AFTERTHOUGHTS (60)
EMPIRE’S 50 GREATEST TV SHOWS EVER MADE!

And on Empire’s list…

45. Farscape 1999-2003
An Australian sci-fi series featuring muppet aliens from The Jim Henson Company – it's not exactly a pitch that says 'edgy' or even very good. Against the odds, though, Farscape emerged as an innovative, amusing and endlessly watchable romp as Astronaut John Crichton fumbled his way through life on the other side of the galaxy while dropping endless pop culture references that were clearly lost on his alien companions. In Claudia Black's Aeryn Sun was found one of sci-fi's favourite pin-up girls and the chemistry between Black and co-star Ben Browder was so apparent they were reunited after Farscape's cancellation for the final series of Stargate SG-1.

30. Dexter 2006-present
The last thing the world needed was another series about a forensic scientist but it certainly adds something to the mix when said CSI is also a recreational serial killer. Mischievously sadistic, Dexter is a darkly amusing tale of a psychopathic monster living in the heart of sunny Miami and trying to reconcile his stabbier urges with being an otherwise decent guy. Michael C Hall is flawless as the carver in question and the show sports one of the cleverest title sequences around.

27. Six Feet Under 2001-2005
Dark, comical and really rather wonderful, it's little wonder that Six Feet Under flowed from the same pen that gave us the equally incredible American Beauty. Alan Ball's HBO series about a dysfunctional Pasadena family who run an independent funeral home was a wonderful meditation on life, love and grief. Headed up by Peter Krause as the prodigal elder son Nate Fisher and featuring Michael C Hall, Frances Conroy, Lauren Ambrose and Rachel Griffiths, the cast, like every facet of this compelling production, oozed class.

25. Futurama 1999-present
It's unfair to compare Matt Groening's other show to The Simpsons. Because what is as good as The Simpsons? Judged on its own merits, this futuristic comedy about the bumbling employees of an intergalactic delivery company is witty, silly and completely non-sensical in just the right measure. It's got some characters who don't work (Hermes Conrad, we're looking at you), but Bender the antagonistic robot makes up for any faults. It was revived for a reason, you know?

24. Twin Peaks 1990-1991
Who killed Laura Palmer? That was the question on everyone's lips during 1990 as David Lynch's bizarre small town mystery unfolded on our screens. A demon called Bob, a little man who talked backward and minor pie fetish were just some of the features on display here. But despite a healthy dose of surrealism everything fell into place. Until the rather less appealing second season, that is, where the question on people's minds was more akin to 'Who is Windom Earle and what in God's name is going on?' but that's beside the point.

17. South Park 1997-present
The Guinness World Record holder for "Most swearing in an animated series," Trey Parker and Matt Stone's crudely animated monster is going strong more than ten years later after we were first introduced to Cartman and the boys. Still offending just about everybody on the planet, it has avoided jumping the shark by continuously changing its targets and, most importantly, remaining incredibly funny. While it's undeniably puerile, the secret of South Park's success lies in the fact that its intentions are essentially good. Those who challenge common sense and general decency are the ones in the firing line – anybody else who gets hit are, well, collateral damage.

15. Heroes 2006-present
We'd heard shows before boast about 'cinematic' production values, but Tim Kring's Heroes actually meant it. Every super-charged hour boasts lavish amounts of special effects – Hiro's time-freezing abilities are particularly cool – and a classy, noirish aesthetic partly inspired by M. Night Shyamalan's Unbreakable. But eye-candy alone wouldn't have won Heroes its place on this list. Kring's genius was in bolting the flashy action onto a slow-burning storyline full of shadows and mystery. And having a really cute, invincible cheerleader in the cast doesn't hurt none either.

13. Battlestar Galactica 2003-present
Dark, unflinching and often brutal, BSG is a very long way from the camp seventies show of the same name. In fact, given that this is one of the most pioneering sci-fi shows in decades, its name is probably its biggest liability. This is a show more concerned with internal rifts, politics and strife than spatial anomalies or aliens with forehead prosthetics, making it a far more introverted character-driven drama than anything in the Star Trek canon. Edward James Olmos' gravel-tongued Admiral leads a great cast of characters (Gaius Baltar, we salute you) and the epic space conflicts, portrayed with a shaky, hand-held style for realism, are blissfully rendered mayhem.

9. The X-Files 1993-2002
Created by surfing enthusiast Chris Carter, The X-Files proved to be the show that could do anything. It could modulate its tone from Twin Peaks creepy to Texas Chain Saw Massacre terrifying to Three Stooges silly. It had a pair of good-looking, charismatic heroes with deliciously simmering sexual chemistry – plus a rogue's gallery of memorable villains, including the putrid Flukeman, stretchy Eugene Tooms and butt-loving Cigarette Smoking Man. Of course, the long-running 'Myth-Arc' conspiracy plotline would have baffled Einstein and was never properly wrapped up in any case, but with at least one more big-screen outing lined up for Mulder and Scully there's still time to redeem the show that launched a thousand Dark Skies.

5. Lost 2004-present
Only time will tell whether it's as clever as it seems, but few TV shows have gripped viewers' imaginations like this hybrid of Swiss Family Robinson and Twin Peaks. An innovative structure in which each episode hones in on a different character, with flashbacks and flashforwards expanding their backstory, ensures the entire cast is fleshed out beyond the constraints of the primary narrative. But aside from the host of unique and colourful characters – from earnest Jack to cocky Sawyer, noble Jin to bug-eyed Ben – it's the epic mysteries at the core of the story that keeps us coming back. What powers does the island have? What's that polar bear doing in the tropics? And how come Hurley never loses weight despite being marooned on an island?

Note that all comments are from the article, a few of which I may not completely agree with.
As much fun as I manage to find in all the Island weirdness, I actually have been riveted to Lost more for the characters than anything else. I really do want to find out what happens to them…
And speaking of weirdness, I think Twin Peaks got short shrift here, considering any bizarre bits we may happen to find in television today, I feel can be traced all the way back to TP’s influence. (Even Empire makes mention of TP twice, in shows that ranked higher than it.)
Not only was its shadow only too evident on shows like Northern Exposure and Picket Fences, the massive cultural impact it had clearly made strangeness welcome on the small screen, paving the way for all the off-kilter programming that came in its wake, and continues to this day.
It’s also important to note that when TP was strange, it was truly strange. Network television had never been to such surreal spots before, and truth to tell, hasn’t really been there since.
(I also happen to rather like Season 2…)

At any rate, I’m still glad TP made the list, which you can find here. Check it out for more bits on these shows, and to see if your favourite series made Empire’s cut.

Parting shot: Episodic recaps/reactions of Battlestar Galactica, Dexter, Heroes, and Lost can be found in the Archive, along with a review of the Futurama straight-to-DVD feature, Bender’s Big Score.

(Lost OS courtesy of impawards.com; The X-Files 2 OS courtesy of aintitcool.com; Battlestar Galactica image courtesy of SCIFI Channel; Twin Peaks image courtesy of tarnishedlady.typepad.com; Dexter image courtesy of fanpop.com.)

reVIEW (33)
ELEKTRA

Since my review for Suspect Zero went up here at the Iguana because it was co-written by Zak Penn, I figured this one should go up too, since it was also written by Penn. (Boy, it’s a good thing I enjoyed Incident at Loch Ness, or Penn might think I’ve got it in for him…)

Marvel really does know how to shoot itself in the foot.
For all their initiative in translating their superhero properties onto the big screen in the past few years—leaving DC far behind in the dust—it’s really only been Bryan Singer’s X2, Guillermo del Toro’s Blade II, and Sam Raimi’s Spider-man, that have passed muster. All their other movies have run the gamut from, a) better-than-good-but-not-great (X-Men), to b) disappointing (Ang Lee’s The Hulk), to c) just plain awful (Mark Steven Johnson‘s Daredevil).
Rob Bowman’s Elektra though, has the distinction of being the first of Marvel’s recent screen adaptations that is downright boring. And if it’s one thing a comic book film shouldn’t be, it’s boring. The four-color world of comics is frenetic and stylized, charged with adrenaline, and, in the case of red-clad assassin Elektra, a fair amount of pubescent hormones. Unfortunately, none of that is carried over to Bowman’s film.

Picking up some years after the events in Daredevil, Elektra begins with some voice-over back story by Terence Stamp’s Stick, before segueing into a standard sequence which is supposed to establish how formidable our heroine is. Her existence is now considered an urban legend, since she died, after all, in Daredevil. Now an assassin-for-hire, it isn’t long before she gets embroiled in the affairs of The Hand, an evil order of ninja—we know they are evil because when their minions die, they dissolve into billowing yellow smoke—with sinister designs on “The Treasure,” a warrior pivotal to the battle between light and dark.
What follows is a film that is not so much predictable as it is blandly unsurprising. Revelations are made in the course of the story that do absolutely nothing to raise the tepid sense of detached observation which quickly sets in while watching Jennifer Garner alternate between agonizing over the loss of her mother at an early age, and kicking Hand butt.
Sadly, not even the action sequences do much to alter the tenor of Elektra. Uniformly unimpressive—despite one that has a neat set-up with a multitude of floating white sheets—the fight scenes are even more inept than another recent Marvel entry, Blade: Trinity’s, and those were already nearly dispensable. Even the showdown with the quartet of enemy warriors—who we know are formidable and merciless because their grand entrance is done in slow-motion—are horribly inconsequential, as is Elektra’s face-off with main baddie, Kirigi (Will Yun Lee; Colonel Moon from Die Another Day). More’s the pity, considering Kirigi’s (again) none-too-surprising significance to Elektra’s life.

Zak Penn‘s script, in attempting to give us a human protagonist with a past filled with pain and emotion, ends up delivering a story totally devoid of action and tension, dealing, as it does, with story elements we’ve all seen before: the supposedly stone-cold killer with a good heart; the contract that isn’t what it seems; the targets that cause the killer to be conflicted, etcetera, ad nauseum.
Nowhere in the film’s running time do we actually feel a threat, a sense of danger. At no single point do we feel that life is a precious thing. After all, those of Elektra’s order can raise the dead, as they did with her. With that sort of power in your corner, why bother to worry?

Rob Bowman, meanwhile, elevates Elektra not a whit beyond its tension-free beginnings. An X-Files directorial alumnus, Bowman then went on to helm the X-Files feature film, as well as Reign of Fire. Other than a phantasmagoric kiss in a forest, and one of Elektra’s flashbacks involving an apparent demon, nothing in the film is indicative of any sort of directorial flair. Like the X-Files movie, Elektra is straight-forward and by-the-numbers, leaving no residue at all, no lingering feeling of “What did I just see?”, of the revelatory wonder that cinema is capable of.
Perhaps if the director were more versed in the very specific sort of world Elektra’s story is set in, then things would have turned out differently. This is a world steeped in martial arts and mysticism, the world of the Hong Kong martial arts genre, or, to be truer to Elektra’s comic book roots, the world of Japanese manga and anime.

Now, lest I be accused of racism, let me reiterate: Elektra needed a director versed in the genre. Quentin Tarantino understood it well in the Kill Bill saga, as did Guillermo del Toro in Blade II, and the Wachowskis in The Matrix, and none of them are Asian. Inappropriately, Bowman seems to have approached the material as if it were a normal action film with a touch of the supernatural thrown into the mix. Elektra needed to be soaked in a certain atmosphere, to have a specific sensibility. Instead, it languishes in a flavorless stock of mundane proportion.
Not even the presence of charismatic Terence Stamp—who has done everything in his career from facing down the Man of Steel in Superman II, to prancing around the Australian outback in drag in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert—manages to make a dent in the terribly pedestrian armor Elektra is wrapped in.

In the end, where Elektra is concerned, I think this was the biggest surprise: spinning off from the awful Daredevil, I thought it would either be better, or worse, with the greater possibility of being better, as Daredevil was already pretty bad
I just never expected Elektra to be a big, stupefying bore.

(Elektra OS courtesy of impawards.com.)

(The above is a slightly altered version of a previously published review entitled “Marvelous Bore.”)