-Muggle Television Series Reviews-

Fringe - My rating: ★★★★★ (5/5 stars)

This is my favorite show of all time, mostly because it does such a beautiful job at using a compelling mytharc to develop complex characters. At its core, Fringe is a story about love, about family, and most of all, about hope. This may sound like a weird description for a show that opens with a flesh-eating contagion, prominently features mad scientists and alternate universes, and spends its final season in a dystopian future, but it's the truth. No matter what insanity is going on around them, the heart of the show is always the bond between the three main characters: Olivia Dunham, the FBI agent trying to make sense of her world as it gets turned upside down again and again, Walter Bishop, the more-than-slightly-crazy scientist trying to atone for his past mistakes, and Peter Bishop, the son who has been running from his past for most of his life.

The main premise of the show is the existence of cases that deal with fringe science - things such as teleportation, precognition, cryonics, mind control, cryptozoology, and genetic hybrids. At the beginning, Fringe stays mostly in a case-of-the-week format, with only small hints at a larger underlying storyline, but as the seasons progress, the show becomes more serialized in nature, and even stand-alone cases begin to have subtle tie-ins to the overall mythology. As a scientist myself, I love the way Fringe uses established science as a jumping-off point for an exploration of the realms of the weird and the inexplicable, basing itself just enough in reality that it makes you wonder if the rest could really exist too.

Fringe is one of the few shows that has it all, in my opinion - characters that are both heroic and deeply flawed at the same time, a satisfying, compelling, and at times heart-wrenching mytharc, and enough science and philosophy to start a thousand interesting discussions, all served with a healthy helping of the weird and fantastic.

If I've convinced you to watch it, all five seasons are available to stream in the US through both Netflix and Amazon Prime. And if you watch the show, love it as much as I did, and want more, Fringe has a small but devoted fandom that has produced some amazing fanfiction, so feel free to ask me (Kris Shah) for fic recs.

Gotham - My rating: ★★★★½ (4.5/5 stars)

Set directly after the Wayne family murders, this show is a gripping reimagining of the early days of the heroes and villains of Gotham. The series focuses on Jim Gordon, years before he became police commissioner, and follows his work as a detective for the GCPD. Fans of Batman will recognize younger versions of many iconic characters, including Bruce Wayne himself, as well as Penguin, Catwoman, and many others. Even with familiar characters, Gotham does a good job at avoiding predictability, and expertly combines known quantities with original storylines.

The first season of the show feels like a noir superhero procedural, and the majority of the episodes could be classified as case-of-the-week. However, towards the end of the first season, Gotham starts to lean more heavily towards a serialized format, and the second season has continued in that vein. This works well, because the show is at its strongest when telling a larger, continuous story.

Some of my favorite things about Gotham are the way it deals with the Riddler’s origin story, the fact that even heroes get their hands bloody sometimes, and the general noir feel that pervades the whole series. Like many superhero stories, the show also raises interesting questions about the boundaries between good and evil, and the moral grey area that lies in between.

If any of this sounds interesting to you, season one of Gotham is available in the US on Netflix, and season two is currently airing on Fox.

-Reviewed by Kris Shah