BBC's New Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson
In a time of programming uncertainty and early cancellations on American TV, the BBC has produced some of the best television currently available. BBC’s new series Sherlock is absolutely a poster child for great television. Sherlock is a modernized version of the classic Sherlock Holmes tale set in the London of today. Unfortunately, I missed Sherlock when it first aired on BBC, but due to overwhelming positive reviews, comments, and recommendations, I made sure I set the DVR to record it when it first aired on American PBS stations on October 24th. Even amidst such high recommendations Sherlock not only delivered, but amazed me in its brilliance.
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Confession #1: I watched Caprica out of loyalty to Battlestar Galactica. BSG brought me back to the scifi genre. Somewhere between leaving college and rebuilding my life after my divorce I stopped watching science fiction. Somewhere between the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager television shows simultaneously airing I decided to focus on my career and my post graduate education. Somewhere between Shooter Jr being born and actually paying for cable television I lost track of shows like Andromeda, Farscape, and Babylon 5. But BSG brought me back and I owed BSG, Ronald D. Moore, and everyone else involved to watch Caprica.
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SyFy's New Series Haven - Check it Out!
This summer SyFy introduced a new treat for Friday viewers. Eureka and Warehouse 13 were split to plug the Tuesday and Friday summer timeslots left vacant by such names as Stargate Universe, Caprica, Merlin, and Sanctuary. So, on July 9, 2010 SyFy introduced us to a new Friday show, Haven. The show has many aspects that I know would appeal to GWCers like unexplained supernatural phenomena, Warehouse 13-like artifact powers, Sanctuary style mutants (although all in human form…so far), X-files mystery, and a town full of common Northern Lights style folks.
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While most GWC denizens are sci-fi/fantasy geeks, there’s a healthy number of us that have fallen in love with the musical TV show Glee. Something about awkward high school misfits belting their hearts out in the face of overwhelming unpopularity speaks to anyone who’s ever sat at the wrong lunch table. But if you’re still not convinced to trade your phasers for a high F, let me introduce you to a musical that might help get you in the right mood.
Years before he peeled his face off in The Last Starfighter, Robert Preston charmed and connived his way through my favorite musical, The Music Man.
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A man named Will walks down a dim school corridor. His shoulders slightly hunched, he marks time in the same dull routine. He derives no real pleasure from what he does, even though he is exceedingly good at it. He glances absentmindedly towards a dusty trophy case overfilled with forgotten awards and as he pauses his eyes fall on a plaque. Engraved with the name of a former teacher who passed away, the inscription reads:
By its very definition, glee is about opening yourself up to joy.
Thus opens Glee, a show you — and you’re not alone — may have rejected out of hand. (““A show about a Glee club?” you think? “Seriously? No thank you.” Or possibly: “What the hell is a Glee club?”) If this describes you, I’d like to let you in on a little secret: This show isn’t about a glee club. This show is about you.
SLINGERS from Mike Sizemore on Vimeo.
It’s got circa-1960s style and spaceships. It’s got con artists in black-tie formal wear and holographic roulette wheels. It’s got a classic casino heist storyline and a self-aware pistol with a sense of humor. It’s got women in cocktail dresses…and one who changes out of hers into a spacesuit in an airlock. Slingers has all the anachronistic juxtaposition a sci-fi fan could hope for in a TV show, and it promises to return a level of playfulness to gritty, naturalistic sci-fi that we haven’t seen since the days of Firefly. If this all sounds too good to be true, it’s probably because it isn’t…yet.
Having seen the two-hour premier of the new SyFy series Stargate Universe, I am stoked for what looks like another well-crafted, action-filled sci-fi drama. As we’ve seen in shows like Battlestar Galactica, established actors can bring the skill and gravitas required for a good dramatic series — in this case, Robert Carlyle (The Full Monty, Eragon), Lou Diamond Phillips (La Bamba, Stand and Deliver, Young Guns), and a host of experienced television actors.
Compared to previous Stargate series, SG-U‘s serious and gritty style stands out, more reminiscent of BSG than of the campy humor and geeky in-jokes we’ve come to love, particularly in SG-1. We get colored filters that make the world look gray and inhospitable, and we get shaky cameras. Most importantly we get realistic characters who hook up in the storage closets and people who get wounded (and killed) in action in a way that feels more true-to-life than say, the way Star Trek: Voyager scrubs the deck clean of pesky casualties and carpet stains only moments after an explosion decimates the crew.
We’ve been waiting for it. We’ve marked our calendars and counted the months for the Battlestar Galactica tele-movie, The Plan. Sometime in June SyFy president Dave Howe mentioned it would air in November. However, now the network says The Plan will not air in 2009.
This should come as no surprise.
The 2009 Creative Arts Emmy winners were announced Saturday, September twelfth in Los Angeles.
Please join in congratulating a few old friends in their Emmy win! So say we all!
For Outstanding Sound Editing in a Series
Battlestar Galactica • Daybreak (Part 2) • Syfy • R&D TV in association with Universal Cable Productions
Daniel Colman, Supervising Sound Editor / Sound Designer
Jack Levy, Supervising Sound Editor
Vince Balunas, Dialogue/ADR Editor
Sam Lewis, Sound Effects Editor
Michael Baber, Music Editor
Doug Maddik, Foley Artist
Rick Partlow, Foley Artist
Complete List of Creative Arts Emmys Noms and Winners
The sci-fi film/television production community is surprisingly close knit. Everyone seems to know everyone else, and it would be difficult to come up with two movies or shows that couldn’t be connected “six degrees of separation”-style. With that in mind, it should come as no surprise that a lot of sci-fi contains nods to other works in the genre. One of my favorite things to do when rewatching sci-fi is to keep my eyes peeled for robots/ships/props/etc. from other TV shows or movies to make cameo appearances. And believe it or not, it’s actually pretty common. Allow me to be your guide as we take a look at sci-fi past and present to explore some of the coolest — and some of the most well hidden – of these appearances.
Kaywinnit Lee Frye, a.k.a. Kaylee. Beloved mechanic for the ship Serenity. Mal’s girl Friday with an attitude. I think we all love Kaylee in our own way — but is she a good role model? One definition of the term is “a person whose behavior in a particular role is imitated by others.” Do parents want their daughters to behave like Kaylee? Should young adults imitate her? A more in-depth look at Kaylee should answer this question.
If you happened to miss Virtuality‘s premiere on FOX, it wouldn’t surprise me. If not for the GWC hivemind, I would have. In my opinion, it wasn’t promoted very well. Far be it for me to question the marketing decisions of a highly successful network — but they dropped the ball.
Created by Ronald D. Moore and Michael Taylor, Virtuality is set aboard the Phaeton on a ten-year journey to explore the nearby star system Epsilon Eridani. A corporation known as the Consortium partially funds the project via a Reality TV show called Edge of Never: Life on the Phaeton which chronicles the experiences of the 12-person crew. Months after leaving Earth they are informed that their planet will become inhospitable within the next 100 years, thus changing the priorities of the mission from exploration to the survival of the human race.
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