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What to say about Westworld?  How to sum up its frustrating, fitfully brilliant first season?  The problem with Westworld--or rather, not the problem, because this is a show with so many different problems, which is, of course, a problem in itself--is that it never quite seems to cohere into the sum of its parts.  Those parts were frequently magnificent--from incidental but beautiful touches like

This year's fall pilot season is shaping up to be rather muted.  Which, to be fair, is an improvement on the dreck of previous years, but also not much to talk about.  It probably tells you all need to know about the fall pilots of 2016 that there are two different time travel shows--Timeless and Frequency--and neither of them are worth saying anything about.  Nevertheless, here are a few series,

Many people watching UK television drama National Treasure will have made their minds up about the guilt or innocence of the protagonist well before the end of the series. In episode one we learn that this aging celebrity has ‘slept around’ throughout his long marriage but when an allegation of non-recent sexual assault is made he strenuously denies it.

The post What if they are innocent? Justice for people accused of sexual and child abuse appeared first on OUPblog.

As I've mentioned already, I spent much of the summer working on a large writing project, which is now online.  Over at PopMatters, you can read my essay "This is the Next World": The Stealth Futurism of Person of Interest, in which I discuss how an initially inauspicious high-concept procedural transformed, over the course of five seasons, into one of the most explicitly SFnal shows on TV, one

"For black lives to matter, black history has to matter."  A character says this shortly into the first episode of Luke Cage, Netflix's third MCU series, and the fourth season of television it has produced in collaboration with Marvel as it ramps up for its Defenders mega- event.  It's easy to read this line as a thesis statement on the nature of the show we're about to watch, but it's not until

This week has seen the first inklings of the new TV season, as the US networks start trotting out shows in the hopes of success, legitimacy, or even the tiniest bit of attention.  And yet here I am, still talking about some of the shows of summer.  This is partly because, as we've all more or less accepted, network shows just aren't where it's at anymore, and there isn't that much to say about

  Before you all rush to say Arrow, here’s the whole line-up of keycards from WBTV this year for SDCC.  It’s the eighth year in a row they’ve sponsored these valued mementos of time spent standing in line then collapsing in exhaustion on your hotel bed.   Arrow (premieres Wednesday, October 5, at 8/7c on The CW): […]

The Flash adds its first new cast member for the third season

Starz unveils two of their big panels for SDCC

“The Winds of Winter,” the finale to the sixth season of HBO’s Game of Thrones was one of the most thrilling episodes of television ever. It was triumphant, revelatory, sad, powerful – all the feels. Ramin Djawadi’s score was extraordinary, and brought a tear to my eye. And after six years we started to see […]

Preacher will return in 2017

The first big SDCC set of panels have been announced

Deep in the grubby sump of one of those so-called ‘Social Media’ sites, there is a clump of aging comics fanboys called The Really Very Serious Alan Moore Scholars’ Group, known to its sad and lonely adherents as TRVSAMSG. When they’re not annotating everything in sight, or calling down ancient evils on the heads of […]

The prodigal sons and daughters return to "defy" your expectations once more.

Everybody Wants Some's Tyler Hoechlin will don the red cape for the new season

It’s a busy Monday, and there’s a couple of worthwhile bits of entertainment news of interest for the comics crowd: – I’ve been pretty vocal about this in the past, but I was never the biggest fan of Pacific Rim, despite some very nice Guy Davis concept work, and that neon Blade Runner aesthetic that […]

Legion, the Noah Hawley (Fargo) developed X-Men spin-off for the FX network has just been picked up for an eight episode order in early 2017. Per a press release from Marvel, here’s how the new series is described: “Legion” introduces the story of David Haller: Since he was a teenager, David has struggled with mental […]

I finally saw the first episode of Preacher, based on the Garth Ennis,- Steve Dillon Vertigo classic last night; “finally” even though it won’t air until the official premiere on Sunday, this episode has been screened at cons and events for a few months now, and review copies have been floating around. I like to […]

"The gods won't mind. They spill more blood than the rest of us combined."

Much like Warner Bros is spreading the DC Universe on a number of different networks, Disney and Marvel Television look to be doing the same with some of their characters on the fringe. Today, Freeform (formerly known as ABC Family) has announced a greenlight for a Cloak and Dagger series per Variety. Given the romantic […]

Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg are really into Garth Ennis comics, so much so that they’re following up their soon-to-debut Preacher adaptation for AMC with a live action version of Ennis and Darick Robertson’s The Boys for Cinemax. For this outing, the duo is teaming with Supernatural creator Eric Kripke, who will write the series […]

It’s Friday, so we’re about to call it a weekend over here on the Entertainment side of The Beat, but here’s a couple of quick items of interest: Marvel and Netflix’s Iron Fist has added its second cast member, following Finn Jones as Danny Rand, as the series has enlisted another Game of Thrones alum […]

With The Walking Dead‘s finale coming this Sunday, AMC has just released a teaser image of Jeffrey Dean Morgan, last seen playing Thomas Wayne in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, as Negan. As you can see, he comes equipped with his trust weapon Lucille, which surely can’t bode well for anybody. The season six […]

by Pamela Auditore               The Spawn of Satan arrived on Good Friday at WonderCon, —A&E’s Damien. You know Damien from the classic horror film The Omen. The chubby cheeked child, born of a jackal, who inspires nannies to hang themselves and Rockweilers to appear mysteriously, threatening to tear apart […]

On Friday, in a small back meeting room of the Los Angeles Convention Center we talked for a few minutes  with the executive producer Sam Catlin from AMC’s Preacher along with Jesse Custer and Tulip O’Hare themselves Dominic Cooper and Ruth Negga. Along with development from Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, executive producer Sam Catlin knows […]