Haven promo gives us a glimpse of new Stephen King on TV
By Scott Edelman at Sci Fi Wire
Syfy aired its first promo last night for Haven, the new series based on Stephen King’s novella The Colorado Kid, and just in case you missed it—here it is!
The series premieres Friday, July 9, at 10 p.m on SyFy
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NBC’s new series The Event is the feral love child of 24 and Lost
By Meredith Woerner at io9
Even though we highly doubt there will be another Lost-type TV show for some time, NBC’s certainly angling its new series, The Event that way — with a 24 twist.
The Event, which will be on Mondays at 9 PM, has a pretty bare-bones synopsis:
When an average guy stumbles upon a secret so powerful it could change the course of humanity, and a cover-up so big that the President is on a need-to-know basis, answers can only lead to bigger questions.
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Is the UK capable of truly great sci-fi television? Yeah, but, no, but..
by Martyn Drake
The only exception to this is Doctor Who, and this is being held back by the BBC themselves. They’ve already buggered about with their own policies on marketing (spending a fortune marketing the show in the cinema and TV and using 3D to boot, consequently giving the show itself a tighter budget to work with).
Primeval (ITV) is a dire, tired and useless show where the special effects are not (and feature some of the worst visual effects I’ve seen in a TV show since the BBC decided to give the The Wrong Door a go) and I’m surprised that people like this enough for ITV and it’s advertisers to fund more nonsense. Being Human is promising, but I still rate Neil Gorton’s (Doctor Who, make-up effects to be dire and a mere shadow on the stuff that Rick Baker did back in the 80’s with American Werewolf.
If anybody remembers Space Precinct will recall that we tried the American approach and it failed miserably. The visual effects were fantastic, the creature effects were dodgy, the writing appalling and the acting dismal. Whether we’d truly be able to take an American/Canadian approach to producing good quality sci-fi these days remains to be seen (also bear in mind that our seasons are usually 6-12 episodes and the US/Canada around 22 episodes).
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Is ‘Slingers’ the Best Sci-fi Show Not Yet on Television?
by Neil Miller at Film School Rejects
Here’s how their official site describes this stylish sci-fi show: “Slingers is anything but just another science fiction show. Think the action of Bullitt, the sophistication of Ocean’s 11 and the humour of M*A*S*H all wrapped in a futuristic package and you have an idea of the potential of Slingers.”
“Slingers is set in the year 2263 A.D., following mankind’s first interplanetary war. Humanity is now clustered into a finite, but still vast section of the universe known as Enclosed Space. Humanity won the war with an aggressive alien enemy, but at a cost. The way back to Earth is now cut off by an impassable barrier – a side effect of the blast that finally pushed the enemy back.”
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Top 10 Sci-fi Shows
by Blair Marnell at Crave Online
With the recent culmination of “Lost,” some have proclaimed that series to be one of the best sci-fi shows of all time. While we’re all big fans of “Lost,” I have to take issue with classifying it as “sci-fi.”
The term “science fiction” has become wildly overused to include several shows that feature supernatural or adventure elements that aren’t that far away from traditional genre television. For the purposes of this list, we’re exploring ten of the best sci-fi TV series that explored the concepts of space travel and aliens on other worlds.
10. Stargate SG-1: A lot of people tend to forget that the original “Stargate” movie wasn’t really that good. It was a forgettable mix of “Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones” that failed to catch on with the public… until it was adapted into a TV series three years later. Over the course of ten seasons, two spinoff series and two direct-to-DVD movies, “Stargate SG-1” has become the longest running American sci-fi TV series of all time. And while “Stargate SG-1” was sometimes criticized for its light tone and occasional mystical overtones, the series fulfilled the promise of adventure and sci-fi that the original film failed to live up to.
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I love SG-1, but I love the movie too. I think that’s a pretty good list, there’s only one show I’d never heard of, but I watched a lot of the rest. I was a little irritated at the article about the UK sci fi shows, because they have great ones, but it is true about their budgets (which sucks).
What do you think of the new show previews?