Highs And Lows of 2015 Nerd TV

This past year was one full of promise for amazing nerdy content on television. Some of these things lived up to that promise, and others failed to, in some cases spectacularly. Below I will look at two that hit the right highs, and to that descended into the depths of low quality.

To explain why I made my choices, there will be some mild spoilers ahead, so be warned.

The Highs
This was a very tough category in which to pick just two. I could easily have filled the two slots with the pair of Netflix shows from Marvel that both ran in 2015, but then I would have missed some excellent content on other networks.

So, you wonder, which Netflix show did I pick, Daredevil or Jessica Jones?

The almost imperceptible nod goes to Daredevil. In almost all things they are equal — writing, casting, production. But in two areas Daredevil has a slight edge — acting and directing. Both shows have nearly perfect leads in Charlie Cox as Matt Murdock and Kristen Ritter as Jessica Jones. Both also have outstanding villains, and David Tenant’s Kilgrave in Jessica Jones is one of the most creepy, disturbing characters ever put on television. But you could never take your eyes of Vincent D’Onofrio’s Wilson Fisk, and never knew how he would react to anything that happened around him at any time. The sense of menace that poured off him every second he was on screen (even when making the same omelet for breakfast every morning) was a nearly palpable thing.

While the direction of Jessica Jones was solid, nothing compared to that long single camera hallway tracking shot of the fight that took Daredevil in and out of each room on his way to the room at the end — and this was in just the second episode.

My second choice for a high goes to a show on the network that brought us such wonderfully horrible drivel as Sharknado — Syfy and its adaption of the novel series The Expanse. Like Daredevil, The Expanse has done an excellent job with casting, from the biggest name, Thomas Jane, as a corrupt cop on the planetoid Ceres, to Steven Strait as James Holden, the executive officer of an ice mining ship, a man with absolutely no ambition who gets thrown into a huge interplanetary mystery. But it also went out of the way to cast physically appropriate actors to play those residents of the Asteroid Belt who have become attenuated through living in very low gravity — tall, very thin with long limbs. This aspect of the books could have easily been tossed aside as too difficult to pull off, but the authors — the pair of Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham writing under the name James S. A. Corey — are deeply involved in this adaptation and insisted on the casting team making the extra effort to find people who could act and fit the description, according to a video on their blog.

I admit that one of the main reasons I chose The Expanse is that it checks off a bunch of nerd boxes for me when it comes to how science fiction is portrayed on the screen. It has the most realistic depiction of zero gravity life I have seen on TV, with little comparable even in the movies except actual historical stories like Apollo 13. But it also has outstanding writing, with believable dialogue even among the very minor characters. And I had no idea why one reviewer called it “Game of Thrones in space” until a few episodes in — I’ll just say, don’t get too attached to any one character.

Honorable Mentions: Jessica Jones, The Man in the High Castle (Amazon), Mr. Robot (USA), Ash Vs. Evil Dead (Starz!)

The Lows
Sadly, there were plenty of choices in this category as well. So for my choices I will pick those shows I thought had the greatest promise, and squandered that so badly. First up, Heroes Reborn.

I know I shouldn’t have been expecting much from this continuation of the original Heroes series, since the last 2.5 seasons of that first show were pretty awful. But I was hoping that the original show creator, Tim Kring, would do a better job with his new series than when he came back to Heroes for Season 4 and it was mostly unwatchable (seriously, a “circus of evil”? Stale trope much, Tim?).

But that first season of Heroes was groundbreaking and creative, and much of Season 2 as well, so I was full of hope for Heroes Reborn. Boy was I disappointed. Aside from the good work of Jack Coleman, returning as Noah Bennett, the rest of the acting varied from OK to awful — Henry Zebrowski as Bennett’s comic relief sidekick literally made me cringe almost every time he was on screen. The villain was simply boring, and the excellent Zachary Levi was wasted as a depressed emo father of a “gifted” child killed in the big catastrophe at the beginning, who discovers he himself has the gift of powers.

One of the big problems with the show is nobody used any powers in a way that held any real personal consequence. Sure, we are told the world is endangered, but where is the horror of Primatech kidnapping the gifted, or a Sylar scooping out brains as in the first series?

The second choice for biggest disappointment makes me really sad. I was so hoping that Supergirl would live up to the excellent look it showed in the trailers and commercials, but no such luck. One of the reasons those spots worked is because they focused on the one truly bright spot in the show — Melissa Benoist is excellent as Supergirl/Kara Danvers. But aside from her, the acting — like in Heroes Reborn — ranges from decent to teeth-grindingly awful. One example of the latter is David Harewood as Hank Henshaw, the head of the government agency that tracks alien activity. He was in the excellent series Homeland, and was awarded the MBE by the Queen in his native England in 2012 for Service to Drama. And yet in Supergirl he has delivered some of the worst-written technical gobbledygook lines as though he was in a sci-fi fan film made by high schoolers. And that makes the big reveal of who he actually is on the show extra worrisome. That character (no spoiler!) deserves a stellar acting job.

Other regular characters are no better than place holders for moving story or plot along. Kara’s coworker at CatCo Worldwide Media, Winn Schott, (played ably by Jeremy Jordan) is perhaps the least developed major secondary character I’ve seen on TV. He seems to exist solely to make goo-goo eyes at Kara, design and sew her Supergirl costume, and create a “superhero lair” inside an unused office at work, with what seems like well more than $100,000 worth of repurposed bleeding edge computer gear from the company. How he isn’t in jail for grand theft I have no idea.

Perhaps Supergirl can pull itself out of the pits, in the way that Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. has, put I wouldn’t bet the farm on it.

Dishonorable Mentions: Dig (Amazon. Wow, what a bad year for Tim Kring), Fear the Walking Dead (AMC), The Bastard Executioner (FX).