That Shelf

You have seen this series before. There’s no getting around the fact that Netflix’s new series Untamed employs several tropes of the mystery genre. You’ll have seen the series where an older cop with a gift for investigation lives in a remote place due to some past trauma that keeps him isolated from the world, who…

Black Mirror is the successor to series like The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits, using science fiction narratives to expand and expound on themes of our everyday lives and make us think deeply about the world around us. It’s incredibly well produced and has given us some of the finest science fiction stories of the last decade.…

The first episode introduces each of the couples as they are arriving at the lake house. The initial moments are light and fun, and set up the group dynamics almost immediately as a group of old friends who know almost, but not quite, everything about one another. The first night goes well, with talk…

Doctor Who has been running forever and has delved into every genre in every conceivable way.  Recasting the main role every few years means that there have been fun doctors, dour doctors, weird doctors, and everything in between.  The one thing that holds the show together, though, is the most basic premise of the show: a slightly…

Clive Barker is famous for scaring people. Whether it’s demons from the underworld or malevolent spirits, his films have provided some of the best scares of the last few decades, and now his formula has been adapted to a story for kids. Yes, you read that right: Night of the Zoopocalypse is a new…

Before the days of Disney+, Marvel Studios struck a deal with Netflix to bring several of their street-level heroes to the small screen.  There were several, but the first of them was Daredevil, a master acrobat and vigilante who wears a red combat suit adorned with devil’s horns and who is, by day, a blind…

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Two coworkers, one a little uptight and by the book and the other perhaps a little too loose for their own good, have their fates and jobs intertwined by happenstance. Then, hilarity—with a dash of honesty and vulnerability—ensues.  This is the tried-and-true setup of Small Achievable Goals, a…

Star Trek is one of the greatest pop culture franchises on the planet.  It has been running for nearly 60 years, spanning more than 700 television episodes across ten series and thirteen—now fourteen—movies. It is a ubiquitous cultural touchstone that many people hold dear, this critic included. The beauty of the franchise is that it works…

Love can happen at any time or place and to anyone. Sometimes there’s a long, slow period of courtship and sometimes there’s an immediate attraction, a lightning bolt that strikes a person to let them know that they’ve just met their one person. But does the lighting always strike both people? This is the…

What If…?, the long-running Marvel comic book series, is one of the most fun titles in the company’s entire repertoire. Each issue places one of their characters in some new context, either by examining a different pivotal choice they could have made or by shifting them into another universe entirely. The streaming adaptation from…