TV Shows

1 May 2016

The Magic of The Magicians

“Hogwarts for adults” is how Syfy’s new show The Magicians is popularly described – but it’s SO much more than that. I admit the parallels are pretty obvious; both The Magicians and Harry Potter are about a guy who discovers magic and proceeds to go to magic school. Both stories have a truly terrifying, seemingly omnipotent villain. And in both stories, the school teachers seem surprisingly unhelpful in solving problems. But compared to the complexity of characters in The Magicians, Harry Potter seems terribly flat. Actually, I would argue that The Magicians is rather the spiritual heir to Buffy the […]

29 September 2015

The 100

Yet another TV show about a post-apocalyptic world? Well… yay! (Honestly!) I’m a big fan of this genre, so big that I actually wrote my bachelor’s thesis about it. And quite a few blog posts / reviews ([1] [2] [3]). So here’s another one of those review blog posts: this one is about The 100, a TV show that began airing on The CW (US) in 2014. The 100 begins loaded with teen drama (or whatever you want to call it), as the premise of the show is that 100 juvenile delinquents are banished to a post-apocalyptic earth which is […]

25 September 2015

Blood and Chocolate

Yesterday I finally finished watching the latest and likely final season of Hannibal. Sadly, Hannibal has been cancelled by NBC and by now it doesn’t look like the show will be picked up by another production company, as most people involved in it have already moved on to other projects. Though I always did admire Hannibal for its writing and cinematography, I did not always necessarily enjoy watching it – it’s just a bit too disgusting for me, and way too sick. I think that’s pretty obvious if you read my profanity-laden post-season-one review of Hannibal. Therefore, I have to […]

24 September 2015

The Crime Scene Cleaner

I have not owned a device capable of receiving German television in ten years, because I can’t bear to watch German television. The primary reason for that is that I just can’t watch dubbed stuff anymore. You’ll find a plethora of reasons for that on against-dubbing.com. So naturally, with the absence from German television, I really have no idea about what’s good in actual German-language productions. Good German films or TV shows are very rare anyway – the only two good German films I can think of are Knockin on Heaven’s Door and Das Leben der Anderen. But as a […]

21 September 2015

Sense8: A Feast for the Senses

When I learned that J. Michael Straczynski, creator and writer of the brilliant Babylon 5, would be writing a new science fiction series, I was very excited. And to make things even more exciting, he was joining forces with the Wachowskis – who, despite the not-good-at-all Jupiter Ascending, are still pioneers of science fiction. Sense8, however, is different from anything they have ever done. In fact, it’s different from everything that ever has been done on television – at least as far as I can tell, and I do watch way too many TV shows. It’s not exactly science fiction. […]

16 September 2015

Американцы (The Americans)

On Netflix, a TV series with the rather unobtrusive name The Americans caught my attention. I wondered why I hadn’t really heard much about it before, and I also wondered what kind of show this could be – seriously, who would name a show The Americans? It sounds so obscenely patriotic. And you could argue that the show actually is obscenely patriotic – but definitely not the in the American sense. It is a show about two KGB agents in deep cover, living the normal 1980s American family life by day and spying for the Russians by night. These two […]

11 September 2015

Victorian Gothic Embodied: Penny Dreadful

Gothic is a literary genre that is as popular today as it was in the past. First attributed to Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), it has inspired an entire array of subgenres, such as horror, the supernatural and even science fiction. Not only do these genres still play an important role in present day literature, film and television – also, the Gothic genre has sparked an entire subculture that mostly defines itself around its music and dresscode. A recent television series that embodies everything about the spirit of Gothic literature is Penny Dreadful, which is set in a […]

23 May 2015

The Future is looking Grimm

Or is it? Over its past four seasons, Grimm has established itself as a rather serene show. Despite it dark and gritty outward appearance, its serialized plots always tend towards a happy ending – as one would expect of a show that is largely inspired by fairy tales. The world of Grimm is inhabited by creatures (‘Wesen’) that cannot be seen by the majority of the population. They are sort of creatures that live inside people, but the people themselves are the creatures. They only show this when they want to or when they get emotional (‘Woge’). Some of them […]

26 September 2013

The Glory of Spartacus

Let us break words on most glorious entertainment! When my ears first received tale of a television spectacle bearing the name of Spartacus, they did not stand to attention. “Meh”, was the only thought that sprang to mind, “gladiators, Romans, they have been so numerous on our screens in the past. Why bother…” The thought fell from mind and was not brought back to surface for many moons. But word from trusted friend left impression and action was taken. Familiar names among scribes accelerated process – Steven S. DeKnight and Jed Whedon of Whedonverse fame stand among them. Thus, shortly […]