Tag: the good place

Direct Beam Comms #148

CategoriesComic Books, Direct Beam Comms, Feature, Movies, TVPosted on

TV

Mr Inbetween

I hadn’t even heard of this FX show until a few weeks ago, and it wasn’t because I saw a trailer or commercial for it on TV or online. I only heard about Mr Inbetween because I happened to see a poster for it that caught my eye, otherwise I doubt I’d have checked out this wonderful series at all since I can’t watch what I don’t know about.

Originally developed for FX Australia but airing here on FX since that channel went “belly up,” Mr. Inbetween follows Ray Shoesmith (Scott Ryan), an underworld hood who’s equally at home tossing guys off of balconies as he is threatening someone for owing $10,000 to the wrong people. As Ray puts it, “I’m the guy who’s here to make you regret not paying up.”

And since Mr Inbetween is an FX show I figured it would have all these over-the-top action scenes of machine guns and violence like practically every other original show they air but that’s just not the case here. There is violence in the first episode, Ray does toss one unsuspecting man off a balcony and onto the hard ground below and in the second he murders a man who might not had it coming, but Mr Inbetween is much more nuanced, grounded, and much more a character piece, than say a similar show on FX like Mayans. Ray feels like a real person with real problems from his job to being a single dad who’s also on the wrong side of 40 for someone who needs to stay in top condition to beat people up for a living.

Unfortunately, I suspect because Mr Inbetween is grounded and because there aren’t machine gun fights every episode, it seems as if FX is burning this one off, airing two episodes back-to-back Tuesday nights at 11:30 PM Eastern. I guess the prime-time slots on FX are already full of things like airing The Avengers for the 100th time.

Oh well. If you’re interested in quality programming that’s character based, checkout Mr Inbetween while you can.

The Good Place

The Good Place
The Good Place

Most sitcoms ascribe to the rule that nothing ever changes. Just look at something like Big Bang Theory. That series has been on the air 12 seasons yet new episodes today aren’t that much different then the ones that debuted more than a decade ago. Which is perfect for shows headed towards syndication where episodes air out of order all the time which might lead to confusion if shows tied together in any real meaningful way. Sitcoms are the comfort food of the TV world where viewers know they can tune into just about any episode and spend a half hour or so with their TV friends. All of which is fine, I just find those kinds of shows in permanent stasis boring.

But it doesn’t have to be that way, there’s one network sitcom that breaks this mold and that sitcom is The Good Place On NBC. In The Good Place characters change all the time.

Spoilers for the first few seasons of the show follow.

In the first season Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen Bell) awakens in heaven after an accident only to realize that because of a mixup she was supposed to go to the bad place but switched places with another person who just so happens to also be named Eleanor Shellstrop too. As the season progressed and Eleanor did her darnedest to turn good and really earn a spot in the good place it was revealed that, a) there were others in the good place who were supposed to be in the bad as well and b) it was all a ruse by supposedly good overseer Michael (Ted Danson) who reveals that they’re really in the bad place.

And the second season starts with the characters having their memories wiped and Michael starting over tricking everyone that they’re in the good place. Only this time if Michael fails he’ll be put in a very bad place himself.

The third season begins right after the end of the second where Michael, not wanting to be burned alive for all eternity on the surface of a star, helps Eleanor and her group find a way to the real good place. But in order to do so they’re all sent back to the Earth as if they never died in order to prove to the universe they really do deserve a place in the good place. The group comes together not realizing they already know one and other but there’s one small problem, a new member who just so happens to be a demon (Adam Scott) sent to make sure they don’t earn a ticket to the real good place.

The Good Place
The Good Place

What I dig about The Good Place is that the characters have evolved and changed throughout the series. If in the first season Eleanor is a self-centered destructive person then by the second she’s actively looking out for others in her group, going as far as turning down a spot in the good place if it meant that everyone else couldn’t go with her. And the same goes for Michael, who’s the character who’s changed the most in the series. If in the first season he’s a goofy, lovable guy who can’t understand why his perfect creation is failing in all these weird ways, he’s trying to trick Eleanor into believing it’s because of her, then in the second he starts as this slimy demon who’s actively trying to hurt the main characters of the show until he comes to the realization, abet over hundreds and hundreds of times of “rebooting” everything and trying to convince Eleanor and her group that they’re really in the good place, that what he’s doing is wrong until he goes about helping them escape.

Not only do the characters change but each episode of the show builds upon the last which is death for syndicated series. Viewers can’t start with a random episode and enjoy the show. The only way to watch The Good Place is to start from the first episode and watch from there. Though the series might be bad for syndication it’s great for binge watching via streaming services.

But that’s why I think I like The Good Place so much. I never know what’s lurking around the next corner or how the characters will evolve as the season progresses.

Manifest

Manifest
Manifest

The plot to the new NBC series Manifest is genuinely interesting. In it, a airliner takes off from Jamaica in 2013 but lands in New York in 2018. Five years have passed outside, but inside the plane it’s only been a few hours. For some like Michaela (Melissa Roxburgh) it means a mother who’s passed away and a fiancé who ended up marrying her best friend. For others like Ben’s (Josh Dallas) son, it means treatment options for what was considered five years ago terminal leukemia.

Now the idea that a plane taking off and landing someplace/somewhen else isn’t unique, “The Odyssey of Flight 33” from The Twilight Zone and the Stephen King novel The Langoliers immediately spring to mind. Still, Manifest could be a really interesting series about what it’s like to fall asleep in one world and wake up in another.

Some of which is present in Manifest, there are interesting ideas about what happens to a family separated for years and brought together and a woman trying to pick up the pieces of a life broken while she was away and how these people are seen by the outside world.

But in the first episode of Manifest the show takes a bizarre left turn. Instead of focusing on the whole time travel thing, which is pretty interested in itself, the creators of it decided to insert a weird, almost superhero, thread to the series. Here, Michaela begins hearing voices, one warns that a bus she’s riding in is about to hit a little kid and another tells her that she needs to release a few dogs locked behind a gate. She thinks she’s going crazy until her brother shows up after hearing the same thing. And it turns out letting the dogs go was the beginning of cracking the case of two missing girls.

I don’t know how interested I am in sticking with Manifest, the whole voices thing has me really worried. Like, isn’t the whole airplane full of people traveling in time five years interesting enough, isn’t there enough material for at least one season of a show from that all by itself?

Murphy Brown

Murphy Brown
Murphy Brown

I remember I used to watch Murphy Brown when it was originally on but honestly can’t remember when I stopped. I wasn’t watching it up until the series ended in 1998 after 10 seasons, nor can I honestly even remember a single episode of the show. Some of that has to be that as far as I can tell other than the period Murphy Brown aired the series never ran in syndication. I’m assuming this is because episodes were sometimes very topical so that jokes about Dan Quayle that worked in 1988 might not be as funny to those alive today who weren’t even born with he was Vice President.

I take it back, I do remember two things about Murphy Brown. The first was that one of the running gags on the show was the character of Murphy Brown had a rotating cast of characters who played her secretary with a new face at the desk every week. That and she had a guy played by the late Robert Pastorelli who spent the seasons constantly renovating her house.

But as for actual episodes and stories, I don’t remember a single one.

And now 20 years after the series originally ended comes another season of the show also on CBS. This time instead of being a brash 40-something Murphy’s a retired 70-something who’s watching the world change around her with no outlet for her opinions. So she decides to get the gang back together and take a job hosting a new show.

I though the first episode of Murphy Brown was interesting, if I’m not sure that I’ll stick around for many more. Sitcoms that measure success by how many jokes they can deliver per minute usually aren’t my thing.

Comics

Marvelocity: The Marvel Comics Art of Alex Ross
Marvelocity: The Marvel Comics Art of Alex Ross

Marvelocity

Comic book artist and illustrator Alex Ross has already had a collection of his work from DC published with Mythology: The DC Comics Art of Alex Ross and now comes a collection of his work at Marvel with Marvelocity.

Here is the beloved Marvel Universe of comics characters, brought to thrilling life as only Alex Ross can. They’re all here: Spider-Man, Captain America, Iron Man, the Avengers, the Guardians of the Galaxy, the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, Black Panther, and many more—all seeming to leap, blast, and launch off the page.

For almost thirty years, Ross has been working nonstop to create some of the most astonishing images in comics, and while Marvelocity collects the very best of that oeuvre, it’s much more than that. Inside are hundreds of drawings, paintings, and photographs that have never been published before, including an original ten-page story featuring Spider-Man versus the Sinister Six, redesign proposals for the X-Men and the Fantastic Four, and a re-creation of an epic battle between the Sub-Mariner and Iron Man.

But this isn’t just the story of the Marvel characters—it’s also the incredibly inspiring true tale of a little boy who only ever wanted to draw and paint super heroes. And with enough determination, talent, and very hard work, that’s precisely what he did. Marvelocity is the result, and is sure to entrance and delight fans of all ages.

Swamp Thing: The Bronze Age Vol. 1

If you’ve yet to checkout the early appearances of Swamp Thing you might want to pick up this reasonably priced collection that retails for just $25.

Deep in the bayou of Louisiana, far from civilization’s grasp, a shadowed creature seen only in fleeting glimpses roils the black waters…a twisted, vegetative mockery of a man…a Swamp Thing! These are the tales that introduced Alec and Linda Holland, Anton Arcane, Abigail Cable, the Patchwork Man, the Un-Men, plus an appearance by Batman! Collects THE HOUSE OF SECRETS #92 and SWAMP THING #1–13.

Movies

The Night Stalker
The Night Stalker

The two classic Kolchak TV movies get a first-time-ever release on HD this week from Kino Lorber. This is a “must buy” for me as these movies were some of the best things to ever air on broadcast TV.

The Night Stalker:

An investigative journalist takes a stab at the supernatural. This unforgettable first entry in the Night Stalker series introduced the world to the quirky reporter with a penchant for the paranormal and became one of the top-rated TV movies of all time. Investigating a series of Las Vegas murders, Carl Kolchak (Darren McGavin, The Night Strangler) discovers that each victim has been bitten in the neck and drained of blood. Though Kolchak’s outlandish theory about the murders gets him nowhere with the police, his initiative to apprehend the killer himself gets him into hot water… with a modern-day vampire…Teleplay by legendary sci-fi/horror writer Richard Matheson (The Incredible Shrinking Man).

The Night Strangler:

Supernatural phenomena, baffling murders and offbeat humor mark this second Night Stalker offering with a great cast and suspense so palpable, it’ll feel like a presence right there in the room with you. Surfacing in Seattle, Kolchak (Darren McGavin, The Night Stalker) uncovers another maddening mystery: Every 21 years—for the past century—a serial killer commits a spree of murders, drains his victims’ blood and then quietly disappears. But Kolchak is onto this monster and is about to discover a shocking underground lair… an army of rotting corpses… and the ageless madman behind it all. The great Dan Curtis (Burnt Offerings) produced and directed this highly-rated TV movie written by legendary sci-fi/horror writer Richard Matheson (I Am Legend).

Dark Phoenix trailer

What To Watch This Week

Deadly Friend
Deadly Friend

Tuesday

The most recent Marvel Studios movie Ant Man and the Wasp gets a release on digital this week.

Wednesday

HDNET Movies will be airing one of the greatest horror movies of all time today, The Evil Dead.

Saturday

Insomniac Theater: A truly bizarre horror flick from 1986 Deadly Friend that has one thing going for it — it was directed by Wes Craven — airs very early Saturday morning on TCM.

Quite possibly my favorite classic sci-fi horror movie of all time The Thing From Another World also airs on TCM Saturday afternoon.

The Reading List

Cool TV Posters of the Week

  • Supergirl
    Supergirl
  • The Haunting of Hill House
    The Haunting of Hill House

2018/2019 TV preview

CategoriesFeature, TVPosted on

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 #113

CategoriesDirect Beam Comms, Feature, Movies, TVPosted on

TV

Altered Carbon **/****

The domination of sci-fi continues unabated.

The latest sci-fi series to hit Netflix is Altered Carbon, a kind’a sort’a riff on movies like Akira, Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell. I liked the first episode of this series if I thought it was a weak one.

Altered Carbon begins at some point in the future on a far-off planet where some sort of military agents gun down a terrorist/freedom fighter named Takeshi Kovacs and his girlfriend. Flash forward 250 years further and Kovacs awakens in a new body, known as a sleeve, in San Francisco on Earth. In the future it’s relatively easy for people’s consciousness to be downloaded into new “sleeves” and Kovacs has been awakened to investigate an attempted murder. Well, that person’s sleeve was killed but they had a backup of their consciousness in the cloud and now wants to know who’s out to get him.

What follows is a bit long-winded as we as the audience knows that by the end of the episode Kovacs will certainly be investigating the murder even if he spends most of the episode denying that. At first, Kovacs doesn’t want anything to do with the case being a terrorist/freedom fighter and all but eventually agrees to take it when some hit-men come after him and know who he is even though he’s in a new body.

My big question is how is Kovacs even able to function in a society 250 years into his future? Just think of how things were 250 years ago in the 1700s and how a person being transported from that time to ours would react. It’s debatable on whether or not they’d even understand the language let along things we take for granted like electricity and running water let alone smart phones and the internet. And yet in Altered Carbon Kovacs is able to fit right into this world more than two centuries into his future without any muss or fuss.

Altered Carbon does take its cues from what’s come before and this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Right now pop-culture seems to be in the mode of futuristic dystopian stories where our wildest dreams can be fulfilled yet we live in a digital hell ala shows like Black Mirror and films like Ghost in the Shell and Blade Runner: 2049. And Altered Carbon certainly uses themes and visuals from these movies as well as things like the mentioned anime Akira and yes even Ghost in the Shell again as jumping off points. The problem as I see it is that while Altered Carbon is neat to look at and everything is played to the nth degree on the “cool factor,” there was a lot going visually on but the story wasn’t quite gelling for me yet.

Hopefully, this is just a messed-up first episode where the creators of the show were so intent on telling a season-long first-season story they forgot to give the first episode a solid story within this overall narrative structure. This happens a lot with series where the rules of telling good stories episode to episode are forgotten in trying to tell a good season-long story. I think this may work for binge viewers blowing through many episodes at a sitting but since I don’t watch TV that was that I notice these things.

One episode in and Altered Carbon is good, I was just hoping for better.

A.P. Bio */****

I’m not sure what to think about the latest NBC sitcom A.P. Bio? On the one hand it’s got a lot of talent behind it from series creator Michael Patrick O’Brien who wrote on more than 100 episodes of Saturday Night Live, lead actor Glenn Howerton who’s a star and co-creator of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia but also had a nice role in the first season of Fargo and the series co-stars Patton Oswalt who’s good in practically everything he’s in.

Yet I never felt that the first episode of A.P. Bio ever “clicked.” The plot here is that Howerton plays Jack, an ex-college philosophy professor now slumming it as a high school biology teacher in Toledo. Well, “teaching” might be too strong of a word since Jack really has no interest in that and instead wants to use his students to try and ruin another professor who Jack thinks got his job. There’s a question of how is a college professor allowed to teach high school, like did he first get his teaching degree before switching to philosophy and why do all the students in Jack’s class who should realistically be 14 or 15 instead look 24 or 25?

What’s weirdest about the show is that the Jack character seems to exist in a world without any consequences. In the opening scene he crashes his car into and smashes the sign for the high school then threatens a bike rider he nearly hit… yet the cops are never called nor does he lose his job when he pretty much tells the school principal (Oswalt) that he’s not going to teach. I feel like if maybe A.P. Bio had been a traditional three camera sitcom and all the TV artificialness that brings then the show might have worked, but as a single-camera one I don’t think it works very well.

The biggest problem here is that Jack is essentially the same character Howerton plays on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, with maybe a few of the naughtier edges sanded off to appease network censors. That character once felt daring and new way back when that show started in 2005, but 13 years later he feels old and tired.

The Good Place second season ***/****

The Good Place isn’t like anything else on TV. On the surface this NBC series is a sitcom about four people lead by Eleanor (Kristen Bell) who thought in the first season they had died and had literally gone to heaven instead found that they’d actually gone to the bad place. And all of the crazy things that happened during the first season was actually head of their neighborhood in the bad place Michael (Ted Danson) trying to find new ways to torture them for eternity.

But when was the last time there was ever a sitcom that dealt with people trapped in hell and trying to find ways to become better people by doing things like studying philosophy to earn a spot in the good place?

There’s also the structure of The Good Place that’s different then the standard sitcom which I like a lot. Traditional, and even untraditional, sitcoms usually hold to the axiom where each episode is a self-contained unit. Stories don’t much carry-over from episode to episode which is perfect for syndication where shows usually air out of order at different times of day. But each episode of The Good Place is a chapter in its overall story. So viewers can’t just start with the second season of the show and expect to follow the story. They’ve got to start at the very first episode and watch each one from there which is terrible for syndication.

If The Good Place isn’t going to work in syndication, I do think it works extremely well on streaming platforms. There, the viewer can control what episodes they watch and can easily start from the beginning. And since each episode is a chapter in the story of The Good Place, I can imagine that the series would play out like one long four hour movie each season that’s easy to binge in a day.

In fact, it’s almost like The Good Place was designed for streaming/binging and I can’t think of another sitcom that’s like that.

Finally, The Good Place breaks the cardinal rule of TV sitcoms; the characters change. I don’t think Jerry Seinfeld, Sheldon Cooper or Claire Dunphy changed in any meaningful way from the first episodes of their TV series to the last/latest. But the characters of The Good Place have changed a great deal in the first two seasons of the show. At the start Eleanor was a self-centered woman who thought only of herself. Much of the first season’s focus was of her trying to become a better person but not quite being able to stop thinking about herself first. But over the course of two seasons she has started to change. So much so that in fact in this season she gives up a spot in the good place in order to stay with her friends who are still stuck in the bad one.

A third season is scheduled for The Good Place and I can’t wait to see where the show will go from here.

Jack Ryan promo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V69XYIRjKww

Castle Rock promo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwmhiqUPa28

Movies

The Movie Chain: #5: Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014)

Last week: Zero Dark Thirty

The Movie Chain is a weekly, micro-movie review where each week’s film is related to the previous week’s movie in some way.

One of the more surprising movie franchises in recent memory is the reboot of the Planet of the Apes films, the second of which was Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. If the first Rise of the Planet of the Apes took place in a modern day where experimentation on apes accidentally leads to them gaining human-levels of intelligence, then this second movie is an all-out post-apocalyptic question of what happens when mankind cedes being the dominant species on the planet to the once lowly ape?

Jason Clarke who played a CIA agent in last week’s Zero Dark Thirty and Gary Oldman co-star as the chief human protagonists with Andy Serkis starring as chimpanzee Caesar, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes took the rebooted franchise in some interesting directions while at the same time paying homage to the original films. There’s not a lot of “camp” in these new Apes movies like there were in the original films, yet there’s quite a few nice little moments in them that call-back to the original films that so many still love today.

In Dawn of the Planet of the Apes the Earth has been mostly depopulated of people by the “Simian Flu” that killed most of the people but made the apes smart. And even though the cities are mostly abandoned and there’s miles and miles of nothing across the planet, there’s not enough room for both ape and man in San Francisco as the remaining survivors there begin to push into apes territory as they try and rebuild their lives. It all comes down to trust, can the apes trust the humans who tried their best to kill all the smart apes in the first movie and can the humans trust the apes who grow in number and power every single day?

Next week: Rich Man, Poor Man, Beggar Man, Thief.

Ant Man and the Wasp movie trailer

Mute movie trailer

Cool Movie & TV Posters of the Week

Direct Beam Comms #94

CategoriesDirect Beam Comms, Feature, TVPosted on

TV

Star Trek: The Next Generation

It literally took me years after it had ended to see all the episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG) when I decided to watch the series in the early 1990s. I remember what a big deal TNG was when it premiered this week 30 years ago in 1987 with there being news stories about the show and the first episode “Encounter at Farpoint” airing in primetime. I even remember that my dad who wasn’t at all into sci-fi was excited about TNG because of some nostalgia factor and we watched that first episode when it aired.

Some of the cast of TNG

And I think to a certain extent that’s why it took me so long to checkout TNG. If my dad was into TNG, then surly it was uncool.

It wasn’t easy when TNG was first running episodes to see it in my area. Much like with Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future where I lived TNG aired early Sunday mornings well into the 1990s. And since there was no way I was ever going to get up early on a Sunday morning unless I had to I missed a lot of years of TNG.

What finally got me interested in TNG was the debut of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in 1993 which I liked and got me interested in Star Trek in general as well. And when I started watching TNG which was still in its first run syndication then I really dug it.

However, watching older episodes of TNG that I had already missed then wasn’t an easy task. One good thing was that right when I started watching TNG was the time that Star Trek in general was undergoing a surge or popularity so older episodes of TNG would air at different times during the week alongside the new ones. So slowly, but surly I began catching older episodes of TNG that I had missed.

Here’s a drawing I did in 1997 celebrating the 10th anniversary of TNG

At some point I’d bought a Star Trek book that listed all the episodes each Star Trek series that had aired to that point. I still have it. In the guide I’d mark off each episode of TNG that I’d seen and would be on the lookout in the TV listings for any that I had missed. And because TNG was airing in syndication everyday and because I started taping these episodes off of TV while I was at school I quickly began marking off more and more episodes as I’d see them. For some reason 25 years later I still have all these VHS tapes of TNG episodes I’d recorded off of TV and watched once. I figured I was building a personal TNG episode collection — of course now with TNG being easily available via many streaming services and VHS being a relatively dead medium these tapes do little more than take up closet space these days.

Still, tapes and syndicated TNG or no there was still episodes of TNG that I never seemed to be able to catch. These episode always seemed to be from the first or second season, one of which I remember wanting to see badly was “Q Who” that featured the first appearance of the villainous Borg. In that case I ended up buying a copy of the episode on VHS — they used to do that, sell single episodes of popular TV series on VHS — just to be able to see that episode. Even later I joined the TNG Columbia House tape club where every month I’d receive one tape in the mail that contained two episodes of the series for something like $20 a month.

($4.95 is for the first tape — every tape after that was $19.95.)

Because of the expense and because more of the older episodes of TNG started turning up in syndication I didn’t do this long. But still, I have a drawer full of these tapes along side the ones I recorded off of TV too.

Some of the cast of TNG

I’d guess that sometime in the later 1990s I finally fulfilled my quest of seeing each and every episode of TNG and having marked off all those episodes in my book. At least I don’t think there’s any TNG out there that I haven’t seen, or at least I’ve never turned over to a random episode of TNG on TV and thought, “What’s this one!?”

Now that I think of it, even if I have seen all of TNG I certainly never saw the episodes in order. When I started watching the show in the early 1990s I would have seen any new ones in order. But as for the old ones I’d have seen them as they happened to air in syndication. And they didn’t always air in order. So my experience with TNG is a bit of a hodgepodge, with me seeing brand new episodes along older ones on TV along with whatever tape I’d get from Columbia House that month whenever I started doing that.

Now of course it couldn’t be easier to see every episode of TNG. The entire series can be bought on Blu-ray for something like $80 which is about 30% of what Columbia House was charging for a single season of the series on VHS and the series is also available via a few streaming services and aires in regular rotation on BBC America too.

The Good Place

The sitcom The Good Place returned to NBC for a second season last week and is as good as ever. This show about Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen Bell) who was supposed to go to the bad place after she died but accidentally was sent to the good was one of the bright spots on the networks last year that was filled with mostly ick.

Spoilers about the first season follow, so if you haven’t seen it you might want to skip the rest of this review. But trust me, if you’re not watching The Good Place you’re missing out.

At the end of the first season Eleanor came to the realization that she wasn’t mistakenly sent to the good place, she’s been in the bad place all along. And everything that’s been happening in what she thought was the good place was really a ploy by this bad place manager Michael (Ted Danson) to find new and unique ways to torture people there.

The second season starts right back where the first ended, with Eleanor and her group of fellow people who think they’re in the good place coming to the realization they’re in the bad, but Michael having reset everything to run his plan again with Eleanor and her group starting from scratch with them having no memory of what had come before.

Whereas the first season mostly followed Eleanor tying to become a better person to stay in what she thought was the good place, so far the second has followed Michael and his minions behind the scenes as it were trying to get his plan back on track but finding that even though Eleanor doesn’t know what’s going on, she’s still a formidable opponent.

The Punisher TV spot

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIY6zFL95hE

The Reading List

This week in pop-culture history

  • 1952: Christopher Reeve, Superman, is born
  • 1954: Linda Hamilton of Terminator, Terminator 2 and the TV series Beauty and the Beast is born
  • 1985: The TV series Amazing Stories debuts
  • 1987: Star Trek: The Next Generation premiers
  • 1995: The TV series Space: Above and Beyond premiers
  • 2001: Star Trek: Enterprise premiers
  • 2004: Shaun of the Dead opens in theaters
  • 2005: Serenity opens in theaters
  • 2013: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. premieres

2017/2018 TV preview

CategoriesFeature, TVPosted on

New Series

The year superheroes broke TV

There are so many superhero series debuting this TV season there’s almost too many to cover here. In fact, there are at least eight new live-action superhero shows debuting this season which will bring the number currently airing to more than 25 based on comic books.

Inhumans

Inhumans

What was originally set to be a series of Marvel films has now become a TV series with Inhumans on ABC. I never really collected any Inhumans comics so I don’t really know the core Inhumans story. I do know that the show will be the third Marvel series to debut on ABC with Agents of SHIELD entering its fifth season and Agent Carter being cancelled after two. I wasn’t a fan of Agents of SHIELD nor of Agent Carter but will still checkout Inhumans, if with a bit of trepidation.

What I do know about The Inhumans, and what I could glean from ABC’s marketing materials, has them as a race of super-powered people living in a hidden city on the Moon with the likes of Black Bolt who’s voice is so powerful it can destroy entire cities and Medusa with living hair. In the series, a coup on the Moon forces this ruling family down to the Earth to face life among us mere mortals and the rest of the Marvel universe characters.

The Gifted

The Gifted

The Gifted on FOX looks to take the X-Men franchise TV screens with a series about a family on the run after they learn that two of their kids are mutants with super-powers. Some X-Men characters are set to appear in the series but don’t expect Wolverine, Cyclops or Jean Grey to show up in The Gifted. Instead the likes of Polaris, Thunderbird and Blink will be the muties helping the family on the run.

Krypton

Syfy enters the superhero TV game with their series Krypton about life on Superman’s alien home-world decades before his birth. But like with The Gifted don’t expect the Man of Steel to swoop in during sweeps week to boost ratings on the show as Krypton follows Superman’s granddad Seg-El as a spry 20-something living and working on Krypton before the planet went and got all explody.

The Punisher

The Punisher

The Punisher, on Netflix, follows the character of the same name who originally began as an ally/antagonist on the series Daredevil before being spun-off onto his own show. Not much is known about The Punisher other than to expect to see him eliminating as many bad-guys as he can in 13 episodes.

Runaways

The Hulu series Runaways sounds interesting, but reports from the creators of the show make me wonder if it’ll be as interesting as I first thought? The comic series Runaways is about a group of teens who discover that a) they all have superpowers because b) their parents are all major super-villains who run a west coast crime empire. But the creators of the Hulu version have said that the series will be “the O.C. of the Marvel Universe” and that just because the parents are super-villains who quite literally sacrifice people, “that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re all that bad.” Ugh, ugh, and double ugh.

Black Lightning

Black Lightning will join the CW stable of established DC characters like Arrow, Supergirl and The Flash this season with the title character who can harness electricity and must return to the superhero fold years after retiring.

Freeform, the old ABC Family, is set to debut two new superhero series next season with New Warriors and Cloak and Dagger.

New Warriors

Cloak and Dagger

When I was a teen New Warriors, a comic about a team a sort of teenaged X-Men, was one of my favorites. But this TV New Warriors isn’t an action series, it’s reportedly a half-hour comedy starring a character named Squirrel Girl, who’s, admittedly, really popular with the younger set these days.

Cloak and Dagger

In the comic Cloak and Dagger Cloak was a character of darkness and Dagger of light who were a team called, you guessed it, Cloak and Dagger. From the looks of it, the TV version retains the characters and their powers, but looks to be more Twilight, “they’re from two different worlds but are in love,” than X-Men “let’s kick Magneto’s butt” in tone.

Non-comic book series

I can’t tell you how weird it feels to write that. Literally a few years ago there weren’t any series based on comic books, now there’s so many I can’t even keep track. But even though there’s quite a few new superhero TV series to look forward to this season, there are a few non-superpowered shows debuting 2017–18 as well.

The Crossing

The Crossing

The Crossing on ABC has a small town becoming inundated when hundreds of bodies begin washing ashore from some disaster. But this disaster is something that’s going to happen in the future and these people are really refugees escaping to their past, our present, to find safety. The Crossing is a show I’m interested in as long as it doesn’t turn out to be another Lost where the goal is to spread the mystery of it out over as many seasons and episodes as possible rather than telling a coherent story.

Even The Crossing seems to have somewhat of a superhero element to it with some of the characters from the future possessing strange abilities far beyond that of mere mortal men.

There are a few interesting looking non-superhero series on FOX this season, the first of which is The Orville.

The Orville

The Orville

The Orville created by and starring Seth McFarlane of Family Guy fame is a live action comedic take on Star Trek. From the looks of things, The Orville is a sort of TV version of Galaxy Quest if the characters on Galaxy Quest were really the bumbling crew of a starship and not Hollywood actors playing them. I think The Orville is a great idea for a series, if I don’t think I laughed once at the promo that was released for the show a few months back.

Ghosted

If The Orville is a take on the movie Galaxy Quest then Ghosted also on FOX seems to be a take on the movie Ghostbusters. This time, instead of four scientists working together to bust ghosts, it’s, according to FOX, a skeptic (Craig Robinson) and true believer (Adam Scott) who’re the ones having to go around and do the busting as it were.

LA > Vegas

LA > Vegas

LA > Vegas has the most unique sitcom setting I can think of over the last few years. The show takes place aboard an airliner that makes a weekly round-trip between LA and Las Vegas with there being some regular characters of LA > Vegas including jet’s crew and people who travel to Vegas every week as well as new passengers each episode on a trip to lose money in the desert.

S.W.A.T.

The S.W.A.T. franchise has had a surprisingly long history. The original TV series of the same name debuted in 1975 with a feature film version in 2003 and a low-budget sequel released in 2011. And now comes a new S.W.A.T. TV series on CBS that’s set to premiere later this fall. CBS dramas aren’t known for their subtly and the promo for S.W.A.T. isn’t subtle with S.W.A.T police officers having gun battles in the streets one minute, smooching with their wives in the shower the next to dodging bazooka blasts a later that evening.

Star Trek: Discovery

Star Trek: Discovery

Star Trek: Discovery also on CBS has the most interesting path to series of any show in memory. This series has been around so long that I originally wrote about it in my 2016 TV preview. Star Trek: Discovery was supposed to premiere January 2017 but was then pushed back to May after execs realized that there was no way the series would be ready to air last winter. Then, a few months into 2017, they also realized that a May debut wasn’t going to happen either so the series was once again pushed back to September 24. Which looks like it’s going to happen since there’s been quite a bit of marketing released on the series including things like posters and online promos for the show.

But wait, there’s more.

Only one episode of Star Trek: Discovery will be shown on CBS with the remainder of the episodes then debuting over the next few weeks on the CBS All Access streaming service for residents in the US and Netflix for most of the rest of the world. Which seems like a bit of a misstep to me. I think CBS is eying fans of Star Trek and are just assuming they’re going to shell out $6 a month to watch Star Trek: Discovery because it’s Star Trek and fans of Star Trek will pay any amount of money to see anything labelled Star Trek. Now, I’m a fan of the Star Trek but I think most of what CBS offers is pure mung and can’t imagine shelling out $6 a month just to watch Star Trek: Discovery when there’s so many other things to watch on TV, especially around the time Star Trek: Discovery is premiering.

Here’s what I could see doing, though.

Star Trek: Discovery

If that first episode of Star Trek: Discovery that airs on CBS is good, if it’s intriguing enough for me to want to checkout the rest of the episodes — all of which is debatable since though I consider myself a fan of Star Trek none-the-less I really haven’t liked anything Star Trek since the late 1990s. If Star Trek: Discovery is interesting enough what I may do is wait until all the episodes are available on CBS All Access since they’re not all being released at once but instead over the course of a few months. And when they’re all available get CBS All Access for a month, binge them and then cancel my subscription.

But like I said that’s debatable. Star Trek: Discovery will have to be really good for me to want to do that and everything I’ve read about the show, from original series helmer Bryan Fuller exiting the series to CBS changing the look of Star Trek: Discovery from retro-Trek to something more futuristic makes me doubt that I’ll be in a big rush to checkout the rest of the series after it debuts in September.

Returning series

Because of the weird nature of TV I’m not quite sure what all current series are returning and when? Like both the series Legion and Westworld aired episodes in early 2017, but are only scheduled to return “sometime” in 2018, which might mean they’ll return in a few months or in more than a year. While there might not be a load of returning shows I’m interested in this season, those that are returning are really good and I don’t think I could be more excited about new episodes if I tried.

The Good Place

The Good Place

One show that is scheduled to return fairly soon is The Good Place on September 20. This NBC comedy about a woman (Kristen Bell) who dies and wakes in “the good place” but really was supposed to go to the bad one was the one new network show from last season that I liked that’s still around for a season two. I was surprised as to just how much a slow-burn The Good Place was, with each episode acting as a single chapter in a season-long story. My initial thoughts on the show was that it might be the most disturbing thing on TV since in the universe of the The Good Place 99.999% of everyone who dies goes to “the bad place,” and it’s only the supremely good among us that end up in “the good place.” So even the best of us are doomed. And in the show if Bell’s character is ever found out what happens to her? Does she get a one-way ticked to hell? I liked The Good Place enough to stick with it until the end, when a twist I saw coming from the very first episode hit that I was still surprised by made me change The Good Place from a show I liked to one I adored.

Stranger Things

Stranger Things

The 2016 breakout TV series that I think surprised everyone, including myself, as to how good it was Stranger Things returns to Netflix for a second season October 27. Stranger Things is a show about the 1980s but isn’t about the 1980s, it just so happens to take place there and is this weird, cool mesh of horror and sci-fi I really wasn’t expecting when I first started watching it last summer. Stranger Things stars a mostly pre-teen/teen cast of actors who, after one of the group goes missing and a girl mysteriously appears out of nowhere, must go on a quest to rescue their friend. But be it starring kids and teens or not, the danger and violence of the first season of Stranger Things was palpable with characters being shot, consumed by monsters and cocooned alive to wait out a fate worse than death. I don’t want to say that the first season of Stranger Things was a perfect show, but it might be about the most perfect show fans of horror/sci-fi these days can hope for.

Black Mirror

This surprisingly long-lasting British anthology horror/sci-fi series returns for a fourth season on Netflix this year. It’s easiest to describe this series as a modern day The Twilight Zone, but it’s really its own thing. Generally, episodes of Black Mirror take place in a few years time and deal with our everyday technology gone amok. Be it a society that runs on social media “likes” or soldiers with computers in their heads doing battle with mutant people who turn out to be a little less “mutant” and a lot more “people.” Where Black Mirror excels is at this everyday horror aspect to our lives, it’s the answer to the question, “Do we control our technology, or does it control us?”

And now for the ones that return sometime in 2018.

The Expanse

The Expanse

The Expanse on SyFy channel remains the lone holdout on a network that’s supposed to be for fans of sci-fi that actually is a quality sci-fi show. Two seasons in and I’m surprised as to just how well The Expanse has progressed. What started as a sort’a conspiracy thriller set in deep space with the search for a missing woman has grown exponentially into a war spanning the entire solar system with a group of characters spread out between the Earth, Mars, the asteroid belt, Jupiter and now Venus. I think what I like most about The Expanse is that while the show has grown in scope, the focus has remained on most of the same characters from the first season with a few additions here and there. So while a similar series like Game of Thrones has grown to the point of being unable to contain its story in a single episode, The Expanse has remained grounded and feels much like the same show when it started while the bounds of the story had been let to expand.

Legion

Legion

Legion might be the most trippy series on TV — and one of the best. It’s a superhero show but is nothing like a traditional superhero show since the focus of Legion is on character’s mental states rather than who can punch the villain hardest. I’m not sure the construction of the first season of Legion is like any other series out there. Legion starts out with David Haller (Dan Stevens) living his life inside a mental institution who has these weird memories of his childhood. It seems like David can do these strange things, or maybe he just imagines that he can. As the series progresses we go in and out of David’s, as well as other character’s minds, to the point where we’re really not sure what’s real and what’s not. But in the universe that is Legion what’s real and what is not is not as important as what the characters believe is real or not.

Westworld

Westworld

To me at least, this year wasn’t a great one for original series on HBO. I’m not sure if I’m just aging out of the core HBO demographic, but in 2017 the only show I really cared about there was Westworld, and much like with The Good Place I didn’t think it was going to be very good when I first heard about it. I mean, how could it be? Westworld was delayed ages because of “script problems” and was based on a decades old movie about rich people who visit a theme park where they can do whatever they want to the robotic inhabitants there. And I mean whatever they want. But instead of simply following the model of the movie, the creators of the Westworld TV show also made its focus on the robotic characters of the park in addition to the wealthy visitors. These robots are doomed to unknowingly live the same day over and over again, on a loop with the park’s patrons treating them like toys to be shot or raped or murdered. The question of the Westworld series is, what happens if these robots start realizing their lives aren’t their own and want to claim them back?

The X-Files

The X-FIles

An eleventh season of The X-Files is slated to debut in 2018 on Fox even with the 2016 tenth season having the fans divided. Some thought that because episodes of the new The X-Files were essentially a continuation of the old, and were told in the same anachronistic 1990s fashion, the new episodes were no good when put up against other modern series. While others, myself included, thought that when people were screaming that they wanted more The X-Files, and when more episodes of The X-Files arrived on their TV screens, what did they think they were exactly going to get?

Better Call Saul

Better Call Saul

The AMC series that started off as just a prequel to the hit series Breaking Bad but over the years has evolved into something so much more Better Call Saul usually returns in the first quarter of the year. The last two years I’ve called Better Call Saul the best series on TV and so far in 2017 it’s still the best. This series has some of the best characters out there, be it sack-sack Jimmy (Bob Odenkirk) who in the third season is well on his way to becoming Saul Goodman, Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks), Jimmy’s not yet right hand man who turned to the dark side last season and Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn), a woman who’d seemingly have it all together and a great life as a lawyer except she’s fallen into Jimmy’s orbit and ends up literally crashing and burning this season.