Paper Girls by Brian K. Vaughan & Cliff Chiang

1 November 1988. Erin Tieng, a new resident of Stony Stream, on the outskirts of Cleveland, Ohio, is starting her new role delivering newspapers. Falling afoul of Halloween revellers, she joins forces with three other paper girls for mutual protection: Mac, KJ and Tiffany. The girls find their job complicated by the normal problems: creepy residents, overzealous cops, bullies and, obviously, a trans-temporal war between two different groups of time travellers from the far and even further futures. Sucked into a conflict spanning millions of years, the four girls have to work out how to survive, get home and prevent the annihilation of the universe. And get their papers delivered on time.

Paper Girls was an American comic book published between 2015 and 2019. Written by Brian K. Vaughan, better-known as the writer of the epic science fiction saga known as, er, Saga, the series has become a cult hit over the years. Amazon started adapting the show in 2022, creating a first season that was well-cast and excellently paced with some intriguing variances from the source material whilst also remaining faithful to the big picture. Obviously, being good, it could not be allowed to survive beyond a single season.

The original comic series was collected into a single volume a few years back, large enough to be used to stun a yak if wielded correctly. Read as a single piece, Paper Girls is relentless in its pacing. Every issue throws new ideas, new factions, new characters (or different versions of existing ones) and new creatures at the reader. Weird alien beings from another dimension? Sure. Dinosaurs? Obviously! Older versions of the main characters suffering from existential and mid-life crises? Go wild. This turns the book into a compelling page-turner, if an occasionally confusing one. Unlike the well-paced Saga, it's sometimes easy to lose the thread of what's going on in Paper Girls, what each faction is after, what resources they have access to and so forth.

In a way that increases the reader's empathy with the core quartet of girls, who sometimes get as lost in the morass of competing timelines, alternate selves and wars being fought for obscure reasons that haven't even happened yet. Our central quartet are grounded, interesting characters who grow and learn from their crazy experience. Sure, maybe they take the insane events a little too easily in their stride (the TV show works a bit better by slowing down the craziness, giving them more time to adjust to what's happening), but that also feels true to the 1980s SF movies the comic feels like it's homaging.

Ultimately the crazy SF antics are a backdrop to the simple notion of adolescent friendship. As Stephen King said, the friendships you form in later life are nothing like the ones you form at and before the age of 13 or so, and the whole book feels like it revolves around that idea. This gives the story universality, but can feel a bit like an overtrodden path, especially as contemporary projects like the superficially similar Stranger Things (which started after Paper Girls but obviously got a lot more attention) also went down the same route. But universal narratives which a lot of people can relate to remain powerful, especially if attached to the furniture of combat robots, weaponised lizards and religions emerging from modern corporate entities.

Paper Girls: The Complete Story (****) is a fun, breathless read, if sometimes a tad overwhelming or confusing. The well-drawn central characters pull the narrative back on course when it threatens to meander, and there's enough crazy SF antics to keep genre fans entertained. The book is available now. 

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PAPER GIRLS cancelled at Amazon, despite being excellent

Sadly, but perhaps inevitably, Paper Girls has been cancelled at Amazon after a single season.

The show launched in late July to critical acclaim, but decidedly muted viewing figures. Amazon's marketing for the show was lacklustre, as Amazon shifted its marketing efforts towards the decidedly less-accomplished but staggeringly more expensive Rings of Power, which launched on 2 September, and its marketing seemed custom-designed to make the initially 1980s-set show look like a Stranger Things rip-off (despite Paper Girls' source material predating Stranger Things and the story not being anything like it).

As I said in my review, Paper Girls was the rare comic book adaptation that dramatically improved its (oft-messy and underdeveloped) source material by focusing much more on characterisation, whilst also ensuring a solid amount of plot development and action in each episode. The show also featured superb performances by seasoned hands Adina Porter, Ali Wong, Nate Corddry and Jason Mantzoukas, but outstanding turns by its four young leads: Camryn Jones, Riley Lai Nelet, Sofia Rosinsky and Fina Strazza. I suspect great things are ahead for all of them.

The show was produced by Legendary Television for Amazon but it does not appear that there's any hope of another channel or streamer taking on the project. Fortunately, the graphic novel by Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang remains available for anyone wanting closure on the story.

Paper Girls: Season 1

 November 1st, 1988. Erin Tieng starts her first-ever early morning paper round, to the distress of her over-protective mother. She meets three other paper girls doing the same neighbourhood: Tiffany Quilkin, Mac Coyle and KJ Brandman. Their first challenges are late-night revellers and pranksters not over Halloween, followed by an escalation to getting involved in a temporal war spanning thousands of years. The girls have to navigate the timelines to find a way home, whilst also learning maybe far more than they should about their own personal futures.

Paper Girls started life as a comic by Brian K. Vaughn and Cliff Chiang, which launched in 2015. The comic ran for 30 issues, ending in 2019 and wracking up significant critical acclaim along the way, including five Eisner Awards. Along with Stranger Things - which launched on Netflix ten months later - the comic was credited as being part of a wave of 1980s nostalgia-driven properties. Unlike Stranger Things, Paper Girls was credited for interrogating its nostalgia in a deeper way, and shining a light on the less pleasant aspects of the time period.

The television adaptation of Paper Girls is that rarest of beasts: a television adaptation that significantly improves on its source material. The same creative team as the brilliant Halt and Catch Fire are involved, so are no strangers to the 1980s nostalgia bandwagon with a darker and more cynical twist. But Paper Girls works primarily because the writers have the confidence to slow the comic's manic pace and focus more on character development. The comic is infamous for being relentless, throwing new ideas, time periods, factions and characters into the mix like a demented chef with a superfast new blender, which was both invigorating but also risked becoming seriously confusing at times. The TV show isn't slow-burning by any means, but it does know it doesn't have to be at full throttle all the time.

The show follows the comic in zeroing in on the central cast of four characters: Erin, Mac, KJ and Tiffany. It also achieves the near-impossible of finding the perfect cast to embody them: Riley Lai Nelet, Sofia Rosinsky, Fina Strazza and Camryn Jones respectively. These young actresses nail their characters from the opening moments and across the season rise to the challenge of having to drag them through the emotional wringer as they learn about their own futures, occasionally having arguments with their older selves about how their lives are nothing like what they had imagined.

They are ably supported by a top-notch supporting cast, led by Ali Wong and Sekai Abeni as the older versions of Erin and Tiffany, with the actresses doing great jobs of making them appear to be the same people separated by decades (shades of Yellowjackets, except the two incarnations of each character get to meet one another). There's also fantastic support by Adina Porter (True Blood, The 100), Nate Corddry (For All Mankind) and Jason Mantzoukas (Parks & Recreation, Brooklyn Nine Nine).

The show succeeds by mixing its time-travelling, crazy SF antics with more human stories. Erin dreams of graduating from college and becoming the first Asian-American President of the United States; she occasionally breaks from the action to filter events through an imagined Presidential TV debate with Ronald Reagan (the CG Reagan is the show's weakest link, effects-wise). KJ is worried that her future will be determined by her controlling parents. Tiffany dreams of going to a top university and using her intelligence for good purposes. Destitute Mac doesn't even know what her future could be. As each of them discovers their destinies, they have to confront the people they're going to be (literally) and what choices they can make in the past to change things for the better. This theme is a minor element in the comics but becomes a much bigger focus in the TV show.

But the time-travelling, crazy SF elements are still here and they show up in a big way. City-sized spaceships, raging mech fights, gun battles between time-travelling armies and dinosaurs (!) are all present and correct, just slowed down a bit and given more weight than in the comics.

The series starts well, ticks along nicely and ends on a hell of a cliffhanger. The cast is exemplary, the writing is strong and the effects are superb, not being allowed to overwhelm the show as they have for other properties. Above all, the show knows how to use its time-travelling premise to tell really human stories. The only weak link is that the throttled-down pace is maybe a tad too throttled-down, and the main storyline feels like it goes on a break a few times until they get back on track.

Paper Girls (****½) is the rare example of a TV adaptation that improves on its source material to become a compelling watch. It is available now on Amazon Prime Video worldwide.

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Amazon releases first trailer for PAPER GIRLS and confirms airdate

Amazon have released the first (short) trailer for their upcoming adaptation of the Paper Girls comic series.

The comic, written by Brian K. Vaughan and drawn by Cliff Chiang, ran from 2015 to 2019 and told the story of four teenage girls in 1988 who are inadvertently involved in a conflict between two groups of time-travellers. The resulting chaos sees them displaced to multiple time periods, meeting later versions of themselves and trying to stay alive whilst also ending the temporal war and restoring the increasingly fractured timeline. Along the way they also have to navigate more traditional coming-of-age problems.

The TV version of the story stars Sofia Rosinsky as Mac Coyle, Camryn Jones as Tiffany Quilkin, Fina Strazza as KJ Brandman and Riley Lai Nelet as Erin Tieng, with Ali Wong playing her older self.

Paper Girls lands on Amazon Prime Video on 29 July.

Amazon releases first teaser for PAPER GIRLS

Amazon TV has released the first teaser for its upcoming series Paper Girls, based on the comic series by Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang.

Paper Girls ran from 2015 to 2019 and attracted critical acclaim, solidifying Brian Vaughan's position as one of the world's premier comic book writers (along with his work on Y: The Last Man, Runaways and Saga). Beginning on Halloween, 1988, the story follows four teenage girls in Stony Stream, Ohio (a suburb of Cleveland) who deliver papers in their spare time for extra money. The girls are inadvertently caught up in a temporal war involving two factions from different periods in the future, and find themselves travelling between different periods of the past and future in an effort to stop the conflict.

The series stars Sofia Rosinsky as Mac Coyle, Camryn Jones as Tiffany Quilkin, Riley Lai Nelet as Erin Tieng and Fina Strazza as KJ Brandman. Other castmembers include Ali Wong and Nate Corddry. The series was filmed between May and October 2021.

Paper Girls should debut on Amazon Prime Video later this year.

Y: THE LAST MAN TV series dropped by FX

In a surprising move, FX has decided not to proceed with a second season of Y: The Last Man, its adaptation of Brian K. Vaughan's much-lauded comic book series. The decision is especially startling as it was taken when only seven of the ten episodes had aired in the United States, and six worldwide. Typically such decisions would only be taken or announced once the whole season was available, so as not to put people off watching the rest of the season.

Vaughan's Y: The Last Man comic book series, co-created and drawn by Pia Guerra, ran from 2002 to 2008 and was a marked early success in the post-apocalyptic comic genre (Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead debuted a year later). The comic posits a world where every single mammal with a Y chromosome (even sperm) has instantly dropped dead or become unviable, apart from two: the titular Yorick Brown and his pet monkey, Ampersand. The two find themselves at the mercy of the surviving female population, some of whom want to clone them, others who want to use their genetic material to create a cure, and a nihilistic cult which wants to kill him and end any hope of survival for the human race. The comic was applauded for its unpredictable story turns.

There were several attempts to bring the show to the screen before FX landed the rights in 2015. Development was repeatedly stymied by changes in personnel and disputes between the studio and various showrunners on the tone of the show. A pilot was filmed in 2018, which created a mixed reaction at the network. Eliza Clark finally landed the showrunner gig in 2019 and was able to steer the first season into production. However, the production period for the show then ran into problems and delays resulting from the COVID pandemic before finally concluding in July 2021, three years after shooting on the pilot began. The show began airing last month after a further change, a last-minute move from FX itself to American streaming service Hulu.

The show has received fairly mixed reviews, with a common consensus being that the opening episodes are too grim and humourless before the show is allowed to breathe in later episodes. Other criticisms include the writing for protagonist Yorick Brown, which makes him very unlikeable for large chunks of the season, and a scattergun narrative that careens between three storylines (Yorick on the move, his sister who has fallen in with a cult and his mother's precarious position as the President of the United States) with some severe pacing issues. Some critics also noted that the show's grimdark tone is not necessarily the best fit for the world in general right now, and that also some of the show's thunder and power has been stolen by several other post-apocalyptic shows, including The Walking Dead and its two spin-offs, as well as the recent mini-series version of The Stand. However, critical appreciation for the series has grown over the course of the season, with special praise reserved for Ashley Romans' powerful performance as Agent 355.

The actual reasons for the cancellation are unclear - FX has not commented so far - but it might be that the show's initial release has simply not delivered the required viewing figures on Hulu and, worldwide, Disney+. The delays have meant that the show is very expensive and it needed to be a massive hit right out of the gate.

For my part, the show started sluggishly but has picked up momentum over the course of the season and the story has become more interesting. Certainly the source material, if adapted well, has the potential to take the show on a wild ride which should avoid comparisons with other post-apocalyptic series.

Showrunner Eliza Clark has noted that they have the opportunity to take the project elsewhere, and it may be possible to save the show on another network or streaming service. The show has picked up a few high-profile fans, with Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul star Bob Odenkirk revealing he's a fan on Twitter.

UPDATE: The Hollywood Reporter has the inside scoop on why the show was cancelled. There was a hard deadline of 15 October when FX had to decide to spend $3 million on renewing the cast contracts or not, and they decided they would not do that without a renewal decision. Since they did not have enough viewing figure data to make the call, they decided not to renew. It also sounds like FX may have become somewhat disillusioned with the project given its six-year gestation period and frequent changes of showrunner and actors.

However, FX are reportedly keen to help the show find a new home and it sounds like discussions are underway for Y: The Last Man to move to potentially HBO Max, which might be a better fit for it. This is unusual given that FX is part of the Disney family and the show could perhaps move somewhere else within its empire, but a sign of good faith that FX has in the production team. Given that the cast contracts have now been terminated and the cast could start getting other offers soon, such a transition would have to happen pretty quickly.

SAGA comic series to resume in January 2022

The comic book series Saga is to resume in January 2022. The series, written by Brian Vaughn and Fiona Staples, went on hiatus in 2018. The hiatus was originally meant to be for a year or so, but was extended by the COVID pandemic and the creators getting involved in other projects. However, Vaughn confirmed they were hard at work back on the series last year.

Saga began in 2012 and rapidly garnered both critical and commercial acclaim, becoming one of the biggest-selling comic book series of the decade in both monthly release and later collections (totalling more than 7 million sales). The series went on hiatus after issue #54, the planned exact halfway point of the entire story, on an absolutely massive cliffhanger.

The series begins with two soldiers from different sides in an interstellar war, Marko and Alana, meeting and falling in love. They have a child, Hazel, who might be a symbol of hope and peace, and for that reason people on both sides want her and her parents dead. Various bounty hunters are assigned to the task, which is made more complicated by both Marko and Alana's formidable skills and by the battery of weird and wonderful allies they build up whilst on the run.

Saga #55 will be a double-length, 44-page special and will hit shelves on 26 January.

Brian K. Vaughan's Y: THE LAST MAN to hit screens on 13 September

After years in development hell, a protracted development process involving a pilot that had to be heavily reshot and then production delays due to a pandemic, Brian K. Vaughan's Y: The Last Man finally has a release date and trailer.

The series is set in a world where, in one single moment, every living mammal on the planet with a Y chromosome drops dead, including sperm and embryos. With, to all intents and purposes, every man on the planet dead, the remainder of humanity grapples with the prospect of extinction and also the sheer difficulty in keeping everything running when ever other member of the species has expired. As chaos spreads and civilisation threatens to unravel, it is revealed that two Y-bearing mammals have survived...and are now the #1 target for every government, scientist and nutcase in the world.

The original comic series ran for sixty issues between 2002 and 2008. It made Vaughan's name, paving the way for his later work on the TV show Lost and later comic series including Paper Girls and the massively successful Saga.

The TV version is executive produced by Eliza Clark and stars Diane Lane as President Jennifer Brown, Ben Schnetzer as Yorick Brown, Ashley Romans as Agent 355, Diana Bang as Dr. Allison Mann, Olivia Thirlby as Hero Brown, Juliana Canfield as Beth DeVille and Marin Ireland as Nora Brady.

Y: The Last Man will debut on 13 September on FX on Hulu. International broadcast partners have not been revealed, though due to a deal with the BBC in the UK, it is likely to air on the BBC and iPlayer streaming service there.

SAGA due to resume soon

Brian K. Vaughan has confirmed that Saga, the bestselling, multi-award-winning comic he's been working on with Fiona Staples since 2011, will resume in the near future.

54 issues of the comic were released between 2012 and 2018, when the title went on hiatus at what Vaughan claimed was the pre-conceived exact halfway point of the story. Originally the hiatus was planned to last around two years, but has been extended by various issues (including the COVID pandemic).

Vaughan and Staples report they have been hard at work on new issues, which hopefully should be available soon.

Wertzone Classics: Saga - Compendium One by Brian K. Vaughan & Fiona Staples

Alana and Marko were born on different sides of the devastating war between Landfall and its satellite, Wreath. The war rages across the galaxy, consuming world after world, with no official contact between the two sides. But Alana and Marko have, somehow, become lovers and had a child, Hazel, showing that more than just coexistence is possible. This has made them the most dangerous, wanted fugitives in the galaxy and dozens of skilled hunters and assassins are on their tail.

Saga is the story of a girl named Hazel, who is born and grows up under decidedly unusual circumstances. This small-scale story is a window into a much larger and more epic...well, saga. It takes in androids (here depicted as humanoids with televisions for heads), assassins, lie-detecting cats, sex, magic, guns, wooden spaceships, drugs, superheroes and cyclopses. There's so much going on in Saga that it's impossible to convey its sheer scope succinctly.

The comic book's writer is Brian K. Vaughan, late of Y: The Last Man, Paper Girls and his work in television (on Lost and Under the Dome) and its artist is Fiona Staples (also responsible for a recent Archie relaunch). Both had reasonable careers before Saga, but it does feel like this is the project that both had been waiting for, something to take both their careers to the next level. Vaughan's writing is relaxed and confident (some of the misjudgements in tone that plagued early Y are here absent) and Staples' artwork is brimming with character and colour. The combination of the two is potent, resulting in a gripping and page-turning experience.

Saga is a family saga first and foremost, as we see Hazel being raised by her parents: Marko, a pacifist who keeps being forced back into violence and Alana, a rebel without a cause who has suddenly found one (and then two). The cast expands slowly, bringing in Marko's parents, a ghost-turned-baby-sitter, two reporters, a trashy romance author and a lot more besides. The story also follows the lives of several antagonists, most notably the bounty hunter known as the Will (and his companion, the meme-generating Lying Cat) and the noble, mildly psychotic android nobleman, Prince Robot IV. Over the course of these 54 issues the story twists and turns unexpectedly, all narrated with aplomb by the now grown-up Hazel.

This flashback device means that we know Hazel lives to see the end of the story, but everyone else is at risk. And really at risk. The series shows a George R.R. Martin Plus level of willingness to kill off established characters and bring in new ones at the drop of a hat. No-one is safe, which becomes increasingly clear as the series continues and long-running mainstays are dispatched, sometimes very unceremoniously indeed.

Whilst the story has a good line in carnage, it also has a great deal of heart. The series dwells a lot on the idea of family, not just biological but also accumulated, the lifelong friends we make along the way and those recurring people who keep showing up unexpectedly. Saga's grand science fantasy, war-torn backdrop is a compelling part of the experience, but the more interesting theme the series explores is that all of us - every single one - are the protagonist of our own personal saga, and how we live our lives determines how our roles will be seen by others: hero, villain, morally ambiguous bounty-hunter or bit-part extra.

Saga (*****) is a love story, a war story, a tragedy, a comedy, sometimes a vivid fever dream, often a touching story of family and childhood. It's an adult story about life, loss, literature and lovesickness. It's about the appreciation of fine boardgames and finer friends. It's certainly one of the best slices of science fiction and fantasy produced in this rapidly closing decade. Compendium One is available now in the UK and USA.

Note: Compendium One is meant to gather the entire first half of Saga into one (relatively) easy-to-read collection. The first 54 issues of the comic book are collected here, totalling 1,328 pages. Saga had previously been available as six-issue collections and larger hardcover volumes (each combining three collections), but this marks a good opportunity to jump aboard the Saga hype train if you haven't been sold on it so far. Compendium One is obviously huge though, and as a paperback-only release (for now) it puts a bit of a strain on the binding, which I can't see surviving too many rereads, especially if you're transporting it around. On that basis, the hardcover volumes which collect eighteen issues at a time (into still-chunky 400-page volumes) may be a better choice. It's also worth noting that Saga went on extended hiatus after issue 54 was released in mid-2018 and isn't due back until some time in 2020. From that point, it'll likely be another seven years until the series ends and another year or two beyond that before we get Compendium Two. More impatient readers might prefer to follow the volume format to get to the end of the story faster.

Cast announced for Y: THE LAST MAN TV adaptation

Or, more accurately, the cast was announced back in July and I missed it at the time.

Y: The Last Man, originally a graphic novel series by Saga writer Brian K. Vaughan, opens with the death of every single male mammal on the planet with a Y-chromosome, apart from Yorick Brown and his pet monkey, Ampersand. The sixty-issue comic series explores the aftermath of this event, with various factions battling to take control of Yorick, kill him, or use him to repopulate the human race.

The principle roles for the series have been cast as follows:

• Barry Keoghan (Dunkirk) will play the protagonist, Yorick Brown, the last man alive.
• Diane Lane (The Cotton Club, Chaplin, Man of Steel) will play Senator Jennifer Brown, Yorick's mother and a high-ranking member of the US government following the disaster.
• Imogen Poots (V for Vendetta, 28 Weeks Later) will play Hero Brown, Yorick's sister who falls in with an extremist group following the disaster.
• Lashana Lynch (Captain Marvel) will play Agent 355, a member of a top-secret American intelligence organisation who is - reluctantly - tasked with protecting Yorick.
• Juliana Canfield (Succession) will play Beth, Yorick's girlfriend who is in Australia when the disaster strikes and is subsequently stuck there.
• Marin Ireland (Sneaky Pete) will play Nora, the US President's right-hand woman and confidante.
• Amber Tamblyn (Two-and-a-Half Men, Django Unchained) will play Mariette Callows, the daughter of the US President and a new character created for the TV series.
• Ampersand the monkey will be portrayed through the medium of CGI.

The pilot episode of the show is shooting now and, if ordered to series, will debut on FX in 2019. The current plan is for the TV series to just be named Y, apparently due to concerns over confusion with the recently-cancelled Last Man on Earth.

Under the Dome: Season 1

The town of Chester's Mill is sealed off from the rest of the world by an invisible dome. The inhabitants - and various visitors - have to manage dwindling supplies and social disorder whilst trying to figure out how to escape.

We live in a golden age of television, with TV shows pushing further in crafting excellent narratives and creating compelling characters out of even the most mundane of situations. Rising budgets and production values mean that TV shows now often look like movies, sometimes with big movie stars opting for the less-lucrative but more creatively and artistically rewarding opportunities to slowly explore and develop characters over hours and maybe years. It's a great time to be a TV fan.

Under the Dome therefore stands as a stark warning that we should not be complacent or overconfident that this is a state that will last forever. Under the Dome is a horrible show, so terrible that on a fundamental level all involved with it must know how bad it is, and therefore can only have made it deliberately as a warning to others to stay on the ball and avoid this show's pitfalls.

Under the Dome is based on Stephen King's quite excruciatingly awful novel of the same name, but in a move that is actually impressive, is awful for completely different reasons. The primary weaknesses of King's novel - the ludicrous implausibility at how quickly everything disintegrates and its unhealthy obsession with raping Twilight fans (seriously Stephen, we know you're a Harry Potter fan but that's just juvenile) - are fortunately missing from the TV show. Brian K. Vaughan - the man credited with saving Lost from a dip in form during its early third season - has great credentials and is a good enough writer to know what to change from the book (i.e. almost everything apart from the dome itself and a few character names) to make it work on TV. But pretty much none of it does work.

The biggest problem is the total lack of decent, compelling characters. Our main lead appears to be Dale 'Barbie' Barbara, but he is a rather unsympathetic killer and thug. Actor Mike Vogel initially gives it his all, but after a couple of episodes seems to realise that the inexplicable lurches in his character's motivations aren't going away and decides to sleep-walk through the rest of the series. Rachelle Lefevre also gamely engages with her character of Julia before realising she doesn't have a character, just a cliche (unconventional journalist from out of town with totally amazing hair), and likewise phones it in. The young kids are more enthusiastic and get some credit for being the only people in town actually bothered about what the dome is and where it came from, but their lack of experience and some poor direction results in them lurching from painfully over-acting to massively underselling big moments.

There are some good points in the cast. Natalie Martinez's character of Linda has some bizarre character turns and is rather gullible at times, but she at least just about manages to sell the idea of a character cracking up from the stress of the situation (whether that was the aim or not). Dean Norris also brings some much-needed charisma to the antagonistic role of 'Big Jim' Rennie, even if some of his quite astonishing lines are delivered through teeth hugely gritted as he tries to forget he went from filming Breaking Bad to this mess (a drop in quality only comparable to Natalie Portman appearing in Black Swan and then Your Highness). However, the good work of others is undone by Alexander Koch as Junior. His utter lack of acting talent and the way he seems to have only three stand-by expressions he moves between, sometimes randomly, is almost hypnotic. It's certainly the worst performance by a regular in a TV series that I've seen in many, many years.

The writing is also awful. Brian K. Vaughan has some seriously good work to his name, but he seems unable to employ it here. Dialogue is expositionary, unconvincing and wooden in the extreme. You can predict how entire scenes will go - sometimes down to lines - from their opening moments. The show also starts back-pedalling from its premise - a bunch of people trapped together in a dome - immediately by periodically bringing in new characters and unconvincingly explaining they've been in hiding since the dome came down. When the writing doesn't even have the courage to deal with the basic premise of the show, there's a huge problem.

Under the Dome's first season (*½) is almost irredeemably bad. The writing is almost completely bad, the acting is mostly bad, very little about it (from character motivations to the supply situation to the utter lack of contact with the outside world after the third or fourth episode) makes any kind of sense and the whole thing feels like a big, dead, inert weight. A few flashes of competence from a couple of the actors are the only thing that makes watching it even remotely bearable. Still, it's a vast improvement on the novel.