The best young adult show on TV continued to be MTV’s Teen Wolf, which got progressively darker as its likeable young cast grew older. During the third season, high school werewolf Scott McCall (Tyler Posey) tried to help Stiles (Dylan O’Brien), who was possessed by an evil entity after returning from the dead, and Scott’s former girlfriend Allison (Crystal Reed) met a heroic demise saving her friends. Season 4 found Scott’s “Alpha” teaming up with unlikely allies and some new faces as the mysterious “Benefactor” used assassins to target the supernatural creatures of Beacon Hills.
The Clone Club (Tatiana Maslany in a variety of roles) found out more about their past and the sinister Dyad Group in the second season of the BBC America/Space series Orphan Black which, despite its vocal Internet supporters, attracted disappointing viewing figures.
Teenager Emma Alonso (Paolo Andino) moved to Miami, Florida, and discovered she was the “Chosen One” in Nickelodeon’s Every Witch Way, and an urban American teenager (Naomi Sequeira) and her extended family moved to the eponymous spooky English village in the Disney Channel’s four-part Evermoor.
The third series of BBC’s Wolfblood found the half-wolf school pupils still trying to hide their secret from Dr. Whitewood (Letty Butler) and the rest of humanity, while the third and final series of Wizards vs. Aliens featured teen schoolboy wizard Tom (Scott Haran) and his friends uncovering an alien zombie labour force and battling an old witch.
In Series 5 of BBC Wales’ Young Dracula, Vlad (Gerran Howell) finally met his human mother.
The thirteen unaired episodes of Cartoon Network’s Star Wars: The Clone Wars were finally shown on Netflix starting in March, along with the previous five seasons.
Meanwhile, Disney XD’s fourteen-part animated Star Wars: Rebels, about the rise of the Rebel Alliance, was set between Revenge of the Sith and the original Star Wars and even utilised some of Ralph McQuarrie’s previously unused concept designs. James Earl Jones, Frank Oz and Anthony Daniels all returned to voice their original movie characters.
Created by Patrick McHale and featuring the voices of Elijah Wood and Collin Dean, Over the Garden Wall was a ten-part fairy tale which aired over five consecutive evenings on Cartoon Network.
Inspired by Jonny Quest and other Hanna-Barbera shows, Adult Swim’s series of ten animated Mike Tyson Mysteries featured the former heavyweight boxer teaming up with his adopted daughter, an alcoholic pigeon and a friendly ghost.
Season 25 of Fox Network’s The Simpsons continued with an episode set thirty years in the future, one set in the Lego world, and another based around a voodoo doll. The show’s subsequent season celebrated its 25th Anniversary ‘Treehouse of Horror’ with three stories in which Bart and Lisa were transported to a demonic alternate universe, Homer was a member of A Clockwork Orange-style gang, and the dysfunctional family were visited by earlier 1980s incarnations of themselves. A couple of weeks later, the characters from Matt Groening’s cancelled companion show Futurama travelled back to the past to prevent Bart from destroying the future.
The Cartoon Network/Adult Swim’s unusually dark animated series Beware the Batman, teamed the Caped Crusader (voiced by Anthony Ruivivar) with a young female ninja warrior (Sumalee Montano) to battle such familiar foes as Harvey Dent/Two-Face (Christopher McDonald), Mr. Toad (Udo Kier), Metamorpho/the Golem (Adam Baldwin) and Ra’s Al Ghul (Lance Reddick).
ABC-TV/Pixar’s half-hour Christmas special, Toy Story That Time Forgot, found Woody (Tom Hanks), Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen) and the other toys were captured by the Battlesaurs, an army of prehistoric reptilian action figures.
During the shortened eighth and final season of the USA Networks’ hugely entertaining Psych, Gus (Dulé Hill) thought his nightmares were coming true in an episode featuring Bruce Campbell.
Season 6 of ABC-TV’s Castle included an episode in which the eponymous author (Nathan Fillion) and his detective fiancée Beckett (Stana Katic) investigated a Carrie-like murder in a high school, before Castle’s car was forced off the road on their wedding day. Having returned for a seventh season with no memory of where he had disappeared to, Castle found himself involved in a murder committed by an invisible man and was transported by an Inca artefact to an alternative reality in which he had never met Beckett.
The Halloween episode of CBS-TV’s latest spin-off, NCIS: New Orleans, had Dwayne Pride (Scott Bakula) and his team investigating the death of a Naval Judge Advocate found in a cemetery with apparent vampire bites on her neck.
The second series of the BBC’s Father Brown found G.K. Chesterton’s mystery-solving priest (Mark Williams) called in to exorcise a supposedly haunted house, while Series 16 of ITV’s Midsomer Murders included an episode in which detectives Barnaby (Neil Dudgeon) and Nelson (Gwilym Lee) investigated a series of murders inspired by macabre images on a Medieval fresco discovered in a church crypt. Guest stars included Roy Hudd and Michael Jayston.
The third series of Death in Paradise on BBC featured a new detective (Kris Marshall, replacing Ben Miller) investigating murders on the Caribbean island of Sainte-Marie. Michelle Ryan guest-starred in an episode involving the death of a stand-in during the filming of a zombie movie.
The seventh season episode of Murdoch Mysteries (aka The Artful Detective), ‘Friday the 13th, 1901’, involved a series of killings at a remote cabin on a lake, while the Season 8 episode ‘The Death of Dr. Ogden’ dealt with a puzzle published by Edgar Allan Poe years earlier.
Written by, and featuring Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith, Inside No.9 was a six-part anthology series on BBC 2 set inside various buildings and rooms with that number. The majority of the half-hour episodes were dark gems of macabre humour and the final episode, about a teenage babysitter’s night of terror, was full-on Gothic horror. The show’s impressive list of guest stars included Gemma Arterton, Oona Chaplin, Tamsin Greig, Denis Lawson, Helen McCrory, Sophie Thompson and Timothy West.
Sky Arts’ half-hour short film series Playhouse Presents included Peter Straughan’s black comedy Nosferatu in Love, which starred Mark Strong as an actor on location in the Czech Republic who had a nervous breakdown when his wife left him and went on a journey of self-discovery dressed as a toothy vampire.
As part of the same series, Richard Wilson and Simon Callow’s elderly space explorers found themselves at the mercy of their ship’s computer (silkily voiced by Robert Vaughn) when their mission turned out to be no longer relevant in Lawrence Gough’s Space Age.
Despite featuring on-screen interviews with Christopher Lee, Douglas Wilmer, Nicholas Meyer, Benedict Cumberbatch, the ubiquitous Mark Gatiss and others, BBC 4’s hour-long Timeshift documentary, How to Be Sherlock Holmes: The Many Faces of a Master Detective featured some surprising omissions, and an annoying narration by veteran Peter Wyngarde.
The independently produced Doc of the Dead was described as “the definitive zombie culture documentary”. It featured interviews with, amongst others, Charles Adlard, Max Brooks, Bruce Campbell, Alex Cox, Stuart Gordon, Robert Kirkman, Simon Pegg, George A. Romero and John Russo, but nothing about the Italian zombi movies of the 1970s and ‘80s.