With the new season upon us, season sets from the big shows are dropping all over the place. This week offers some great choices. Leading the pack is The Big Bang Theory. And if you like that, please do check out my pick of the week, The IT Crowd. Other comedy offerings include It’s Always Sunny, and the final season of My Name Is Earl. For the more medically inclined viewers, Grey’s Anatomy and Private Practice have their latest seasons ready.

On the sci-fi side, we have the Doctor Who 2008 Christmas Special, and Sanctuary. The big shows are rounded out by Crash, CSI: Miami, Primeval, The Clone Wars, and Fear Itself. If nostalgia is your thing, also look for new sets from Bonanza, Fame, Dark Shadows, One Step Beyond, and Transformers. And that’s just for starters. The full list is after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

Highlights of the Week

• This event is so epic it’s going to take all week to get through it. Straight from a smash run in the UK, the five-night Torchwood: Children of Earth event begins on Monday at 9pm and runs nightly through Friday. It will have you on the edge of your seats!
• If that’s not enough, the series that spawned Torchwood is back with a movie event. David Tennant is wrapping his run as The Doctor, so don’t miss Doctor Who: Planet of the Dead, now on BBC America. (Sun. 8pm)
• On the anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11, Discovery takes a look back with the special When We Left Earth: Apollo 11. (Mon. 10pm)
• Gordon Ramsay is back to tell potential chefs what fucking wastes of time they are on a new season of Hell’s Kitchen. (Tue. 8pm, FOX)
• Say goodbye to Samantha Who? with the last two new episodes ever. (Thu. 8pm, ABC)
• The Wanted is NBC’s new reality offering, where an elite team of specialists track down an international terrorist. How about they go after Bin Laden? (Mon. 10pm)
• Discovery is launching The Colony, a 10-part experiment that looks at what it would take to rebuild a society if everything has been destroyed. (Tue. 10pm)
• ABC News is probably going to tell us lies in Over a Barrel: The Truth About Oil, but you never know. (Wed. 10pm)
• So You Think You Can Dance celebrates 100 episodes with new performances of classic dances, past contestants and more! (Thu. 8pm, FOX)
• I don’t even need to read about this one to know how great it’s going to be. It’s a Syfy original movie on Saturday night. And it’s called Malibu Shark Attack. Bikinis. Blood. Gore. Bad effects. I’m there! (Sat. 9pm) Read the rest of this entry »

Two bitches, so little time. When Nick and Jenny respectively left the show, their names were immediately excised from the credits. And yet, week after week, there we saw Juliet Aubrey’s name. So we knew Helen Cutter was still out there.

Considering she’s been at the center of the anomalies since the beginning, I think we knew we weren’t done with her yet … at least until we’re done with her. My guess is next week’s finale, especially considering the fact that the show’s canceled in the UK after this third season. At least there’s hope of a film and/or spinoff. Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s see, first we added an Egyptologist into the team at the beginning of the season. Then we lost Cutter, the leading man of the series, and now tonight we lost someone else. Primeval has been all about change virtually since the beginning, even going so far as to change Lucy Brown’s character from Claudie to Jenny; and honestly the change wasn’t an improvement.

I guess the idea is to establish a brand new status quo for a new generation of Primeval. Cutter always seemed a bit out of place once we got into the ARC with the second season. He never seemed a good fit for that much bureaucracy. Connor and Abby didn’t look that much more comfortable, but they managed to make that work. I do miss Hannah Spearritt having to run around in her underwear virtually every episode, though.

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This story broke a couple weeks ago, but I’m a little behind in my news gathering. Primeval — the BBC’s creature-filled sci-fi adventure series — has been tabbed to hit the big screen. Warner Bros. purchased the feature film rights and selected I am Legend screenwriter Akiva Goldsman to produce. At present, the newest season of Primeval can be seen on BBC America, while the first two seasons air on Syfy.

With any big screen adaptation comes a certain amount of apprehension from the die-hard fans, and deservedly so. The fact that Goldsman plans to transplant the setting of the series to America already has some loyalists up in arms. My guess is New York City will get heavy consideration, with Central Park replacing the Forest of Dean as the location of the initial anomaly. I’m merely speculating; I have no concrete proof.

What other changes can we expect? Let’s ponder, shall we.

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If that’s really the way they’re going to write Cutter out of the show, it’s pretty realistic. Dealing with the anomalies is dangerous work, and to have the main character so abruptly taken down in the line of duty is brilliant. In America, this would never happen. I don’t know if last week’s episode was hyped as game changing, but it certainly caught me by surprise when he died at the end.

Luckily, his apparent replacement is an absolute blast to watch. Jason Flemyng’s charisma comes through in the crazy character of Danny Quinn, who we first met in the second episode of this season with the weird house gremlin. He had a presence even then that you couldn’t take your eyes off of him.

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I’m new to the science fiction series Primeval. Well, that’s not exactly accurate. I caught the first couple episodes of season two last summer on BBC America, but I was a little confused. I was hoping the network would re-air the first season at some point. It didn’t happen. I could have gone out and purchased the episodes I missed, but it would have cut into my pizza and beer budget.

Lucky for me, the Sci-Fi Channel, er, I mean, the Syfy Channel, has begun showing the inaugural season of Primeval Friday nights at 10pm. I’ve watched the first two installments and while not blown away, I have found it to be a pretty cool concept. Now, I realize I’m cheating a bit by watching the show on Syfy rather than BBC America, but season three of Primeval will debut on BBC America later in 2009. In fact, it’s currently airing across the pond on Saturday evenings.

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