Slickly produced and featuring a head-turning lead performance in Gemma Chan's Anita, it's in the minute-to-minute dialogue and tediously overused sci-fi themes that Humans begins to disassemble.
With a solid hook, zippy pace, and mounting menace, Zoo is far more economically assembled than a series of this making -- and with this kind of airport-ready source material -- should ever have allowed.
Evoking the essence of its namesake without blatantly retreading in its footsteps, MTV's Scream proves to be terrifying, clever, weird, and exhilarating, and usually all at once.
With the release of Inside Out over the weekend, and the collective agreement that Pixar "is back," it's easy to begin wondering where the studio's newest animated flick sits amongst the rest of its pantheon of classics. We Got This Covered tasked me with updating its ranking of the now-15-film-strong studio to see where the movies of the legendary Disney-owned animation warehouse sit next to one another.
The Astronaut Wives Club is a black hole of monotonous characters and stale writing and does absolutely nothing to represent the teetering excitement and dread the show's true-life events caused across the world.
Tyrant may be afraid to follow through with some of its most incendiary plot threads, but season two already feels fully-formed, less of a mirage of ideas and promises like last year and more of an actual, richly realized vision.
It took me approximately five minutes to estimate the kind of Syfy series Dark Matter would be. None would call the network's track record unblemished, exactly, so deciding to give a new Syfy show a chance is sometimes a crap shoot. You could win big (last year's Ascension sure came close), or you could lose even bigger. Dark Matter, the network's new show based on the Dark Horse comic of the same name, fits rightfully on brand with the network's pivot away from quirky ephemerality (Eureka, Warehouse 13) and into the grittier deep space shenanigans of yesteryear; or, you know, when Battlestar Galactica made them a lot of money. Now, thanks to Dark Matter's dramatically preposterous mishandling of both its "adult" themes and that elusive grittiness, Syfy is even further away from the quality programming it so eagerly wants to recapture.
With Fox's Lost-inspired summer offering Wayward Pines (off to a dizzyingly fun start), ABC is jumping into the fray with The Whispers, a new drama series based off Ray Bradbury's short story "Zero Hour." It focuses on a group of apparently disconnected children under the influence of an invisible entity they refer only to as "Drill." After a few fatal accidents or two, a mysteriously downed fighter jet in Africa, and an amnesiac covered with tattoos all begin setting off blips on the FBI's radar, an FBI child specialist Claire Bennigan (Lily Rabe) races to connect the dots of the seemingly disconnected events.
It's got big ideas and a dark enough tone to tackle them in due time, but for the first three hours at least, UnREAL introduces itself as a shockingly watchable showbiz farce with only fleeting teases of what could be something truly special.
Picking up seconds after last year's wedding massacre cliffhanger, the third season of Devious Maids doesn't waste any time in not only answering major questions from that finale, but in setting up the big mysteries of the new season as well. There's a lot that can be said about the show's inherently cheesy dialogue, over-the-top twists, and blatant similarity to creator Marc Cherry's other show about a group of woman dealing with not-so-idyllic problems in beautifully idyllic settings. Devious Maids has yet to reach the embarrassingly good heights of Desperate Housewives, but as a 13-hour slice of frothy summer fun, you could do a whole lot worse.
