2018 Sci-Fi Report

I shouldn’t be surprised when I look back at the year overall, but in terms of sci-fi movies and TV there was a lot going on. Some things weren’t good, but an awful lot were, or at least they were interesting. I keep thinking back to years ago when we’d be lucky to have one or two interesting sci-fi movies a year and a handful of TV shows. Nowadays there seems to be a sci-fi movie coming out once every few weeks, and that’s not including superhero things since while I think they’re sci-fi I’m not counting them here, and there are loads of sci-fi series on TV.

Random thoughts…

  • BBC America really killed it in 2018 as being the home for all things Doctor Who, The X-Files and classic Star Trek TV.
  • And let’s give props to TNT/TBS as well for airing marathons of Star Wars every few weeks. Have I see every episode of Star Wars many, many times before? Yep! Do I watch them again every time they show up on TNT/TBS? You bet’cha!
  • Along those lines… We now live in a world where there is a brand new Star Wars movie being released each and every year, this year was Star Wars: A Solo Story, which is always something to be happy about.
  • While BBC America was the home for sci-fi in 2018, Syfy, the old SCI-FI Channel, was not. That network which barely airs any sci-fi anymore actually cancelled the one great sci-fi show they had The Expanse.
  • That being said Amazon Prime picked up The Expanse where it will air a fourth season in alongside The Man in the High Castle, another sci-fi show on that platform.
  • Netflix released a whole bunch of sci-fi movies in 2018 including good ones like The Cloverfield Paradox and not so good ones like Mute. Hey, they can’t all be winners.
  • The sci-fi/horror film A Quiet Place did what not a lot of sci-fi/horror movies have done in the past; it was very successful as well as gained lots of critical acclaim.
  • That being said not everything sci-fi at the box office worked, both Pacific Rim: Uprising and Overlord underperformed here in the US, though Uprising did great business overseas.
  • While I absolutely did not understand the ending of the second season of Westworld, I have to say that the ride getting there was a lot of fun.
  • I mentioned that BBC America was the home for all things classic Star Trek, but there’s also new episodes being added to the Trek canon every year with Star Trek: Discovery on CBS All Access.
  • Okay, okay, okay, I like to rag on Syfy a lot, but I do have to give them props for taking a big chance on the decent ten episode limited sci-fi/horror series Nightflyers a few weeks back. It wasn’t great, but at least it was science fiction.

2018/2019 TV preview

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

The Passage

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.

Nightflyers

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.

The Good Place

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

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.

Star Trek: Discovery
Star Trek: Discovery

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.

The Terror

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

Mindhunter

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

Direct Beam Comms #134

TV

GLOW

Who would have ever guessed that a series about the 1980s female TV wrestling program GLOW: Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling would be so good? The second season of the drama GLOW on Netflix debuted Friday and picked up right where the first season left off. If the first season was about the girls of GLOW lead by Alison Brie and Betty Gilpin banding together to make something out of nothing — even if it’s a women’s wrestling program that airs on local TV — then the second is about what happens when these same girls realize that if they’re all not looking out for themselves, no one will.

The cast of GLOW
The cast of GLOW

The story of GLOW is complex. On the one hand it’s about these wild, over-the-top comic book-esque characters doing all these nutty and crazy things in a wrestling ring. They’ve got names like “Zoya the Destroya,” “Liberty Bell” and “The Welfare Queen” with over-the-top personalities to match. On the other hand these characters are played by “real” people like Ruth Wilder (Brie) an actress who hasn’t quite figured out how to make it in Hollywood and accidentally finds herself at a GLOW audition and realizes this might be her only chance at fame, Debbie Eagan (Gilpin) another actress who did make it in Hollywood for a time before having a baby derailed her career and Tammé Dawson (Kia Stevens) who plays the “Welfare Queen” in the ring but in “real life” has a son who’s attending Stanford and is willing to do anything, even play the “Welfare Queen” on TV, to keep him there.

And these are just a few of the deep and interesting characters of GLOW.

I kind’a sort’a wonder if the second season of GLOW will mark the beginning of the end of the fictional show within-the-show of the same name? While the real GLOW: Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling turned out to be very influential, it only ran for four seasons and then only in syndication. I wonder if that’s where the fictional GLOW is headed too? The first episode is kind’a setting things up that way with director Sam Sylvia (Marc Maron) firing one of the girls for insubordination, Eagan renegotiating her contract for more money and a producer credit on the show and Wilder finding out that her spirit of “all for one, one for all” might be wasted on GLOW.

The fictional GLOW looks like a fun place to visit but it’s a facade, the “real life” place the actors of GLOW live in is just as unforgiving as our own.

Westworld

Westerns and sci-fi usually don’t go very well together. Whenever these genera meet it’s usually not very pretty — Cowboys vs Aliens immediately pops to mind. However, the exception to that rule is the marvelous Westworld series on HBO that mixes both genres together into something both new and familiar that wrapped up its second season last week.

Ed Harris and Evan Rachel Wood
Ed Harris and Evan Rachel Wood

In Westworld, it’s the future at the park of the same name guests can come and interact with the robotic “hosts” in a place that looks and feels like the real wild west. But the guests aren’t interested in playing nice with the hosts, many of them are there play out every dark fantasy they’ve ever had in a consequence-free environment during their stay. Much of the first season of Westworld had a distinctly Philip K. Dick vibe going on and dealt with a software glitch that caused many of the hosts to realize the true nature of the reality they’re trapped in and want to rebel.

The focus of the second season of Westworld is on the rebellion and its aftermath, told in two separate timelines. Here, once meek and mild host Dolores (Rachel Evan Wood) now leads a band of robots doing to whatever guests they find along the way that had been done to them over the years. But they’re not just out for blood, they’re also trying to find the fabled “valley beyond” and escape from the park. In a parallel story another group lead by ex-madam Maeve (Thandie Newton) who can control and reprogram other hosts on the fly searches the park for her daughter while guest William (Ed Harris) is trying to find the real meaning of Westworld hidden somewhere inside its borders. And that’s not even mentioning Bernard’s (Jeffrey Wright) story of, shall we say, “self discovery” in the second season of the show too.

Jeffrey Wright and Tessa Thompson
Jeffrey Wright and Tessa Thompson

If the first season was Philip K. Dick then the second was a bit of that along with Solaris with Terminator thrown in for good measure.

I really enjoyed the second season of Westworld if I was a bit confused at finale episode. There were a few too many twists and turns and “is this taking place in the past or future?” in the finale for me to keep them all straight. There were a lot of stories all going on in the second season, probably too many to be neatly wrapped up in one episode which Is what I felt happened in the last one. In addition to wrapping things up and clipping dangling storylines, there was also a bit of new story, getting things ready for the third season of the show due out sometime next year in the finale.

I think it would have made more sense to rather than try and wrap everything up in the finale, to instead only finish some of the storylines and continue others next season.

The Expanse

There once was a time when The Sci-Fi Channel was the destination for quality science fiction programming. In addition to airing lots of classic sci-fi shows, they also aired series like Farscape, Stargate SG–1 and the Battlestar Galactica reboot in addition to doing things like creating mini-series like Dune. But over the years things changed and as The Sci-Fi Channel chased the bottom line into the ground airing things like professional wrestling and cheap-o movies like the Sharknado series while also changing their name to SYFY, fans of the genera slowly began abandoning the channel for other venues. However, a few years back new management seeing how well sci-fi was doing on other venues decided to once again air more original sci-fi programming on SYFY, one of the first shows of this new slate was The Expanse.

The cast of The Expanse
The cast of The Expanse

Great from the very beginning, The Expanse is set in the near-future where mankind is living on the Earth, Mars and throughout the solar system and is still struggling with all the things we struggle with today. But when a mysterious alien artifact is discovered that threatens the entire human race, humanity must band together or face extinction. The Expanse was the first show in a long while to return to the genera of “people in big ships zooming around in outer space” and is a show that seemed like it was made for me. Over the three seasons of The Expanse I only loved it more as the story of the series changed and shifted from what started out in the first season to the current third season.

If the first season and second seasons were about the lead-up to war because of this artifact, then the third was about this war breaking out. Which I figured was going to take up the bulk of the third season of the The Expanse. But that’s not what happened. Rather than focus on this war, the creators of The Expanse instead stopped the conflict in its tracks and then jumped ahead many months into the future. Going from conflict to a weird sort of inter-solar system alliance to figure out what happened when the artifact changed into a … something.

The ships of The Expanse
The ships of The Expanse

And that’s where the second half of the third season of The Expanse spent its time, trying to figure out what this artifact had become while at the same time trying to keep the conflict that had just been capped from boiling back over into war.

Honestly, the third season of The Expanse was the best season of the show so far, and I was dying to see where the series was going to go from here.

Except that even before it ended SYFY announced that they were going to cancel The Expanse after its third season. Their reasoning was the ratings of the show were never what they wanted and that since the series had convoluted streaming deals in place that didn’t benefit SYFY they weren’t going to commission any more seasons of the show.

Which was a major bummer, but luckily the cancellation was short-lived as Amazon quickly stepped up and picked up the show for their Prime service.

Still, it burns me to no end how much SYFY has fallen from once being the home to sci-fi to the thing it is now. When I want to watch sci-fi I almost never turn to SYFY, I turn to places like BBC America that shows things like Star Trek and The X-Files, pay cable like HBO with Westworld and Fahrenheit 451 and online streaming services like Netflix with Stranger Things and Lost in Space. SYFY? I usually avoid it at all costs — even morso now that they dumped The Expanse.

Ironically, the big new “thing” that Syfy has been promoting as of late is them being the new home of the Harry Potter film franchise. The film franchise that at this point is a whopping 17 years old. The film franchise that has been playing on all sorts of other channels for those 17 years already.

The Expanse is new and fresh and I’m extremely excited that I’ll be able to watch new episodes of it on Prime (hopefully) next year. As for Harry Potter on Syfy? Give me a break.

Comics

Lone Wolf and Cub Gallery Edition

Lone Wolf & CubA new edition of the critically acclaimed and highly influential Lone Wolf and Cub manga series is due out this week. This volume costs a whopping $100 but has reproduced the artwork at its original size and in original Japanese.

Kazuo Koikes samurai epic is a tour-de-force of graphic fiction, and the Lone Wolf and Cub Gallery Edition features selections of the late Goseki Kojima’s spectacular illustration reproduced at original size on heavy-stock art paper to preserve the work in detail as it exists today, as close as one can come to owning these rarest of artworks. Including in its entirety the final titanic clash between ogami Itto and Yagyu Retsudo. This deluxe volume is a must-have for collectors and enthusiasts of the finest comic art ever created.

Movies

The Predator trailer

The Reading & Watch List

Cool Movie & TV Posters of the Week

Posters of the Week

Direct Beam Comms #129

TV

The Terror

The first season of the AMC series The Terror wrapped up Monday night, and it too like Barry was another series I greatly enjoyed. Though The Terror did start off slowly and takes a while to “get going,” none-the-less it’s the best limited-series in recent memory.

Jared Harris as Captain Francis Crozier
Jared Harris as Captain Francis Crozier

Based on a true story, here the ships HMS Erebus and Terror are trying to find the fabled Northwest Passage but become stuck in the ice and have to spend a winter in the Arctic waiting for the thaw in the mid–19th century. But one winter becomes two and as a third looms ahead Captain Francis Crozier (Jared Harris) must decide whether to spend another year on the ice as their supplies dwindle or set off on foot heading south hoping they can find open water and a friendly ship to take them home. But that’s not Crozier’s only problem as it quickly becomes apparent that the food they’re eating was made in a way that it’s slowly poisoning the crew and, even worse, there’s a weird thing that kind’a sort’a looks like a polar bear but is seemingly indestructible who has a taste for human flesh and is working it’s way through the crew a few men at a time.

No one’s quite sure what really happened to the men of the real Terror and Erebus, other than they never made it back home and were presumed either killed by the harsh Arctic elements or when they ran out of supplies, so the addition of this pseudo-supernatural element, it might be a supernatural bear or just a weird mutant one, is inspired. It’s also entirely possible that in The Terror what they men were witnessing wasn’t a super-bear, but a regular one, or even a few bears, but since they were being unknowingly poisoned by their food, maybe they didn’t have their best faculties about them to be aware either way?

Can we trust what the men of the Erebus and Terror are seeing since they can’t totally rely on their senses, or is there really something supernatural going on here?

Ciarán Hinds
Ciarán Hinds

The sense of approaching doom in The Terror is palpable as the last third of the season is of Crozier and the remaining men walking south away from their ships and the only safety they’ve ever known in hopes of stumbling across rescue. And even when they do reach an island on their journey it’s not a paradise. Instead, it’s a dead place, covered in rocks and completely devoid of anything the men can eat. Which quickly becomes an issue as the group splinters with one thinking the unthinkable towards the weaker crew members in order to stay alive even a few more days.

There’s really no escape from the Arctic for the men. They can either head further south into the unknown but are in no condition to get very far, or they can stay on their island and stave off death a few weeks until winter comes and does them in. Sometimes in these expeditions into the unknown no one in them comes home, and this expedition to find the Northwest Passage is one of them.

The last episode of The Terror ends up in a place I wasn’t expecting. Not to spoil things, but just because in the history books the fate of the crew of the Erebus and Terror may have played out one way doesn’t mean it plays out the same way in The Terror. Now this doesn’t quite pull an Inglourious Basterds here, but it does go to a place I hadn’t thought of.

I was greatly impressed with how The Terror ended up but have one question — if this is the “first season” of the show as AMC puts it where will a second go from here? Maybe The Terror will become an anthology series for AMC like American Horror Story has become for FX since the story of Captain Crozier and his crew at the end of the first season of The Terror is certainly complete.

The Expanse

A little more than a week after it was cancelled, the TV series The Expanse was “uncancelled” by Amazon and the fourth season of the series will officially premier there sometime in, I’m assuming, 2019.

Huzzah!

Comics

Punisher Invades the ’Nam

The Punisher invades The 'Nam
The Punisher invades The ‘Nam

In the late 1980s one of the most critically acclaimed comic books was Marvel’s The ‘Nam which realistically told the life of soldier Ed Marks during his tour of duty in Vietnam. The comic was very successful long while but as the years went on it became less so, so Marvel decided to try and boost sales by including a story that featured one of their most popular characters of that time who had just so happened to have served in Vietnam as a Marine, Frank Castle aka Punisher. Which was a bit odd since up until then The ‘Nam took place outside the Marvel comics universe where superheroes didn’t exist. So with the introduction of Punisher meant that in reality Ed Marks was living in the same universe as Spider-Man and Captain America.

Regardless, this new Punisher Invades the ’Nam edition collects all of Punishers appearances in The ‘Nam, some ‘Nam stories from other Punisher titles and, I believe, an issue of The ‘Nam that was set to be published but never was because of the title’s cancellation.

From Marvel:

Years before he brought his personal war to the mean streets of the Marvel Universe, Marine Sgt. Frank Castle fought in Vietnam — and the man he would become took shape in those killing fields. Revisit the horrors of the ’Nam along with Frank as he battles side-by-side with comrade-in-arms Mike “Ice” Phillips and faces down a deadly jungle sniper, and fights alone in his final tour of duty to rescue a crew of downed airmen from a sadistic vivisectionist. Plus: Years later, “Ice” comes to the aid of his fellow veteran — but can the two of them take down the paramilitary group the Sons of Liberty and a Central American drug kingpin?

Movies

Sicario: Day of the Soldado trailer

The Reading & Watch List

Cool Movie & TV Posters of the Week

Posters of the Week

Direct Beam Comms #127

TV

The Expanse

So SyFy channel cancelled the wonderful TV series The Expanse Friday and I have to admit that came as quite a shock to me. The show which has consistently been the most critically acclaimed series on the channel since Battlestar Galactica is one of my favorites on TV and this season in particular has been the strongest yet. For a channel that’s supposedly devoted to fans of science fiction, their slogan is “It’s a Fan Thing,” for them to cancel the best sci-fi show in years that the fans adore doesn’t make sense. 
Maybe SyFy was concerned airing something like The Expanse would make room for more airings of their crappy movies like the Sharknado franchise that for some reason people keep watching.

The ExpanseI should’ve known something was up last winter when SyFy didn’t promote The Expanse as heavily they did in years past. For Krypton we got loads of posters and a TV commercial every break promoting that show, for The Expanse there was one poster and just a single TV spot I can’t ever remember airing. I had to find it myself on YouTube.

Now that I think about it, it’s been a while since the last time a show I was into was cancelled like this. To be sure shows I liked have been cancelled in the past, but it seemed as if they either didn’t work from the start and didn’t get a second season, or they were cancelled but given one more season to wrap things up. For SyFy to kill this show in the middle of the third season, which I can only imagine is going to end on a bit of a cliffhanger with no end to the story in sight is extremely frustrating.

The ExpanseThe Expanse will join other shows that got cancelled after three seasons like Deadwood, Ash vs Evil Dead and a little show I don’t think many people have ever heard of called Star Trek that were all cancelled after year three.

The one hope for The Expanse is that some other network or streaming service will pick it up and to give it a few more seasons of life or at the very least give the creators of The Expanse a chance to finish the story. I can see this happening especially since sci-fi series are so popular these days and The Expanse already has a built in fanbase and critical acclaim.

I’ve written before about the dreck that SyFy currently airs and their cancellation of The Expanse only solidifies my low opinion of them. Their new series Nightfliers does look interesting, but it doesn’t start up until the fall and I’ll check that one out when it airs. But until then I don’t think I’ll be watching much of any thing on SyFy in the near future.

Upfronts

This weeks marks the beginning of the TV Upfronts, or when all the networks debut what new series they’ll be airing next fall/winter. For the series that are picked up this week it means a lot of work for show creators over the summer getting ready for their series to start airing this fall/winter. For those shows not picked up it probably means a long vacation in Hawaii for all involved before starting the process over again in a few months.

This week is an exciting time for me, it’s always cool to see what new shows I’ll be checking out in a few months and to start tracking them now.

One thing I’ve learned is that even if a show sounds interesting during the Upfronts, it doesn’t mean that it will actually be any good next fall. After the Upfronts last year I was really excited about shows like Ghosted, The Gifted, Inhumans and The Crossing. Yet after having actually watched a few episodes of them I quickly lost interest and moved onto other things.

The Orville
The Orville

But the opposite is true too. Last year at this time I was lukewarm over the Seth McFarlane sci-fi series The Orville, yet that show quickly became one of my favorites of this TV season and even made it to my “best of” list last year.

While I do get excited over the Upftonts, I honestly don’t watch too much network TV these days. I can only think of a handful of shows there that I watch, Roseanne, The Good Place, the mentioned The Orville… and that’s about it. And don’t get me started on the dreck that CBS airs years after year after year.

For the most part I get my entertainment from cable and streaming services. Those outlets don’t really have big Upfronts like the networks do and instead release series year round. So while I might get excited about some new sci-fi/horror/superhero show that’ll be airing on FOX in October, chances are when that time comes I’ll be much more interested in what’s airing on AMC, or FX or HBO.

Arrested Development season 5 teaser

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXg2_yExgVY&feature=youtu.be

Movies

The Predator teaser trailer

The Reading List

Cool Movie & TV Posters of the Week

Posters of the week