Paul Mount's - TV Zone

This issue, we mourn the premature passing of PENNY DREADFUL: CITY OF ANGELS, take refuge under THE UMBRELLA ACADEMY, leap aboard the COBRA KAI bandwagon, and belatedly remind you that you BETTER CALL SAUL…

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TV shows. They come and go, like summer rain. You get your fantasy fangs stuck into some great new genre show. Be it a whizzy, snarky superhero show on Netflix or Amazon, a timely parable for our times on Sky Atlantic, a period horror on some other streaming service you probably had no idea even existed. Then it’s gone, consigned to the Great TV Show Dumper in the Sky, the victim of some mind-mangling budget/audience ratings mathematical ratio whatnot or, worryingly, axed because the sheer effort and expense of making it in a tricky post-COVID world isn’t worth the potential return. Since we were last together, a handful of shows I was quite taken with have bitten the dust as well as a couple I will shed no tears for. At the time of writing, Netflix has pulled the plug on the promising I Am Not Okay With This, a teen show with some real edge that I enjoyed despite my current reluctance to spend my time watching angry teenagers screaming at me from the TV screen (that’s very specifically you, Fort Salem), AMC’s dreary and rather stupid NOS4R2 has been staked after two seasons, and Amazon’s prohibitively-expensive cyberpunk drama Altered Carbon has been deleted despite the fact that its second season starred my mate Anthony Mackie (long, dull story). Netflix also axed something called The Society that I am sure I tried for a few episodes but have no memory of - so no loss there. But the axing that has most distressed me recently was the plug-pulling by Showtime of their lavish and captivating Penny Dreadful ‘sequel’ series