“Thank you for being my people.” Gravity Falls, after two seasons of the best-looking backgrounds, liveliest characters, and all-out most infuriating production schedules of all time, is off the air. It isn’t a perfect finale, nor is it a particularly daring one, but it has heart, horror, and an end-of-summer bittersweetness that gives its many indulgences […]
“I am getting a taste of what Agent Scully must suffer.” Boy, this season is one wild ride. Ups and downs have abounded and here on the precipice of its foreshortened run there’s still no clear thrust as to where it’s all heading and why any of it was dragged up from cold storage for […]
“Yeah, Mighty Monarch. My wife invited me.” Nothing in The Venture Bros is merely exceptional. If there’s one thing the show does consistently, it’s portraying a world where even the most astonishing lives are riddled with fear, insecurity, fuckups, and tedium. ‘Faking Miracles’ is a quiet case study in how the glossy exterior is maintained through hack-work, […]
The second spin-off from NCIS (and technically the third from JAG – which is where the original NCIS series was spun out of), NCIS New Orleans is a very different beast to its predecessors. Whereas the first show was a stoic, patriotic series; and the second was more action and comedy orientated; this third entry […]
“YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE” ‘Home Again’ is a parable about how we deal with our garbage. It births this metaphor via a gooey canal, giving us a garbage golem who kills to protect the homeless, or at least to punish those who oppress them, and a bluntly mirrored plot centered on Scully’s struggle to accept her […]
“Where am I? Hell? Or a children’s TV show set in Hell?” There’s a blurry line between the everyday and the exceptional. Plenty of superhero flicks have made fodder out of the murkiness of that division. Think back to Mr. Incredible’s super-powered midlife crisis, his inability to reconcile his power and ability with what he […]
“It’s a reminder that no matter how overwhelming our anxieties might be, they will soon be resolved when we are dead and buried for all eternity.” Thus does the preposterously Teutonic psychiatrist prescribe a walk in the graveyard as a cure for life’s angst. Even life’s most terrifying and mysterious questions, he asserts, have answers. […]
“It’s a Sicilian thing.” It feels like the Earth was young the last time The Venture Bros was on the air, but here we are again at the start of a brand new season. Season 5 ended in flames, death, and an accordion-driven rendition of The Crash Test Dummies’ ‘Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm’ along with the […]
“Note the letter-opener sticking out of his head.” ‘Founder’s Mutation,’ a much stronger episode than last night’s The X-Files premiere, finds a balance between mythology and the human condition and then hums along in that sweet spot. If the story of an egotistical scientist conducting experiments on his own children is perhaps a little shopworn in the […]
“If I’m putting my ass out there, I need to know it’s hanging by more than just a very slender thread.” After eight years of radio silence, the number stations are spinning back up. Returning to the air with the inauspiciously-named ‘My Struggle,’ The X-Files manages to wed frenetic pacing and herky editing to David Duchovny’s affectless […]
Watching WWE: Best PPV Matches 2015 the hope is to see the big fights from the WWE, and for us to have a year in review. What we get is exactly that, a year in which WWE showed a need for a revolution, and not only in the Diva division… At the beginning of the […]
When I got Arne Dahl: The Complete Second Season to review, I hoped that I’d be able to pick up the show without having to watch the first season. Luckily this is the case, and I was introduced to another good dose of Nordic Noir… Arne Dahl follows the A Unit, a group of elite police […]
Older wrestling fans remember Hell in a Cell fondly. It used to be the cage that saw the debut of Kane, that Mick Foley threw himself off (and through) all the time, and of course The Undertaker made iconic. Now, as we arrive at WWE’s Hell in a Cell 2015 it is just another name […]
“If I can just keep this up for the rest of my life, no one will suspect a thing.” Steven Universe is not made for me. This is good and correct, as it is made for children and the alternate Earth where it’s packed full of references to Hellraiser and soundtracked with deep cuts from Godspeed You! Black Emperor‘s discography is […]
“There’s still time!” “That is a nice thought, but no.” Love is a key component of the fabric of Steven Universe, a force the show treats as both weapon and comfort. It’s also a subject the show has displayed immense maturity in dealing with, but there’s very little to get into when it comes to ‘The […]
If I ever had a problem with Peep Show, it is that the characters aren’t particularly nice people. They like to think they are, particularly Mark (David Mitchell) with his snobbish selfish view on life and Jeremy (Robert Webb) …who is just Jeremy. In the end for me it’s the people like Super Hans (Matt […]
There is something very likable about Matt Berry, and it’s not just his awesome voice. The fact that we see him in many British comedies shows just how talented he is, and with Toast of London: Series Three we see him at his best. It would be easy to believe that Steven Toast is Matt […]
Christmas episodes of Doctor Who are normally irrelevant stories that don’t connect to the main series, and manage to be a little more light-hearted. This is why what we get with The Husbands of River Song is total fan service and the perfect coming together of Peter Capaldi and Alex Kingston. When The Doctor (Peter […]
With my main experience of The Bridge coming from one of its remakes, The Tunnel, I did wonder if it would be a mistake jumping straight in with The Bridge: The Complete Season Three. Thankfully I found that it was a very good move to make… When a woman is found murdered and placed in […]
Tables, Ladders and Chairs matches haven’t really been the same since the Attitude heyday of Edge & Christian and The Hardy Boys but still the WWE perserve with the pay per view each and every year. 2015 looks set to be an interesting PPV with – at least on paper – a few matches that […]
If you are a WWE fan over a certain age you’ll find it hard to believe that there are wrestling fans out there who don’t know who Owen Hart was… A wrestler who died way before his time, this release may be controversial but it is also a fitting tribute to one of the best wrestlers […]
A show like Doctor Who sometimes needs to do the unexpected, and that is what Doctor Who: 9×12 – Hell Bent does. What I think I will call this episode is “fan service” because that is exactly what it is, in all the right ways Continuing from Heaven Sent The Doctor (Peter Capaldi) is now […]
