the terror

The best TV series of 2018

Feature, TVDecember 21, 2018December 17, 2018

I find that it’s really tough to rank TV series in this “best of” list every year. Like I think Better Call Saul and The Haunting of Hill House were my #1 and #2 shows of 2018, but for the rest the order is kind’a arbitrary. There were lots of great shows this year and putting them in any reasonable order is at best guesswork and at worse however I felt the day I was generating this list.

Better Call Saul

I’m honestly surprised that after all these years I still love Better Call Saul on AMC as much as I do. Usually, after a few seasons of a show I start to lose interest but I haven’t so far with this one. I think that’s because Better Call Saul has evolved and changed each season, meaning that what is Better Call Saul in its most recent fourth season is very much different than what it was in its first.

Essentially, Better Call Saul is the story of Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk) and his transformation from being a meek and mild attorney to the infamous cut-throat lawyer to the criminal underworld Saul Goodman. Maybe “transformation” isn’t the best word, maybe a better one would be “descent.” Where Jimmy is a guy who can’t catch a break, as he starts becoming more Saul-like ironically he starts catching loads of breaks and begins making money doing things like selling disposable cell phones to crooks and even getting his law license back by lying and playing the sympathy card.

Crime does pay for Jimmy, even if we as the audience know that the end of the road for Goodman doesn’t lead to a fancy house and lots of riches, it leads to hiding out as a guy named “Gene” a lonely manager of a Cinnabon in Nebraska, on the run and panic stricken constantly looking over his shoulder for a bullet that may never come.

The Haunting of Hill House

Each year there’s always at least one series a season that surprises me as to how good it is, and that show in 2018 was The Haunting of Hill House on Netflix. This horror series is the stuff of nightmares, and I mean that literally since watching it gave me real nightmares. While most horror shows follow the same tried and true path, there are monsters and they are out to get us, The Haunting of Hill House is quite a bit different. This series about a family set in two time periods, one in the early 1990s where mom, dad and their four kids are trying to flip what turns out to be a haunted house, and modern-day where this family now grown are still dealing with all the ramifications of what happened when they were living at Hill House, and especially what happened the last night they stayed there, is fascinating. Most horror shows rely on the scares first, second and last and while there are a lot of scares in The Haunting of Hill House, see my report about nightmares above, it also has this underlying core of sadness to it.

The family of the 1990s were this not quite perfect but happy together family unit, yet because of what happened to them, and what we find during the course of the show is still happening to them, have splintered and shattered. They’re not quite family anymore and are instead simply “acquaintances.”

And honestly, I don’t know anything scarier than that.

I never thought there’d be more than one horror series on my best of list yet this year there’s two. The second is another amazing AMC series The Terror about an expedition to the Arctic that went disastrously wrong in the 19th century. This fictionalized telling of a real-life event seems to either be set a night, or the equally scary time of gloaming where the sun has just set casting the world in a weird, mysterious glow. And since this expedition was to the Arctic, a place where the sun is either up for months at a time or set for an equally long period, it means that much of the show is cast in this weird etherial light.

Mr Inbetween

I hadn’t even heard of the FX series Mr Inbetween until I stumbled upon a poster for the show that was set to start airing the next day. I was suspicious at first about a series where the lead guy is a hit-man in Australia who’s got anger management issues since that sounds like something Tony was going through in The Sopranos 20 years ago. But Mr Inbetween is different and I was hooked right from the first scene. Starring and written by Scott Ryan, Mr Inbetween is the rare crime show that has fully fleshed characters, not character archetypes. The stories vary from Ryan’s character Ray Shoesmith trying to help out a friend who’s been beaten and put in the hospital while at the same time trying to keep his new girlfriend in the dark about where he slips off to at night when he goes out to hurt people.

The Expanse

The fourth season of the SyFy series The Expanse continued to deliver in the realm of science fiction in one of the most satisfying sci-fi series on TV these days. Wait, did I say “SyFy!?” Well, SyFy in their infinite wisdom decided to cancel The Expanse shortly before the latest superb season ended. I guess they must’ve needed its time slot for more appropriate sci-fi shows like the reality monster makeup series Face Off. Luckily, Amazon Prime quickly picked up The Expanse for a fifth season which is set to premiere there sometime next year.

Barry

The HBO dramety Barry about a depressed hitman (Bill Hader) who dreams of becoming an actor in LA was another surprise this year. Barry can go from hilariously funny to downright scary in the blink of an eye, and I can’t think of any other show that can do that without coming off cheesy. And the way Hader plays Barry, he comes off as a real, troubled guy the audience is rooting for at the start of the show but by the end of the first season might actively be hating because of some of the things he does throughout the episodes.

GLOW

I’m not quite sure how they do it, but a TV series about women’s wrestling in the 1980s is one of the best things on Netflix right now. Mostly about the behind the scenes lives of the women who star in this show-within-a-show, GLOW chronicles how hard it is to make something, even something as silly as a women’s wrestling show, especially if you were a women in the 1980s.

Black Mirror

Black Mirror is one of the most disturbingly accurate shows on these days about what it’s like living in our 21st century where it seems like we’re constantly crashing into the future where people controlling the technology don’t always have our best interests in mind, or even realize the ramifications of what they’re doing, while our world constantly shifts around us and not always for the better.

Little Drummer Girl

Another limited series that ran on AMC this TV season was the adaptation of the John Le Carré novel Little Drummer Girl. I totally dig these spy series, especially ones by Le Carré like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Smiley’s People and now Little Drummer Girl too. I just wish AMC had given this one a little more time for people to catch it, rather than burning its six episodes off in a three night “event” the week of Thanksgiving.

2018/2019 TV preview

Feature, TVSeptember 7, 2018August 25, 2018

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

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

New series

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Returning series

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shows that I think will premiere sometime in 2019

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

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

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

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Direct Beam Comms #129

Comic Books, Direct Beam Comms, Feature, TVMay 27, 2018May 26, 2018

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.

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?

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.