Best New Horror #26, page 8
Bisexual succubus Bo (Anna Silk) descended to Valhalla to save Kenzi (Ksenia Solo) in the fourth season of Syfy’s loopy Lost Girl, and although it didn’t last quite as many seasons as the British original, the fourth and final season of Syfy’s Being Human reached its own downbeat conclusion.
Based on Kelley Armstrong’s “Women of the Otherworld” books, Syfy’s Bitten starred Laura Vandervoort as the only living female werewolf called back by her Pack to help solve a series of lycanthropic murders.
Syfy’s entertaining Warehouse 13 returned for a limited, six-part fifth and final series, while the mythology behind the channel’s Haven became even more convoluted during its truncated fifth season as Nathan (Lucas Bryant) and Duke (Eric Balfour) battled to keep the Troubles under control and find Audrey’s buried personality within the evil Mara (Emily Rose).
Despite the occasional participation of executive producer Noah Wyle as Flynn Carsen, TNT’s ten-part series The Librarians was nowhere near as clever or entertaining as the three TV movies it was based on. A new team of globe-travelling Librarians, overseen by a deadpan John Larroquette, attempted to prevent The Serpent Brotherhood from bringing magic back into the world. Familiar guest-stars included ubiquitous Canadian actor Matt Frewer, Bob Newhart, Rene Auberjonois, Alicia Witt, Jane Curtin, Bruce Campbell (as Santa Claus) and Jerry O’Connell.
Created by Brannon Braga and Adam Simon, WGN’s Salem was a dull historical drama based around the 17th century witch trials, while the second season of Lifetime’s contemporary The Witches of East End was apparently aimed at a similar soap opera demographic.
Hulu’s half-hour comedy Deadbeat featured Tyler Labine as a slacker medium-for-hire who fixed ghosts’ unfinished business in New York City. Cat Deeley played his sexy rival, who wasn’t quite what she seemed.
Comedians Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim wrote, directed and starred in a series of seven eleven-minute horror stories on Adult Swim entitled Tim and Eric’s Bedtime Stories. The impressive guest cast included Zach Galifianakis, John C. Reilly, Jason Schwartzman, M. Emmet Walsh, John Heard, Jimmy Kimmel and Laurie Metcalf.
The inhabitants of Arcadia, Missouri, were concerned when the dead began returning with no memory of their demise in the ABC-TV series Resurrection which, despite having a near-identical premise to the superior French series The Returned, was not based on that show but on a 2013 novel entitled The Returned by Jason Mott. Season 2 found immigration agent Bellamy (Omar Epps) coming to terms with the knowledge that he was also one of the Returned.
Meanwhile, in a transposition of that plot, the residents of the small town of Mapleton overreacted to the Rapture-like disappearance of 2% of the world’s population in HBO’s The Leftovers. Co-created by Damon Lindelof (Lost) and original novelist Tom Perrotta, it featured Christopher Eccleston (with a dodgy American accent), a tired-looking Liv Tyler and a welcome guest-shot by Scott Glenn.
The BBC’s action-packed Atlantis jumped into Series 2, with Ariadne (Alysha Hart) now Queen and Jason (Jack Donnelly) and his loyal companions protecting her rule against exiled evil sorceress Pasiphae (Sarah Parish) and her sidekick Medea (Amy Manson), who raised an army of ravaging zombies against the city. Unfortunately, in an attempt to appeal to an older audience, the show lost some of its comedic charm.
Season 2 of Starz’s Da Vinci’s Demons found the Renaissance inventor (Tom Riley) and his companions travelling to the New World, where they discovered the mystical Vault of Heaven.
A young soldier (Christopher Egan) discovered that he was the “chosen one”, destined to lead mankind in a war against the angels in Syfy’s South African-made Dominion, which was set twenty-five years after the events in the 2010 movie Legion.
Claire Randall played a married battlefield nurse in 1945 who was mysteriously transported back to 18th-century Scotland in Starz’s Outlander, based on the romance novels by Diana Gabaldon.
The two-hour finale of Season 3 of ABC’s increasingly convoluted Once Upon a Time saw Emma (Jennifer Morrison) and Hook (Colin O’Donoghue) transported into the past, while the evil Snow Queen (Elizabeth Mitchell) turned up in Storybrooke and cast the Spell of Shattered Sight over the fairy-tale inhabitants during the fourth season.
Nobody really needed yet another version of the story, let alone Peter Pan Live!, a musical adaptation on NBC in December starring Christopher Walken as Captain Hook and Allison Williams as the titular boy who never grew up.
When he wasn’t working on The Librarians, Noah Wyle was off starring in and co-producing (along with Steven Spielberg) TNT’s relentlessly grim Falling Skies, in which Tom Mason and his bickering companions escaped an alien prison-camp, but still had to contend with the hybrid Lexi’s growing powers as they planned to destroy an Espheni base on the Moon.
Also executive produced by the busy Mr Spielberg, Halle Berry’s astronaut returned to Earth after a thirteen-month solo space mission to discover tat she was pregnant in CBS-TV’s Extant, which also included sub-plots involving a creepy cyborg child and some kind of corporate conspiracy.
The second season of the same network’s Under the Dome, yet another Spielberg-produced series, kicked off with a game-changing episode scripted by executive producer Stephen King (who had a cameo) in which a major character was shockingly murdered. It then went downhill from there, as the endlessly bickering inhabitants of Chester’s Mill discovered a mysterious tunnel that led to the world outside the increasingly inhospitable dome.
In a near-future dystopian world facing extinction, 100 embryos were successfully fertilised and put up for surrogacy in Lifetime’s ten-part series The Lottery, supposedly inspired by Shirley Jackson’s superior short story.
Eric Dane commanded the crew of naval destroyer USS Nathan James in a world where a pandemic virus had destroyed most of the Earth’s population in TNT’s The Last Ship, while the J.J. Abrams-produced post-apocalyptic series Revolution dragged on for a second series on NBC, as the two factions of survivors continued to battle it out for supremacy in a world without electricity.
Troubled detective John Kennex (Karl Urban) and his android partner (Michael Ealy) ended their futuristic investigations after just thirteen episodes when the Fox Network cancelled Abrams’ other series, derivative Almost Human.
New York City was destroyed in the second season of Syfy’s post-apocalyptic Western-with-aliens Defiance, while the second season of Channel 4’s conspiracy thriller Utopia revealed where the humanity-sterilising virus “Janus” originated and how it came to turn up in the DNA of Jessica Hyde (Fiona O’Shaughnessy).
Norman Bates (Freddie Highmore) finally recalled killing his high school teacher, but his dysfunctional mother (Vera Farmiga) wouldn’t believe him in the soporific Season 2 of the A&E Network’s Bates Motel.
Troubled FBI agent Ryan Hardy (Kevin Bacon) discovered that Joe Carroll (James Purefoy) was still alive and controlling another cult of serial killers in the second season of Fox’s The Following, while pretty much everybody had finally worked out that Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen) was not only a good chef but also a sophisticated serial killer by the end of Season 2 of NBC-TV’s elegant Hannibal.
Confusingly credited to “Michael Marshall Smith”, BBC America’s bleak eight-episode Intruders was actually based on a novel published under the genre author’s mainstream pen-name, “Michael Marshall”. A former LAPD cop (British actor John Simm, with an unconvincing and unnecessary American accent) discovered that his wife (Mira Sorvino) was actually part of a secret immortality cult. Child actress Millie Bobby Brown stood out in a cast that also included James Frain and Robert Forster as a pair of hit men.
Having had to consult with Moriarty (the wonderful Natalie Dormer), deal with the inflated ego of Gareth Lestrade (Sean Pertwee) and prove his brother Mycroft (Rhys Ifans) innocent of treason, the second season of CBS-TV’s entertaining Elementary ended with Johnny Lee Miller’s Holmes and Lucy Liu’s Watson going their separate ways. For Season 3, Holmes returned to New York City with a damaged new protégé (Ophelia Lovibond) and investigated a case where an A.I. computer was suspected of murdering its creator.
In yet another twist on the TV detective genre, charming Welsh actor Ioan Gruffud played immortal medical examiner Henry Morgan, who teamed up with glamorous NYPD Detective Jo Martinez (Alana De La Garza) to solve crimes with his Holmesian deductions in ABC’s cosy Forever. The supporting cast included veteran Judd Hirsch as Henry’s older-looking son.
A Texas death row escapee (Jake McLaughlin) found himself protecting a 10-year-old girl with paranormal powers (the oddly named Johnny Sequoyah) from Kyle MacLachlan’s sinister billionaire scientist in NBC-TV’s Believe, which lasted for just thirteen episodes despite counting co-creator Alfonso Cuarón (who also directed the pilot) and J.J. Abrams amongst its numerous producers.
Josh Holloway’s high-tec operative had a super-computer microchip imbedded in his brain in CBS-TV’s by-the-numbers spy drama, Intelligence.
Having started out on shaky ground, ABC’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. returned after the Christmas hiatus with more focussed plot-lines that firmly tied Agent Coulson (Clark Gregg) and his team into the Marvel’s Thor, Captain America and Guardians of the Galaxy movie franchises, as Nick Fury’s disappearance and HYDRA’s infiltration destroyed all trust in the organisation.
Unfortunately, Season 2 quickly lost its way again as the rogue agents investigated a subterranean alien city and uncovered the annoying Skye’s (Chloe Bennet) hidden past.
As female crime-fighter The Canary (Caity Lotz) was murdered by a mysterious assassin, The CW’s increasingly grim and flashback-laden Arrow introduced Brandon Routh’s future superhero The Atom. Meanwhile, crossover series The Flash featured another DC Comics superhero (played by the likeable Grant Gustin) trying to prove that his father (original 1990s TV Flash, John Wesley Shipp) was not responsible for the death of his mother.
Fox Network’s Gotham got off to a painfully slow start, despite being a prequel to the Batman story. It followed idealistic detective James Gordon (Ben McKenzie) and his more cynical partner Harvey Bullock (Donal Logue) as they attempted to clean up the corruption and crime in Gotham City. The only fun was in identifying such proto-villains as Cat Woman, The Penguin, The Riddler and Two-Face before they were infamous, while Sean Pertwee turned up as an unusually hardened Alfred Pennyworth, Bruce Wayne’s faithful butler.
Also based on a DC Comics character, Constantine starred miscast Welsh actor Matt Ryan as the eponymous down-at-heel psychic detective investigating ghosts and demons. NBC wisely cancelled the show after just thirteen episodes.
For the all-important young adult demographic, the networks continued to churn out insipid series based on well-established genre concepts: Stefan (Paul Wesley) and Elena (the usually glum Nina Dobrev) got to experience an inevitable It’s a Wonderful Life episode in Season 5 of The CW’s The Vampire Diaries, while the sixth season opened with Mystic Falls a supernatural-free zone and Damon (Ian Somerhalder) and Bonnie (Kat Graham) trapped on the Other Side.
Meanwhile, tensions continued between the New Orleans vampires, were-wolves and witches in the second season of companion series The Originals.
Having exhausted Brian McGreevy’s 2012 source novel in the first season, a new show-runner was brought in for Season 2 of Hemlock Grove, Netflix’ answer to Dark Shadows executive produced by Eli Roth.
Based on the YA novel by Kass Morgan, a spacecraft containing mankind’s last survivors dumped 100 annoying juvenile delinquents back on a post-apocalyptic Earth, with predictable results, in The CW’s The 100. Meanwhile, a human girl and an alien boy attending the same high school fell in love in the sappy Star-Crossed.
Another misfire from the same network was its ill-judged reboot of the UK SF series The Tomorrow People, which lasted just one stupefyingly dull season, while Season 2 of The CW’s Beauty and the Beast continued with New York detective Cat Chandler (Kristin Kreuk) having to decide between her current unsuitable boyfriend and her former one, mysterious super-soldier Vincent (Jay Ryan).
The best young adult show on TV continued to be MTV’s Teen Wolf, which got progressively darker as its likeable young cast grew older. During the third season, high school werewolf Scott McCall (Tyler Posey) tried to help Stiles (Dylan O’Brien), who was possessed by an evil entity after returning from the dead, and Scott’s former girlfriend Allison (Crystal Reed) met a heroic demise saving her friends. Season 4 found Scott’s “Alpha” teaming up with unlikely allies and some new faces as the mysterious “Benefactor” used assassins to target the supernatural creatures of Beacon Hills.
The Clone Club (Tatiana Maslany in a variety of roles) found out more about their past and the sinister Dyad Group in the second season of the BBC America/Space series Orphan Black which, despite its vocal Internet supporters, attracted disappointing viewing figures.
Teenager Emma Alonso (Paolo Andino) moved to Miami, Florida, and discovered she was the “Chosen One” in Nickelodeon’s Every Witch Way, and an urban American teenager (Naomi Sequeira) and her extended family moved to the eponymous spooky English village in the Disney Channel’s four-part Evermoor.
The third series of BBC’s Wolfblood found the half-wolf school pupils still trying to hide their secret from Dr. Whitewood (Letty Butler) and the rest of humanity, while the third and final series of Wizards vs. Aliens featured teen schoolboy wizard Tom (Scott Haran) and his friends uncovering an alien zombie labour force and battling an old witch.
In Series 5 of BBC Wales’ Young Dracula, Vlad (Gerran Howell) finally met his human mother.
The thirteen unaired episodes of Cartoon Network’s Star Wars: The Clone Wars were finally shown on Netflix starting in March, along with the previous five seasons.
Meanwhile, Disney XD’s fourteen-part animated Star Wars: Rebels, about the rise of the Rebel Alliance, was set between Revenge of the Sith and the original Star Wars and even utilised some of Ralph McQuarrie’s previously unused concept designs. James Earl Jones, Frank Oz and Anthony Daniels all returned to voice their original movie characters.
Created by Patrick McHale and featuring the voices of Elijah Wood and Collin Dean, Over the Garden Wall was a ten-part fairy tale which aired over five consecutive evenings on Cartoon Network.
Inspired by Jonny Quest and other Hanna-Barbera shows, Adult Swim’s series of ten animated Mike Tyson Mysteries featured the former heavyweight boxer teaming up with his adopted daughter, an alcoholic pigeon and a friendly ghost.
Season 25 of Fox Network’s The Simpsons continued with an episode set thirty years in the future, one set in the Lego world, and another based around a voodoo doll. The show’s subsequent season celebrated its 25th Anniversary ‘Treehouse of Horror’ with three stories in which Bart and Lisa were transported to a demonic alternate universe, Homer was a member of A Clockwork Orange-style gang, and the dysfunctional family were visited by earlier 1980s incarnations of themselves. A couple of weeks later, the characters from Matt Groening’s cancelled companion show Futurama travelled back to the past to prevent Bart from destroying the future.
The Cartoon Network/Adult Swim’s unusually dark animated series Beware the Batman, teamed the Caped Crusader (voiced by Anthony Ruivivar) with a young female ninja warrior (Sumalee Montano) to battle such familiar foes as Harvey Dent/Two-Face (Christopher McDonald), Mr. Toad (Udo Kier), Metamorpho/the Golem (Adam Baldwin) and Ra’s Al Ghul (Lance Reddick).
ABC-TV/Pixar’s half-hour Christmas special, Toy Story That Time Forgot, found Woody (Tom Hanks), Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen) and the other toys were captured by the Battlesaurs, an army of prehistoric reptilian action figures.
During the shortened eighth and final season of the USA Networks’ hugely entertaining Psych, Gus (Dulé Hill) thought his nightmares were coming true in an episode featuring Bruce Campbell.
Season 6 of ABC-TV’s Castle included an episode in which the eponymous author (Nathan Fillion) and his detective fiancée Beckett (Stana Katic) investigated a Carrie-like murder in a high school, before Castle’s car was forced off the road on their wedding day. Having returned for a seventh season with no memory of where he had disappeared to, Castle found himself involved in a murder committed by an invisible man and was transported by an Inca artefact to an alternative reality in which he had never met Beckett.
The Halloween episode of CBS-TV’s latest spin-off, NCIS: New Orleans, had Dwayne Pride (Scott Bakula) and his team investigating the death of a Naval Judge Advocate found in a cemetery with apparent vampire bites on her neck.
The second series of the BBC’s Father Brown found G.K. Chesterton’s mystery-solving priest (Mark Williams) called in to exorcise a supposedly haunted house, while Series 16 of ITV’s Midsomer Murders included an episode in which detectives Barnaby (Neil Dudgeon) and Nelson (Gwilym Lee) investigated a series of murders inspired by macabre images on a Medieval fresco discovered in a church crypt. Guest stars included Roy Hudd and Michael Jayston.
The third series of Death in Paradise on BBC featured a new detective (Kris Marshall, replacing Ben Miller) investigating murders on the Caribbean island of Sainte-Marie. Michelle Ryan guest-starred in an episode involving the death of a stand-in during the filming of a zombie movie.
The seventh season episode of Murdoch Mysteries (aka The Artful Detective), ‘Friday the 13th, 1901’, involved a series of killings at a remote cabin on a lake, while the Season 8 episode ‘The Death of Dr. Ogden’ dealt with a puzzle published by Edgar Allan Poe years earlier.
Written by, and featuring Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith, Inside No.9 was a six-part anthology series on BBC 2 set inside various buildings and rooms with that number. The majority of the half-hour episodes were dark gems of macabre humour and the final episode, about a teenage babysitter’s night of terror, was full-on Gothic horror. The show’s impressive list of guest stars included Gemma Arterton, Oona Chaplin, Tamsin Greig, Denis Lawson, Helen McCrory, Sophie Thompson and Timothy West.
