HBO has a knack for luring notable filmmakers – as in, people who are perfectly capable of sustaining a successful career in feature films if they want – to the land of television. For its latest half-hour comedy series ‘Family Tree’, the network nabbed mockumentary king Christopher Guest. Based on the first episode, the pairing is a very comfortable fit.
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Despite its crappy made-for-TV movies, endless pro-wrestling and other idiotic programming, I have to admit that I’ve liked a few of the Syfy channel’s original series. ‘Haven’ is pretty fun, and (before it got canceled) ‘Alphas’ was a good show. Of course, the ‘Battlestar Galactica’ reboot aired there too. I’m inclined to give the network some small benefit of the doubt. Last Monday, Syfy premiered perhaps its most ambitious new series yet, the post-apocalyptic alien invasion drama ‘Defiance’, from ‘Farscape’ creator Rockne S. O’Bannon. Because it debuted with a two-hour premiere (who has time for that?), I wasn’t able to catch up with the pilot episode until this weekend. Let’s give it a look now to see if we should bother to record the next new episode tonight.
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Created by David S. Goyer, the writer behind Christopher Nolan’s ‘Dark Knight’ trilogy, ‘Da Vinci’s Demons’ could have very well been entitled ‘Da Vinci Begins’. The show features a young version of the famed painter/inventor/mathematician (to name just a few talents) and tries to weave a mythological story behind the man we know from history. The pilot episode, entitled ‘The Hanged Man’, has just debuted on Starz, with seven more episodes scheduled to air in the first season.
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As if one new TV series designed as a prequel/reboot of an iconic serial killer movie franchise (A&E’s ‘Bates Motel‘) weren’t enough, NBC attempts to pull off the same trick with ‘Hannibal’, which brings cinema’s most infamous evil psychiatrist, Hannibal Lecter, to the small screen. Given NBC’s track record, and the inherent limitations that any major broadcast network faces with material this dark, I’ll be honest that I went into the show with pretty low expectations. Color me surprised, therefore, that last Thursday’s pilot episode was pretty damn terrific.
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The funny thing about HBO’s ‘Game of Thrones’, which returned for its third season on Sunday, is that this is one of the few shows on television where an episode can go by in which basically nothing at all happens, and yet fans will still regard it as “epic” and “awe inspiring.”
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It’s been a long, timey-wimey road, but here we are. After dying twice, Clara Oswald has finally come to stay. Perhaps because of how complicated a path this storyline has taken, show-runner Steven Moffat kept Saturday’s ‘Doctor Who’ episode, called ‘The Bells of St. John’, rather low key. However, while it doesn’t have much action, the episode provides plenty of good times and character setup.
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Although the A&E network’s new drama series ‘Bates Motel’, a modern-day reboot of Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho’, doesn’t officially premiere until this evening, many cable networks have offered a preview of the pilot episode On Demand for the past several days. Intrigued by the concept, I decided to get a jump start on this one early. [Warning: This post will contain spoilers for tonight's episode.]
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Wait’ll you hear the pitch for CBS’ new detective series ‘Golden Boy’. See, we’ve got these two cops, but they’re totally mismatched buddies. One is black, but the other’s white, kind of like salt and pepper. One is young and brash, and the other’s old and grizzled. Crazy, right? Why has nobody done this before?
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Here we are in March already, and the networks are still rolling out mid-season replacements. ABC has promoted the hell out of its new thriller series ‘Red Widow’, which debuted with a two-hour premiere on Sunday. Does the show live up to the hype and the network’s faith in it?
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We’ve waited months for the Daryl versus Merle beat-down. We were left hanging as the two brothers were made to fight to the death in front of a crowd of bloodthirsty Woodburians. It’s a good thing that the second half of this ‘Walking Dead’ season picks right up where the first half left off.
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