New Exciting TV Shows Coming This Fall – Thriller and Sci-Fi
September 12, 2011 Leave a Comment
The Secret Circle. In this twisty tale from Vampire Diaries exec producer Kevin Williamson, newly orphaned Cassie (Britt Robertson) learns she's a teen witch who must reluctantly bind powers with five classmates and uncover what happened to their parents 16 years ago — when many of them, also witches, died — so they can protect themselves. Naturally, there's forbidden love: Cassie and already-attached Adam (Thomas Dekker) are ''written in the stars,'' though Robertson cautions, ''that doesn't mean exactly what you may think.'' And two parents (Natasha Henstridge and Queer as Folk's Gale Harold) have an agenda that will get a little bloody. ''This is how I want to see this man,'' Williamson says of Harold. ''I want to see him be devilish and delicious again.'' Sept. 15
Terra Nova opens in 2149 amid a Chicago landscape blighted by pollution and the destructive effects of global warming. Residents must wear masks to breathe, and the sight of an orange can set a family like the Shannons — Jim and Elisabeth (Life on Mars' Jason O'Mara and British actress Shelley Conn) and their children, Josh (Landon Liboiron), Maddy (Naomi Scott), and Zoe (Alana Mansour) — alight with glee. Things are bleak. But the recent discovery of a fracture in time has prompted a series of ''Pilgrimages'' filled with brave (or perhaps foolhardy) folk who embark on a one-way trip to Terra Nova, a settlement on prehistoric, Cretaceous-period Earth where they can literally start fresh. Desperate, the Shannons decide to go. Jim, a former police officer, hasn't seen his brood in two years, since he was jailed when population-control officers learned about his third child, a no-no in dystopian Chicago. (''A Family Is Four!'' trumpet the government's population-control propaganda billboards.) The Shannons come under the cagey leadership of Commander Nathaniel Taylor (played by grizzled Avatar baddie Stephen Lang, who was handpicked by executive producer Steven Spielberg), the inaugural resident. There's also a rogue group of residents called the Sixers that keeps attacking the settlers for unknown reasons, not to mention those pesky dinosaurs, which hover just outside the camp's not-quite-impenetrable barrier fence. ''If the Shannons can survive,'' says exec producer Brannon Braga, ''maybe humanity has a chance by extension. That notion mirrors what the whole show is about, which is second chances. Humanity has been given a second chance to do things right.'' Sept. 26
American Horror Story. The Harmon family — husband Ben (Dylan McDermott), wife Vivien (Connie Britton), and daughter Violet (Taissa Farmiga) — moves into an old Los Angeles house with a creepy neighbor (Jessica Lange) and an even creepier basement. While it sounds like the beginnings of a fairly standard scary movie, it doesn't even begin to describe how capital-C crazy this Story, created by Glee's Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk, becomes. ''There's no place for the word typical anywhere,'' says Britton (Friday Night Lights). ''That's the thing about this show — it sort of defies explanation.'' When Story isn't trying to scare the pants off you, it likes to showcase its characters without pants: Vivien has sex with a man in rubber fetish suit, and Ben pleasures himself while being spied on by a badly burned man (True Blood's Denis O'Hare) — who, by the way, warns Ben that the house drove him to commit murder. Oct. 5
