Category Archives: TV

And I’m done watching The Cape.

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The show isn’t getting better. It isn’t getting funnier and it’s ratings are going down quickly, so we know there won’t be a season two (especially since season one got cut from 13 to 10 episodes). Tonight’s leading idiocy:

Chess hires a wheelchair ridden villain and his partner to track and kill The Cape. They set him up and hit him with a bug so they can track and follow him. They follow him to a meetup with Oracle. And the partner goes in with a camera in his hat. The camera is set up in the front of his hat, so that the partner (sitting at the bar) has to turn and stare at Cape and Oracle to record what’s going on. Neither of them notice the strange guy in a hat staring at them in the diner. The guy is literally sitting at the bar staring at them and neither notice.

Oh, and we learn that the cape that The Cape wears, can stop bullets among other tricks. This is starting to be like a low budget Greatest American Hero, complete with costume that the hero doesn’t have instructions for.

Robot Chicken review

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For awhile, I assumed everyone knew about Robot Chicken, but was surprised how rarely it was talked about. Then I realized that it was a small, unknown masterpiece from the deranged minds of Seth Green and Matthew Senreich (who met Green through the late Wizard Magazine where Senreich was editor). The pair hit on a truly demented idea, a series where they can make fun of pop culture by using action figures. So, who is Robot Chicken?

Continue reading →

Is Superman the only superhero TV star?

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With the news that NBC has reduced the number of Cape episodes from 13 to 10 (deservedly so for losing viewers from Chuck‘s low ratings) and No Ordinary Family‘s ratings heading downhill, is it fair to ask if superhero shows on TV are gone forever (or for awhile)? If we look at the recent history of superhero TV shows (non animated TV shows), we’ll see that in the last 20 years, there have really only been two successful superhero shows: Smallville and Lois and Clark. Those two have one thing in common: Superman.

When was the last time a non-Superman superhero show survived? Greatest American Hero (about a Superman like hero) lasted three seasons. Batman (the Adam West/Burt Ward show) lasted three seasons. Flash died a merciful death after one season. Justice League was killed before it aired for good reason. So we are left to wonder, is Superman the only hero that can last on the small screen?

Grimm’s Fairy Tale Pilot for NBC

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Similar to the Ron Moore pilot that NBC is looking at, some ex-Buffy writer’s have their own police/fairy tale pilot.

NBC has picked up another pilot mixing fantasy with a crime drama: The network has greenlit Grimm, described as a “dark but fantastical cop drama about a world in which characters inspired by Grimm’s Fairy Tales exist.”

Makes one wonder what happened to the proposed Fables TV pilot.

Edgar Allen Poe

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ABC greenlit an Edgar Allen Poe pilot:

The crime procedural Poe follows Edgar Allan Poe as the world’s first detective. He employs unorthodox methods to investigate dark mysteries in 1840s Boston. The project will tell how some of Poe’s famous stories came to be, but only some episodes will be about a specific Poe story.

Almost sounds like a sequel to Louis Bayard’s The Pale Blue Eye (my review)

H/T IO9

Red Dwarf coming back

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Long time BBC comedy science fiction series Red Dwarf (which ended in 1999) is scheduled to come back to BBC sometime next year:

in 2009, Freeview channel Dave commissioned three new episodes of the programme to celebrate the 21st anniversary of the show.
And the episode gained record viewings for the channel when they aired over the Easter Break, attracting more viewers than BBC2 and Channel 4 combined.
Now it seems that the unprecedented success of the comeback show Red Dwarf: Back to Earth has led to a new series being commissioned bringing much loved characters including Lister, the Cat and Rimmer back to our screens.

James Ellroy’s LA: City of Demons

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The ID network (which apparently stands for Investigative Discovery) has a new series coming out: James Ellroy’s LA: City of Demons. It starts tomorrow (1/19) night and is scheduled to run through at least the end of February. The first episode deals with The Black Dahlia (the murder, not his great book or the bad movie) and Ellroy’s mother’s murder (as well as a couple recent murders) and Ellroy is off from there with Lana Turner, Confidential Magazine, LA Police, LA Gangs and a whole lot of other things you only read about in Ellroy’s LA Quartet (and you did read them didn’t you?).

It should be a fun ride.