Based on the series of dark and gory high fantasy novels by George R. R. Martin, HBO’s terrific ten-part Game of Thrones was, quite simply, one of the year’s best TV dramas in any genre. The superlative cast included Sean Bean (whose lead character was surprisingly killed off in the penultimate episode), a scene-stealing Peter Dinklage, Mark Addy, Lena Headey and Jason Momoa.
With its fourth season, HBO’s True Blood finally inherited the mantle of 1960s daytime soap opera Dark Shadows as Sookie (Anna Paquin) returned from fairyland to find that Fiona Shaw’s possessed witch had cast a spell over Eric (Alexander Skarsgard), causing him to lose much of his memory.
In a major departure from the original books, a leading character was surprisingly killed off by Skarsgard’s vampire, and the season finale featured the shocking deaths of three, or possibly four, other major characters. Veterans William Schallert and Katherine Helmond turned up in nice cameos.
The sixth season of Showtime’s Dexter jumped ahead a year as Michael C. Hall’s killer-with-a-code encountered a pair of religious “Doomsday Killers” (Edward James Olmos and Colin Hanks), a reformed Brother Sam (rapper-actor Mos Def), a septuagenarian serial killer (veteran Ronny Cox) and his own dead brother (Christian Camargo).
With its delayed fourth and fifth seasons filmed in Ireland, ITV’s always bonkers Primeval returned in January for seven episodes as Connor (Andrew-Lee Potts) and Abby (Hannah Spearitt) escaped the Cretaceous Period only to find that the ARC (Anomaly Research Centre) had been rebuilt and was now controlled by mysterious magnate Philip Burton (Alexander Siddig), who had his own secret agenda. Despite the introduction of a new team of dinosaur-hunters, previous cast members Lucy Brown and Jason Flemyng returned for an episode apiece.
The series was back with a further six shows in May, and included an episode in which a velociraptor was accidentally sent back to 1868 London, where it gave rise to the legend of “Spring-heeled Jack”.
There were more CGI dinosaurs in Fox’s much-delayed Terra Nova, executive produced by Steven Spielberg, in which the annoying Shannon family (led by Jason O’Mara and Shelley Conn) travelled back from a dystopian future to 85 million years in the past to make a new life for themselves in what was basically a thirteen-part reworking of Land of the Lost with added rebel factions and conspiracy sub-plots.
Not content with boring audiences rigid with the family values of Terra Nova, Steven Spielberg also executive produced TNT’s tedious War of the Worlds-inspired Falling Skies, in which a history professor (E.R.’s Noah Wyle) and a rag-tag group of resistance fighters mostly talked their way through yet another alien invasion of Earth.
If Terra Nova and Falling Skies could make dinosaurs and alien invasions dull, then AMC’s increasingly pointless The Walking Dead was guilty of doing the same thing with zombies, as the ever-dwindling band of survivors (led by Andrew Lincoln’s cuckold Sheriff) took refuge on a seemingly-tranquil rural farm until they went and looked at what was kept in the barn. It was perhaps no surprise that creator and executive producer Frank Darabont stepped down as showrunner after just a few episodes into the second season.
Despite its lethargic pacing, the show still managed to rank as the top-rated cable TV drama amongst young adults in the US, with average viewing numbers of nine million.
Sam (Jared Padalecki) returned from Hell without a soul, and angel Castiel (Misha Collins) went off the rails in the disappointing sixth series of The CW’s Supernatural. In the best episode of the season, Sam and Dean (Jensen Ackles) were transported to an alternate reality, where they were actors in a TV series called. Supernatural.
The seventh season kicked off with the brothers trying to find a way to stop a power-mad Castiel, and Buffy cast members Charisma Carpenter and James Marsters turned up as a pair of bickering married witches.
The third season of The CW’s unwatchably awful The Vampire Diaries was joined by the equally turgid teen witch series, The Secret Circle, also based on a bunch of books by L. J.Smith and executive produced by Kevin Williamson. At least Natasha Henstridge was on hand in the latter show to chew up the scenery as a scheming older witch.
Looking as if it was filmed on a $5.00-per-episode budget, Brighter in Darkness was an amateurish half-hour gay vampire soap opera filmed in and around Wales that ran for eight interminable episodes on a cut-price UK cable TV channel.
Michael Emerson’s billionaire scientist and Jim Caviezel’s former CIA hitman teamed up to prevent crimes before they happened with the help of a handy gizmo in CBS’ Person of Interest, executive produced by J. J. Abrams.
NBC’s Grimm featured David Giuntoli as a homicide detective, the descendant of the eponymous clan of supernatural hunters, who discovered that the fairy tales were based on fact. Silas Weir Mitchell’s reluctant werewolf sidekick was the best thing about the show.
Fairy tale characters inhabited two different worlds in ABC’s Once Upon a Time, which debuted with an impressive 12.8 million viewers and became the highest-rated new drama amongst adults in the US.
Meanwhile, the parallel universes merged in the fourth season of Fox’s underrated Fringe, where for a while it seemed as if Peter Bishop (Joshua Jackson) had never existed.
Xander Berkeley played a mysterious patron who sat in a diner and helped people solve their problems in Hulu’s five-part series The Booth at the End, which was also available as webisodes.
MTV’s reboot of the 1980s movie franchise Teen Wolf was an entertaining and edgy twelve-part series aimed at young adults. Tyler Posey’s likeable high school student Scott McCall found himself turning into a werewolf just as he discovered that the girl of his dreams (Crystal Reed) came from a long line of werewolf hunters. Unfortunately, the show premiered in a graveyard slot in the US.
Death Valley was a spoof mockumentary series on MTV about the LAPD’s Undead Task Force dealing with criminal vampires, werewolves, zombies and other supernatural creatures while being trailed around by a camera crew.
Stoner metalhead Todd Smith (Alex House) and his high school friends continued to search for the Satantic book of spells in the half-hour Fear Net comedy series Todd & the Book of Pure Evil.
A supposedly dead cop (David Lyons) donned the superhero outfit and teamed up with an investigative blogger named Orwell (Summer Glau) to bring down her father’s evil corporate company in NBC’s enjoyable superhero series The Cape, which ran for only ten episodes.
Over at Syfy, Glau also guest-starred on the eleven-part Alphas, a dropped ABC pilot in which David Strathairn’s scientist was the leader of a group of five ordinary people with extraordinary abilities who battled to save the world from a secret terrorist organisation called Red Flag.
In the third series of the E4’s eight-part Misfits, the gang of super-powered young offenders decided to change their powers and had to deal with an alternate reality involving time-travelling Nazis. Meanwhile Seth (Matthew McNulty) used his resurrection power to bring his former girlfriend back from the grave as a bloodthirsty zombie, and the gang ended up encountering a fake medium who had the power to call their fallen foes back from the dead.
ABC Family’s The Nine Lives of Chloe King was about a sixteen-year-old girl (Syler Samuels) who found out that she was descended from an ancient race of half-humans with feline powers.
Following an hour-long opener, Nickelodeon’s House of Anubis was shown in forty- five daily ten-minute instalments and involved a group of eight students investigating mysterious disappearances at an English boarding school. It averaged almost three million viewers in the US and was also available online.
In the six-part The Sparticle Mystery, a group of children discovered that everybody on Earth over the age of fifteen had been transported to a parallel dimension when an experiment went wrong.
Nathaniel Parker joined the fourth season of the BBC’s increasingly impressive
