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Category Archives: Other Prestige Dramas
Why The Haunting of Hill House Succeeds Where So Many Other Netflix Shows Fail
Every prestige-ish drama has to have a mystery box. Whether the cultural influence comes from J.J. Abrams or Game of Thrones or the other forces that prompt studios and creators to play follow the leader, no season of television, particularly genre television, can seem to get by without some burning mystery that you’ll have to wait till the season finale to see resolved.
The Haunting of Hill House is no exception. As I discussed on The Serial Fanaticist podcast, the horror series from writer/director Mike Flanagan actually has two mystery boxes. The series gradually ladles out the story of the Crain family — two young parents and their five children — in both the past and the present, offering parallel mysteries in both timeframes. And its puzzles and scares are each centered around the titular haunted house.
Posted in Other Prestige Dramas, Television
Tagged Haunted Houses, Horror, Netflix, Season Reviews, The Haunting of Hill House
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Nightflyers sees George R.R. Martin Head to Deep Space For Syfy
It’s 2093, and the Earth is dying. The crew of the Nightflyer, a bustling human colony ship, is leaving orbit and heading to “The Void” in hopes that they can save it. An alien ship housing a species referred to as “The Volcryn” (a confusing pronunciation for Star Trek fans) is traversing that space, and it’s a long shot, but they may hold the key to fixing our planet.
But the catch is twofold. First, the aliens have ignored all our attempts to contact them, so the humans have reluctantly resorted to enlisting a telepath to help their cause, who may or may not be able to hop on the aliens’ wavelength. Second, in this universe, telepaths are gravely mistrusted after a spate of vaguely-referred-to massacres. So when things start to go terribly wrong on the ship, and main characters and redshirts alike start to experience haunting hallucinations, that mistrust only grows. It quickly becomes apparent that this mission may be doomed before it ever really starts.
Posted in Other Prestige Dramas, Television
Tagged George R.R. Martin, Science Fiction, TV Reviews
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Castle Rock’s First Season Offers the Same Old Tiresome Excesses of High Class Genre Fare
CAUTION: This article contains major spoilers for Castle Rock.
When the first season of Netflix’s Daredevil came out, it felt like the series fulfilled an unmet need. The show had its problems, even in its promising first year, but it did things differently than other live action superhero shows at the time. The series had something on its mind. It had production values and grimy visuals and creatively-staged fights. It was far from flawless, but its quick success made it seem like the herald of a new phase of genre television, one that aimed for something a little deeper, a little darker, and a little realer than what we’d had before.
Well maybe it’s time to send that herald back from whence it came. As I discussed on The Serial Fanatacist podcast, Castle Rock doesn’t directly borrow much, if anything, from Daredevil, but it’s part of the same wave of prestige-aping, navel-gazing genre shows whose reach far exceeds their grasp. While briefly novel, this sort of take on geek-approved material has worn out its welcome amid the onslaught of shows that know enough to gesticulate toward deeper themes and move the camera around in faux-portentous montages, but never really master the trade, let alone the depth of character or storytelling that could make those badges of seriousness legitimately meaningful.
Posted in Other Prestige Dramas, Television
Tagged Castle Rock, Genre Television, Horror, Season Reviews, Stephen King
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Season 2 of Westworld Had Bigger Challenges Than Before, But Couldn’t Overcome Them in “The Passenger”
Season 1 of Westworld had an easier task than Season 2 did. The first season of the show, as Clementine might put it, didn’t have much of a rind on it. All of its mysteries, all of its characters, all of its ideas, were completely new. The audience was starting from square one, and the show was able to spoon feed details and reveal important facts bit-by-bit until the shocking twists burst out. The first season also had a clearer trajectory for its season-length mega arc, with early hints that there was something amiss with the hosts, building to a full blown revolt at the end.
But as I discussed on the Serial Fanaticist Podcast, Season 2 had no such luxuries. Despite the introduction of a handful of new characters, when the second season rolled around, Westworld’s major figures had become known quantities. How the park worked, the contours of this artificial world, was no longer as burning a question after ten episodes’ worth of worldbuilding. And the path from business as usual in Westworld to all hell breaking loose proved a much clearer and more direct path than Season 2’s disparate collections of characters who each want different things, and are all marauding around the park in a far less unified fashion.
Posted in Other Prestige Dramas, Television
Tagged Akecheta, Episode Reviews, Season Reviews, Westworld, Westworld S02E10, Westworld Season 2
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Ranking: Every Season of The Wire from Worst to Best
Andrew joins Randall Colburn and Greg Whitt to rank, dissect, and honor one of the greatest television shows of all time.
Star Trek: Discovery’s First Season Finale Is a Mixed Bag that Still Honors the Spirit of the Franchise
There was no shortage of pearl-clutching and garment-rending over the tone and spirit of Star Trek Discovery through much of its first season (some of it from yours truly). The show embraced a moral ambiguity in Starfleet’s mission that every other series (outside of Deep Space 9) had only hinted at. Captain Lorca leaving Harry Mudd to rot in a Klingon prison cell was touted as a betrayal of Federation and franchise principles. And Heaven help any writer who’d dared to have a character suggest that some Star Trek ideals must be bent or broken in a time of war.
But as I discussed with Robbie Dorman on The Serial Fanaticist Podcast, for all that folderol (or perhaps because of it) Star Trek Discovery ends its first season with a firm embrace of the franchise’s hallowed ideals of optimism, mercy, and understanding; a firm rejection of those who would eschew or ignore those things when they’re inconvenient; and a firm vindication of a lead character who grows enough to discover that it’s worth a mutiny to stand by those principles, not to toss them aside.
Breaking Down the First Season of Star Trek: Discovery
Andrew teams up with Clint Worthington to look back at Star Trek: Discovery‘s first season and decide how it measured up.
Posted in Other Prestige Dramas, Television
Tagged Jason Isaacs, Klingons, Michael Burnham, Season Reviews, Star Trek, Star Trek Discovery
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Gilmore Girls: “A Vineyard Valentine” Presages Mad Men in One of Season 6’s Best Episodes
It’s rare that Gilmore Girls feels like Mad Men, no matter what the overlapping talents of Alexis Bledel, Danny Strong, and (very briefly) Jon Hamm on both shows might suggest. The former is more explicitly comedic and bright, while the latter is more capital-S Serious and apt to explore the dark corners.
Despite that, the two series have a surprising amount in common. While their tones differ, both shows are intimately concerned with their characters’ emotional states and how a mood or a feeling can carry or direct them through a given day. Both examine their protagonists’ sense of who they are, what place they occupy in the world, and how that translates to their treatment of those around them. And despite its heavier vibe, Mad Men could be hilarious, and despite its whimsical bent, Gilmore Girls was often incisive and heartbreaking.
Breaking Bad’s Pilot Has It All, And Yet Has Nothing
It’s all there. And none of it’s there.
As I talked about on the Pilot Study Podcast, the Breaking Bad pilot tells you everything you need to know to watch and understand the series. It gives you Walter White, the down-on-his-luck, spineless high school chemistry teacher who’s sleepwalking his way through life. It gives you the hint of an interest and a talent within him that goes unnoticed and unregarded by everyone around him. It gives you Skyler and Walt Jr., Hank and Marie, Jesse Pinkman and so many other figures who make up his world, with just enough color to get a sense for who they are. It gives you the cancer diagnosis that ignites something in Walt, that causes him to take control of his life. And it gives you the sense of the consequences of that change and that choice, the subtle transformation that sets him on a different trajectory.
But what isn’t present, what’s barely even hinted at in this first installment, is where that slow-burning transformation will take him. That’s the beauty of Breaking Bad, and its devotion to the idea of change embodied in Walt’s speech about chemistry. We see the first chemical reaction here, the catalyst that sends a lowly science teacher down a new path. We see brief sketches of his wife, his brother-in-law, and his new, less-than-reputable business partner. But we can’t see how much these individuals, and our view of them, will shift and flip over the ensuing five seasons of one of television’s all-time great dramas.
This pilot gives you everything you need to dip your toe into the world of Breaking Bad, but only gives the slightest hints as to how deep and how dark the water goes.
Posted in Other Prestige Dramas, Television
Tagged Breaking Bad, Bryan Cranston, Episode Reviews, Vince Gilligan, Walter White
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The Star Trek: Discovery Premiere Is a Risky Proposition
Risk is our business. That famous line from Captain Kirk lays out the essential ethos of Star Trek — that the wild and wooly galaxy that our heroes explore is full of pitfalls and dangers, but also of unfathomable possibilities, there to be discovered. As I discussed with Robbie Dorman on the Serial Fanaticist Podcast, the premiere of the aptly-titled Star Trek Discovery embraces that franchise philosophy, giving it form in the sort of distillation and debate and that once fueled its 1960s counterpart.
