That Shelf

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…

[T]his reliance on archetypes and such a well-established formula is both the show’s biggest weakness and its greatest strength. It’s either “another Law & Order…” or “Another Law & Order!” That might seem like a fairly narrow distinction, but it’s true. Once again, this is a franchise with enough episodes under its belt that if…

Every excellent detective show needs a hook. Sometimes, the detective is a rogueish outsider or has a particular personality quirk or compulsion. In Sight Unseen, ace detective Tess Avery (newcomer Dolly Lewis) abruptly loses her ability to see. At first, in denial of this, she puts her partner Jake (Daniel Gillies) in peril and…

The television entries of the Marvel Cinematic Universe have been, to date, mostly pretty good. While not 100% successful, they have each tried new genres and expanded the universe in interesting ways. While they have performed well with most audiences, there are some that have been dissatisfied with them. Aside from claiming they suffer…