iBoy was the first UK original movie on Netflix. Based on the young adult novel by Kevin Brooks, a teenager (Tom Milner) gained superpowers after being shot and waking up with fragments of a smart phone embedded in his brain. Masie Williams, Miranda Richardson and Rory Kinnear co-starred.
Released directly to BBC iPlayer, Simon Amstell’s comedy Carnage was set in 2067, in which a now-vegan human race struggled to come to terms with its meat-eating past, while Bong Joon Ho’s Okja, a cautionary satire about genetically modified meat starring Tilda Swinton, went to Netflix.
Set in 2032, after starvation and plague have decimated much of the Earth’s population, Richard Madden starred as a Scottish chaplain sent to a new colony on a distant planet in the Amazon pilot movie Oasis, based on the novel The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber.
Following the mysterious disappearance of her husband, a woman gave up her large high-tech home and moved into an isolated tiny house in Lifetime’s Tiny House of Terror.
Anjelica Huston took over the part played by Bette Davis in the original for Lifetime’s atmospheric Halloween remake of Disney’s The Watcher in the Woods, which was expertly directed by TV’s Sabrina, the Teenage Witch, Melissa Joan Hart, whose family financed the movie. Benedict Taylor, who co-starred in the 1980 version, returned for the “re-imagining” of Florence Engel Randall’s young adult novel.
The partially crowdfunded The Carmilla Movie was set five years after the original 2014-16 web series, as the now-mortal vampire (Natasha Negovanlis) began to revert to her blood-sucking ways and her partner, Laura (Elise Bauman), started having ghostly dreams.
Thumbing its nose at the laws of diminishing returns, Anthony C. Ferrante’s Sharknado 5: Global Swarming on Syfy found Ian Ziering’s put-upon hero Fin Shepard and Tara Reid as his bionic wife April Wexler travelling around the world to save their young son from the ludicrous CGI flying sharks. The usual long list of cameos by C-list “celebrities” included Chris Kattan, Clay Aiken, Samantha Fox, Katie Price, Tom Daley, David Naughton, Nichelle Nichols, Geraldo Rivera, Downtown Julie Brown, Fabio, Margaret Cho, Kathie Lee Gifford, Al Roker, Gilbert Gottfried, Dolph Lundgren and Olivia Newton-John!
Alan Moore’s crowdfunded anthology of three stories, Show Pieces, was set in an otherworldly Nighthampton [sic] gentleman’s club and was belatedly streamed on the new horror/thriller service Shudder.
Susan Lacy’s epic HBO documentary Spielberg was an in-depth examination of one of the most influential film-makers of all time, with input from Steven Spielberg himself, along with such friends and colleagues as Martin Scorsese, Richard Dreyfuss, John Williams, J.J. Abrams, George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, Brian De Palma, Tom Hanks, Harrison Ford, Robert Zemeckis, Tom Cruise and many others.
Okay, there are now officially too many genre shows on television/online for anyone to possibly keep up with and still have a life!
In the opening episode of Season 7 of HBO’s Game of Thrones (which consisted of seven delayed episodes instead of the usual ten), pop star Ed Sheeran turned up in an embarrassing cameo as a singing soldier. Despite that small mis-step, a record 16.5 million US viewers tuned in to the finale, making ‘The Dragon and the Wolf’ the most-watched episode in the show’s history. Finally, having moved beyond George R.R. Martin’s source novels, most of the series’ major characters came together to confront the approaching threat of the army of the dead as fans were treated to the sight of a zombie dragon!
Following a year’s hiatus, the tenth season of the BBC’s revived Doctor Who found Peter Capaldi’s Doctor teaming up with companions Nardole (Matt Lucus) and gay university student Bill Potts (the remarkable Pearl Mackie) to confront an alien puddle, futuristic emojibots, a giant monster living in London’s River Thames, a haunted house, zombies in outer space, a demonic book, alien monks, fake news, Martian Ice Warriors (scripted by a busy Mark Gatiss), and a vanished Roman Legion. Steven Moffat’s two-part season finale found poor Bill converted into a Cyber-person, and the double-jeopardy of Missy (Michelle Gomez) and The Master (a returning John Simm with requisite beard) playing very different incarnations of the same character.
Capaldi finally bowed out as the twelfth incarnation of the Doctor, along with showrunner Moffat, with the Doctor Who Christmas special ‘Twice Upon a Time’. The actor’s Time Lord teamed up with his brusque first incarnation (David Bradley) and a First World War captain lifted out of frozen time (the ubiquitous Mark Gatiss again) in a talky and sometimes mawkish valediction of Capaldi’s ambitious tenure in the role.
There were squeals of delight from fans when Capaldi’s Doctor finally regenerated into Jodie Whittaker’s first regular female Doctor, although former Doctor Who actor Peter Davison had been forced to come off Twitter when he criticised “the loss of a role model for boys” after the gender-transformation was originally announced back in July.
Thank the gods for Ian McShane and Ricky Whittle, who basically held the first season of American Gods together as the enigmatic Mr. Wednesday and former thief Shadow Moon, respectively. Based on co-executive producer Neil Gaiman’s epic fantasy novel, the eight-episode road trip on Starz! featured such guest stars as Crispin Glover, Chris Obi, Orlando Jones, Cloris Leachman, Corbin Bersnen and Gillian Anderson in several roles, including TV’s Lucy Ricardo.
Having defeated the British Men of Letters and saved Lucifer’s nephilim son Jack, Sam and Dean Winchester (Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles) headed into the twelfth season of The CW’s Supernatural with Crowley and Castiel apparently dead and their mother, Mary (Samantha Smith), trapped in an apocalyptic alternate universe. After Jack quickly grew into a teenager (Alexander Calvert), the brothers helped him control his powers as Lucifer (the wonderful Mark Pellegrino) escaped his imprisonment and started searching for his extremely powerful offspring.
After Nick (David Giuntoli) and his allies finally defeated the power-mad Renard (Sasha Roiz), the sixth and final season of NBC’s Grimm ended on a confusing note and then added on a coda set twenty years later that angered some viewers and baffled others.
Following the shocking death of his detective partner (Nicole Beharie) at the end of the previous series, Tom Mison’s Ichabod Crane found himself working out of Washington DC in the fourth and final series of the Fox Network’s Sleepy Hollow. Despite having a new mystical library to work out of, and a couple of young assistants at his disposal, this attempt to turn what was once a clever and fun show into just another formulaic fantasy series fell decidedly flat, despite a downbeat dystopian climax.
The ten-part second and final season of Fox’s The Exorcist found Father Thomas Ortega (Alfonso Herrera) and Father Marcus Keane (Ben Daniels) leaving Chicago to investigate demonic possession at an island foster home run by John Cho’s foster father.
Cinemax’s tedious Outcast was also inexplicably back, as Patrick Fugit and Philip Glenister’s demon-hunters tried to prevent their West Virginia hometown of Rome being overrun by the possessed. The entire second season was shown on the Fox channel in the UK more than a year before it aired in America.
After the nuclear explosion that ended the first season, the second series of AMC’s Preacher, based on the Vertigo comic book by Garth Ennis and the late Steve Dillon, was extended to thirteen episodes. It found Jesse (Dominic Cooper), Tulip (Ruth Negga) and vampire Cassidy (Joseph Gilgun) on the road searching for a missing God and being pursued by a cursed gunslinger (Graham McTavish). They all ended up in New Orleans, where Jesse discovered he was being groomed to become the new Messiah. Meanwhile, Arseface (Ian Colletti) managed to escape Hell with the help of Adolf Hitler (Noah Taylor) in a (so far) completely unrelated plot strand.
When psychic hustler Manfred Bernado (François Arnaud) arrived in the titular small town, he didn’t expect to encounter witches, vampires, werewolves, angels and demons in NBC’s ten-episode Midnight Texas, based on the novels by Charlaine Harris.
The eighth and thankfully final series of The CW’s The Vampire Diaries ended with brothers Stefan (Paul We
sley) and Damon (Ian Somerhalder) working together to save the town of Mystic Falls, while original co-star Nina Dobrev returned to the show after a two-year hiatus.
The fourth season of companion series The Originals found Marcel (Charles Michael Davis) once again in control of New Orleans and Klaus (Joseph Morgan) imprisoned and concerned for the safety of his seven-year-old daughter. Eventually an all-powerful new threat, known as “The Hollow”, forced the vampires into an uneasy alliance.
The third season of Freeform’s Stitchers found Kirsten (Emma Ishta) and her team of fellow psychics using the memories of the recently dead to solve more murders.
Following on from the nuclear explosion that ended the previous season, the fourth series of FX Network’s The Strain, based on the novel trilogy by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan, found the world plunged into Eternal Night and ruled over by The Master and his undead strigoi. Although not all the major characters survived the final ten episodes, the show at least came to an end on an upbeat note.
The seventh season of the Fox Network’s American Horror Story, subtitled Cult, was another step down for Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk’s once darkly humorous horror show. This time, the eleven-episode series was based around the aftermath of Donald’s Trump’s surprise election victory, as an upwardly-mobile liberal lesbian couple (Sarah Paulson and Alison Pill) found themselves menaced by a murderous cult of personality, led by Evan Peters’ homicidal narcissist. Unfortunately, the satire was as laboured as the script.
The third season of Fox Network’s Lucifer, based on the DC/Vertigo comics character, opened with the demon detective (Tom Ellis) trying to discover who kidnapped him and gave him back his angel wings. Tom Welling (Smallville) joined the cast as the new police captain who was hiding a secret of his own.
The second series of ITV’s The Frankenstein Chronicles found Sean Bean’s reanimated former police inspector John Marlott escaping the madhouse and using his new-found ability of seeing ghosts to investigate the mutilation murders of local clergymen in 19th century London. Marlott suspected that his old adversary, mad scientist Lord Daniel Hervey (Ed Stoppard), was somehow connected to the killings, and he wasn’t wrong in this sumptuously made and acted six-part period melodrama.
The second season of The Duffer Brothers’ over-hyped Stranger Things, streamed on Netflix, continued its endless plundering of pop culture references as it opened on Halloween 1984, a year after the events in the first season. Will (Noah Schnapp) was having traumatic flashbacks to the Upside Down dimension, while it was revealed that Milly Bobby Brown’s tele-kinetic Eleven had a “sister” named Kali, aka “Eight” (Danish actress Linnea Berthelsen). Sean Astin and Paul Reiser joined the cast as, respectively, a new boyfriend for Winona Ryder’s Joyce and an enigmatic government scientist.
According to Nielsen ratings, an impressive 15.8 million viewers tuned into the Stranger Things 2 premiere episode over its first three days in October, with nearly 11 million of those coming from the all-important 18-49 year-old demographic.
The ten-episode second season of Hulu’s Freakish found its band of high school students not only battling mutated members of their own community, but also a new group of survivors.
David Lynch and Mark Frost’s much-anticipated revival of Twin Peaks—a quarter of a century after the show last aired on ABC-TV—pretty much eschewed the norms of series TV. Many of the original characters returned (including Kyle MacLachlan’s off-kilter versions of Special Agent Dale Cooper, Sheryl Lee’s Laura Palmer and the late Miguel Ferrer’s FBI Agent Albert Rosenfield), but the result never lived up to the whole of its parts. The original series was challenging at times, but at least it attempted a coherent narrative structure. Unfortunately, for this new eighteen-episode sequel/re-imagining, Lynch mostly jettisoned such things as storytelling, characterisation and entertainment for frustrating self-absorption. As a result, those viewers who stayed with the Showtime series either loved it or loathed it.
Leaving no cliché in the author’s work unturned, Spike’s ten-part series based on Stephen King’s novella The Mist made the mistake of focussing on the dull survivors trapped in the mall instead of the horrors happening outside. It was justifiably cancelled after just one season.
David E. Kelley somehow managed to spin executive producer King’s 2014 novel Mr. Mercedes into a ten-part limited series for the AT&T Audience Network, as Bredan Gleeson’s retired cop played a cat-and-mouse game with a psychopathic killer (Harry Treadaway).
With Max Landis as one of its executive producers, the second season of Syfy’s Channel Zero, entitled No-End House, featured six episodes linked to a mysterious building that showed those who entered its six rooms their greatest fears. The series was based on stories on the Creepypasta website.
Based on a series of SF books by James S.A. Corey and set against an intergalactic conflict between Earth and Mars, The Expanse turned into another Star Trek-style series in its second season as Jim Holden (Steven Strait) and the crew of the Rocinante uncovered a plot to release a destructive proto-molecule on the Eros asteroid station.
Somehow the Syfy series Dark Matter reached a third season, as the crew of the derelict spaceship Raza continued to fight an intergalactic war while having to deal with a Groundhog Day plot and being transported 600 years back in time to the 21st century.
The trio of rebel intergalactic bounty hunters found themselves going to war in the equally baffling third season of Syfy’s Killjoys.The third season of 12 Monkeys began with the birth of the “Witness” as Cole (Aaron Stanford) and his team travelled back and forth in time to try to prevent the end of the world. Guest stars included Tom Noonan, Rupert Graves, James Callis, and Christopher Lloyd as the villain who wanted to destroy time and reality.
Christopher Meloni’s hit-man found himself befriended by his kidnapped daughter’s imaginary friend—a tiny cartoon blue-winged unicorn voiced by Patton Oswalt—in Syfy’s surreal nine-part series Happy!, based on a graphic novel by Grant Morrison and Dick Robertson.
Ghost Wars was set in a remote Alaskan town that had been overrun by paranormal forces and featured Avan Jogia, Kim Coates, the busy Vincent D’Onofrio and singer Meat Loaf. Created by Simon Barry, it ran for just one thirteen-episode season before Syfy cancelled it.
Set in a dystopian 1999, Syfy’s thirteen-episode Blood Drive managed to rip-off a bunch of much better movies as a former cop (Alan Ritchson) and a tough street racer (Christina Ochoa) were forced to team up in a grindhouse version of Wacky Races, where the cars ran on human blood for fuel.
The second season of Syfy’s Wynonna Earp, based on the IDW comic, found the gunslinger’s titular great-granddaughter (Melanie Scrofano) and her companions still battling the demonic Revenants, and the second season of Van Helsing found the vampire-hunter’s distant relative Vanessa (Kelly Overton) and her friends trying to survive against both humans and vampires in a post-apocalyptic world.
As the patriarch of a mysterious family of undertakers, executive producer Mario Van Peebles hung around for just ten of the twelve episodes of Syfy’s Superstition. The show, which co-starred the actor’s appropriately named real-life daughter Morgana, saw the Hastings family battling demons, witches, demonic dolls and recurring villain, “The Dredge”.
In the second series of Zapped on Dave, hapless office worker Brian (James Buckley) was still trapped in a magical parallel universe and only the Super Solstice could get him home again. Sylvester McCoy turned up as the “Lord Protector”.
The small town of Winden was beset by mysterious disappearances and family secrets as the past and present intertwined in the creepy German-made series Dark, which ran for eleven episodes on Netflix.
There were more missing children and family secrets in the second season of the Swedish series Jordskott, as police detective Eva Thörnblad (Moa Gammel) once again found herself caught up in another otherworldly mystery, and a group of friends staying in a remote, abandoned ski lodge discovered a malign force in the “haunted” cellar in
the eight-episode Swedish series Black Lake (aka Svarysjön).
A woman (LynnVan Royen) woke up covered in blood and discovered that she had been murdered and was now a ghost in the ten-part Belgian series Hotel Beau Séjour.
Following the death of Sonequa Martin-Green’s Sasha Williams at the end of Season 7, the eighth season of AMC’s The Walking Dead began with the show celebrating its 100th episode, as the various bickering human groups banded together to try to defeat Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) and his self-appointed Saviours and Rick’s hugely annoying son Carl (Chandler Riggs) was bitten by the zombies.
Meanwhile, the third season of the spin-off show Fear the Walking Dead found the equally irritating Clark family still attempting to deal with the zombie apocalypse and their own dysfunctionalism while prisoners of a militia group (a recurring theme of these shows).
Andrew Lincoln, Norman Reedus, Melissa McBride and Jeffrey Dean Morgan were amongst the original cast members who voiced animated versions of their characters in Adult Swim’s The Robot Chicken Walking Dead Special, which aired in early October.
In the third season of The CW’s iZombie, Chase Grave’s (Jason Dohring) private army of walking dead soldiers prepared to take control of Seattle, while Ravi (Rahul Kohli) continued to search for a cure to the zombie infection.
Drew Barrymore’s SoCal realtor woke up one day with a taste for human flesh, while her husband (Timothy Olyphant) and teenage daughter (Liv Hewson) attempted to support her cannibalist cravings in Netflix’s inventive ten-episode zom-com, Santa Clarita Diet.
A seventeen-year-old boy (Benjamin Papac) and his cyborg pal (Hartley Sawyer) searched for a female survivor to help repopulate the human race after a zombie apocalypse in the six six-minute episodes of Saving the Human Race: Webisodes streamed on CW Seed.
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