Death is the adhesive that joins all the pieces of Penny Dreadful together. Dr. Frankenstein (Harry Treadaway) believes the only lofty goal of science is finding out how to hit the escape button on death. Vanessa Ives (Eva Green) draws death to her wherever she goes. Dorian Gray will be found to have survived a mountain of death. Sir Malcolm Murray (Timothy Dalton) wants to save his daughter from a fate worse than death....
1.1 Night Work With the rising popularity of series like American Horror Story, Hannibal and Bates Motel, modern gothic is very much in the murky spotlight on television at the moment. Returning to Victorian literature for inspiration, Penny Dreadful takes the gothic back into the past, pitching its intrepid supernatural fighters Vanessa Ives (Eva Green), Ethan Chandler (Josh Hartnett) and Sir Malcolm Murray (Timothy Dalton) into a world full of vampires and men playing with other undead things....
Over the past few years, TBS has been knocking out its original programming of the park by banking on distinct shows such as Angie Tribeca, Wrecked, and The Detour. Aliens. They’re the gimmick in People of Earth. Only they’re not being treated like a gimmick at all (except when they are). Instead they take on the topic with a tremendous amount of maturity and curiosity, shining light on the people involved in “abductions” with respect and honesty....
Growing up, I was never a big fan of female comics. My exposure was limited, of course. Jo Brand, Victoria Wood, French and Saunders and… well, that’s about it, really. It was a relief, once I started seeing live comedy, to discover that, actually, I wasn’t a terrible sexist who hated all female comics. I just happened to dislike those female comics. I have to wonder, then, what my teenage self would have thought of me on Sunday, as I popped along to the Lyric Hammersmith for their monthly comedy night, with an all-female line-up (and a compere called Richard Herring – never heard of him, but apparently he was on telly in the 90s)....
Pitchisn’t as good as Friday Night Lights, but that is a high bar to reach, and falling short still leaves a lot of room to be good — and Pitchis good. It’s still finding its footing, but the pilot shows a lot of promise and hits a lot of the emotional beats it needs to with its introduction. In this first, stylish, well-soundtracked hour, we meet Ginny Baker (Kylie Bunbury), the fiercely determined young woman who is carrying the weight of the world — or at least the weight of the expectations of an infinite amount of adorable little girls who want to play in the major leagues, too — on her shoulders....
7.10 ‘Til Death Do Us Part But it’s finished now, and I’ve seen as many lists of stupid stuff that went down as I have think-pieces about how it changed television forever without anyone really noticing. I agree with both, and I also have a lot of thoughts of my own that I won’t spend too much time boring you with. At it’s best, Pretty Little Liars was a Taylor Swift song, a Hitchcock movie, a philosophy lecture and a soap opera all at once....
1.2 Sisiutl With its title taken from the name of a mythical Native American creature, Sisiutl sees Evan Cross and his team come together to stop a large sea serpent from killing any more people. Just as in the first episode, the opening scenes set up the story and once more feel a little like a sci-fi version of Casualty, where you can see the setup happening – oh, two people in boats, the silhouette of something large approaching, he disappears, she gets dragged into the water – knowing it will lead to the crux of the episode....
For those with a good view, it will be a colorful spectacle, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. The clouds of Jupiter make the planet look white. Mars is red. Saturn is pale yellow, and the bright quarter moon was made by Stanley Kubrick. The red star Antares will add some shading between Mars and Jupiter. Left of Saturn is Pluto, still struggling for its place in the stratosphere....
In the pilot episode of Vinyl, directed by Martin Scorsese, the American Century Records coffee and coke girl is transfixed by the raw aggressive sounds coming through the headphones in her office. She’d only snagged the tape because she liked the look of the lead singer but here was a new style that was a distillation of all the energy of pop music since the beginning of rock and roll....
For me, Red Dwarf began falling apart when Rob Grant left and Doug Naylor was left to carry the baton. As proved by their two solo Red Dwarf books, Backwards and Last Human, respectively, Grant was the ‘jokes’ man, and Naylor was the ‘plot’ guy. Seasons Seven and Eight were knee deep in plot, but unforgivably light on jokes. The opening scenes were a wonderful recreation of the old Rimmer and Lister dynamic as they wound each other up over trivial matters....
If you compare it with its illustrious predecessor, then no, it wasn’t a triumph, because despite having two celebrated writers instead of one, Reggie Perrin comes no-way near in terms of startling originality, quirky characters or shining wit. Thanks largely to Martin Clunes’ sensitive portrayal of the lead character, Reggie Perrin managed to be a colourful pleasure in an otherwise concrete grey field. No classic, but entertaining and clever enough to rise above its sitcom constraints....
The year was 1982 and Marvel was also beginning to experiment with the graphic novel format, so it asked its X-scribe if he could come up with something. The end result was God Loves, Man Kills – a tale which not only had shaped the next 25 years of mutant stories, but it also had a major influence on the second X-Men movie – X2. Mutants are the perfect metaphor for intolerance, prejudice and injustice and sadly, those issues are still as relevant today as they were 25 years ago....
Scouts Guide To The Zombie Apocalypse is one such film; its characters are so aware they’re in the middle of a zombie movie, they don’t even waste time discussing how the army of ghouls invading their Californian town should be sent back to hell. As soon as the dead start to walk the earth, it’s open season. Scouts Guide’s best scene is its first: a niftily-constructed set-up and pay-off involving a body-popping janitor at a medical research lab, sound-proofed glass and an apparently lifeless corpse....
Shameless Season 8 Episode 9 Midway through tonight’s episode of Shameless, Carl gives the kind of snarky comment that can only land so well after a show has been running for at least a half-dozen years. And land it did, “I’m not going to let [her] go just to end up like everyone else in this family who can’t keep a relationship.” The punchline is just as much for we, the viewers, as it is for his befuddled brothers Lip and Ian....
How many horror sequels exceed the scare factor of the first film? You can probably count them on one hand and unfortunately, despite offering stronger characters and a more emotionally resonant story, Sinister 2 falls among the far more numerous cases of diminishing returns in horror franchise history. It’s deeper, but not scarier. Sinister 2 is told from the perspective of Ellison’s ally, known only as Deputy So & So (James Ransome) – the only other person who has figured it all out....
Turns out Gemma told him that she saw one of Lin’s men leaving Tara’s house the night she died. It makes sense – Jax was responsible for the death of Lin’s uncle. Family retribution, right? Sure looks good on paper. But Jax should have learned by now not to trust what Gemma says. If there was one thing Tara tried to instill on her husband, it was the understanding that Gemma was worse than the club....
6.6 Salvage Arguably, what he have here is Jax realizing that a dictatorship is not the way to successfully run any type of organization and him hopefully accepting the fact that through democracy the club can survive. This idea is made all the more apparent when we get to the Irish King’s explanation about the attempted murder of the Redwood charter. Galen, who seems to be getting almost all of the best lines lately says “I don’t give a shit about your democracy....
Like a lot of the best South Park episodes, this one starts off extremely innocently with Butters looking at pictures that he took of bird eggs with Cartman, who couldn’t care less about them. That is until he hears that Butters and his dad took these pictures with a drone of all things. It’s not long after this setup that Cartman is coercing Butters into allowing him to use the drone so they can secretly spy on people....
Death is not a joke, baby. It’s a complicated, evolving, helpful process, and it’s what this episode is all about and what it boils down to in the end as the subject is debated ad infinitum. A rather different looking Dandy finds himself on a planet steeped in death; the “corner of everywhere and nowhere” known as Planet Limbo, a way station of transition. A world where your own funeral procession happens right in front of you with you leading the way....
After the explosive finale of the last season of Spooks. the team are once again down an agent and, while death isn’t a unknown thing with at least one member of the team being killed off per season, it was sad to see the hard as nails Ros finally bow out. So, with Lucas, Harry, Ruth and the rest of the team trying to pick up the pieces, the new season kicks off with Ros’ funeral, a subdued and quiet ceremony led by Ruth, who states that Ros was “an enigma to the last”, which is true....
