Hansel discovered his grown-up sister (Shannen Doherty) was working for the evil witch in Witchslayer Gretl, Grimm’s Snow White featured Jane March as the wicked Queen, and Ben Cross turned up in Black Forest.
Aliens attacked the Earth with electromagnetic tornadoes in Alien Tornado (aka Tornado Warning) starring Jeff Fahey and Kari Wührer.
A demonic dead school principal wanted revenge in Haunted High (aka Ghostquake) starring Danny Trejo and Charisma Carpenter, and Morgan Fairchild was the housemother from Hell (literally), harvesting the souls of sorority pledges in American Horror House.
Poachers Yancy Butler and Robert Englund discovered a lake was full of man-eating crocodiles in Lake Placid: The Final Chapter, while TV sitcom veterans Danny Bonaduce and Barry Williams were joined by Bruce Davison, Sherilyn Fenn, Howard Hesseman and Alice Cooper playing himself in Bigfoot.
Emma Samms’s chief of police had to stop the Boogey-man, and the Syfy channel celebrated St. Patrick’s Day with Leprechaun’s Revenge starring Billy Zane and William Devane.
Of course the Roger Corman-produced Attack of the 50ft Cheerleader was shown in 3-D on EPIX. At least the cast included Sean Young, Treat Williams and Mary Woronov, with cameos by John Landis, Ted Raimi and Corman himself.
In The Girl, Toby Jones’s lecherous Alfred Hitchcock was obsessed with Tippi Hedren (Sienna Miller), his leading lady in The Birds, in a distasteful HBO movie made with the co-operation of the actress herself.
Olivia Holt’s teenager discovered that she was descended from a family of monster hunters in Disney’s Girl vs. Monster.
Delayed from its intended Hallowe’en debut, the BBC’s three-part The Secret of Crickley Hall, written and directed by Joe Ahearne and based on the novel by James Herbert, made heavy-going of its story about the eponymous haunted house. Suranne Jones, Tom Ellis, Douglas Henshall and David Warner starred.
Matthew Rhys starred as the opium-addicted choirmaster John Jasper in the BBC’s two-part adaptation of Charles Dickens’s final, unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
“Presented by” Ridley Scott and Tony Scott, Lauren Ambrose, Geena Davis, James Woods, Ellen Burstyn and Richard Dreyfuss starred in A&E’s two-part remake of Coma. It was based on the novel by Michael Crichton, which had previously been filmed in 1978.
Matt Smith’s third season as Doctor Who began promisingly with Steven Moffat’s psychotic zombie Daleks, but the BBC show soon returned to its annoyingly juvenile roots with a spaceship full of dinosaurs, a cyborg gunslinger and an invasion of Earth by alien cubes. Before the seventh new series went on hiatus after only five episodes, the Doctor travelled back in time to New York City, where he confronted the Weeping Angels and companions Amy and Rory (Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill) finally and thankfully bowed out. Guest stars included Rupert Graves, Mark Williams, David Bradley, Jemma Redgrave, Steven Berkoff and Alex Kingston as River Song.
Meanwhile in May, children’s show Blue Peter aired an exclusive Doctor Who mini-episode featuring Matt Smith and Karen Gillan, reputedly scripted by three young viewers who took part in a competition earlier in the year. Children in Need in November included a sneak preview of the Doctor’s new companion Clara, played by Jenna-Louise Coleman, who had already turned up as a sassy disembodied intelligence in that first new episode of the year, “Asylum of the Daleks”.
Another version of Coleman’s character was introduced in the Doctor Who Christmas Day special, “The Snow-men”, set in Victorian London. Guided by the “Great Intelligence” (voiced by Ian McKellen), Richard E. Grant’s sinister Dr Simeon tried to take over the world with an army of pointy-toothed snowman.
After a brief appearance by Russell Tovey’s George and an intriguing flash-forward to a dystopian future ruled by vampires, the ghostly Annie (Lenora Crichlow) was joined in the fourth season of the BBC’s increasingly darker Being Human by new housemates – werewolf Tom (Michael Socha), bloodsucker Hal (Damien Molony), new ghost Alex (Kate Bracken) and a mysterious baby – as the vampiric Old Ones (led by Mark Gattis’s campy Mr Snow) finally showed up to take control of humanity. Among the guest stars was Mark Williams, while Craig Roberts returned as Adam, the forty-year-old vampire trapped in the body of a teenager.
At the end of its resumed second season, AMC’s The Walking Dead killed off its two most interesting characters before Hershal’s farm was overrun by zombies and Sheriff Rick Grimes’s (Andrew Lincoln) depleted band were scattered. As Season 3 began, the bickering survivors took refuge in an abandoned prison, while David Morrissey joined the cast as the obsessed governor, who held his zombie-free town of Woodbury in a lethal grip with the help of a familiar face.
Unexpectedly, a second six-part season of the supernatural soap opera Bedlam turned up on Sky Living in June. Most of the original leads were gone as Lacey Turner played a weepy paramedic who had inherited the power to see ghosts in the haunted luxury apartment block converted from an old insane asylum. At least the show created its own bogeyman.
And then there were nuns . . . Despite featuring a number of returning actors from the first series, FX’s American Horror Story Asylum (no colon) was a totally unrelated tale about a madcap Church-run asylum set (mostly) in the mid-1960s. Into a heady mix of sex and the supernatural, the producers threw a lesbian journalist, alien abduction, bloody-faced serial killers, a mad doctor and his mutant experiments, demonic possession, a homicidal Santa and spanking nuns. Actors such as Zachary Quinto, Joseph Fiennes, James Cromwell, Jessica Lange, Ian McShane and Chloë Sevigny must have wondered what they had done wrong to end up in this mess.
Following the killing of series regular Bobby Singer (Jim Beaver) by Leviathan leader Dick Roman (James Patrick Stuart) on The CW’s much-improved Supernatural, Dean Winchester (Jensen Ackles) travelled back to 1944 to team up with proto-hunter Eliot Ness (Nicholas Lea) while Bobby’s angry spirit returned Topper-like to help the boys out when they needed him. After a cliff-hanger ending, Season 8 revealed in flashback what happened to Dean after he spent a year in Purgatory and what caused his brother Sam (Jared Padalecki) to give up monster-hunting.
For Season 5 of HBO’s True Blood, Christopher Meloni joined the cast as the 400-year-old head of the Vampire Authority, an undead faction that wanted to live in harmony with humans. However, he met his true death at the hands of a resurrected Russell Edgington (Denis O’Hare), who wanted just the opposite. Meanwhile, Rutina Wesley’s increasingly annoying Tara found herself transformed into an unwilling vampire to save her life, and Sookie (Anna Paquin) and Jason (Ryan Kwanten) discovered a secret about their parents’ death in a fairy burlesque club. Creator Alan Ball announced that he was stepping down as show-runner if True Blood was picked up for a sixth season.
Bi-sexual succubus Bo’s (Anna Silk) attempts to prevent a civil war amongst the Fae led to the deaths of two major characters in Season 2 of Syfy’s Lost Girl.
Terry O’Quinn and Vanessa Williams were the devilishly attractive couple out to steal the souls of a young couple (Rachel Taylor and Dave Annable) hired to manage their cursed Manhattan apartment building in ABC’s 666 Park Avenue.
Despite a slowly emerging conspiracy plot, NBC’s Grimm was never more than a mythological creature-of-week series. The first season ended with Detective Nick Burckhardt (David Gluntoli) discovering that the mother he thought dead (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) was alive and kicking monsters. The second series shook things up a bit, as Nick’s annoying girlfriend (Bitsie Tulloch) awakened from a magical coma with no memory of who he was, and a mysterious cabal sent some nasty critters to kill the monster-hunter.
After Artie (Saul Rubinek) used a stolen artefact to turn back time and restore Warehouse 13, the investigators encountered people who thought they saw H. P. Lovecraft’s tentacled monsters, and series regular Leena (Genelle Williams) was apparently killed by someone she trusted at the end of the third season of the Syfy show.
With its final thirteen-part season, Syfy’s Eureka (aka A Town Called Eureka) upped its game considerabl
y in the opening two episodes, with the crew of the Astraeus trapped inside a dark virtual reality created by renegade scientist Beverley Barlowe (Debrah Farentino), which lead to the shocking death of one of the show’s most likeable characters.
However, that character was subsequently resurrected in a new body and the series quickly returned to its usual lightweight format as a couple of townsfolk were revealed to be saboteurs, and Sheriff Carter (Colin Ferguson) finally married Allison (Salli Richardson-Whitfield).
After five seasons the series ended on a perfect note, with a number of characters returning for the bittersweet finale.
Unfortunately, the fourth season of Syfy’s Sanctuary was the most disappointing yet, with its tedious overarching plot about abnormal terrorists from Hollow Earth. After an opening episode in which Dr Helen Magnus (Amanda Tapping) travelled back in time to stop Adam Worth changing history, the show reached its nadir with a cringe-worthy musical episode.
Despite being executive produced by J. J. Abrams (Lost), Alcatraz was cancelled by the Fox network after just one season. A young San Francisco detective (Sarah Jones) teamed up with a geeky historian (Jorge Garcia) and a taciturn government agent (Sam Neill) to investigate why 302 prisoners and staff who mysteriously disappeared from the island prison in 1963 were returning to modern San Francisco unchanged. Unfortunately, we never found out in the cliff-hanger final episode.
In its third season, Syfy’s Haven continued to build upon its complicated mythology as Audrey (Emily Rose) discovered more about her own mysterious history, the origin of the Troubles and the truth behind the Colorado Kid. In the perplexing season finale, she finally entered the mysterious barn as the predicted meteor shower struck the town.
The seventh season of Showtime’s Dexter opened with the show’s highest-rated premiere to date as the serial killer’s sister, Lt Debra Morgan (Jennifer Carpenter), tried to come to terms with her brother’s true nature, and Yvonne Strahovski turned up as the former girlfriend of a dead killer who had her own secrets to hide.
Although not quite up to the standard of BBC’s Sherlock, CBS’s Elementary was still an enjoyable updating of the consulting detective, as an addictive Holmes (Jonny Lee Miller), fresh out of rehab, teamed up with his sobriety monitor, Dr Joan Watson (Lucy Liu), to solve not-too-baffling crimes in New York City.
Perhaps the biggest problem with Season 2 of HBO’s Game of Thrones was that there was too much plot – and plotting – as everybody and their brother (often literally) attempted to seize control of King’s Landing before the horrific threat behind the Wall was revealed in a stunning final sequence.
ABC’s Once Upon a Time continued to have some problems blending its real-life and fairy tale narratives, but Lana Parrilla was a terrific Evil Queen/Mayor Regina and Robert Carlyle had fun as the scheming Rumpelstiltskin/Mr Gold. In a clever twist, Meghan Ory’s Red Riding Hood turned out to be the Big Bad Wolf herself, while genre veteran Brad Dourif guest-starred as a dark sorcerer.
In the show’s second season, despite the queen’s curse being lifted on Storybrooke, the fairy-tale characters recovered their memories but were still trapped. Meanwhile, Sheriff Emma Swan (Jennifer Morrison) and her mother Mary Margaret/Snow White (Ginnifer Goodwin) were transported to the other reality, where they encountered a number of characters familiar to fans of Disney films, including Captain Hook (Colin O’Donoghue), along with a certain Dr Frankenstein/Dr Whale (David Anders). Barbara Hershey also joined the cast as Regina’s even more evil mother Cora.
The CW’s drippy Beauty and the Beast wasn’t a patch on the 1980s show as Kristin Kreuk’s brittle NYPD detective became involved with Jay Ryan’s military experiment while also trying to solve the murder of her mother.
Pouty heroine Elena (Nina Dobrev) died and came back as a vampire at the end of the third season of The CW’s increasingly convoluted The Vampire Diaries, while the fourth season kicked off with Connor (Arielle Kebbel) trying to uncover the secrets of Mystic Falls.
The teen witches of The Secret Circle were almost convinced to tap into their dark magic by the manipulative John Blackwell (Joe Lando) before The CW thankfully cancelled the charmless show after just one season.
ITV’s equally dull Switch featured Lacey Turner, Hannah Tointon, Nina Toussaint-White and Phoebe Fox as four friends living in the London borough of Camden who used magic to try to sort out their love lives. Caroline Quentin turned up as a batty older witch in the six-part series.
After being saved from cancellation by a last-minute co-financing deal, Primeval returned to ITV with a fun fourth season. After a year trapped in the Cretaceous period, Abby Maitland (Hannah Spearritt) and Connor Temple (Andrew-Lee Potts) returned through an “anomaly” to their own time, only to discover a rebuilt ARC (Anomaly Research Centre) with a new dinosaur-hunting team in place. Alexander Siddig joined the cast as a mysterious billionaire.
One door closed, as Steven Spielberg’s Terra Nova was justifiably cancelled after one season by Fox, and another briefly opened, as Spielberg went on also to executive produce ABC’s faux-documentary series The River, in which a shaky camera crew followed the trail of a missing wildlife-TV host (Bruce Greenwood) into the Amazon jungle. The creepy show was co-created by Paranormal Activity director Oren Peli but was still also cancelled after a single season.
Meanwhile, we were treated to a two-hour season premiere for the second season of TNT’s ten-part Falling Skies, which Spielberg also executive produced. After escaping from an invader’s ship, Noah Wyle’s dour history professor found himself not trusted by his fellow rebel fighters and not trusting himself. After a slow start, the show picked up as a number of supporting characters were killed off before the 2nd Mass arrived at an underground headquarters in Charleston (governed by Terry O’Quinn and Matt Frewer, which should have been a warning) and teamed up with a revolutionary force amongst the skitters to assassinate a powerful alien Overlord.
Thrown back in time from a dystopian future to the twenty-first century while pursuing a group of urban terrorists in Syfy’s Continuum, future cop Kiera Cameron (Rachel Nichols) discovered that to save the future she had to control the past.
Despite combining the creative talents of J. J. Abrams, Jon Favreau and Eric Kripke, along with an interesting opening premise in which all the power of Earth suddenly stopped working, NBC’s Revolution quickly ran out of juice and turned into just another post-apocalyptic drama with horses and crossbows set fifteen years after the planet went dark.
The second season of MTV’s twelve-part Teen Wolf grew up quickly to become the year’s darkest YA genre show. Scott (Tyler Posey), Stiles (Dylan O’Brien) and Alison (Crystal Reed) found themselves battling a merciless team of Hunters and a deadly new werewolf clan, while at the same time trying to identify a “Kanima” – a legendary reptilian shape-changer. By the season finale, old foes had joined forces to confront a common enemy, and plenty of interesting new characters had been introduced.
Aimee Smith starred in the BBC’s seventeen-part YA series Wolfblood as the member of a lupine race with heightened senses and abilities that have lived amongst humans for centuries.
In Season 4 of BBC Wales’ Young Dracula, Vlad (Gerran Howell) attempted to broker a truce between the Vampire High Council and the Slayers’ Guild as he struggled to overcome his blood-thirst and track down a murderous shape-shifter.
Nickelodeon’s House of Anubis returned for a second season of forty-five fifteen-minute mysteries set in a strange English boarding school.
There was more than a touch of Game of Thrones to the two-part opening of the fifth and final season of BBC’s Merlin. Set three years after end of the previous series, King Arthur (Bradley James) and his faithful knights rode north to rescue their comrades from the clutches of Morgana (Katie McGrath) and Mordred (Alexanda Vlahos).
After a series of final adventures, that included Gwen (Angel Coulby) being “possessed” by the vengeful sorceress, the two-part Christmas finale brought the show to its inevitable conclusion,
with an added contemporary twist. Liam Cunningham and Julian Glover turned up in both fantasy shows, and during the thirteen-part series there were memorable appearances by Lindsay Duncan, James Fox, John Shrapnel and Anthony Head as a resurrected Uther Pendragon.
Sky’s Sinbad may have been a too violent for small children and too dull for adults, but the spectacular-looking twelve-part Arabian Nights series boasted a likeable performance by newcomer Elliot Knight as the young thief cursed to sail the seven seas with a multinational crew by his grandmother (Janet Suzman). Naveen Andrews was the vengeful Prince Akbar, Orla Brady played the scheming kohl-eyed sorceress Taryn, while Timothy Spall turned up as a sly personification of Death. In the season finale, the companions travelled to the Land of the Dead, with unexpected consequences.
Co-created by Russell T. Davies and Phil Ford for the BBC, Wizards vs. Aliens featured boy wizard Tom Clarke (Scott Haran) and his science-geek school friend Benny (Percelle Ascott) battling the Nekross, a race of alien invaders.
Based on the DC Comics character Green Arrow, The CW’s Arrow was a gritty and stylish reboot of the character (played by Stephen Amell), out to wreak revenge on Starling City’s criminals after being shipwrecked on a remote island for five years. John Barrowman portrayed a ruthless crime boss, while Jessica De Gouw showed up as the homicidal Huntress.
After revealing the existence of his super-powered Alphas at the end of Season 1, Dr Lee Rosen (David Strathairn) was tasked with bringing the team back together in the unanticipated thirteen-part second season of the Syfy series.
E4’s fourth season of Misfits saw the community service superheroes gaining two new gang members as, over eight episodes, they encountered zombies, a giant White Rabbit and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
ITV’s six-part Eternal Law was about two angelic lawyers (Samuel West and Ukwell Roach) supplying celestial legal aid to the people in the city of York.
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