Much more fun was The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot, a hilarious half-hour film in which former Doctors Peter Davison, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy attempted to get themselves into the 50th anniversary episode. Written and directed by Davison, it featured a host of guest cameos by, amongst others, Sean Pertwee, Olivia Colman, Jenna Coleman, Matt Smith, Steven Moffat, Katy Manning, Louise Jameson, Carole Ann Ford, Deborah Watling, Sophie Aldred, Sarah Sutton, K-9 (voiced by John Leeson), Paul McGann, John Barrowman, David Tennant, Russell T. Davies, Peter Jackson and Sir Ian McKellan.
Unfortunately, the Christmas special, The Time of the Doctor, was a return to the usual incomprehensible mess from writer Moffat, as Matt Smith bowed out after four years as a dying Doctor defending an alien town against such old enemies as Daleks, Cybermen, Weeping Angels, Sontarans and others. At the end of this 800th episode, Smith’s Time Lord regenerated as Peter Capaldi’s manic new incarnation, and there was a guest appearance by Karen Gillan as former companion Amy Pond.
Broadcast on BBC2 in November, writer Mark Gatiss’ ninety-minute drama An Adventure in Space and Time chronicled the trials and tribulations of getting the first episode of Doctor Who on screen in 1963. David Bradley made a terrific William Hartnell, and he was ably supported by Brian Cox, Jessica Raine and Sacha Dhawan, but the whole production lacked any empathy for its subject matter. William Russell, who played one of the very first companions, had a blink-and-you’ll-miss-him cameo, Reece Shearsmith portrayed Patrick Troughton, and the busy Matt Smith also made an appearance.
Writer, director and co-executive producer Mark Gatiss attempt to revive the BBC’s classic A Ghost Story for Christmas resulted in a stupefyingly dull adaptation of The Tractate Middoth which was re-set in the 1950s and featured Sacha Dhawan, Louise Jameson, John Castle, Eleanor Bron and Una Stubbs.
As scriptwriter and presenter, Gatiss also followed in the bicycle tracks of the author for John Das’ hourlong documentary M. R. James: Ghost Writer, which added nothing new to our knowledge of James beyond an unnecessary attempt to make a case for “Monty” being a closet gay. At least the programme included interviews with film-makers Jonathan Miller and Lawrence Gordon Clark, clips from some earlier BBC adaptations of James’ work, and the wonderful Robert Lloyd Parry portraying the author on screen.
Following our first glimpse of the zombie White Walkers at the end of the second season, Diana Rigg joined HBO’s Game of Thrones as the scheming Tyrell matriarch Lady Olenna, and three major characters were brutally massacred after being betrayed at the now-infamous “Red Wedding” during Season Three’s penultimate episode.
Despite not crediting Bram Stoker anywhere on screen, NBC’s sexy, steampunk Dracula starred Jonathan Rhys Meyers as the seductive vampire posing as an American entrepreneur. He teamed up with Professor Van Helsing (Thomas Kretschmann) to invent a new form of electrical power and get revenge on a secret society known as the Order of the Dragon. Unfortunately, he also fell in love with Mina Murray (Jessica De Gouw), a woman who looked just like his dead wife.
HBO’s increasingly complicated True Blood returned for its sixth and penultimate season, as humans declared war against all vampires. While Bill (Stephen Moyer) became a vampire demi-god and Eric (Alexander Skarsgård) battled against the new Louisiana governor, so Sookie (Anna Paquin) had her own problems with a powerful vampire-faerie hybrid (Robert Kazinsky) and Rutger Hauer turned up as a wild-haired faerie king.
Season Eight of The CW’s long-running Supernatural continued with Sam (Jared Padalecki) learning from the angel tablet that he had to undertake three tasks so that he could close the Gates of Hell. Felicia Day returned for a couple of episodes as Charlie Bradbury, and Curtis Armstrong and Amanda Tapping joined the cast as very different angels. In the season finale, Castiel (Misha Collins) once again lost his angel powers, and the ninth series continued the whole war between the angels story arc instead of concentrating on what this show once did best – feature interesting monsters. The Halloween episode was based around The Wizard of Oz and in another episode Dean (Jensen Ackles) ended up talking to the dogs, which is where Supernatural was unfortunately heading … especially after killing off a major character during the mid-season finale.
In the Fox Network’s enjoyable thirteen-episode Sleepy Hollow, Revolutionary War spy Ichabod Crane (a likeable fish-out-of-water performance by Tom Mison) awakened after two-and-a-half centuries in the present-day. Helped by police Lieutenant Abbie Mills (Nicole Beharie), he continued his battle against the Headless Horseman, attempted to rescue his witchy wife (Katia Winter) from Purgatory, and began to solve a mystery that dated back to America’s founding fathers. Washington Irving wasn’t even credited.
The second season of NBC’s Grimm ended with a two-part episode in which a voodoo Baron (Reg E. Cathey) raised an army of zombies to confront Nick (David Giuntoli) and his friends, while Wesen royal Eric (James Frain) tried to get to Adalind’s (Claire Coffee) unborn baby. Season Three began with Nick infected by the zombie virus and Eric being assassinated. Alexis Denisof joined the cast as Prince Viktor, and the Christmas episode featured an evil Santa who did very bad things to children who had been naughty.
There were more than a few shades of the Da Vinci Code as Anthony Edwards’ sceptical magazine publisher had to find his kidnapped wife and save the world from an evil Nazi-mad scientist in ABC-TV’s thirteen-part series Zero Hour.
Created by David S. Goyer, Starz’s Da Vinci’s Demons was an alternate history of Renaissance Florence’s greatest inventor and his quest for the mystic Book of Leaves. Amongst the sex and intrigue, Leonardo (a likeable Tom Riley) had to deal with an apparent outbreak of demonic possession at a convent and travel to the castle of Vlad Dracula (Paul Rhys).
Atlantis, the BBC’s follow-up to Merlin, quickly forgot about its time-travel opening and concentrated on the Ancient Greece-style adventures of friends Jason (Jack Donnelly), Pythagoras (Robert Emms) and Hercules (Mark Addy). Together they battled the Minotaur, faced fanatical Maenads, fought vengeful Furies, took a trip to Hades and attempted to assassinate the wicked Queen Pasiphae (Sarah Parish). Jemima Rooper turned up as a cursed Medusa, Juliet Stevenson was a mysterious Oracle and Alexander Siddig played a naïve King Minos, while the final two-part episode featured a nice tribute to the late Ray Harryhausen’s Jason and the Argonauts.
As Season Two of ABC-TV’s Once Upon a Time continued, Captain Hook (Colin O’Donoghue) and Cora (Barbara Hershey) arrived in Storybrooke with a crew of zombies to plot their revenge, and waitress Ruby (Meghan Ory) returned to her werewolf form. Meanwhile, back in fairytale land, Dr Frankenstein (David Anders) embarked upon his greatest experiment. The third series featured new villain Peter Pan (Jared Gilmore), who tried to put another curse on the town.
ABC’s spinoff series, Once Upon a Time in Wonderland, starred Sophie Lowe as a Victorian Alice who escaped from a mental institution and fell down a rabbit hole. John Lithgow was The White Rabbit and Iggy Pop played The Caterpillar.
Evil alchemist Paracelsus (Anthony Stewart Head) escaped the bronzing chamber and planned to change history at the conclusion of Season Four of Syfy’s Warehouse 13.
ITV’s overwrought five-part drama Lightfields was a follow-up to Marchlands (2011) and, as with that show, was set in a haunted house over three generations. Sophie Thompson and Kris Marshall headed the ensemble cast.
The BBC’s fifth and final six-part series of Being Human set new flatmates – ghost Alex (Katie Bracken), werewolf Tom (Michael Socha) and vampire Hal (Damien Molony) – against Devil incarnate pensioner Captain Hatch (Phil Davis), who attempted to foster a war between vampires and werewolves. Toby Whitehouse’s always-engaging series was brought to a satisfying, if bittersweet conclusion that appeared to owe its inspiration to Blade Runner.
The third and penultimate series of the very different American version of Being Human on Syfy found Aidan (Sam Witwer) returning to find that the vampire community had greatly changed, while Kenny (Connor Price) had turned into an abomi
nation by the season’s end.
Although AMC’s increasingly tedious The Walking Dead concluded Season Three with a face-off between Rick (Andrew Lincoln) and The Governor (David Morrissey), they were back at it again in the fourth series as a flu epidemic broke out amongst the survivors and Carol (Melissa McBride) was banished from the prison. A lot of characters also died.
It were also grim up North for In the Flesh, Dominic Mitchell’s angst-ridden three-part mini-series for the BBC. Following an apocalyptic “Returning” of the dead, rehabilitated “Rotters” were reintroduced back into society as suffering from reclassified “Partially Deceased Syndrome”. When suicide victim Kieren (Luke Newberry) was returned to his home village, it exposed the divisions and intolerance of many of the locals. Supporting an excellent cast of mostly newcomers were Kenneth Cranham and Ricky Tomlinson.
Much the same theme was explored in the far darker eight-part French series The Returned (Les revenants), which saw increasing numbers of dead people returning to a quiet Alpine village looking no older and with no memory of what had happened to them. As water levels in a nearby reservoir began to drop without any explanation and it appeared that a cannibal serial killer from the past had returned, creepy child Victor (Swann Nambotin) seemed to be the only person who knew what was going on.
The increasingly ridiculous American Horror Story: Asylum finally came to an end with the closing down of Briarcliff. The third season, American Horror Story: Coven, was a huge improvement over the previous two as the formerly misogynistic show featured a strong cast of female characters led by regulars Jessica Lange, Sarah Paulson, Taissa Farmiga and Lily Rabe, but with the addition this time of Kathy Bates and Angela Bassett. The thirteen-part series, which centred around Miss Robichaux’s Academy for Exceptional Young Ladies, a school in New Orleans for budding Salem witches, also featured a reanimated corpse, a talking severed head, a serial-killer ghost and an army of zombies.
Meanwhile, Lifetime’s Witches of East End – which felt like a re-tread of ABC’s cancelled Eastwick (which shared a same executive producer) and The WB’s Charmed – featured a family of witches that included matriarch Julia Ormond and Mädchen Amick, who could turn into a black cat.
In Sally Wainwright’s hourlong Drama Matters: The Last Witch for Sky Living, a woman (Katherine Kelly) mysteriously turned up on the doorstep of a pensioner (Anne Reid) and revealed more than she should know.
The second season of Black Mirror, Charlie Brooker’s trilogy of satirical hourlong dramas on Channel 4, featured a widow who was given the opportunity to create a double of her late husband from his social media profiles, a signal that turned people into apathetic onlookers, and a foulmouthed cartoon bear who stood as a by-election candidate.
Primeval New World, the dull Canadian spinoff from the British TV series, ended its first and only season with a two-part time-travel episode that saw the return of Andrew Lee Potts’ Connor Temple from the original show.
After changing the dystopian future, Fox’s Fringe ended its fifth and final season on a surprisingly positive note.
ABC-TV’s 666 Park Avenue was abruptly cancelled after just thirteen episodes, as Jane (Rachael Taylor) and Henry (Dave Annable) finally discovered the price they had to pay for what they wanted most in life.
The third season of Syfy’s Lost Girl began three weeks after the defeat of the Garuda, while Season Four kicked off with her friends having no memory whatsoever of Bo (Anna Silk).
Charlotte Rampling joined the cast as the sinister Dr Vogel for the eighth and final season of HBO’s Dexter, set sixth months after his sister Deb (Jennifer Carpenter) witnessed Dexter (Michael C. Hall) killing Captain LaGuerta. Dexter took on a murderous protégé (Sam Underwood) and, after being reunited with fellow serial killer Hannah (Yvonne Strahovski), the odd couple went after a serial-killer known as the “Brain Surgeon”.
Created by Kevin Williamson, Fox’s The Following starred Kevin Bacon as alcoholic FBI agent Ryan Hardy, who was convinced that Edgar Allan Poe-obsessed serial killer Joe Carroll (James Purefoy) was controlling an army of psychotic “Followers”.
When troubled FBI criminal profiler Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) teamed up with secret cannibal psychiatrist Dr Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen) to solve gruesome murders, he ended up being framed for Lecter’s own crimes in Hannibal, a prequel series created by Bryan Fuller. The cast also featured Laurence Fishburne, Gillian Anderson, Eddie Izzard, Gina Torres and Anna Chlumsky. NBC pulled an episode involving children after the Newton school shooting.
A&E’s Bates Motel was another modern-day prequel show, detailing the somewhat twisted relationship between a teenage Norman Bates (Freddie Highmore) and his widowed mother (Vera Farmiga) when they moved into a certain motel on the edge of town. The first season concluded with Norman’s sexy schoolteacher (Keegan Connor Tracy) ending up dead.
After Audrey (Emily Rose) disappeared in the barn at the end of Series Three, she returned six months later with an apparently new identity at the beginning of the fourth season of Syfy’s Haven, loosely based on The Colorado Kid by Stephen King. As Audrey and Nathan (Lucas Bryant) attempted to discover the identity of the Bolt Gun Killer, Colin Ferguson joined the cast as the mysterious William, who knew more about Audrey and the town’s Troubles than he was initially letting on.
The rest of CBS-TV’s thirteen-episode Under the Dome, based on the 2009 bestseller by Stephen King and co-executive produced by Steven Spielberg, could not live up to the opening episode, in which the town of Chester’s Mill, Maine, was mysteriously cut off from the world by an invisible force-field.
As it was with genre literature and movies, so the proliferation of young adult fiction also continued on TV with The CW’s Beauty & the Beast, featuring Kristin Kreuk’s simpering New York detective and Jay Ryan’s hunky but tormented genetically mutated vigilante. Cat learned the truth about her family’s secrets and, after Vincent was kidnapped at the end of Season One, he returned in the second season with new powers and a secret mission.
Following the appearance of ghosts in Mystic Falls, the fourth season of The Vampire Diaries ended with the sulky Elena’s (Nina Dobrev) graduation ceremony. In the even more ludicrous Season Five, she returned from spending the summer with Damon (Ian Somerhalder), and together they uncovered the true intentions of Dr Wes Maxfield (Rick Cosnett) and the dark history of Whitmore College.
The CW’s spinoff series The Originals was set in New Orleans, where vampire-werewolf Klaus (Joseph Morgan) battled his former protégé (Charles Michael Davis) for control of the city while they kept control of the local witch population.
ABC Family’s Ravenswood was a spinoff from Pretty Little Liars, as Rosewood’s rebellious Caleb Rivers (Tyler Blackburn) moved to the show’s eponymous cursed town filled with ghosts and long-hidden family secrets.
Based on the 2012 werewolf-vampire novel by Brian McGreevy, Famke Janssen and Dougray Scott starred in Netflix’s thirteen-episode Hemlock Grove from co-executive producer Eli Roth, about a creepy Pennsylvania town where everyone also had a secret.
Following the death of a major character, Scott McCall (Tyler Posey) and his friends were forced to use an ancient ritual to save the ones they loved in the much darker third season of MTV’s Teen Wolf.
In the second series of the BBC’s half-hour Wolfblood, teenager Maddy Smith (Aimee Kelly) and her family tried to hide their inner wolf powers from Dr Whitewood (Effie Woods).
For teens who found Game of Thrones too complicated, The CW’s Reign concerned the romantic entanglements of a fifteen-year-old Mary, Queen of Scots (Adelaide Kane), along with a woodland cult that practised human sacrifice, a possible ghost, and Rossif Sutherland as a young Nostradamus.
In a terrible teen reimagining of the British 1970’s show The Tomorrow People from The CW, Stephen Jacobson (Robbie Amell) discovered that his uncle (Mark Pellegrino) intended to wipe out everyone with mutant powers like his own.
In the fifth and final eight-part series of E4’s Misfits, the sup
er-powered young offenders encountered a group of Satanists and a childhood bogeyman before their community service was over.
BBC America’s Orphan Black starred Tatiana Maslany in multiple roles as clones being hunted down by their creators.
Tom (Scott Haran) and Benny (Percelle Ascott) continued their fight against the magic-stealing Nekross in the second series of the BBC’s Wizards vs. Aliens, and a sixteen-year-old boy (Aaron Sauter) attempted to find his missing astronaut father from clues left in an unfinished graphic novel in Alien Dawn (aka Black Dawn).
The second series of the BBC’s The Sparticle Mystery was again set in a world where anyone over the age of fifteen had vanished into a parallel universe, while a group of adults wanted to sacrifice students to the evil underground Egyptian god Ammut in the third season of Nickelodeon’s House of Anubis. The show bowed out with a ninety-minute special, “Touchstone of Ra”.
In Sky’s eight-part family comedy Yonderland, Martha Howe-Douglas played a bored housewife who stepped through a portal in her larder and found herself a reluctant “Chosen One” in another realm populated by puppet monsters.
Fifteen years after a permanent global blackout, Rachel (Elizabeth Mitchell) and her rebel friends arrived at the tower at the end of the first season of NBC-TV’s Revolution and prepared to turn the power back on. Following the nuking of the American East Coast, in an unexpected Season Two Aaron (Zak Orth) started having strange visions involving the nano-technology.
Kiefer Sutherland was also back in an unexpected second series of Fox’s tedious Touch.
The spirits of the dead haunted the corridors of Hope Zion Hospital in the second season of NBC’s Saving Hope, while a brilliant neurosurgeon (Steven Pasquale) had to battle his own Jekyll-like alter-ego in the same network’s Do No Harm.
TNT’s Falling Skies returned for a much more action-orientated ten-episode third season. It started out with Tom Mason (Noah Wyle) now elected president, and concluded with betrayals, both alien and human.
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