Merlin as Arthur’s duplicitous uncle, Agravaine. The thirteen-part series featured Lancelot (Santiago Cabrera) sacrificing himself and then returning from the dead; the discovery of the last remaining dragon’s egg; an encounter with a vampire-like Lamia; the possessive spirit of murdered Druid child; the introduction of Tristan and Isolde, and an epic two-part finale in which the evil Morgana (Katie McGrath) led a full- on assault upon Camelot.
Eva Green’s far sexier “Morgan” also took over Arthur’s fabled city in the otherwise redundant ten-part Starz series Camelot, which also featured Joseph Fiennes as an older and dirtier version of Merlin.
The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror XXII on Fox included lame spoofs of Dexter and Avatar, while Mike Judge’s animated Beavis and Butt-Head returned to MTV in October with an episode in which the two stupid-smart buffoons poked fun at the Twilight movies as the dumb duo tried to get themselves bitten by a werewolf so they could attract girls.
Liam Neeson and Peter Mayhew voiced their characters Qui-Gon Jinn and Chewbacca, respectively, in different episodes of the Cartoon Network’s Star Wars: The Clone Wars.
Wolverine and Iron Man both got anime makeovers, while 1980s cartoon Thundercats was revived for a new generation of potential toy consumers.
James Roday and Dule Hill’s comedy investigators went undercover as Tom Cruise’s Lestat and William Marshall’s Blacula, respectively, in a vampire-themed Halloween episode of USA Network’s Psych, while Castle (Nathan Fillion) and Beckett (Stana Katic) investigated the death of a TV ghost-hunter in a supposedly haunted mansion in the Halloween episode of ABC’s Castle.
The recent publication of Bram Stoker’s Dracula resulted in a number of apparent vampire attacks at an exclusive girl’s school in a fourth season episode of Canada’s Murdoch Mysteries. In another episode, the uptight detective (Yannick Bisson) investigated what seemed to be a case of demonic possession.
For its special Super Bowl episode in February, Fox’s Glee included a performance of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”, complete with a zombie football team.
In January, ABC’s V reboot returned for ten episodes before it was finally put out of everybody’s misery. Original star Marc Singer turned up in the final episode while Jane Badler, who reprised her role as the evil “Diana” from the original 1983 show, turned out to be alien leader Anna’s (Morena Baccarin) estranged mother.
Medium finally also reached the end of its seven-year run on NBC in January. The final episode flash-forwarded forty years into the future.
Chuck played out its fifth and final season on the same network, as Zachery Levi’s character created his own spy agency. Mark Hamill guest-starred in the first episode.
The CW’s Smallville ended after ten seasons with a satisfying two-part finale that finally saw the return of Michael Rosenbaum’s Lex Luthor.
The Syfy channel finally aired the remaining nine episodes of its overblown Battlestar Galactica prequel, Caprica, which ended on a virtual reality teaser for a second series that never happened.
NBC’s meandering The Event was also justifiably cancelled, as was Syfy’s SGU Stargate Universe after only two seasons.
As part of Turner Classic Movies’s “Lost and Found” series, in April the station showcased a rare print of the 1976 Spanish film The Mysterious House of Dr C (aka Dr Coppelius), while two months later the “Drive-In Double Features” series presented a number of 1950s “Monsters, Mutants and Martians”. In August, the channel programmed a day of Lon Chaney, Sr. films, including The Monster, Mockery, The Unknown, West of Zanzibar and both the silent and sound versions of The Unholy Three.
On October 3, TCM premiered A Night at the Movies: The Horrors of Stephen King, an hour-long documentary in which the author traced the history of the genre through personal recollections and film clips.
Appropriately, director John Carpenter was the TCM’s Guest Programmer for the month, and his picks included The Thing from Another World, It! The Terror from Beyond Space and The Curse of Frankenstein.
Rex Appeal was an hour-long BBC4 documentary about dinosaurs in the movies.
William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, Nichelle Michols, Billy Mumy, Angela Carter and Marta Kristen were amongst those who recalled the golden age of TV science fiction and the sometimes rivalry between Rod Serling, Gene Roddenberry and Irwin Allen in an episode of PBS’ Pioneers of Television.
Ridley Scott executive produced the Science channel’s eight-part Prophets of Science Fiction docu-series, which began its run with an episode about Mary Shelley (played by Mara King in the re-enactments).
Broadcast by BBC3 from Kirkstall Abbey on 19 March, Frankenstein’s Wedding: Live in Leeds was a muddled musical retelling of Shelley’s classic novel. Andrew Gower played Dr Victor Frankenstein, while David Harewood was his sympathetic Creature.
During the summer, actress Joanna Lumley joined an online petition of those opposed to BBC Radio 4 controller Gwyneth Williams’ plans to cut the broadcaster’s short story output in favour of more news coverage.
To tie-in with the launch of the mini-series Torchwood: Miracle Day in July, Radio 4’s Afternoon Play presented Torchwood: The Lost Files. Broadcast in three forty-five minute episodes, John Barrowman, Eve Myles, Gareth David-Lloyd and Kai Owen recreated their original TV roles alongside Martin Jarvis, Juliet Mills and Rosalind Ayres.
All the Dark Corners featured three spooky tales by Andrew Readman, Paul Cornell and Rosemary Kay and was broadcast over three successive days in the Afternoon Play slot, while The Shining Guest was written and narrated by Paul Evans and used real-life sound recordings to tell the story of a puzzling ancient corpse discovered in the Welsh hills. It was produced by the same team that created The Ditch in 2010.
Other editions of the Afternoon Play featured Kim Newman’s Cry Babies, about busy couple’s genetically enhanced daughter; Sally Griffiths’ Haunted, in which a professional illusionist and a spiritualist medium teamed up for a television show with unexpected results, and A Time to Dance, directed by Julian Simpson, in which a mysterious plague affected London’s South Bank.
Joan Aiken’s Black Hearts of Battersea was adapted over two days in the same slot at Christmas.
Julian Simpson’s Bad Memories for Radio 4’s The Friday Play slot involved the macabre disappearance of a family from their remote country home in 2004, and the discovery six years later in the cellar of five bodies apparently dating back to 1926. The hour-long drama made use of digital audio files to unlock the key to the time-travel mystery.
David Robb starred as Professor Challenger in Chris Harrald’s two-part dramatisation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World as part of the radio station’s Classic Serial series.
Wilkie Collins’ 1868 macabre mystery The Moonstone was adapted into four one- hour episodes on Radio 4 starring Kenneth Cranham, Eleanor Bron and Bill Paterson, and Cranham also portrayed carnival owner Mr Dark in Diana Griffiths’ hour-long adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, broadcast as The Saturday Play on 29 October.
The following month, Robert Powell starred in an hour-long adaptation of Alan Garner’s The Weirdstone of Brisingamen in the same slot.
