance , Monday night at 9 and 10, [...]
“Lovestruck: The Musical” might attract the “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman” demographic because Jane Seymour is one of its stars and it’s on a network with the word “family” in its name. But any such viewers are likely to be rushing for the remote when the movie reaches a bachelorette-party scene in which young women compare notes on when and how they lost their virginity. A sortable calendar of noteworthy cultural events in the New York region, selected by Times critics. Of course, other viewers may be abandoning this made-for-TV muddle, Sunday night on ABC Family, just because it’s not very [...]
Churchill called the thousands of puzzle-solvers and clerks who spent World War II at Bletchley Park secretly breaking enemy codes “my geese that laid the golden eggs and never cackled.” And almost as extraordinary as their work was — some say the decryption of Germany’s Enigma machine hastened the end of the war by as many as two years — their loyalty to the Official Secrets Act is almost impossible to fathom. Codebreakers kept silent about their war effort for decades; the British government didn’t officially recognize Bletchley Park veterans until 2009. Nowadays, it is still possible to read newspaper [...]