Lost’s Harold Perrineau leads Epix’s sci-fi drama From
Plus: A presidential documentary on Lincoln, and the end of PBS’ Around the World of 80 Days… for now
TV Lists From
Here’s what’s happening in the world of television for Sunday, February 20. All times are Eastern.
Top pick
From (EPIX, 10 p.m.): Executive produced by the Russo brothers, From stars Lost’s Harold Perrineau in another science-fiction drama. This one is set in a nightmarish middle American town that traps everyone who enters. The residents have to also fight surrounding forest threats, including terrifying nocturnal creatures. In her review, Leila Latif writes:
“There is a balance to strike with a horror series: You need to be able to subject your characters to unspeakable terrors, and to trap them within torturous multi-episode nightmares, but offer enough of a glimmer of hope to keep them fighting. The world around them cannot descend into such unmitigated hell that no one would choose to stay alive in it. The new Epix series From gets very close to the latter, where trying to stay alive at times seems like a fool’s errand, but it mostly walks that tightrope without tipping over into an unrelenting misery.”
Regular coverage
Euphoria (HBO, 9 p.m.)
The Righteous Gemstones (HBO, 10 p.m.)
The Walking Dead (AMC, 9 p.m.)
Wild cards
Abraham Lincoln (History, 8 p.m.): This three-night, almost eight-hour documentary event is based on historian Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book Leadership: In Turbulent Times. Graham Sibley stars as Honest Abe in the show, which includes interviews with former President Barack Obama, among others. Watch to see how many of the “Honest Abe” stories—like of him walking miles to return someone’s change, for example—are actually true.
Around The World in 80 Days (PBS, 8 p.m.): The season finale is out. Frustratingly, the changes to Aouda’s (Shivaani Ghai) story means she’s not part of the finale. It’s weird how the one time an Indian woman gets cast as the character, she becomes useless to the plot. Don’t know why changing the narrative had to excise one of the few women of color from the Western canon, but the show is getting a second season, so maybe that’ll change. We’ll see.
16 Comments
Funimation’s been putting up the subbed version of the Romeo X Juliet anime, a show I hadn’t watched in ages. It’s still just as great as I remember it, but man, I wish they had posted the dub instead, since they inserted a lot more Shakespeare lines into there.
TUAYPCW:I finished Peacemaker & regret nothing! Unlike the TV series ostensibly about Boba Fett, Peacemaker develops its protagonist & focuses its plot. The result is much better! Who would’ve expected that?
https://mattthecatania.wordpress.com/2022/02/17/hbo-max-comes-in-peacemaker/
Son Of The White Mare is a gorgeously fluid Hungarian cartoon that’s like the spawn of Jack Kirby & Peter Max.
Tell us about your Pop Culture Weekend I finished the fourth “part” of Disenchantment. It was definitely a set of jokes and pathos. Some of that even worked together. My small humans and I went to the library where they selected a bunch of books by their covers. I read several. Books about anthropomorphic animals baking are apparently a big hit.
Last weekend, I said I had started Dollface but that it didn’t really grab me in the first episode, so I’d give it one more to see how that went. I watched the second one, then blew through all of season 1 and part of season 2. Kat Dennings is ostensibly the star of this show, but Shay Mitchell is the MVP. Her character is absolutely nuts and I love it.The Peacemaker finale was a delightful capper to a wild & wonderful season. I’m pretty stoked that they’re getting another season to explore just how bad a pissed-off Amanda Waller can get.There’s a deal for 99 cents for one month of Epix on Prime Video, so I will probably jump on that and check out From for a month & see how it is.
I forgot Dollface came back. Neat.
OK, I’ve watched the first 3 episodes of From (all that Epix has thus far) and I’m in, it’s good & scary. Feels like it takes inspiration from a lot of other things I enjoy – TWD, Wayward Pines, Salem’s Lot.
I like the new Around the World in Eighty Days, but yeah, they are changing things in weird ways. Minimized Aouda so there could be a female lead. Not your parents Jules Verne I guess.
WWWAAALLLTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT!
“Back in the early 2000s I was in a very famous mystery show…”
From stars Lost’s Harold Perrineau in another science-fiction drama.
Science fiction? (btw, no hyphen)Speculative fiction, maybe. Horror fiction, definitely. But promoting it as sci-fi (hyphen’s okay here) seems a bit misleading.
The monsters are actually metaphors for subatomic particles and the town is really an atomic nucleus that is being bombarded by them.
Cute but by that logic Buffy was science fiction.
In all seriousness, the early seasons of Buffy were kind of meant to be taken metaphorically as a kind of “social science fiction” — there were a lot of episodes that were clearly meant to be metaphorical like when Willow meets an actual demon on an Internet chat room representing the threat of cyber predators to teens, Buffy being asked by her mom if she’s tried “not being a vampire slayer” as a metaphor for similarly unhelpful comments about sexuality, etc. But for better or worse as the show went on it began to be more about taking its premise seriously in and of itself.
To be fair though, it’s a stretch to have one episode metaphorically addressing cyber predators and then call the entire show a science fiction series.
It wasn’t and it’s not. It was a YA fantasy/supernatural show.
That was just an example. But there were many such episodes in the first couple of seasons. Xander learns about the dangers of performance-enhancing drugs when the other members of the swim team begin turning literally into fish, drinking beer literally turns people into cavemen, a shy girl literally becomes invisible, etc. In the later seasons they turned it into a literal fantasy/supernatural show and the vampires and things didn’t represent anything — they just were what they were.
And the cyber predator ep was based on real cyber threats, performance-enhancing drugs based in reality too, so could be argued that they weren’t science fiction but just based on current technology and given a supernatural twist. Also, a handful of episodes isn’t many.
Again, it’s a stretch to call Buffy a sci-fi series, no matter which season. But fortunately we don’t have to because the more appropriate YA supernatural/fantasy genre is right there for it to fit into.