And now for something completely different. In 1969, five overeducated British comics and an American illustrator ambushed the BBC with the strangest show in British history. How they got on the air is anyone’s guess (rumors of blackmail were quickly hushed, though the Python’s penchant for sheep gags… but enough of speculation), but their irreverent […]
Veronica Mars launched in 2004 as a youth-skewing high school version of the American detective drama: Nancy Drew meets Raymond Chandler in a beachside suburb of big city noir. It ran for three seasons, followed by a disappointing 2014 Kickstarter-funded feature film—but neither creator Rob Thomas nor the fans were ready to let go of the […]
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – Seasons 1-7 (1993-1999), the generation after Next, began its seven season tour of duty aboard a rust-bucket space station in 1993, while The Next Generation was still flying strong. In fact, Enterprise Captain Picard makes an appearance in tumultuous the two part opening, “Emissary,” to convince Commander Sisko (Avery […]
Stargate Universe: Seasons 1-2 (2009-2011) – For a time, the Stargate franchise was the Star Trek universe of the SyFy channel. I confess I was never a fan of the original Stargate SG-1 series (which began on Showtime and then moved to SyFy) and never got past the first episodes of Stargate: Atlantis but Stargate […]
Farscape (1999-2003), created by Rockne S. O’Bannon (who wrote the cult science fiction film Alien Nation) for the Sci-Fi channel (long before they rebranded themselves SyFy), is like no other SF show on TV. If you missed the trip through the wormhole, here’s the gist of it: Ben Browder is John Crichton, an American astronaut […]
Killing Eve: Season 1 (2018), BBC America’s clever, compelling, mordantly funny spy thriller, is the network’s first must-see original series since Orphan Black and is even more fun. Sandra Oh earned an Emmy nomination for her performance as Eve Polastri, a low-level security agent for MI-5 who has traced a series of unsolved assassination to […]
Firefly: Complete Series, Joss Whedon’s short-lived foray into sci-fi television, was (purposely or not) sabotaged by Fox when it finally premiered on network TV. The 14 episodes (that’s counting the movie-length pilot as a single episode) were rearranged by the network brain trust, completely disrupting the carefully constructed narrative that he wove through the episodes […]
Lifetime Channel original series The Witches of East End (2013-2014) is not a remake of The Witches of Eastwick, mind you (creator Maggie Friedman already tried that) but a femme-centered supernatural series centered on a family of witches beset by a curse. Joanna Beauchamp (Julia Ormond) is immortal and doomed to watch her two daughters […]
“I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered. I am my own man.” There are those who proclaim The Prisoner: Complete Series (1968), Patrick McGoohan’s cerebral spy show and portrait of personal freedom as an existential prison, the greatest TV show of all time. I won’t argue the point. His insidiously […]
Before Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, director Edgar Wright and actor/writer Simon Pegg collaborated with actress/writer Jessica Hynes on the cult BBC sitcom Spaced (1999-2000, TV-14). Pegg and Hynes play Tim and Daisy, slackers who meet at a pub and decide to pose as a couple to get a great flat. They’re not […]
