Another year, another crop of new shows from the USA, all competing for the hearts and mind of an ever-fracturing audience. As social media, and time-shifting (recording and then watching a show later) continue to change the way we consume new media of any kind, these up-and-coming TV programs need Continue Reading
TV
First Impression: “Falling Skies” season 2 premiere
Falling Skies is back and it has been absolutely worthy the wait. Picking up just three months after Tom Mason (Noah Wylie) bravely stepped onto the aliens’ spacecraft to find out more about why they’re here, and how it affects not just the human race as a whole but his Continue Reading
It’s the Muppets, Jim but not as know them
The Muppets leapt back onto the cultural zeitgeist in a big way with the release of their latest movie, titled appropriately enough, The Muppets this year. Riding the crest of this cinema-driven renewed interest in all things Muppet, BBC One has announced it’s planning to make an all new puppets Continue Reading
“Minuscule” heads to the big screen
One of the delights of the small spaces between programs on the Australian national broadcaster ABC’s schedule are small bite-sized cartoons by a French company, Ikon Productions. Their series, Minuscule, features short usually humorous interplays between various computer-generated 3D insects set against the idyllic backdrop of rural France. The insects Continue Reading
Tralalalalala! My all-time favourite 1970s Hanna-Barbera cartoons
“Hi, my name is Andrew and I am old enough to have lived through the 1970s!” “Hi Andrew.” “You may think that makes me ridiculously old, and the way my body is behaving lately I feel that way sometimes, but growing up back in the age of bell bottoms, and Continue Reading
I want to live in television land
I know we have all said it at one time or another, usually after a shockingly hard day out in the trenches of the real world, that it would be great to live in a scripted TV program (this excludes reality programs clearly since they are so, well, real). All Continue Reading
There’s nowhere safe for “Sanctuary” anymore
The news I had been expecting but hoped would never be announced, has lobbed its most unwelcome way into my despairing inbox. (After the renewal of Community was almost fatally tarnished by the removal of Mark Harmon as show runner.) Sanctuary, one of the most imaginative, clever and well-realised shows Continue Reading
Who ripped out the beating heart of “Community”?
Alas I celebrated a little to prematurely about Community being renewed for a 13 episode fourth season. For while one of the most innovative and clever sitcoms on television is back for another season, it will be without it’s creative heart and soul, Dan Harmon, who created the hilarious boundary-pushing Continue Reading
“Community” gets even more animated than usual in season finale
You have to hand it to the gang at Community. They are the most creative, innovative team in the TV industry. Not content with staying within standard sitcom boundaries, or even reality’s boundaries for that matter, they are constantly coming up with clever ways to tell a story and they’re Continue Reading
Bring out your TV show dead…
It’s the modern pop culture equivalent of the gathering up of the dead during the Black Death in the Middle Ages. Once a year all the major US TV networks gather in New York for what is called “upfront season” to announce which shows have survived the brutal contest for Continue Reading