Series Review: Afterlife

One of my favourite features that my local public library's website has is the "Just Ordered" menu, which lets me both know, and put holds on, materials that are currently on order, but not yet available in the library.

Case in point, the 2004 British Mystery series, Afterlife, which I had never heard of before, but due to the intriguing cover art of the box (pictured left) and the fact that it starred a pre-The Walking Dead had me interested enough to add it to my hold queue.

The first series lasts six one hour episodes and works as a mystery, following a medium named Alison Mundy (Lesley Sharp - who I loved in Bob & Rose) and an interested academic, Dr. Robert Bridge (played by Andrew Lincoln) who begins the series believing Alison is some sort of con-artist, but begins to believe her view of the world throughout the first season.

The episodes were creepy, intriguing, and had a lot of great personal drama going on, digging into both Robert's recent personal tragedies and Alison's view of the world.  

For a mystery-of-the-week series with an intriguing supernatural bent, I'd say it is well worth the watch.

Things I've Noticed: My Loyalty to Genre TV has a limit

Yesterday I watched the sixth episode of the TV series The Event, and I think I’m done. Back when the show first appeared I wrote about how much I dug the pilot and especially the everyman quality of lead actor Jason Ritter. The thing is, after half a dozen hour-long episodes, even a cool concept and a great lead actor can’t get me to watch the next episode.

My problem with the show basically came down to pacing – for a show that promised me a world shattering event so awesome that the whole series would be named after it, I needed something more spectacular than a plane disappearing mid-flight.

As a genre fan I love the weird and the amazing, and had the plane appeared on another world or in another dimension, I really think I could have gotten behind the show. What actually happened was that the “event” in question was immediately hushed up by the government and didn’t change much of anything for the man on the street (quick side note – amazing “man on the street story” Marvels by Kurt Busiek). Basically I’ve spent the last six hours of this show watching people work to cover up a thing that was covered up in the pilot – oh but wait, they were also covering up aliens and a viral outbreak, but you know what, The X-Files kind of topped me up for shows about cover-ups, aliens and viral outbreaks – also it worked on an episodic format (where a mini-story occurred every episode, and the overall arc of the series occurred in the background), and they did it much, much better.

In the end I still really like most of the actors in the show, I just couldn’t keep waiting around for the premise to show itself. I hope this doesn’t mean I’m loosing patience with new shows but am simply becoming more discerning.

Things I've noticed: The new genre TV lineup is getting lean

Last year with the end of Lost, the networks were filled with possible replacements – from Flashforward to V and The Witches of Eastwick to The Vampire Diaries, there were a lot of new television series with a significant Genre focus.

This year there are just a handful (to my knowledge, be sure to correct me if I’m wrong); No Ordinary Family on ABC, Lost Girl on Showcase (a specialty cable network up here in Canada), The Walking Dead on AMC, and possibly The Event on NBC (Although if they are a genre show, they are playing it really close to the vest – I guess we won’t know for sure until the pilot airs).

There is a deluge of Police and Legal shows this year (as compared to last years overwhelming Medical offers), and although there are a number of these shows I want to check out (most notably Terriers on FX, but I’ll have to wait for the DVD), I am starting to feel like the offerings for genre fans are starting to get pretty lean.

I guess it’s good in a way, as it lets me focus on the massive backlog of genre shows I’ve got on my shelves and still haven’t got around to (I’m still at season seven of The X-Files, and I’m really hoping to watch both the original Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits someday too), but like with any genre fan, I wish there were more shows specifically made for me!

Hmmm... (The sound of Bookmonkey imagining a bored TV executive coming across his blog and deciding to base a show on the things this blogger talks about – and yes that is a specific sound – the sounds and behaviours of the bookmonkey are a sadly underrepresented science!)

Executive: Perhaps if we made a show focusing on storyline and intriguing concept mixed with well thought out story arcs and perhaps nods to classic genre stories of the past... matching this with any number of up and coming actors, with a significant Canadian percentage... yes, I believe this show could definitely be created at a reasonable charge and it would impress one lone Canadian blogger (and possibly the readers of his blog), we will call it, The Wisdom of Bookmonkey – quick let’s send this blogger an offer to option his blog!

...or maybe I’ll just have to wait and see which of the new shows I’ll like best like everyone else.