As I've mentioned before, I'm not in the habit of plunking myself down on the couch to watch television in its full, commercial-ed glory. Television, to me, is usually white noise I leave on for when I'm studying or researching my next purchase thoroughly by crawling through ten pages of Amazon reviews -- that is, until I started watching the below, recently.
First is Wayward Pines, a one-hour supernatural/sci-fi thriller drama on FOX that's starring my second-favorite 80s poster boy, Matt Dillon. As a Secret Service agent sent to a nondescript town in Idaho to investigate the disappearance of his former partner, he finds himself to be whisked away, enveloped deeply into the strange town's mythos with no way out. Literally. I hear it's deeply inspired by Twin Peaks, which alas, I have never seen. In any case, it's compelling enough that I've never been able to tear myself away from watching the story unfold. So much is packed into every single episode that I suspect binge-watchers will love this series.
I never understood the appeal of Eric Dane when he was on Grey's Anatomy (truth be told, I wasn't too into the show anyway). Then came The Last Ship on TNT last year, which I'd only just started watching a month ago. The storyline is evenly paced and provides just enough surprise to keep the viewers on its toes in watching a Navy ship, one of the last in a post-apocalyptic society thanks to a seemingly unstoppable virus, attempt its journey in helping save the world. There's an irritating side-romance for those of you who find it crucial to a show, but it's just off-the-radar enough for the action fans.
Rami Malek left an indelible impression on the HBO war drama The Pacific, and he's doing phenomenal work as the main character on Mr. Robot, on USA. As a cyber-security engineer, his Eliot is a paranoid, emotionally fragile, and sensitive millenial who's struggling to fit into, what he sees, a "flawed" society that has become a muddled-up, capitalist and materialistic society. Through an underground hacking group, he's now got the chance to either shift the tide or try to wake up the rest of society to the "evils" of commercialism...it's a crazy, intense drama that's only on its fourth episode and I can never tear my eyes away from the screen. Its technologically accurate plot is never too convoluted, the acting is A+, and the timing of its concept could not have been more impeccable. Basically, it's the 2015 Fight Club meets The Social Network.
Time to take a breather from the intense shows above for something lighter. The UK has a show called First Dates which one can watch online, about...first dates. Having an interactive background in which viewers choose to match submitted profiles of hopeful daters on the show's website, the episodes follow a few pairs on their first-ever encounter on a dinner date. The daters also assess each other at the end of the date, and it gets either super awkward or super sweet as some people are meant for each other on paper, but to put them physically in the room together is like watching a ticking grenade about to go off. As a psychology major, human behavior has always been a passion of mine, and to watch something that delves into the psyche of people trying to suss out compatibility for one another is captivating. It proves that ultimately, human behavior is impossible to predict.