In the broadest sense, the 16th century Chinese novel that AMC's Into The Badlands is based off, Journey to the West, can be seen in a large swath of popular culture. The guts of the tale - essentially four heroes who must traverse dangers and mysteries at each turn as they travel towards India to receive enlightenment and answers at the hands of Buddha - can be found in everything from movies like The Wizard of Oz and books like The Dark Tower and The Lord of the Rings to the 2010 video game Enslaved: Odyssey to the West.
With a few ballsy plot lines under its belt and an assured step in the right direction in the season three premiere, Mom may come off as occasionally familiar in its formatting, but content wise it feels downright groundbreaking.
Set in 1980s Los Angeles, there's a plethora of movies, television shows, and books, both fictional and true, that ABC's new crime drama Wicked City can't help but emulate. The new series follows the beginnings of a romantic tryst between a pair of deeply scarred individuals that eventually leads to a series of brutal murders along the Sunset Strip. Sometimes the series evokes the air of Se7en, or the overbearing dread of Zodiac, but it's fashioned and packaged inside the most redundant and rudimentary network procedural possible, and adheres to such a sour and distasteful tone, that none of the terror sticks.
There's a moment in the third season premiere of Hemlock Grove when Peter Rumancek jokingly teases his bro-bestie Roman Godfrey with dumping all of their paranormal secrets onto a hard-assed private investigator they've hired to assist them in the fallout of last season's finale. "You mean that our missing baby with telekinetic powers was taken by a flying reptile with a thirty-foot wingspan who had been masquerading around town as the family doctor?" It's meant to be a winking take on the show's ridiculousness - an oh how crazy has this stuff gotten in two seasons! - but with nothing to support that wink other than a nifty bucket of gore or two, Hemlock Grove remains what it's been since season 1: innovatively bad.
Refreshingly straight-forward and sprightly in a era of brooding small-screen heroes, Supergirl is a rough-and-tumble, bubbly mishmash of superhero & small-girl-in-the-big-city tropes that succeeds far more than it has any right to.
Can we have a moment of silence for NBC's sitcom golden years? Because Truth Be Told is so utterly indescribable in its failings as a sitcom, comedy, and in hilarious attempts to be a social satire, I can't fathom the events that led to its creation.
Hilarious, harrowing and strangely cathartic, everything I put to words for FX's seminal series feels frustratingly futile, but I can say this: the first four hours of Fargo's second season are home to some of my favorite moments of TV in years.
iZombie co-creators Rob Thomas and Diane Ruggiero-Wright have a very specific niche that they've filled over the years, one full of headstrong female protagonists, cathartic voice-overs, noir-style plots, and some enjoyably quippy dialogue that can steamroll anyone caught off-guard. Veronica Mars, and her movie, sculpted a uniquely odd tone and voice around a predictable setting - a high school. iZombie, more than anything, is Thomas and Ruggiero-Wright succumbing to Mars' hints of darkness in full form. But, like with Mars, it's characters first, and on that level iZombie is fast approaching Thomas' previous series - and could surpass it given time.
There's something about the growing lethargy of the scripting, aimlessness of the stories, and static nature of the characters that makes the sixth season premiere of The Walking Dead the first to truly question my future with the show.
Carrie gets pulled back into the twisted espionage world of Homeland in the darkly tense opening hours of season five, and if you ever gave up on the show in the past, you'd be doing yourself a favor in joining her.
