TV – Page 11 – Dangerous Universe

Direct Beam Comms #145

Comic Books, Direct Beam Comms, Feature, TVSeptember 9, 2018September 8, 2018

TV

Mayans MC

We seem to be living in the age of the spin-off series. If it’s not the NCIS… variety on CBS then it’s the Chicago… series on NBC. That’s not to say there’s not a few spin-offs on cable and streaming too. There, you’ve got things like Better Call Saul and Fear the Walking Dead on AMC which are spin-offs from Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead respectively and Star Trek: Discovery on CBS All Access which is a spin-off from the Star Trek TV franchise.

There are really two ways that TV creators can handle the spin-off. The first way is to essentially remake the original show, but put it in a different local with different characters. The stories essentially remain the same, it’s just the small details that change. Most spin-offs are like this from NCIS… to Fear the Walking Dead and even most of the Star Trek series too.

The second way is to take characters and situations from the original series and place them into a new story which Better Call Saul is a great example of.

The new series Mayans MC on FX is a spin-off of Sons of Anarchy, which is kind’a, but not quite, a spin-off of The Shield. The Mayans are a California based motorcycle gang, like the Sons of Anarchy motorcycle gang, except the Mayans are latino.

To me, Mayans MC feels like a continuation of Sons of Anarchy in that the same people are working on the show behind the scenes, namely Sons of Anarchy creator Kurt Sutter, and both deal with essentially the same things — bad guys riding motorcycles doing bad things. Now, maybe Mayans MC will diverge from Sons of Anarchy in some way at some point in the future — though I doubt it.

I could never get into Sons of Anarchy since everything on the show was so heightened. On the one hand, the show seemed to be set in a California very much like our own but on the other there were machine gun shootouts every day, murders and drug and gun running that would’ve been national news headlines with the FBI busting up the gang in a matter of weeks. And after one episode I think Mayans MC will probably just like Sons of Anarchy in that regard.

I think that fans of Sons of Anarchy are probably going to love Mayans MC but I’d be surprised if the show brings in any new fans.

The Purge

I am a The Purge virgin.

So far, there’s been four The Purge movies that have collectively made over $400 million at the box office. Yet I, the self-described “movie nerd” who digs horror flicks, hasn’t seen a single one of them. I think the reason is simply because I generally don’t see horror movies in the theater, and The Purge movies never turned up on any of the cable channels I subscribed to. So I come at the new ten episode The Purge mini-series on USA with fresh eyes.

Honestly, I think seeing some of the movies would’ve helped understanding what was all going on in the TV series. I’m assuming all explanation about what the purge is was described in them, but for the TV show all we get is a little on-screen announcement of what’s about to happen. Why the purge exists in the first place or why people let this happen… we don’t get any explanation about that whatsoever.

There are essentially three stories in The Purge TV series. The first of which is of a brother searching for his sister who’s joined a cult who’s goal is to get purged. There’s also a couple spending the evening at a swanky party riding out the purge. And there’s a business woman doing sneaky things of which we’re not quite sure of during the purge.

The first episode was very much the first chapter in a longer story, and as such it was a bit hard to make heads or tails of how the season would play out. I suspect that The Purge TV series is going to be a ten hours long story about a purge, which the movies seem to be able to do in an hour an a half.

Watching the first episode I kept thinking that I was missing something. That people who had seen all the movies were going, “Oh, this is just like that part from the second movie!” Or, “This guy’s doing that thing because of what happened in the first one.” Or, “This character’s just like that other character from the fourth one.” I, on the other hand, was a bit confused. I’m sure that if I watched the whole series I’d be less confused at the end, I’m just not sure if I’m willing to invest ten hours in it.

The whole idea of a The Purge TV series at this point is a bit odd. The movies are still making money, In fact, the last The Purge movie was released just a few weeks ago in theaters and was the highest grossing movie of the bunch. Maybe it’s because The Purge movies are more of an anthology series of films rather than a continuous series means that splitting off to a TV series makes sense? But I don’t get it.

Comics

Absolute Batman: The Killing Joke

A 30th anniversary edition of the seminal work by Alan Moore and Brian Bolland gets the “absolute” treatment in a new edition from DC this week. At just 64 pages the nearly $50 retail seems a bit high to me, then again there are the standard editions out there of The Killing Joke that can be bought new for $15.

This edition collects BATMAN: THE KILLING JOKE with Bolland’s reimagined colors and the original edition’s colors, a story from BATMAN BLACK AND WHITE and Joker artwork from Bolland’s long career with DC, including never-before-published artwork.

Movies

Halloween trailer

What To Watch This Week

Sunday

The Deuce
The second season of the critically acclaimed HBO series The Deuce begins airing this week. The first season took place in an early 1970s era NYC where prostitution and vice was rampant, while the second is set in 1978 where, I’m assuming, prostitution and vice were just as rampant.

Rel
The first new network show of the 2018–2019 is Rel also debuts this week. I was excited about this one when I first heard about it, I really liked the actor Lil Rel on The Carmichael Show, but all the commercials I’ve seen about Rel makes it look like a stinker to me.

Monday-Friday

The X-Files
Starting Monday at 6AM BBC America will be airing five solid days of The X-Files in what looks like episode order starting with the first one and including airings of both feature films too.

Wednesday

American Horror Story: Apocalypse
The eighth (!!!) season of American Horror story looks to deal with the, well, apocalypse on FX. I really dug the first season of this show but, because I think it’s so stylized, haven’t been able to get into later seasons of the show since.

Clear and Present Danger
HDNET MOVIES will be airing Harrison Ford’s final appearance as Jack Ryan in this thriller from 1994 today.

Friday

The Predator
What looks to be one heck of a ride, the fourth film in the sci-fi horror genera The Predator opens in theaters this Friday.

Solo: A Star Wars Story
Solo: A Star Wars Story was the one of the movies I had the most fun at this summer and is available for digital download Friday. This one is a must-buy for me, if to see the deleted scenes alone.

Cool Sites

Stellarium Web Online Planetarium: Stellarium Web is a free open source planetarium running in your web browser. It shows a realistic sky, just like what you see with the naked eye, binoculars or a telescope.

The Reading & Watch List

Cool Movie Posters of the Week

Solo: A Star Wars Story Poster
The Predator poster

2018/2019 TV preview

Feature, TVSeptember 7, 2018August 25, 2018

It’s going to be a long fall. Usually, when the weather starts changing and the nights start getting longer I look forward to staying in and checking out the new series on TV. But this fall isn’t looking too good. Sure, there’s a few things to watch, but not enough for my taste and only a handful of series on network TV. The template the networks have taken for the 2018–2019 season is to debut a lot of lame-looking sitcoms and tired cop/hospital/lawyer procedural dramas that all seem to have been done before.

The good news is it isn’t all bad, there are quite a few new series on cable and streaming services to look forward to. The bad news is that most of these series don’t start airing until much later in the year and even then quite a few not until 2019. Oh well, there’s always horror movies marathons come Halloween to fill the gap.

New series

On FOX the vampire thriller The Passage starring Mark-Paul Gosselaar is set to put a lot of stakes into the hearts of the undead ghouls in the one network show I want to check out in January. While the novel the series is based on took place mostly in a future overrun with the blood-suckers, this new TV show looks to moved things back a bit to the pre-apocalypse when these vampires were just being created in the lab.

Manifest on NBC about a plane that takes off one day but lands five years later with everyone on board not realizing the time-jump departs September 24. I think I’d be more looking forward to this show if it didn’t look like a clone of many other series before it, especially Lost.

Matt Weiner’s follow-up series to his uber-successful Mad Man entitled The Romanoffs is set to debut on Amazon Prime October 12. I’m not totally sure how this one’s going to go, but reportedly this anthology series will focus on characters who think they’re related to the Russian royal family the Romanoffs.

After the animated Star Wars: Rebels series on Disney ended earlier this year comes the new series Star Wars Resistance also on Disney October 13. This one is set to take place around the time of the current film series but before the events of Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

SYFY is once again trying their hand at traditional sci-fi series with Nightflyers, based on the George R.R. Martin book of the same name. Not at all looking to cash in on Martin’s name and the fact that he wrote Game of Thrones and therefore SYFY can promote Nightflyers as such, here, it’s the near-future and as the ship of the same name explores the solar system it uncovers something that threatens everyone abroad the ship. Nightflyers does sound a bit derivative of things like Event Horizon (1997), except that the novel the series is based on was written way back in 1980.

The Netflix series Another Life has an astronaut (Katie Sackhoff) leading a mission to find the origins of an alien artifact, but this artifact might be deadly and the mission one-way. Maybe the cast of Another Life and Nightflyers can team-up since their two shows sure sound a lot alike.

The iconic comic book mini-series then film Watchmen will become an HBO TV series of the same name sometime next year. There’s not a whole lot that is known about this one, other than apparently it doesn’t totally follow the story of the comics but instead takes place in the same comic universe.

And as for new shows this season, that’s about it. I’m sure I’ll checkout some of those lame-looking sitcoms hoping to be surprised with something interesting, but I’m not holding my breath.

Returning series

Fortunately, there are a few returning shows this year to look forward to.

Returning network shows that will premiere this year include The Good Place, the sitcom about a group of people lead by Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen Bell) stuck between heaven and hell returns to NBC on Thursday, September 27 and The Orville on FOX that is Seth MacFarlane’s love-letter to the classic series Star Trek squeaks into 2018 with its second season debut on Sunday, December 30.

Two Netflix superhero series return this year too. First up is the second season of Iron Fist which drops September 7. Then, sometime later in the year, comes a third season of Daredevil who appear last season on The Defenders. I honestly don’t really remember what happened in the second season of Daredevil since it aired more than a year and a half ago at this point. Weren’t there lots of ninjas?

Doctor Who returns for its 11th season of the modern incarnation of the character October on BBC America here in the US. The big news with Doctor Who is that after 55 years and more than a dozen versions of the character, this time the lead will be played by a woman, Jodie Whittaker. Personally, I still like Peter Davison’s version of the character the best, no matter how many Matt Smith fans out there I have to go all “Sharks and Jets” with.

The Sundance series Deutschland 86 will return for its second season October 25. The first season was about an East German spy played by Jonas Nay infiltrating West Germany in order to steal military secrets and had tinges of The Americans to it. The third season looks to pick up three years from there and just a few years before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The British sci-fi series Black Mirror will serve up more creepy goodness sometime this winter on Netflix. Even after four seasons I still really dig this show and I think it’s partially because even though there’s already been those four seasons, Black Mirror is an anthology series so each episode is a story unto itself. And to date there’s been just 20 episodes of it produced in total, which is less than how many episodes of a modern network series are produced in just one year, so the show is still fresh.

A second season of Star Trek: Discovery returns to CBS All Access this January. The first season of Discovery got good enough reviews from Trek fans, if those were the only people seemingly watching it, and the second season looks to bring in the big guns to the show, namely the USS Enterprise along with its Captain Kir… errr… I mean Captain Pike (Anson Mount).

The Netflix phenomenon Stranger Things will return for its third season summer of 2019. Last time we left the plucky kids of Hawkins, Indiana seemingly having beaten the evil forces that had emerged from the “upside down,” but if other sci-fi shows have taught me anything it’s that every victory against evil is just temporary. Until the final episode of the series, that is.

My favorite superhero series The Punisher also returns to Netflix sometime next year. The first season ended with Frank Castle (Jon Bernthal) having totally accepted the mantel of the skull wearing vigilante by blasting all the baddies to smithereens with the second season looking to pick up from there.

A surprise to me this spring was just how much I dug the first season of the AMC series The Terror about an ill-fated expedition to the Arctic the 19th century. The second season will reportedly have a new story and focus on Japanese Americans during the second world war since the first season ended with pretty much the entire cast dead. That’s not a spoiler since the first season was based on a real-life expedition that ended in tragedy and I’m not sure you can consider a historical fact a “spoiler.”

A third season of the critical darling then critically derided True Detective will debut on HBO sometime next year four years after the second. The third season looks to “one-up” the first since that told a story over two time periods by telling a story over three.

Shows that I think will premiere sometime in 2019

My favorite series of the 2017–2018 season , Mindhunter is set to begin its second season on Netflix next year. This show about the creation of a serial killer hunting unit within the FBI in the 1970s was one of the most well-written and acted shows on TV in recent memory. Plus the series is co-produced and had a few episodes directed by David Fincher which is always a good thing.

The sci-fi drama The Expanse will leave its home of three seasons on SYFY and move over to the Amazon Prime service next year. The third season ended on a high note, so I’m extremely excited to see where the show will go from here.

Another sci-fi drama, this time Westworld, is set to debut its third season on HBO. Now, I won’t even pretend to say that I understood what all happened in the second season finale of Westworld, I don’t think it was quite on the level of the final episode of Lost or anything, but I suppose time will tell.

Previous Previews

Alex Toth Space Ghost concept art

TVSeptember 5, 2018August 28, 2018

Direct Beam Comms #144

Direct Beam Comms, Feature, TVSeptember 2, 2018September 1, 2018

TV

Jack Ryan

I have this certain rule about movies. That rule, if I ever see that there’s a scene in a movie where a character is casually walking away from an explosion happening right behind them, I won’t see that movie. The first time someone walked away like that in a movie it was probably pretty cool, but over the years it’s become so lame it’s cliched and is an indication of the overall quality of said movie. I really haven’t had to worry about this with TV series since television budgets don’t really allow for effects like this, until recently. That was when I saw one of the posters for the Amazon Prime Jack Ryan TV series. There, the title character is walking away from an explosion that’s so immense it’s occurring over the horizon that would have to be so gigantic it would have been atomic in size.

And does Jack Ryan notice what’s happening behind him? Not at all.

Ultimately, I decided to give Jack Ryan a pass because, as Pee-Wee Herman so eloquently put it, “I’m a rule-breaker…”

The character of Jack Ryan was originally created by author Tom Clancy in his novel The Hunt for Red October (1984) and has been a feature of many books since. On screen Alec Baldwin appeared as Ryan in the movie version of that novel, then Harrison Ford in two films, Ben Affleck one and Chris Pine one too.

I’m a fan of the Jack Ryan character in general so I come at this new TV version as such, and as a fan I’m on the lookout for certain things. The history of the character is that he’s an analyst for the CIA who’s not a guy who goes out into the field to do things, he’s more comfortable tabulating statistics behind a desk. What happens is that Ryan’s thrust into situations he’s not prepared for — be it trying to find out if a Soviet submarine captain wants to nuke the US or defect or stop a terrorist attack his family is at the center to name a few.

With something like The Hunt for Red October, the only really Ryan’s even in the mix is because he’s one of the few people who knows of the special submarine in that movie and the background of its captain. And since he’s the only one with any knowledge whatsoever, he’s sent to try and figure things out. It’s not because he an expert marksman, has six-pack abs or knows eight silent ways to kill a man that he’s chosen to go, it’s because he has a little knowledge but still knows more than anyone else.

Wendell Pierce and John Krasinski in Jack Ryan

I don’t need much from the latest Jack Ryan TV series from Amazon, except the character should be somewhat true to this. Otherwise, if he’s going to be a Jason Bourne/James Bond/Captain America superhero, why make a Jack Ryan thing and not just make up a brand new character? I say let Jack Ryan be Jack Ryan.

Now comes the TV series version of the character in Jack Ryan, this time starring John Krasinski in the title role.

This version of of the character is more in-line with the Affleck one, they’re both young, single and brash. This Jack Ryan uncovers large sums of money moving through accounts overseas, and when it turns out Ryan is onto something he’s put onto a plane by the head of his department James Greer (Wendell Pierce) where the two end up at a CIA black site in order to interrogate suspects in moving the money. But there Ryan is thrust into being a man of action when the compound is attacked by terrorists in order to free these suspects.

I thought Jack Ryan was interesting, if it wasn’t quite strong enough to hook me just yet. The characters are thinly drawn — Ryan’s biggest characteristic is that he cares too much and Greer is one-note gruff. I also thought the plot was a sort of mish-mash of things that had come before like Zero Dark Thirty and 24.

I wish we could get a Jack Ryan TV series that was a little closer to the characters from the Baldwin/Ford films, but that doesn’t seem to be in the cards these days. It seems as if every character like that on TV or in the movies has to have almost superhuman abilities, they are a perfect physical specimen, never get tired and are never afraid. Which is how I felt about this latest Jack Ryan character. That character didn’t feel like a character, he felt like a real guy and I think the series would’ve been better if he did.

Can I also mention I couldn’t tell if the audio mix on the first episode was off or if it was something about my setup? I practically had to turn my TV speakers up to 11 to hear it when anyone was talking. This could’ve also been a stylistic choice to have everyone mumble and talk under their breath which was a bit maddening. It would be nice to hear what people are speaking now and then to catch what’s all going on.

True Detective season 3 commercial

Movies

First Man trailer

What To Watch This Week

Tuesday

Mayans MC
The spin-off series of the super-successful FX series Sons of Anarchy about a group of terrorist motorcycle riders running guns, murdering people and selling drugs in small-town California debuts this week.

The Purge
A ten episode mini-series based on the The Purge film franchise begins Tuesday on USA. Since The Purge is now a TV series, does that mean there’ll be no more The Purge movies? We couldn’t be that lucky.

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
One of the biggest hits of the summer is set to be released on digital download this week.

Friday

Iron Fist
A second season to the Marvel series begins this Friday on Netflix. The first one got ugly reviews so here’s hoping the second does a bit better.

The Reading & Watch List

Cool Movie & TV Posters of the Week

Mayans MC poster
Overlord poster

Direct Beam Comms #143

Direct Beam Comms, Feature, Movies, TVAugust 26, 2018August 25, 2018

Movies

While the summer movie season officially ends this week, unofficially it petered-out a few weeks back. Ever year when the season ends I’m surprised as to how fast it went by, even though way back in May I’m always thinking that it’ll be done before I know it.

I saw a few movies this summer; Avengers: Infinity War, Deadpool 2, Solo: A Star Wars Story and Mission: Impossible – Fallout and for the most part enjoyed them all. Though, honestly, I really don’t go to movies I don’t think I’m not going to enjoy, I tend to save those for home. It’s pretty rare that I get stuck inside a movie theater these days watching something I don’t like. It does happen, but not as much as it used to. At home I feel comfortable turning movies off if they’re going south but I don’t feel comfortable walking out of a theater. I think the closest I ever came to walking out was during the movie Drive.

Looking at the winners this summer, it’s no surprise that Avengers: Infinity War came out on top, but I was surprised to see that Incredibles 2 was right behind with Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom in third. In fact, Incredibles 2 is now the highest grossing Pixar movie of all time, in second, Finding Dory. I would’ve never guessed that.

Most interesting was that while most Star Wars news articles I read this summer were how Solo: A Star Wars Story was a flop, it actually didn’t do too badly at the box office coming in right behind Deadpool 2 but ahead of Mission: Impossible – Fallout. That movie got a lot of stories written about it how it was the biggest M:I movie to date and a career rejuvenator for Tom Cruise. And Solo did better than M:I. I suppose, though, when expectations for a Star Wars movie are so high that only it earning a billion dollars at the box office are considered a success these days, that when a movie makes only $215 million it’s a flop.

What To Watch This Week

Swamp Thing – Tuesday
The answer to two trivia questions aires this week on Sony Movie Channel. Those questions? What is the second DC character to get his own film and, Wes Craven directed a movie based on a DC comic book, what was the name of that film?

Jack Ryan – Friday
Amazon Prime debuts their series Jack Ryan based on the character from the novels of Tom Clancy like The Hunt for Red October and Sum of All Fears — though the TV series isn’t directly based on any of Clancy’s novels. John Krasinski becomes the fifth person to play the title role after Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford, Ben Affleck and Chris Pine did so on the big screen.

Them! & The Time Machine – Saturday
This Saturday afternoon TCM airs a double sci-fi horror feature. First up is Them!, one of the earliest giant monster movies that, along with Godzilla, helped kick off a craze that’s still going well today. Then comes the 1960 movie adaptation of the H. G. Wells novel The Time Machine.

Books

Jack Ryan

Oddly enough, John Krasinski is now the face of Jack Ryan on the covers of the Tom Clancy novels that featured that character. If they were going to use Krasinski here, I just wish there were some variety since all these photos look like they were taken at the same boring old photo shoot.

Cool Sites

Pulling a rabbit out of a hat – Stories from Roger Rabbit

The Reading & Watch List

Rumor Control

Every year I write 24 articles for the Fort Wayne Reader, and every year it can be tough coming up with things to write. I’ve been doing that for 14 years now so I’ve covered a lot of subjects. But the last few years coming up with things to write have been, dare I say, easy. Or if not easy that easier. I think it’s because over those last few years there have been so many sci-fi and horror movies and TV series out there to write about. In fact, if I wrote about things I thought was crap as well as things I liked, coming up with things to write about would be a breeze.

I’ve got the rest of 2018 planned out with things to write about, and even some of 2019 planned too. This year I’ll be writing about things like The Orville and the 1988 movie The Blob. I’ll also be writing a piece about the 20th anniversary of my blog that’s happening this fall. For 2019 there are things like the delayed new X-Men movie, Pet Sematary and the new Top Gun movie too. I’m sure I’ll be writing about TV series as well but there’s really nothing next year that has a firm release dates yet.

What’s been taking up a lot of my time lately is my annual fall TV preview. It always starts off small but turns into a beast as more and more series are announced. The 2018–2019 one isn’t too bad so far, right now it’s just twice as long as one of my regular columns. What happens is that I write it, think I’m done, realize that I’ve forgotten some shows, add them in, then weeks later have to add a bunch more shows when even more release dates are announced.

And I’m sure I’ll still miss something.

I’m also contemplating writing a much-longer piece that I’m used to on the TV series The Orville since that show will debut later on this year. I usually have a bit of time on my hands come the winter months when it’s dark outside by the time I get off work and it might be nice to work on something with a little more length than I’m used to.

Cool Movie & TV Posters of the Week

Gifted poster
Justice League poster