The first episode of Syfy’s new makeup and CGI fest Defiance was not as good as I had hoped, but not as bad as I had feared. We start of with a family sitting is green field when they are shocked by an alien invasion. This scene is taken almost frame for frame from the last season of Fringe. We then fast forward 33 years to a world that has been terraformed, but not enough to kill off the original population, just enough to add silly looking CGI plants all over the place. We are told that the invasion reached…
Category: tv review
Mr Selfridge
Mr Selfridge tells the story of a rich man who can’t keep it in his pants. There’s more to the story than that, of course, but our hero’s choices tend to effect all of those around him. Mr Selfridge is a brassy American opening up a high end department store in London during the waning hours of the British Empire under King Edward. There’s the usual Upstairs/Downstairs business of following around the rich owner and a select group of the poor working stiffs trudging away in his giant store. All manner of famous and important people come to Selfridge’s, including…
BBC’s In The Flesh
It was only a matter of time before Zombies joined the ranks of Werewolves and Vampires as merely misunderstood victims of an unfortunate accident. In The Flesh tells the story of a recovering Zombie, a victim of Partially Dead Syndrome, who needs a daily shot of medication to keep his brain-eating tendencies at bay. The local chapter of the neighborhood watch wants to drag him into the street and kill him. And he keeps having these flashbacks of the last people killed and another zombie he used to hunt with. All in all, he’s having a difficult time adjusting. In…
HBO’s Girls
Girls is the story of a bunch of 20 something lowlifes living in New York and fucking anything that moves. Since the show is only thirty minutes long these isn’t a lot of room for silly things like character development or motivation. Our mostly struggling lot met someone, have sex with them, and than wonder-hmm, who was that, anyway? when they wake up somewhere strange. These are all unlikeable people doing unlikable things-but that hasn’t stopped Two and Half Men from running for a zillion years. The difference with Girls is that it wants to be the Art House stupid…
Zero Hour
In my lifelong quest to watch just about every show that is canceled after a handful of episodes, I just watched Zero Hour. After setting a record for lowest ratings for a new series on ABC-due to the brain-trust at ABC putting it on against The Big Bang Theory & Two and a Half Men on CBS and American Idol on Fox-the odds of finding the Lost Ark of the Covenant may be better than the odds of this show making it. Like Do No Harm and Monday Mornings, Zero Hour has a meaningless title-it also has a little too…
Monday Mornings
Monday Mornings is yet another ensemble medical show with a nice mixture of race, gender, and accents. I’ve had a longing for a medical mystery show ever since House went on his never ending road trip. TNT’s Monday Mornings centers on weekly meetings where one of the Doctors is told what an idiot he/she is because they screwed up some case or another. Some of these cases we see, others we only hear about in the meeting. We watch the Doctors as they interact with patients and each other, and have all kinds of conflicts over pretty much everything. After…
Battlestar Galactica:Blood and Chrome
I was never a huge fan of Sci-Fi’s remake of Battlestar Galctica, but I did watch it and I did come to like most of the characters. The spin-off series, Caprica, about the worlds before Cyclons never made much sense. Why should anyone care that some idiot billionaire make the Cyclons? And how did it make any sense that his daughter’s soul was the cause of all their problems? Battlestar Galactica:Blood and Chrome was a damned good pilot. It had a lot of action, a lot of foreshadowing, and I have no problem with following around a young William Adama…
The Americans on FX
In 1981 life is not as easy as it once was for a couple of KGB spies. Reagan is rattling sabers and threatening the Soviet Union as it hasn’t been threaten since the Cuban Missile Crisis. On a more personal level, other KGB agents are defecting to America and making a lot of money for doing so. One such traitor to the Mother Country causes problems for our KGB heroes. Also in 1981 a movie called Das Boot came out. It was the story of the heroic crew of a Nazi U-boat doing it’s best to sink Allied ships…
Fringe Wobbles to an End
I’m not a big fan of series finales, but they do seem to be one last chance for the network to snag a few viewers. I hated the last MASH, didn’t much care for the Borg destroying end of Voyager, and the whole last season of LOST was pretty pointless. Fringe started out as a kind of knock off of The X-files, we had a team of people of looked into odd things happening. Then we veered off into this parallel universe and I sort of lost interest as the story became larger and stranger and made less and less…
BBC’s Ripper Street
Last year BBC America had it’s own program called Copper. It’s a good show about cops and killers in New York in 1864. Ripper Street is a BBC show that looks and feels a bit like Copper. It’s the story of cops, whores, and steam-punk CSI. The BBC is a bit more graphic in it’s display of mutilated bodies than CSI and the high tech used to solve crimes is a microscope instead of a laser. Like most cop shows we have a Crime, a Detective, and a Solution. The window dressing is Victorian London, Whitechapel to be specific. The…