Captive offers ample research and compelling stories, but the ways in which its creators artificially heighten tension undercuts the sense of authenticity.
Guillermo del Toro's kaleidoscopic imagination is on full display in Trollhunters, a rich gift of an animated series arriving on Netflix later this month. It's in the depiction of trolls as hulking and metamorphic (yet predictably endearing) creatures, birthed seemingly from the earth itself, shoulders erupting in sprouts of grass or smoothly carved from dark obsidian. It's in the visualization of said trolls' subterranean world, a crystalline treasure-trove kingdom that draws upon every vivid shade the animators' palettes had available (and likely created a few). And yet del Toro's approach and ideology are most evident not just in those striking optical executions but also in the sense of astonishment and joy with which the series itself regards them.
There are smatterings of humor in Pacific Heat - an animated cop spoof created by Aussie outlet Working Dog for Netflix, and incorporating the voice talents of Rob Sitch, Santo Cilauro, Rebecca Massey, Lucia Mastrantone, and Tom Gleisner - that hint at the devotedly wacky, willingly meta send-up of adult animation as a genre that a show like it could one day become. In one scene, a coarsely caricatured Asian drug lord (dubbed Mr. Bang Choi, naturally) is menacing the four members of the titular Pacific Heat special unit through a borderline-indecipherable accent, when his dialogue starts to appear at the bottom of the screen. His eyes flickering down, he yells, "Are you putting subtitles on me?" The villain seethes beside an army of gun-toting henchmen as an officer blithely reassures, "Just the key verbs."
Expanding in scope and size for its Netflix-housed third season, Black Mirror feels alternately super-charged and stretched thin, a more dramatically polarized version of itself that offers just enough tantalizing visions to compensate for its increased inconsistency.
Even with American Horror Story and The Exorcist on the docket, there are few things in this fall TV season more eerie than the timing of Designated Survivor, ABC's bracing political thriller. Appearing in the midst of one of the most politically disheartening, culturally destructive, and socially depressing White House races in modern American history, the David Guggenheim-created series immediately puts its finger on the quickening pulse of the times with a grim what-if scenario: what if a terrorist attack wiped out so many high-level governmental figures that the office of the President wound up bequeathed to a mid-level secretary wholly unprepared for the job?
Despite its yearly tendency to swing the cancellation axe with Lizzie Borden-esque abandon, NBC has somehow remained a reliable bastion for quality comedy. The home of Friends, Cheers, Seinfeld, 30 Rock, and the enduring Saturday Night Live, it's semi-regularly offered viewers the best half-hour sitcoms to be found anywhere on the small screen. That's no small feat, especially with HBO and Showtime leading a movement of razor-sharp satires (Veep, Episodes) and innovative dramedies (Girls, Shameless) liberated by primetime network restrictions. NBC hasn't just endured the rise of the premium cable networks; with series like Community and Parks and Recreation that deconstructed then re-invented the sitcom and mockumentary formats, it's flourished.
For six seasons now, American Horror Story has occupied a unique position in the landscape of small-screen horror, existing simultaneously as a bone-chilling nightmare factory and a garish, sometimes goofy inversion of the same. It's taken viewers inside an infamous murder house, an inescapable asylum, a modern-day witch coven, a misunderstood freak show, and an uncommonly sinister, sanguinary hotel - all locales that served as characters almost as much as any of the A-list actors who received top billing - and spun violent, visceral tales of vice and vengeance out of each and every one.
FX's The Strain has always straddled the line between new-age action-thriller and midnight-madness guts-and-gore - an unsurprising duality when one considers that macabre maestro Guillermo del Toro and gritty thriller novelist Chuck Hogan collaborated on the source material trilogy - but since early last season, it's been rapidly giving itself over to the genre trappings of the latter, mostly to its benefit.
There's a moment at the very end of Ben-Hur that almost wrecks everything that came before; as two characters ride horses, spurring them on, galloping into a warm desert sun, a neo-soul singer named Andra Day is suddenly crooning in the background. It's jarringly anachronistic, side-splittingly funny, and absolutely awful, the kind of last-second studio-executive decision that will ensure the last minutes of Timur Bekmambetov's already risky remake of the 1959, Oscar-dominating classic will be accompanied by peals of incredulous laughter at each and every screening.
