A few TV shows I watched this winter wrapped up their first seasons last week.
The Passage ⭐
The Passage was incredibly average, which for a network sci-fi horror drama is probably the best-case scenario. That being said, I really enjoyed the final episode of the season that was set after the vampires had broken out of the facility holding them and had spent a month sucking their way across the country, turning thousands, if not millions into sun-phobic blood-suckers. This isn’t the post-apocalyptic setting of The Walking Dead it’s the actual apocalypse where the government and military are still around fighting back, which hasn’t been done on TV before as far as I’m aware. However, the series looks to jump 100 years into the future and go straight to post-apocalyptic territory next season.
If there is a next season, that is.
Project Blue Book ⭐⭐
Slightly better than The Passage, and one series that’s definitely getting a second season, Project Blue Book ended in The X-Files territory with the UFO chasing events of the first season leading the
characters to Washington DC where it seems the conspiracy of wanting to
hide the UFOs from the public goes right to the top. I’m guessing the
creators of this History channel series will keep looking for the truth
behind the UFOs for many, many seasons to come.
The new FOX TV series The Passage has a long and interesting
history to the small screen. Based on the novel of the same name by
Justin Cronin, originally the pilot episode of The Passage TV
show was shot the summer of 2017 with an eye to be on the schedule later
that fall. But FOX didn’t like what they saw and instead of cancelling
the series outright sent it back to the drawing board as it were,
replacing actors and reshooting the episode in early 2018. And this time
they must’ve liked the result since the show is now the hub of FOX’s
winter schedule.
While the series is based on the novel The Passage,
the TV series does take quite a few liberties with the story. The novel
is told in several time periods, the first present day where the
vampires are just starting to be active and another nearly 100 years in
the future where the fanged ones have taken over, driving what’s left of
humanity into protective enclaves. While the TV series does focus on
the part of the book that takes place present day, gone, or at least not
present in the first episode, is everything else.
I left the first episode thinking that half of it was really interesting, but that the other half was pure crud.
In the TV The Passage, scientists have found what
essentially turns out to be a vampire in South America and, after one of
their group is attacked and turned, locks this dude up and begins
studying him. In something that’s a stretch for even a horror series
like The Passage, these same scientists find out that being a
vampire makes you immune from all diseases, and that if they can figure
it out they can make regular non-blood drinking people immune from
everything too. But the scientists find that keeping people from fully
turning into vampires is a lot harder than it looks and want to try the
process on a child, because a child has more “something or others” than a
fully grown adult.
And this is the interesting part.
The not so interesting part involves Brad Wolgast (Mark-Paul
Gosselaar), an ex-CIA-Green Beret-Navy Seal-Special Forces type sent out
to pick up an orphan and bring her back to the testing facility since
there’s a virulent form of bird-flu about to descent on the US which
will surly kill thousands unless the scientists can crack the vampire
code. Wolgast picks up this girl, played by an amazing Saniyya Sidney
who hopefully one day will be in something better than this, but quickly
finds that he can’t go through with it and the two go on the run ala
Bruce Banner in The Incredible Hulk.
I thought the idea of scientists studying vampires in a lab not
realizing that the blood-suckers are psychically linked with each other,
and are secretly infecting the dreams of the scientists at night, was
actually pretty great. That alone would make a good series. The second
part with Wolgast on the run was ridiculous. Like all the scientists
need is a kid to run their experiments, and if Wolgast is on the run why
not just find another kid?
Just as insane is the idea that the scientists are going to turn vampirism into a cure for anything since 100% of the time everyone they’ve tried it on has turned into a
vampire. It seems like you’d want to do a lot more testing with
something that has the ability to wipe out the human race that they are
in The Passage.
What I wanted out of The Passage was either I Am Legend before everyone on the planet got turned into vampires or what Fear the Walking Dead should have been rather than what it turned out to be. But so far it’s turned out to be mostly network TV drama schlock.
I’ll give this one a few more episodes but have to admit that things aren’t looking too good for me and The Passage.
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
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.
