Review: Doctor Who Christmas Special

Posted on December 27, 2012 by s.e. smith

Christmas Day brought about the start of a new era on Doctor Who, as the Doctor himself reminded us while we met the woman destined to be his new companion along with the revamped TARDIS and title sequence. It might have felt a little abrupt to wipe the slate clean that way after the fall of the Ponds, but instead it felt more like turning over a new leaf, a reminder that change is constant when you’re a Time Lord, and each change is the start of the next great adventure, rather than something to be mourned.

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Revisiting 666 Park Avenue

Posted on November 19, 2012 by s.e. smith

I find myself oddly mermerised by ABC’s 666 Park Avenue, something I really wasn’t expecting when I first started watching the series. The pilot suggested a run of the mill horror drama that might have a few interesting elements, but ultimately wouldn’t hold my interest very long; this kind of television is not really what I look for, usually. I tend to prefer complex, slow dramas that rely more on subtle shifts of tone and plot to develop the story and the characters while keeping me engaged as a viewer, rather than more showy productions.

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“We’re Done When I Say So”: Breaking Bad’s Dark Final Season

Posted on July 18, 2012 by s.e. smith

Despite AMC’s rivalry with Dish Network, Breaking Bad netted a record number of viewers for its hotly-anticipated season five premiere. This final season of the hit drama will contain two eight episode sections, and there’s a great deal to pack into these 16 episodes if the creators intend to wrap up the story. It’s unlikely creator Vince Gilligan will leave everything neatly packaged in a bow, though, because so much of Breaking Bad is about subtlety and ambiguity.

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Who is HBO’s Girls For?

Posted on April 18, 2012 by s.e. smith

Watching HBO’s Girls felt like standing around at a party with a bunch of people trading insider jokes I don’t get; at the same time that I was being welcomed as part of the club, it was obvious that I was not one of them. Girls is definitely for someone, but I didn’t get the impression that this someone was me. The question is: who is Girls for?

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Good, Clean, Bitchy Fun: Don’t Trust the B– In Apartment 23

Posted on April 7, 2012 by s.e. smith

ABC’s Don’t Trust the B— In Apartment 23 premieres on 11 April as a midseason replacement. It would seem that the network is going both light and swear-avoidant with its midseason pickups; both Apartment 23 and GCB are comedies that have gone through multiple name changes to avoid using the dreaded B-word. This half-hour situation comedy has all of the bark and none of the bite, through. Unlike GCB, it’s not a biting satire on modern society, not is it intended to be.

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Spartacus: Bloody Great or Just Plain Bloody?

Posted on February 1, 2012 by s.e. smith

After a bit of a production delay, Spartacus: Vengeance kicked off the season with a bloodbath from beginning to end, interspersed with the occasional soft-core porn. The Starz adaptation of the Spartacus legend is already noted for its unique production style, meant to evoke the film 300, with an added note of ultraviolence that wasn’t possible in a production intended for theatre audiences. Producers of the series have embraced and fed the apparent desire for blood on the part of cable consumers with a series sopped in nonstop death; viewers either become inured within minutes, or presumably turn the television off out of disgust, depending on their tastes.

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Review: Doctor Who Christmas special

Posted on December 26, 2011 by s.e. smith

Doctor Who fans around the world were far more interested in the landfall of this year’s Christmas special, ‘The Doctor, the Widow, and the Wardrobe,’ than they were in the progress of NORAD Tracks Santa, which is incidentally perhaps one of the best defense-related uses of my tax dollars I can possibly imagine. They gathered ‘round their televisions (or torrents) with glee, made sure their beverage containers were fully supplied, and prepared to settle in for a dose of winter magic on the BBC. They were not disappointed.

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ABC’s Revenge: Class War Onscreen

Posted on November 29, 2011 by s.e. smith

ABC’s Revenge is bringing some delicious class commentary to the table in what would otherwise be a fairly conventional (though still enjoyable!) television drama. Rich girl goes to The Hamptons to get revenge on the people who orchestrated her father’s downfall isn’t exactly the stuff of which radical television is made, no, not even when she’s swapping identities with someone she met in juvenile detention. Where things start to get interesting in the world of Emily Thorne and the people she’s targeted for revenge is that members of the servant class are not relegated to the background, but instead play fully realised roles in the narrative. Important roles, at that.

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NBC’s Prime Suspect: Catch It While You Can

Posted on November 26, 2011 by s.e. smith

NBC’s Prime Suspect is yet another US remake of a UK television show, which makes you expect that it’s going to be absolutely dreadful, since the US seems to have some issues with translation. For this reason alone, I largely ignored its existence for the first few weeks, until Lesley Kinzel wrote about the show to urge people to start watching. Then I had a Prime Suspect marathon and watched all the season’s episodes in a single night, and spent the next week waiting impatiently for another installment.

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Grimm: A cult series in the making?

Posted on November 1, 2011 by s.e. smith

NBC’s darkly atmospheric Grimm premiered last Friday, blending the good old fashioned police procedural with the legends of the Brothers Grimm in a world that one of the characters assures us ‘is no fairytale.’ It’s unfortunate to see the show shunted into the infamous Friday night death slot, as this suggests the network may not be ready to give it a fair chance, and it’s a series well worth an opportunity to shine. Unlike a lot of what’s airing right now, Grimm is fun. If there’s only room for one fairy tale retelling on television, Grimm definitely wins out over Once Upon A Time.

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