I have been meaning to check out The Expanse, since I’ve read all the books, and I’ve heard the TV show is good. I own the first book in the Magicians series, so I was waiting to read the book first before checking out that particular series.
Sadly, I guess the superhero shows bounce off me. I watched the first episode of The Flash, the first few episodes of SHIELD (before Winter Soldier though), the first episode of Gotham, the first two episodes of Supergirl, the first episode of Supernatural. None of them seemed appealing.
I’ll have to look into Dark Matter, Utopia and Steven Universe, I’ve never heard of any of them.
Rick & Morty is indeed excellent. It’s even better than Community.
Most of the superhero shows get stronger as time goes on. Supergirl and Agents in particular. Flash maintains a pretty consistent (albeit, IMO, very high) level of quality throughout its run, though, but its mood is fairly different from a lot of the other shows, so if it doesn’t appeal, definitely possible other stuff will. I’ll say that Supergirl, at its best, is somewhat similar to Flash, so maybe I’d rescind them both from recommendations. But AoS becomes very worth your while if you’re into spy-v-spy drama and hi-tech scifi shenanigans :-D
Oh yeah–I always get it mixed up with Black Mirror, but Orphan Black is also supposed to be stellar (on my own backlog).
Of course, there’s also the elephant in the scifi television room, Doctor Who. Probably a love-it-or-hate-it property, but if you never gave the rebooted series in '05 a chance, there are a few good entry points along the way. . .
Armondo called out a lot of what I was going to reply with - especially the excellent Expanse. I watched the first episode the The Magicians and really enjoyed it, but I just can’t seem to find enough time to binge-watch the rest of it. I’ve heard reasonably-good things about 12 Monkeys as well, and based on reactions here it sounds like Childhood’s End was decent as well.
And that’s just shows on SyFy, a channel that was justifiably written off as nothing but a showcase for drek like Mansquito just a few years back.
Beyond that, we’ve got the excellent Game of Thrones for fantasy (which I do watch), nicely augmented by Black Sails and non-fantasy but still sword-swinging programming like The Vikings and The Last Kingdom… none of which I have managed to carve time out for.
Other shows that I haven’t seen: The 100, the new X-Files, iZombie, Sleepy Hollow, Orphan Black, The Shannara Chronicles, Teen Wolf, Preacher, Shadowhunters, The Colony, Fear The Walking Dead, and Doctor Who.
Are 90% of these utter and complete crap? Maybe… but you know how many shows like this were on ten years back? A tiny fraction: The (pretty good) return of Doctor Who, a couple Stargate shows, Smallville, the pretty-bad mid-point of Battlestar Galactica, the excretable second coming of Heroes, and the limping, undead corpse of Lost. Spoilt for choice, we were NOT.
At least one more left off those lists: Killjoys. Light, but its been fun so far. Both it and Dark Matter start up again soon. I don’t think The Expanse comes back until 2017. I think all three of those are worth watching. Not Shakespeare, but worth watching.
The 100 became a MUCH better show than it had any right to be given the first couple of episodes, and has been very watchable, though at least in my opinion it is starting to drag. The writers are clearly writing to keep the show going at this point rather than to tell a good story.
Sleepy Hollow? Watch the first season. The 2nd is weaker, the 3rd is a trainwreck.
I don’t think I need to say anything about The Walking Dead. Fear the Walking Dead, however, is terrible. You will find yourself cheering for the zombies.
And the last one I want to comment on is 12 Monkeys. I thought the first season was excellent, and my wife loves it too. The 2nd season is more scattered, but that’s because the writers (I suspect) never expected to get a second season, so they really pretty much wrapped the original storyline up quickly. Now that they have more time, they have expanded things a LOT, which has led to something I was comparing to Quantum Leap the other day to a friend. But in my opinion better than most of QL was, or at least as good as the best of QL.
We thought both Dark Matter and Killjoys, both on Syfy were very entertaining (my wife and I prefer Dark Matter). Both are set to begin their second season on Syfy on July 1, 2016.
While I think the gritty and more hard SF nature of The Expanse makes for the best SF series on TV - Dark Matter is still very good.
The most remarkable thing with Syfy rolling out 12 Monkeys, Dark Matter, Killjoys, The Expanse and The Magicians one after the other is how GOOD all these shows are and how SyFY rolled them out in successive quarters (more or less), one after the other, with each better than the one that came before it (a matter of taste on The Expanse and The Magicians as to which you prefer perhaps – but The Magicians proved to be surprisingly excellent and became appointment TV for us).
And all it seemed to take was SyFy to just decide to make good quality programming. It’s like they had a meeting and after much debate, they took a vote and agreed to make good SF shows that didn’t suck. The Chair of Program Development counted the raised hands, resignedly sighed and said: “Okay, okay; fine, fine. We won’t suck anymore”.
The writers and director of Episode #04 of Killjoys must have missed the memo; but other than that faltering misstep, it was … POOF. Done.
Yeah. . . the two shows have very little in common, aside from a few basic scifi tropes. I liked 'em both, but enjoyed The Expanse significantly more, personally.
[quote]Though the series will be premiering in the US on CBS All Access, Netflix and CBS Studios International today announced a landmark international licensing agreement for the new Star Trek television series. Netflix will be the exclusive premiere home of Star Trek in 188 countries (excluding the US and Canada). Each episode of the new series will be available globally within 24 hours of its U.S. premiere.
Additionally, all 727 existing episodes of the iconic Star Trek television library – including Star Trek: The Original Series, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager and Star Trek: Enterprise will be available on Netflix around the world by the end of 2016.[/quote]
If only services like Unblockus were still easily available and reliable options. Oh well. CBS All Access for a month won’t break the bank. Getting SlingTV for a month was a pretty good experience for me for watching Euro 2016. So getting CBS All Access once the season is in its last month is still a solid plan.
Supposedly, the ship design is based on some McQuarrie art for the original movie. Now I love me some McQuarrie callbacks (looking at you, Star Wars Rebels), but not really feeling the ship design in the trailer. A bit of a saucer section grafted onto a Klingon hull. It feels like a pure warship, which makes me wonder if the show will have much ‘Discovery’.
Given the design, and the red warp nacelles, etc., I’m guessing it really is supposed to be a melding of the best of Star Fleet and Klingon tech, in a next gen ship. Which would
put the show after TNG.
Hard to top the original movie-era Enterprise, which I think is one of the prettiest ship designs of all time.
OF ALL TIME.
http://50.56.238.19/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/USS_Enterprise-A_quarter-600x300.jpg[quote=“BennyProfane, post:117, topic:77660, full:true”]
Given the design, and the red warp nacelles, etc., I’m guessing it really is supposed to be a melding of the best of Star Fleet and Klingon tech, in a next gen ship. Which wouldput the show after TNG.
[/quote]
That would make sense. The music is a bit Klingon-ish, and there’s a cloaking device sound effect (I think) at the very end.
You can’t see me, but I’m hammering an imaginary like button. The original Enterprise from the TV series had a cool bird-in-flight grace to it, almost a fragility. And I think the design from the motion picture just improved on that, made it look a little less 60s.
This new ship’s design just lacks that, it looks entirely utilitarian. If it actually is a co-design between the Federation and Klingon Empire that would be cool, I’d definitely be more interested. It’s just not a design to make my heart beat faster.
