For a network stuck in its laugh-track-obsessed, multi-camera world, Angel From Hell, with an offbeat mix of well-tuned humor and charming sentiment, feels relatively divine in comparison.
I am pro-Jennifer Lopez, despite what the next couple hundred words may make you think. I think she's a good, occasionally great actress who gets saddled with subpar material so commonly that it seems comical. She can rise to the occasion and make otherwise pedestrian movies pop (Enough, Maid in Manhattan, and yeah, I'll admit it, The Boy Next Door), but such a task is far beyond the hands of a mere mortal in regards to NBC's new back-alley crime drama Shades of Blue. Even a mortal from the block.
There is a TV show currently airing that once had a Japanese penis monster crash a dinner party. I just want to get that out of the way before we get started here, because the first thing that needs to be understood about Man Seeking Woman is that it's a show about love. It's a candor-filled take on dating, relationships, best friends and the weird, awkward, surreal spirals your life can go down the older you get (on the outside, if maybe not so much on the inside). Oh and there are aliens.
It's been a lonely, quiet year without the screwball charm of ABC's Galavant on television. Although the first season of the "musical comedy extravaganza" somewhat fizzled out by the end of its truncated eight-episode run, its underlying silly spirit carried a lot of weight in sticking everything from the show's characters to its songs and jokes inside of your head long after its January finale. Galavant's second season improves upon that memorably anarchic humor in a way that feels revitalized and once again energetic, for the first seven episodes at least.
Small moments make up the best TV. You're more likely to remember a particular show for some indelible line of dialogue or a random scene that feels inconsequential in the moment but lasts beyond season finales and cancellations than something more obvious. They're the quotable, rewind-worthy, text-your-friends-immediately moments that are the reasons hashtags are born and Twitter riots begin.
Technology is the ultimate sci-fi villain. It is cold, distant, and seemingly out to pull each of us from our own lives and into a singular, lonely existence. Still, most sci-fi gives that villain a gun and a personality and a big motive behind all of the anti-humanity propaganda, i.e. Terminator, The Matrix, hell even Avengers: Age of Ultron. The disturbingly on-point Black Mirror does no such thing; its villains are silent, patient, and utterly at the whim of the person controlling them.
Just as Summer came to an end, as must the year as a whole, and with the impending New Year comes the time to list all of the best television shows that vied for our collective attention spans in 2015. There were worthy combatants this year, maybe more so than recent years on the small screen: networks were finally unafraid to show some diversity (Empire), tinker with unorthodox storytelling (The Leftovers), and let the ladies do the talking, joking, and pegging (Broad City).
Syfy isn't averse to the mini-series "event" format. You can see it in adaptations of everything from The Wizard of Oz (Tin Man) to Peter Pan (Neverland), and even original ideas like last year's twisty 60's nostalgia trip Ascension. 2015 brings Childhood's End, a vision of the classic Arthur C. Clarke novel that posits the future of humanity once an alien race comes along and fixes all of our seemingly unfixable problems.
Silly and eccentric but not quite graceful enough to be considered irreverent, producer/star Eva Longoria's eager commitment to the premise still allows Telenovela to crackle with great jokes and solid physical comedy.
