2018 was a pretty dismal year for TV and movies in general. As I've opined before, there really wasn't anything good outside of the Marvel movies. But there's some interesting stuff coming up on the tube. Let's take a look, going from least to most interesting.
Not long ago, I read about an NBC show called Timeless which sounded interesting. Kind of like Voyagers!, but with a twist since there's an adversary time traveler like Quantum Leap's evil leaper. From what I'd heard, the first season wasn't great, but season two got a lot better. We're now midway through the show's first season and enjoying it.
Although Timeless was cancelled after two seasons, NBC is apparently giving it a finale movie a la Farscape on December 20th. Although we probably won't be caught up by then, I'm glad to see that the show is getting an actual ending.
Altered Carbon was one of my favorite books. The Netflix version of Altered Carbon wasn't nearly as good as the original book, as they changed quite a lot of the story, but I enjoyed it anyway. The second book, Broken Angels, was my least favorite of the trilogy, but I'll still check out season two of the Netflix show.I will however be hoping to see Kovacs in Will Yun Lee's body more. The character really works best as Asian.
I've enjoyed the SyFy series The Magicians as an aside. I'd often put it on in the background while I'm doing something else. The way I've often described it is as a mediocre show with rare moments of brilliance. Roughly once per season, there will be an episode or just a scene that's flat-out awesome, and that's really the reason I watch. The new season starts on January 23rd.
I was a massive fan of the 90s cartoon The Tick. They remade it as live action in the early 2000s, and it was garbage. Patrick Warburton had the look for the part, but couldn't pull off the character. In Amazon Prime's The Tick remake, Peter Serafinowicz is exactly opposite, which is somehow better. He does the voice and the character wonderfully, but he's not a physically large guy and that doesn't fit The Tick as well as somebody with a football player body might. Still, I really liked season one. The show is absolutely not for kids though. Also, Jackie Earle Haley is fantastic as The Terror. I'd kind of prefer rotating villains like in the original cartoon, (Dinosaur Neil, El Seed, The Evil Midnight Bomber) but I wouldn't want to lose Haley in his role. Looking forward to the next season.
I'm a fan of pretty much all things Marvel, so it should be no surprise that I got a kick out of Hulu's Runaways. The premise is pretty much that a teenaged group of childhood friends find out their parents are essentially super-villains. Hard to say more than that. Season two starts on December 21st.
I wouldn't call myself a Trekkie, per se. I've seen probably half of the original series in random bits, and I loved The Next Generation. I watched plenty of Deep Space Nine back when it was still on, but never got on board for Voyager. And when Enterprise came out, I was initially excited, but very quickly grew disillusioned. So when Star Trek: Discovery came out, I was cautiously optimistic.
It turns out that Discovery is kind of not Trek. I mean, it doesn't feel like a Star Trek show. Sure, it's got transporters snd phasers, and it's got Klingons and Vulcans, but it's so lacking in the future utopian outlook that permeated the earlier programs that it doesn't have the same feel. It's even got adult language, which I've never seen in any Trek before.
And it's kind of all over the place. Weird fungus-based teleportation, alternate dimensions, phantasmal alternates. Really bizarre.
But it's not a bad show. I'm going to be checking out season two as of January 17th.
I was kind of excited when Netflix announced a couple months back that they'd be remaking Avatar: The Last Airbender as a live-action show, only because the original creators Michael DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko are on-board. Let's be honest: The M. Night Shyamalan movie was complete garbage.
When I consider television shows that have had really good plot and character arcs, and a satisfying ending, The Last Airbender is always at the top of my list. I watched the entire series by myself, and then had my entire family watch together, and we all loved it.
The Netflix series promises a culturally-appropriate, non-whitewashed cast
, which sounds awesome. I really hope they nail the Aang character, and allow him to be serious at times, and a fun-loving kid at others. I want to see him cruising around on a ball made of air and doing things just to have fun. I want to see the Cave of Two Lovers episode with the goofy musician. And I'd love to see all the hybrid animals.
Production on the new Avatar doesn't even start until next year, so we've got a ways to go on this one.
One of my favorite science fiction shows on Netflix is Travelers. It reminds me of both Timeless and The 4400, because its premise is that people from the future are transported into the bodies of individuals in the present who are just about to die, effectively overwriting their personalities. Since the person was about to die, the future isn't affected. And then the person can simply stop the car before it crashes, not take that lethal drug overdose, or not walk down that dark alley.
The show has really good characters, and it goes interesting places. I very much liked the first two seasons, and I'm looking forward to the third, which is supposed to show up on Netflix within a month or so.
I've written before about Steven Universe. It's a slow burn, starting as a mediocre kids show. But midway through the first season, it starts getting really interesting. And it's got fantastic music. No wonder that it has such a huge cult following.
The show feels like it's near its end. After the season five finale, many loose ends and plot threads feel mostly wrapped up. But it's not over, so I'm looking forward to what's next for Steven Universe.
Another recent announcement was an as-yet Unnamed Star Trek Series with Patrick Stewart. And this recent interview with one of the the showwriters gives a hint of what it can be:
To me, dystopia has lost its bite. A, we're living in it, and B, it's such a complete crushing series of cliches at this point. The tropes have all been worked and reworked so many times. There was a period where a positive, optimistic, techno-future where mankind learns to live in harmony and goes out into the stars just to discover and not to conquer, that was an overworked trope. But that is no longer the case. A positive vision of the future articulated through principles of tolerance and egalitarianism and optimism and the quest for scientific knowledge, to me that's feels fresh nowadays.
I think this new show has the chance to be the true Trek that Discovery is not.
Of all the new shows I've heard announced recently, none has excited me more than the 4400 remake. It was one of my favorite shows, as you can tell by all the blog posts I wrote about it from 2005 to 2007.
Like so many other upcoming things, I'm cautiously optimistic. What made The 4400 great was that although there were characters with powers, it wasn't by any stretch a superhero show. With one exception, nobody ran around stopping crime. Instead, the powers were not in any way balanced - they were disruptive. And the show explored the ways in which a single person with a supernatural ability could change everything. And in many ways, the show's premise and direction changed from season to season. Hopefully the new show can follow the same general direction as the first, while exploring more contemporary themes (government detention of returnees?) and shore up the show's shortcomings. I will miss Joel Gretch and Jeffrey Combs though.
Another only-just-announced show is Amazon's adaptation of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time books. I loved the novles, although they struggled quite a bit in the middle sections. If you're interested in more, I wrote up a big long article about the show at GeekDad.
Moving back into already-existant shows, we're getting the final season of Game of Thrones in 2019. I think we're looking at Spring or Summer. There are only (I think) six episodes, but from what I understand, each is going to be movie-length. Basically six films, which is bananas. Watching those is going to be a cultural event.
Lastly, my favorite of all of these. 2019 is going to bring us season three of Stranger Things. I love that show so much. I don't think I even need to say more.