Welcome to the Munchkyn Zone

I'm Sarah Stegall, and I write reviews of television shows, movies and books. I review mostly science fiction, fantasy, and other speculative fiction, but I might branch out into other genres if something really appeals to me.

We tend to treat popular culture as ephemera, but I choose to treat it as the artistic expression of our times, and as such I try to approach these entertainments from the attitude that some of what they say matters. These are the art forms of our day, and deserve as much intelligent critique as any painting or symphony. How intelligent or useful these opinions may be is entirely left to the reader.

My reviews are usually carried on the website SFScope for a week before they appear here; if you're looking for, say, the review of the latest episode of Chuck, check out SFScope first. My reviews have also been cited in academic television and cultural studies such as Cult Television, Escape Into the Future, Aliens In America, The Philosophy of The X-Files, and Reality Squared (which called these reviews among "the best critical commentary available on the Web").

What you will find here are not "recaps" of shows, which summarize the plot, but critiques. These reviews contain spoilers. I'm more interested in how and why a particular entertainment succeeds or fails (in my opinion) so I tend to get a tad analytical and more than a bit philosophical. That's how I roll. I hope you enjoy it.

Thanks for stopping by!

NEWS

16 June 2009 - New shows I'm reviewing: The Listener. Not too bad for a summer series. I have also started reviewing True Blood. An overview of the first season (containing spoilers!) is here. As usual, the reviews will first appear on SFScope.com, and later will be archived here.

1 June 2009 - Pushing Daisies is back, if only briefly. My reviews of the last three episodes will be carried on SFScope and then appear here. Don't miss the last three episodes of this remarkable show, on ABC on Saturday nights at 10/9 central. I will miss this show a lot.

30 May 2009 - Eleventh Hour has been cancelled, despite pretty decent ratings. It had better ratings than Pushing Daisies or Moonlight, that's for sure. I don't understand how network suits think.

May 18, 2009 - The pink slips have all gone out now, and the news is finalized. The following shows have been cancelled: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Knight Rider, Reaper and Life on Mars. Pushing Daisies is still dead. Fringe has been renewed, to no one's surprise. Smallville and Supernatural are coming back for another season. The shocker this spring, however, is that NBC has renewed Chuck. I had given up hope of seeing my favorite nerds again, so this is welcome news. Surprisingly, the dismal ratings for Dollhouse did not trigger the notoriously impatient Fox Network's cancellation hammer, so Dollhouse will be back next fall. The only series hanging fire as of this morning is Eleventh Hour, and no one expects it to come back.

The Sarah Connor Chronicles had been expected to return. However, Fox apparently decided it had run out of steam:

"Fox entertainment president Kevin Reilly confirmed at a press conference this morning. "I think it had a nice little run. It was a good show. It was not an either or [with Dollhouse]. We did see it tailing off a bit [in the ratings]. It had a nice creative core, but, ultimately, we made the bet on Dollhouse, so that's it for [Sarah Connor]... We make no apologies. We gave it a lot of support and some consistent scheduling. We tried and thought it was time to move on."" Source

Chuck has been renewed, but with a catch - the network has ordered only 13 episodes. There are other changes in the works, too, conditions for its renewal:

"The 13-episode pickup came after Warner Bros. agreed to make significant budget concessions, including scaling back the number of episodes several members of the show's stellar supporting cast will appear in and, per one insider, possibly eliminating one actor altogether (R.I.P. Anna Wu?). The show is also expected to cut two of its staff writers." Source

The real shocker in all this is the renewal of Dollhouse. Not only was it in the ratings basement for most of the season, it was being critically panned right out of the gate. Even though later episodes improved once Joss Whedon finally got his Joss on, I figured it was a case of too little, too late, and too darn strange. Even the Hollywood Reporter was astounded:

"Dollhouse might very well be the lowest-rated in-season scripted drama to ever get a renewal on a major broadcast network. "

The important point to remember here is that Fox, famous for cancelling series during commercial breaks in the pilot, has actually overriden its own history and traditions. Could this be due to some lingering respect for the talents of Joss Whedon and Tim Minear? Could it be due to a new found respect for the passionate and devoted Whedon fans? We'll be mulling this over for a long time. In the meanwhile, Dollhouse is not out of the woods yet; like NBC, the Fox Network has ordered only 13 episodes of Dollhouse for the fall.

I only wish ABC had shown as much patience with Pushing Daisies. Meanwhile, ABC has announced three new genre shows for the fall lineup:

V, a remake of the 80s - era alien-invasion thriller will become a 13-episode miniseries.
Eastwick will be a series based on the 1987 Jack Nicholson film The Witches of Eastwick
Flash Forward, based on Robert J. Sawyer's novel of the same name, will be about a moment when everyone on earth experiences the same moment of clairvoyance.

The CW is rumored to be launching a new vampire series this fall called The Vampire Diaries, based on the L. J. Smith series of the same name. No scheduling information is up yet.