That Shelf

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…

The town is dying. That’s the start of Christian Sparkes’ new drama Sweetland. It’s not entirely clear why, but the town is metaphorically crumbling. The residents have a chance at government-assisted relocation and job retraining, but the offer is only good if every resident takes it, and Moses Sweetland (Mark Lewis Jones) doesn’t want to.…

It feels like this series could have been an immediate follow-up to Davies’s prior run on the series. The tone and style feel in line with Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant’s runs on the series, with a mad alien and a bright-eyed human travelling space and time in a blue box and fixing problems…

… [D]irector Christian Sparkes captures both the scope and feeling of living in a small but tight-knit community. There’s authenticity to how the characters behave around each other and the closeness with which they speak and act, even when antagonistic. The tone of these scenes at the end is nearly pitch-perfect, and the script by writers…