'SHADOWS' TAPS A VEIN OF HUMOR

Unless you count snarky heroes and heroines with snappy comeback, humor is sometimes hard to find in our world of square-jawed starship captains and tough alien fighters. The same can be said for our sister authors’ world of paranormal lusty shapeshifters, vampires and werewolves. Makes one long for the days of YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN (a film I can practically quote line for line).

I had high hopes for The Orville, Seth McFarlane’s homage to Star Trek on the FX Networks. But often the series can’t decide whether it’s a full-out comedy, a parody/satire, or some form of dramatic honorific to the original series. Most episodes elicit little more than a chuckle.

Born in the 12th Century? Your cake needs lots of candles!

But FX keeps trying. Even if vampires and werewolves aren’t particularly your thing in a serious vein (ha-ha), What We Do in the Shadows, the latest FX paranormal parody, is bound to make you laugh. I tuned in on a whim and found it hilarious. This half-hour mockumentary following the misadventures of a tiny nest of modern-day vamps (including one energy vampire!) and their hapless human familiar is just the thing to watch after a long day of depressing news and an extended TV schedule of dark dramas.

In this show, based on a 2014 New Zealand film, an ancient Turkish vampire, Nandor the Relentless (Kayvan Novak), attempts to lead his supposed followers, Nadya (Natasia Demetriou) and Lazlo (Matt Berry), with less success than he might have herding cats. His bumbling familiar Guillermo (Harvey Guillen) wishes only to become a vamp but is constantly ignored and belittled. Then there is Mark Proksch’s Colin Robinson (always the full name), the energy vampire of your nightmares (or your office). He basically talks you to death, his eyes lighting up as he steals your energy all the while.

A recent episode had the vamps fighting off an attack from a pack of werewolves (the werewolves were pissing on the lawn). Rules of a truce between the two groups demanded that each side choose a champion for a showdown. The wolves chose their biggest fighter to face Nandor using as weapons only his teeth and claws. Nandor chose his weapon—a squeaky toy. Which he promptly threw off the roof where they were fighting. The werewolf chased it over—and down to his death. I, um, howled!

How long the writers and directors (original film writer Jemaine Clement, among others) can keep this going is a real question. Watching the Undead from the 12^th Century (or Victorian England or Romania—Lazlo and Nadya are “younger”) trying to navigate such modern-day bafflements as the grocery store or a city council meeting is pretty funny, but, as we are seeing with Saturday Night Live, even a good gag—and a talented cast—eventually stops producing laughs.

For now, though, I’m happy to be along for the ride.

What We Do in the Shadows, Wednesdays at 10:00 EDT on FX.

Cheers, Donna

FIVE THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT THE NEW TV SEASON

The concept of a fall television season is pretty outdated by now, given that new shows debut nearly every month on one platform or another. Streaming services like Netflix or Amazon Prime just throw things out there whenever they please; cable networks have never seemed to have defined seasons; and even the old broadcast networks have fall, winter, summer and “limited run” shows. It’s downright confusing for a child of the rabbit-ears generation like me.

Wow, Mom and Dad--it's the Fall TV Season!

But, okay, right now we have a treasure-trove of new stuff to look at: new shows, old shows coming back with new episodes, beloved canceled shows moving to new platforms. There is much too much content for me to cover it all with a blog post; I recommend a subscription to TV Guide to keep up with everything. I do have a few observations, however.

1) Some great shows have been saved from cancelation by the streaming services. Lucifer, starring Tom Ellis, a light-hearted paranormal crime dramedy, was picked up by Netflix when Fox canceled it. I was cheering, because I love the characters in this story of the sexy Devil who quits his “job” in Hell and sets up in a nightclub in L.A., then falls for a detective in the LAPD. Word on the street is that Star Trek star William Shatner helped save this show by tweeting his support to his millions of Twitter followers.

Our Spacefreighters favorite,The Expanse, was similarly plucked out of the Syfy Channel discard file by Amazon Prime after a fan campaign. It’s almost enough for me to buy that Prime contract, though I’ve been resisting all these years.

2) Manifest, another paranormal drama built along the lines of Lost orThe 4400, debuted this week on NBC. A commercial airliner disappears on a routine flight from Jamaica to New York, then reappears five years later. The people aboard haven’t aged a day; to them, no time has passed, they’ve just gone through a little turbulence. Their readjustment to daily life is complicated not only by what has happened in the time they’ve been gone, but by the fact they’ve acquired supernatural abilities in the meantime. 

The first episode was intriguing in a variety of ways, and not nearly as headache-inducing as Lost. The show definitely has a religious or spiritual vibe, though; I found that interesting, but some may find it off-putting.

3) Speaking of Lost, a new show about a maverick hospital administrator seeking to make sweeping changes in the way health care is delivered at a big public hospital in the city describes New Amsterdam, on NBC. I’m a sucker for medical shows, so I tuned in, only to be so confused I had to turn to my iPad for clarification.

The star of the show is Ryan Eggold (formerly of The Blacklist):

Could he be the long “lost” brother of Matthew Fox, star of “Lost?”:

 

Matthew Fox, actor best known for Lost

Weird, right? Not that I would kick either one of them out of bed for eating crackers, as my mama used to say.

4) The best medical show on television is still ABC’s The Good Doctor, starring Freddie Highmore (Bates Motel), the story of an autistic surgical resident with genius-level med skills and almost no people skills. Highmore is brilliant as Dr. Shaun Murphy, and his supporting cast stretches to come up to his level. Lisa Edelstein (House) joins the cast as the oncologist treating the brain tumor affecting Dr. Murphy’s mentor, Dr. Glassman (Richard Schiff). If you aren’t watching this show, start now.

5) Science fiction has cresting on television for a couple of years now, but it appears that wave has receded. No new shows have made the list (unless you count Manifest, which I wouldn’t, really.) Many have been canceled or shunted to streaming services. The hot trend is “emotional family” stuff, following the success of This Is Us (A Million Little Things), heavy crime drama with an anti-terrorist twist (FBI, based on the success of SEAL Team, Blindspot and Quantico), or reality TV (too many shows to mention). 

The top 20 most popular shows are absolutely dominated by “unscripted” shows—talent competitions, football, “bachelor/bachelorette” crap, game shows. The only breakthroughs are aging comedies (Big Bang Theory, and its spinoff, Young Sheldon) and, rarely, a few episodes of the shows I mentioned.

My advice? Don’t look for a career as a television writer, especially if you write SFR.

Cheers, Donna

WHAT'S TO WATCH? QUICKY REVIEWS!

I’m hip-deep in revisions of my latest novel in the Interstellar Rescue series, so I don’t have the time to do full reviews of what I’ve been watching in my spare time. But how about a couple of quickshot recommendations?

--GHOST IN THE SHELL. Set in a hologram-wild and bionic-crazy future Tokyo, this science fiction thriller starring Scarlett Johansson is visually gorgeous, but somewhat short on new ideas. A remake of a classic Japanese manga, the film is slow going at first, but picks up in the second half. It’s supposed to have us leaving the theater thinking deep thoughts about the human soul, but any SF fan has had those thoughts before. Still, well worth seeing, if only for the eye candy.

--COLONY. If you aren’t watching this USA Network SF series starring Josh Holloway (LOST) and Sarah Wayne Callies (THE WALKING DEAD, PRISON BREAK), you’re missing the second -best SF series on television (after THE EXPANSE). Forget zombies and bleak desert-like post-apocalyptic landscapes, this is what life would really be like if aliens invaded. Think Nazi-like concentration camps, gigantic walls cutting off family members from each other, mysterious “factories,” human collaborators, and an unseen enemy with a plan to eliminate the population of Los Angeles. Science fiction is at its best when it operates as metaphor. This one is a doozy!

--FEUD: BETTY AND JOAN. Okay, this is not science fiction, but it does tell the behind-the-scenes story of one of the greatest psychological horror films ever made: WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE? (1962). That film, a creepily memorable black-and-white classic of the Sixties, starred two aging megastars—Joan Crawford and Bette Davis—as sisters caught in a psychotic, co-dependent downward spiral. Turns out the director, Robert Aldritch, had only managed to capture the hateful true nature of the actors’ years-long Hollywood rivalry, a cat fight encouraged by film industry good-ole-boys like studio head Jack Warner. In FEUD, all this spiteful history is recreated in trainwreck-like detail by producer Ryan Murphy (AMERICAN HORROR STORY) and fascinating stars Jessica Lange (Crawford) and Susan Sarandon (Davis). Must watch!

What are you watching these nights?

Cheers, Donna