TV Features

Terra Nova: Worth Watching?

Of the plethora of shows coming to our screens for the first time this fall, Terra Nova has just about the biggest chance of being an expectative failure. Whilst Alcatraz and Person of Interest
have the backing of J.J Abrams, the man has put enough genuinely
entertaining and intriguing things on television already to be due a bad
one (let’s just pretend that Undercovers didn’t happen). Grimm hasn’t really been thrown in our faces enough to have anyone excited enough to be disappointed if it fails and The River and Awake have the fortune of starting slightly later in the year and being forgotten about before they’re put onto screens.

Was Camelot’s Cancellation Deserved?

Last month, blaming scheduling conflicts and production cost overruns, Starz cancelled Camelot and
I was tasked with reporting the news. Although I had written a piece
indirectly discussing some of the series’ themes, I hadn’t watched a
single episode. Thanks to DVR, I decided to take a look at the pilot
before writing the brief, and in just a few minutes, I was both
pleasantly surprised and positively horrified. That is when it became
apparent to us here at Player Affinity TV that the cable network’s
decision deserved a more thorough examination.

Adaptations
almost always incite passionate reactions for various reasons, so for a
moment, let’s ignore the Arthurian legend — the source material in our
case — and see how the series fares. Camelot is set in the
Early Middle Ages and tells the story of Arthur, a young man who one day
discovers he is the son of a British warlord, Uther Pendragon, known as
the King of all Britons. On that very same day, the young King Arthur
inherits the kingdom and, helped by the sorcerer Merlin and a small
group of friends, spends many months trying to establish his authority,
consolidate his kingdom, and fend off the devious schemes of his sister
Morgana.

Who Should Run The Walking Dead?

Frank Darabont’s departure
from The Walking Dead was a shock to the TV viewing world.
Coming on the heels of the Comic-Con panel, where Darabont joined
cast and crew in enthusiastically discussing the hit AMC series, the
announcement was extremely unexpected. Though Glen Mazzara has
already stepped into the role of show runner, the change in
leadership got me wondering; who else might be worthy of the
position? So I present three candidates who would be well suited for
the job, and while these picks are just wishful thinking, they are
nonetheless qualified.

With NBC passing on his latest project, 17^th
Precinct, Moore was available to take the reins on The Walking
Dead. Working for years in the
Sci-Fi genre, it was his revival of Battlestar Galactica
that brought him his most acclaim; and is what truly qualifies him to
take on TWD. The
sprawling epic pitted the last vestige of humanity against seemingly
insurmountable odds. In addition to the obvious similarity,
Battlestar Galactica also
often conveyed that despite the horrors they faced in battle,
humanity is its own worst enemy; which is another central theme in
the TWD comics. An
aspect that never seemed to translate to Darabont’s interpretation of
the series. Moore joining the TWD
would mean reuniting with composer, Bear McCreary; whose work on BSG
produced one of the best soundtracks in television history, and is
all the more excuse to get the two of them back together.

Will Alcatraz Be the Next Lost?

With the recent screening of the pilot
episode of Alcatraz at Comic-Con 2011, many are wondering that
very thing. Only a few months past the one year anniversary of Lost
ending, it seems like fans have already been clamoring for ages for a
show to take its place. Will Alcatraz be the series to do it?
Lets find out, and take a closer look at this new series that is
already generating buzz, just by its connections to one of the most
discussed television series in recent history.

Before we get into what Alcatraz
might be, let’s take a look at what it is. The plot centers around a
group of over three hundred inmates and guards disappearing from the
infamous prison in 1963. As they begin to reappear decades later in the present,
none of them have aged a day. A team is quickly formed to find all
of those missing, while also investigating what caused the
phenomenon. The series will be set up in a “Prisoner of the Week”
style, with each episode dedicated to tracking down one of the time
jumping prisoners. The mystery behind how and why these men traveled
nearly fifty years into the future will also provide an arcing plot
running throughout.

They Died So Young: Five Great Two Season Shows

Continuing
on from the last installment, I move on to shows that made it
as far as two seasons. Though this batch did develop further, with
one exception, they were all still canceled before their time. Some
of them brought in awards – or at least nominations –
while others
struggled to find any recognition outside of their cult followings.
Some were upbeat and hilarious, others put a unique touch on drama, but
they all left their fans bemoaning their early departures. So
let’s take a look back at five more brilliant short-lived series.

A Study of AMC: Part 2 of 2

In the conclusion of this
article I’ll be examining the lows AMC has experienced with their
new batch of original programming, as well as a look at their
greatest commercial achievement. We’ll also take a peek at what’s to
come for the network in their newest series, and where it might fall
on the scale of AMC’s existing programs.

AMC was riding high on the
success of Mad Men and
Breaking Bad coming
into the summer of 2010. This is when they launched their third
original program since retooling the network. Rubicon
was meant to take another cast of relatively obscure but talented
actors and insert them into a compelling storyline with deep and
often troubled characters (basically following exactly in Breaking
Bad and Mad Men’s
footsteps). Some things just don’t work out the way we hope, though,
and such was the case with Rubicon.
The cast was solid for the most part, but no one stood out or
provided the audience with a particularly memorable performance. The
plot also fell short in enthralling viewers, despite its conspiracy-driven story.

A Study of AMC: Part 1 of 2

With the recent airing of The
Killing‘s season finale, as well
as Breaking Bad‘s
fourth season premiering in a few days, I thought it would be
appropriate to take a look back at where the network has been. With
their drama series, AMC has found both critical acclaim and ratings success –
if never exactly in the same show. But the network existed for years
before the likes of Mad Men
and The Walking Dead
came about. So in the first half of this two part article I’ll be
examining the life of AMC leading up to the network’s greatest
triumphs, and the two shows that began their meteoric rise after a
long history filled with successes and failures.

Haven: A Look at Season 1 & Speculations on Season 2

Haven‘s
premiere in July last year wasn’t exactly a ground-breaking event. The
Syfy series was just one more supernatural drama that received rather
lukewarm initial reviews, and even managed to alienate a part of the
entertainment press after just a few episodes. A moderately active fan
base took over from journalists who only returned when, surprisingly,
the show kept drawing respectable ratings and Syfy stubbornly showed no
sign of canceling it prematurely. 

Very loosely based on The Colorado Kid
from Stephen King, the show tells the story of an FBI agent, Audrey
Parker, who investigates supernatural events in Haven, a small coastal
town in Maine. She is helped by local cop Nathan and small-time smuggler
Duke. The generally tepid reviews were apparently due to the fact that Haven was nothing like Lost or The X-Files
or an improvement over those two. The show designers intended to
deliver a series with independent episodes and just a trace of an
overarching storyline, which is exactly what they did. It follows that
it doesn’t make sense to assess their effort on the lack of a convoluted
mythology from day one.

The Player Affinity Emmys

With
the official nominations being announced on the 14th,
we thought it would be appropriate to put out our own list of picks
for the biggest categories. Far from predictions, these picks are
mainly wishful thinking on our part. Though we do not feel less strongly about our picks just because they don’t have
much chance of coming true.

The Rise of the Weird and Unexplained on TV

The second season of Syfy’s Haven will premiere in about two weeks. As I write, HBO’s True Blood has just started its fourth summer run, and the CW’s Supernatural
has been renewed for a seventh fall season. We are now so used to
having our share of genuine supernatural dramas that it might come as a
surprise to many that it wasn’t always the case. In fact, the weird and
unexplained — for a long time — wasn’t considered safe enough to be
given free rein in a TV series, and when it occasionally happened, the
resulting series rarely ran for more than a season.