TV Shows

17 June 2013

Only the End of the World again: Jericho vs. Revolution

Do Americans have a (sub)conscious desire to eliminate their society? This is a question you could ask yourself when you look at the vast amount of dystopian and apocalyptic fiction out there, seemingly all of which seems to take place on the North American Continent. The Walking Dead, I Am Legend and Falling Skies depict the US as overrun by zombies/vampires/aliens, The Handmaid’s Tale depicts a totalitarian theocracy, Jericho shows us the immediate aftermath of nuclear annihilation and Revolution shows us a world without electricity. [This is probably a good time to warn you about the massive spoilers in this […]

13 June 2013

Vikings: Raiding your TV

The History Channel wants to ride the wave of success many American TV channels are currently experiencing with their serial productions. They have attempted this by creating a fictionalized TV show about the Vikings, the people who lived in Scandinavia in the middle ages and who are probably most famous as seafarers. Fun side note: 99% of vikings were farmers. The TV show was brought to life by none other than Michael Hirst, most famous for the two Elizabeth films with Cate Blanchett in the lead, as well as for the TV show The Tudors, about which I blogged a […]

2 June 2013

The Utopia Experiment

Where is Jessica Hyde? This is the central question of Channel 4’s unique, somewhat experimental six-part series Utopia. This series has attracted my attention by coincidence, but I’m glad it did – it’s been a long time since I have seen something to utterly weird and compelling. The central characters of the show are a group of comic book fans who know each other from an online chatroom. They are united in their obsession for a mysterious comic called “The Utopia Experiments”, which was written by a mad men in a psychiatric ward. When it is discovered that there may […]

16 May 2013

Deus Ex Machina: Person of Interest

Person of Interest is an American TV show about former CIA agent John Reese who teams up with mysterious hacker Harold Finch. Together they help people involved in premeditated crimes – with the help of a secret machine which detects such crimes. The machine was originally built to protect the US from the threat of terror, but it also detects crimes that are not relevant to national security. With the help of a back door built into the code of the machine, Finch is able to determine the identities of the people in need of help and sends Reese out […]

12 March 2013

On TV, Toronto is the new New York

I watch a lot of TV shows and one thing I always notice immediately is when New York is not New York on screen. Lots of TV shows have been doing that for ages – good examples are Friends and Castle, both of which are shot in LA. Most film companies just don’t want to invest in the authenticity of shooting in the real New York, so they stay in Hollywood. But in the last couple of years, even LA appears to have become too expensive – as more and more US shows are shot in Canada. The trick is […]

1 February 2013

Welcome to Babylon 5

There are very few TV shows which send you on an emotional roller coaster beyond compare. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Doctor Who (2005), Downton Abbey and The Sopranos are among them, but none of the shows currently out there can live up to them. It’s a paradox, actually – we know that all those characters and events are fictional, yet we still invest emotionally and our capability for empathy makes us feel with the characters. I have seen so many shows by now, I daresay I suffer from TV show fatigue – the lack of emotional turmoil as experienced during […]

7 June 2011

Much Ado About David Tennant And Catherine Tate

Back in January, on a boring Sunday while doing the usual nothing on the internet, I got a Twitter pop-up on my screen from David Tennant’s news channel. It had just been announced that David Tennant and Catherine Tate would be performing on stage in a new production of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. “Interesting…”, I thought aloud to myself, which alerted my boyfriend who was sitting next to me doing stuff on his own computer. I told him about this discovery, and after about 3 minutes of discussion, we had spontaneously decided that our summer vacation would take place […]

5 June 2011

In the QI audience

I’ve been planning my current trip to London since January, so naturally I continuously kept checking out cool stuff do to while I’m there. One of the things I checked out was applausestore.com, which is a platform where you can apply for TV studio audience tickets. And I got extra lucky – after applying for the waiting list, the reserve list and the actual ticket list, I got a priority ticket to the show QI! Yay! Unless you’re not British or a total Stephen Fry fanatic, you might be thinking “huh?”. QI (Quite Interesting) is a panel quiz show hosted […]

16 December 2010

Of Parallel Universes, Alternate Realities, Realms and Dimensions

As a side effect of the significant amount of Science Fiction I’ve been enjoying lately (most recently having devoured Fringe in no time), I’ve noticed a phenomenon that is almost as inexplicably over-present in fiction as vampires or zombies are: Parallel Universes. There’s just one thing in which Parallel Universes strikingly differ from fiction-favorites vampires and zombies: their existence can not be proven, nor can be proven that they don’t exist. They are the lab cat of science, locked in a box labeled “Schrodinger’s”. Science usually refers to Parallel Universes as the “Multiverse”, which I will also do here, mostly. […]