More New TV!

So, this is gonna be super-brief because my life is chaos now. And because there's only been one episode.

Graceland: USA, Thursdays 10/9C
Anyways, the premise is that this brand-new FBI agent gets stuck in a beach house for undercover FBI, DEA, and CBP (or ICE? They weren't clear, they just said "customs") agents, code-named "Graceland." This beach house is in an undisclosed location in southern California Venice Beach and all kinds of hilarious run-ins with the locals ensue, and the show definitely has some local LA humor - my roommate and I were dying at the "movie" bit - but looks like it could go in some pretty intense and dark directions.

This is one I'm definitely going to start DVRing.

Primeval: New World: Syfy, Saturdays 10/9C
I'm DVRing this, too! You might already know, but I love the original Primeval series - I just want to catch up on it before starting the new one.

Orphan Black: BBC America, on hiatus
Yeah, I wrote a post about it recently. But I finished the season and I'm actually more amazed. Tatiana Maslany needs not just all the Best Actress awards, but like 3 of each Best Supporting Actress award. I've never seen a show go from starting off slow to having a holy-sh!t-what-the-F*CK finale like that one, and it's taken a turn into a much more sci-fi kind of territory. (Although if you've read Next by Micheal Crichton you might guess where it's going) and I completely can not wait for next season!

And one remarkable thing about the Emmy buzz is that this isn't a BBC show that's re-airing on BBC America or PBS, thus making it eligible; This is a BBC America original series, meaning it was their production house (which makes what, maybe one or two shows of its own) and their tiny budget and not the BBC and their slightly less tiny budget that made it - and on top of it being a cable channel, this is a cable channel based around the idea of broadcasting existing programming in a new market, not so much around having original programming or (much) syndication like USA or TNT might have. So it'd be really interesting to see how this might affect TV production by cable channels if it wins any awards.

ETA: Any more awards - as I was writing this, it turns out that Maslany won a Critics' Choice Award

Orphan Black

So back when Doctor Who season 7.2/7.5/whatever you want to call it where JLC shows up for good premiered, this TV show - about clones, who discover they're clones - premiered right afterwards. I watched it, and it seemed interesting, but it didn't hold my interest enough to watch the next week's episode.

Sometime after all the season finales, though, I ran out of new things to watch and gave this show a second try. And wow, was it worth it.

The basic plot is that our main character (and almost always our POV character) Sarah is a small-time criminal and deadbeat single mom, and one night she sees a woman who looks just like her commit suicide in the subway. At that point, she decides that the logical thing to do is to pick up that woman's bag and heels and take over her identity or at least her bank accounts. Then, she ends up discovering that this woman's life isn't magically perfect - in fact, both Sarah and the dead woman, Beth, are members of a group of clones that's being killed off.

Admittedly, the first three or four episodes are a bit slow. But sometime around episode six people outside of their little circle start discovering their secrets, sh#t really hits the fan, and this series becomes incredibly addictive. And the supporting characters are great, too: Beth's partner, Art, and the forensic tech, and her boyfriend, Paul; Allison's husband; Cosima's French friend Delphine; Sarah's foster mom, her biological daughter, Kira, and my absolute favorite of all, her flamboyantly gay foster brother and co-conspirator, Felix.

And that Emmy buzz surrounding Tatiana Maslany? She completely deserves it. At times, I completely forget it's the same actress playing all those characters - apparently, there's supposed to be nine clones that Cosima has tracked down "so far", but so far I've only counted six that I've seen on-screen (Sarah, Beth, The German/Jane Doe, Allison, Cosima, and Helena). The amazing part isn't just how she plays Sarah or Allison or Cosima - it's how she also perfectly manages the complexities of one clone trying to be another. A less skilled actress, if she played Sarah and Allison, for example, and suddenly was faced with the role of Sarah pretending to be Allison, might simply play that role the same way she plays Allison, whereas with Maslany's performance we still know that it's Sarah we're watching.

Although nothing will fill the gap that Fringe has left in my heart and schedule, this is definitely satiating my desire for brainy weird scifi! (Also, this makes keeping track of a different versions of each character in each of 2 universes in each of 2 timelines, plus one universe in a future timeline, look simple!)