This past year was a busy one for genre television. I had meant to post my first impressions of the new fall season, but I struggled with how to organize it: short lists, or detailed analyses? By subgenre, night of the week, or network? At least a few additional months have given me perspective on the shows I like most and least.
Janice and I tend not to watch a lot of reality shows, situation comedies, crime dramas, or serialized soap operas, so you’ll have to look elsewhere for reviews of those types of shows. In live-action TV, we do watch some procedurals, with Masterpiece: Mystery and the second season of the modernized BBC/PBS Sherlock as favorites.
The competing Elementary is decent, if not quite as brilliant as its British forebears. Castle has managed to balance humor and drama, as has White Collar, even though both have occasionally veered too far into gruesome melodrama on the one hand or silly romance on the other. At the same time, I look forward to the goofy shout-outs to the 1980s and ’90s in Psych.
I’d put do-gooder capers such as the original Mission Impossible in a closely related category. This includes the recently canceled Leverage (whose tabletop role-playing game is the best implementation of the Cortex system) and Hu$tle. I haven’t been following popular detective shows such as Bones and the remake of Hawaii Five-O.
In the related genre of supernatural crime fighters, I thought that the canceled Awake was decent. I prefer Grimm, which has inherited some of Buffy: the Vampire Slayer and Angel‘s writers and style, to the fairy tale soap Once Upon a Time.
Fringe is in a league of its own, with the mind-bending perspectives of Farscape and the procedural style of The X-Files. I’ll miss Fringe, which is at least going out strong. I haven’t been following Supernatural.
On the slightly more realistic side, thrillers such as Homeland, Person of Interest, and Last Resort have been pretty good, but I dropped Nikita, which of course outlasted much of its competition. What have you been watching?
Coming soon: More SFTV, animation nation returns, and books and games!
Gene's Worlds 