Despite its terrible title, the thirteen-episode Zoo, adapted from the 2012 novel by James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge, was undemanding fun as animals all over the world finally turned on mankind, just like they did in the 1977 movie Day of the Animals. Unfortunately, CBS decided to end what should have been a limited series on a cliffhanger, leaving it open for a second season.
Christina Ricci was perfectly cast as the acquitted 19th century axe murderer in Lifetime’s eight-part The Lizzie Borden Chronicles.
After six years, the girls of ABC Family’s Pretty Little Liars finally came face-to-face with their mysterious transgender tormentor “A” in the mid-season finale, while an entirely new group of teenagers were menaced by a different masked murderer in MTV’s ten-episode reboot Scream: The TV Series, based on the 1990s movie franchise co-created by executive producer Wes Craven.
Norma (Vera Farmiga) began to realise that her son Norman (Freddie High-more) had an increasingly dark side in the third season of A&E’s Bates Motel.
After viewing figures dropped 54%, the third and final season of NBC’s Hannibal saw Mads Mikkelsen’s cannibal killer relocate to Italy, alongside his mysterious psychiatrist (Gillian Anderson). However, FBI agents Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) and Jack Crawford (Laurence Fishburn) were finally able to capture him before the plot abruptly jumped forward three years and recounted the events in Thomas Harris’ novel Red Dragon.
Jennifer Beals’ troubled doctor was hired by a dying billionaire (Matthew Modine) to investigate the existence of life after death in TNT’s ten-episode Proof, and ABC’s fan favourite Forever ended its twenty-two episode run after just one season, as Ioan Gruffudd’s immortal medical examiner met his match in dwindling ratings.
Jason Isaacs’ FBI agent discovered a 2,000-year-old conspiracy centred around human cloning in the USA Networks’ ten-part Dig, which also featured Anne Heche and Richard E. Grant. It was cancelled after just one season, as was ABC’s thirteen-episode The Whispers, in which Lily Rabe’s FBI child specialist tried to prevent youngsters from luring adults to their death by an imaginary friend named “Drill”. It was supposedly based on Ray Bradbury’s story ‘Zero Hour’.
A young hacker (Emma Ishta) was recruited into a secret government agency that could “stitch” people’s minds into the memories of the recently dead to help solve not very interesting crimes in ABC Family’s eleven-episode Stitchers.
Inspired by much better movies, CBS’s twenty-two episode Limitless was based on Alan Glynn’s 2001 novel The Dark Fields and the 2011 film, as Jake McDorman’s slacker had his brain expanded by executive producer and original star Bradley Cooper’s designer drug NTZ; while in Fox’s ten-episode Minority Report sequel, inspired by the Philip K. Dick short story and executive producer Steven Spielberg’s 2002 movie, Stark Sands’ “precog” teamed up with a police detective (Meagan Good) to prevent crimes before they happened.
Based on a novel by Philip K. Dick, Amazon’s ten-part series The Man in the High Castle was set in an alternate history in which the Nazis and Japanese won World War II and now controlled opposite coasts of America. Ridley Scott was an executive producer.
Unfortunately, just after the show’s streaming debut in November, Amazon was forced to remove advertising posters on the New York Subway due to complaints from activists about the depiction of re-designed insignia that resembled the Nazi Reichsadler, the heraldic eagle used by the Third Reich, and a wartime Imperial Japanese flag (which was kind of the whole point of the series). Even New York Mayor Bill de Blasio jumped on the bandwagon, calling the ads “irresponsible”. Meanwhile, the same posters failed to provoke a similar outcry on the London Underground.
After five relentlessly grim seasons of TNT’s Falling Skies, the war between the humans and the alien Espheni finally came down to a confrontation between resistance leader Tom Mason (co-executive producer Noah Wyle) and a monster-spider Queen. Not only was the final battle for Earth mostly kept off-screen (presumably for budgetary reasons), but the series ended with a ludicrously jingoistic speech that was completely at odds with the show’s previous humanitarian theme.
Clarke (Eliza Taylor) made a final stand against Mount Weather in the two-part finale to the second season of The CW’s The 100.
CBS wisely decided to reboot its second season of Extant with different showrunners, as Halle Berry’s astronaut Molly teamed up with Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s rugged cop to track down her evolving space baby and stop him procreating. Bizarrely, it all ended happily ever after.
Channel 4/AMC’s eight-part Humans was set in a “parallel present” where five cyborg servants, including Gemma Chan’s creepy-looking nanny-synth, were planning to rebel on their human masters. William Hurt turned up as a kindly scientist. A consolidated audience of six million watched the first episode in the UK.
A family’s life changed forever after the eponymous first sentient “artificial person” (Poppy Lee Friar) came to secretly live with them in Eve, the BBC’s similar-sounding series for children.
After the introduction of a group of male clones (Ari Millen) from Project Castor, BBC America’s fan-favourite Orphan Black returned for a third season and was available on BBC iPlayer before its terrestrial transmission in the UK.
Six strangers and a cyborg found themselves on a derelict spacecraft with no idea how they got there in Syfy’s thirteen-part space opera Dark Matter, while the same network’s Killjoys was about a group of bounty hunters in outer space.
The Votanis Collective waged war on the alien inhabitants of the eponymous outpost in the third season of the increasingly complicated Defiance, and Thomas Jane’s space station detective uncovered a vast government conspiracy in Syfy’s The Expanse.
The time-tripping Continuum finally came to an end with a truncated six-episode fourth season on Syfy, while Aaron Stanford played the scruffy time-traveller from a post-apocalyptic future who tried to warn about a deadly plague in the same network’s 12 Monkeys, based on Terry Gilliam’s 1995 movie.
In fact, 2015 was a funny old year for apocalypses. Matthew Baynton, Rob Lowe, Pauline Quirke, Megan Mullally and Diana Rigg were amongst those who had only thirty-four days until a comet obliterated the Earth in Sky’s ten-part comedy-drama You, Me and the Apocalypse. June Whitfield turned up as God in the penultimate episode.
After a virus wiped out most of the human race, Will Forte’s Phil Miller had plenty of time to amuse himself until fellow survivors started showing up in the first two seasons of the Fox Network’s post-apocalyptic comedy-drama The Last Man on Earth, while Daniel Lawrence Taylor starred in ITV2’s six-part sitcom Cockroaches, about a family trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic England.
When a man (Diogo Morgado) fell to Earth, he triggered an energy wave that initially killed five unconnected strangers who then awakened to find they were tasked with averting the Apocalypse in The CW’s The Messengers, which lasted for just one season.
A diverse group of children were taken to a remote and mysterious Scottish castle as the world prepared to end in the half-hour BBC children’s series World’s End, while the third series of The Sparticle Mystery was set on a world where adults had been accidentally banished to a parallel universe by a group of children.
AMC’s six-episode Into the Badlands was a martial arts Western starring Daniel Wu as a warrior making his way through a post-apocalyptic feudal society.
TNT’s The Last Ship sailed into a second season, as Commander Chandler (Eric Dane) and his fractured crew joined forces with an underground resistance group, while still trying to develop a cure for the pandemic that wiped out most of the Earth’s population.
Following a deadly virus outbreak in Antwerp, a quarantine wall was built around the infected area and 5,000 people left to fend for themselves in the ten-part Belgian-made Cordon, and when everybody older than twenty-two in the town of Pretty Lake mysteriously dropped dead, the remaining inhabitants found themselves quarantined by the government in Netflix’s Between.
Based on
the novel by Stephen King, the third season of CBS’ Under the Dome began with some new residents of Chester’s Mill emerging from the tunnels beneath the town. Meanwhile, Julia (Rachelle Lefevre) and Big Jim (Dean Norris) were suspicious of Christine (Marg Helgenberger), who imposed some draconian new rules on the townsfolk before the dome finally came down.
With new Troubles infecting many of the town’s inhabitants, Audrey (Emily Rose) and her friends found themselves in a race against time to defeat Croatoan (William Shatner) in the fifth and final episode of Syfy’s ever more convoluted Haven, also inspired by a King novel.
Based on a series of superior TV movies starring Noah Wyle, who executive produced and sometimes appeared in the spin-off series, the second season of TNT’s The Librarians pitted its quirky team of paranormal investigators against the evil Prospero (Richard Cox).
Created by J. Michael Straczynski and Andy and Lana Wachowski, Netflix’s twelve-episode Sense8 concerned eight “Sensates” around the world who were suddenly psychically linked by visions of the suicide of a mysterious woman (Daryl Hannah) before finding themselves hunted by a stranger known as “Mr Whispers” (Terrence Mann).
In the thirteenth and final episode of NBC’s Constantine, based on the DC Comics character from Hellblazer, the psychic investigator once again teamed up with New Orleans detective Jim Corrigan (Emmett J. Scanlan as the future Spectre), to hunt down a Satanist who was kidnapping young girls, and we learned something shocking about the angel Manny (Harold Perrineau).
After deciding to run for Mayor against evil sorcerer Damien Darhk (Neal McDonough), Oliver McQueen (Stephen Amell) was helped by John Constantine (Matt Ryan, crossing networks to reprise his role from the cancelled NBC show) to restore the soul of the revived Sara Lance (Caity Lotz) in The CW’s much more mystical fourth season of Arrow.
Having travelled back in time in an attempt to change history in the first season finale of the The CW’s The Flash, the scarlet speedster (Grant Gustin) discovered that he had inadvertently opened a wormhole to Earth 2, which not only allowed all kinds of new supervillains to travel between the worlds, but also another Flash (Teddy Sears) and a new version of the untrustworthy Professor Wells (Tom Cavanagh). The mid-season finale saw the return of Mark Hamill’s villain The Trickster (a role he had originally played in the 1991 TV series).
In ‘Legends of Yesterday’, an epic crossover between the two shows in December, The Flash, Green Arrow and their various comrades teamed up to save Egyptian immortals Hawkman (Falk Hentschel) and Hawkgirl (Ciara Renée) from the murderous Vandal Savage (Casper Crump) as the individual storylines built towards the 2016 spin-off DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, which will unite heroes and villains from each series.
From the same stable as The Flash and Arrow, CBS’ more lightweight Supergirl starred newcomer Melissa Benoist as Superman’s younger cousin Kara, who worked for media magnate Carla Grant (Calista Flockhart, having fun) and the DEO (Department of Extra-Normal Operations) run by David Harewood’s J’onn J’onzz, the Martian Manhunter. Although Mehcad Brooks was mis-cast as potential love-interest Jimmy Olsen, Kara’s adopted parents were played in a nice piece of stunt casting by previous superhero actors Helen Slater and Dean Cain.
Meanwhile, over at Fox’s continually improving Gotham, based on DC’s Batman, the second season was all about the rise of the villains.
ABC’s eighteen-episode Agent Carter began life as a “Marvel One-Shot” in 2013. Set in 1946 and following the events in Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell) was reduced to working as a secretary for the SSR (Strategic Scientific Reserve), a secret, male-dominated government agency. When Howard Stark (Dominic Cooper) asked her to discover who was stealing his inventions and selling them to the enemy, she became involved in a deadly cat-and-mouse game with Soviet spies and assassins. The series featured some nice nods to the Marvel universe, including an episode featuring the original “Howling Commandos” and the surprise appearance of an old villain in the first season finale.
Krysten Ritter was a revelation in the title role of Marvel’s Jessica Jones on the thirteen-episode Netflix series, playing a sarcastic superpowered private eye battling against David Tennant’s ruthless mind-controlling villain in a grim New York City. Inhabiting the same Hell’s Kitchen milieu, Netflix’s thirteen-part Daredevil was basically an extended origin story, as blind lawyer Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) was pitted against Vincent D’Onofrio’s remarkably complex crime boss Wilson Fisk.
ABC’s much better second season of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. not only tied in to the movie Avengers: Age of Ultron, but also saw Agent Coulson (Clark Gregg) and his team trying to protect the Inhumans while battling HYDRA. Season 3 featured Powers Boothe as the new head of the evil many-headed organisation.
Based on the graphic novel by Brian Bendis and streamed on the PlayStation Network, Powers was about a pair of homicide detectives (Sharlto Copley and Susan Heyward) who investigated crimes involving superheroes.
NBC’s thirteen-episode Heroes Reborn was an uncalled for reboot/sequel that brought back a number of previous cast members while adding a new batch of “evos” (evolved humans).
The fifth season of HBO’s mega-successful Game of Thrones—a show almost guaranteed to shock its huge audience with ever-more surprising twists—ended with the apparently fatal stabbing of fan-favourite Jon Snow (Kit Harrington), Cersei (Lena Headey) facing a trial for her sins by the Faith Militant, Daenerys (Emilia Clarke) captured by a tribe of warriors despite her dragons, and Arya (Maisie Williams) having her sight taken away by the mystical Jaqen H’ghar. And if none of that made any sense to you, imagine how George R.R. Martin felt knowing that the next series would extend the TV plot beyond the five novels he had so far written.
Game of Thrones picked-up a record-breaking twelve awards at the 67th Primetime Emmys and Creative Arts Emmys in September, including the top prize for Outstanding Drama Series. The dozen trophies were the most ever awarded to a show in a single year.
The darker second and last season of the BBC’s enjoyable Atlantis concluded after its delayed final seven episodes, with most of its plot-lines left unresolved. John Hannah joined the cast as Jason’s father, but the pilot episode’s time-travel story was never explained.
A group of warriors (led by Tom York’s “Hero”) were banished by the Greek gods to the Underworld in Syfy’s thirteen-part series Olympus.
The elusive Author (Patrick Fischler) turned out to have been manipulating the fairy-tale characters, and Jennifer Morrison’s heroine Emma Swann turned into the evil “Dark Swan” for the fifth season of ABC’s Once Upon a Time, which revolved around Camelot, Merlin and the legend of King Arthur.
Problems for wife and mother-of-two Debbie Maddox (Martha Howe-Douglas) continued after she was declared the “Chosen One” of the magical world hidden in her larder in the second series of Sky’s Yonderland. Anthony Head guest starred as Debbie’s suspicious father-in-law.
Having become a private investigator during the seventh season of ABC’s Castle, the eponymous writer (Nathan Fillion) found himself investigating a murder in a Mars simulation and confronting a masked serial killer from his childhood.
Fox’s The Following returned for a third and final season, as Kevin Bacon’s FBI agent was still being plagued by serial killer Joe Carroll (James Purefoy) and his legion of obsessive followers.
An episode of the third season of CBS’ Elementary, involving a murder victim found instantly frozen to death, revolved around the cult 1966 horror movie Manos: The Hands of Fate. Following Holmes’ (Johnny Lee Miller) drug relapse, his estranged father Morland (John Noble) arrived in New York at the beginning of Season 4.
Mark Williams’ eponymous Cotswolds cleric investigated an ancient Egyptian curse, encountered a man who claimed to have built a time machine, and became involved in a ritual murder in the BBC’s enjoyable third series of 1950s-set Father Brown mysteries, loosely based on the character created by G.K. Chesterton.
14-year-old Tara Crossley (Naomi Sequeira) found herself grappling with magic while trying to get on with her schoolwork in the Disney Channel’s YA series Evermoor (aka The Evermoor Chronicles).
Based on Raymond Briggs’ classic children’s book, Sky’s three-part adaptation of Fungus the Bogeyman starred Timothy Spall as the titular smelly monster, ably supported by Marc Warren, Keeley Hawes and Victoria Wood.
More than forty years after Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin’s original series aired, the BBC revived Clangers—about mouse-like aliens living on a distant planet—much to the delight of small children and former university students eveywhere.
The animated Scream Street on children’s channel CBBC featured a werewolf boy relocated by the government to the titular location, which also housed vampires, zombies, mummies and witches.
Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy was turned into an animated series for Disney XD, as Peter Quill (Will Friedle) and his companions searched for a weapon called the Cosmic Seed.
The second season of Disney’s animated Star Wars Rebels on the same network kicked off with a feature-length episode, The Siege of Lothal. James Earl Jones voiced Darth Vader and Billy Dee Williams reprised his role of Lando Calrissian.
ITV’s Thunderbirds Are Go was a misguided attempt to reboot the cult 1960s “Supermarionation” series as a half-hour CGI show. Rosamund Pike voiced Lady Penelope, while her chauffeur Parker was voiced by David Graham, who had also played the role in the original show.
The twenty-sixth annual Halloween episode of Fox’s The Simpsons featured psychopath Sideshow Bob (Kelsey Grammer) killing Bart over and over again in ever more gruesome ways; Homerzilla attacking a city; and Bart, Lisa and Millhouse gaining superpowers. Other episodes included a second Halloween-themed story and the family being transported by an amusement park ride to the planet of tentacled aliens Kang and Kodos.
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