An archive of articles about US television programmes and production.
US TV
Review: Dominion 1×1 (SyFy)
In the US: Thursdays, 9/8c, SyFy
It used to be that there was a reason for adapting movies into TV series. Not necessarily a good one, but there was a reason: people liked the movie so why not cash in on that? It always helped if it was a good movie, because that tricky difficult bit – coming up with a proven good idea and a source material that people would enjoy – was already out the way.
So I’m at an absolute loss to understand Dominion. SyFy might as well have beamed onto our screens a picture of a six-legged cat attacking Luke Goss from Bros with a packet of instant custard and a small porcelain statue of the Ayatollah Khomeini and that still would have made more sense than Dominion.
Remember the 2010 movie Legion, in which Paul Bettany was involved in a war on Earth among the angels after God absconds? Liar. Of course you don’t. Even if you had seen it, your brain would have tried to purge the whole unpleasant experience from your memory. You’re probably just thinking of season five of Supernatural. Easy mistake to make.
Fact: There are literally no fans of Legion. None whatsoever. Science has proven this.
But supposing you were bitten by a rabid bat and in your fevered state, your memory became clear, you suddenly remembered Legion and you decided to make a TV version of it. Wouldn’t you want to at least call it Legion or maybe have something in common with the original movie?
Not so with SyFy. Dominion it is and the whole show is set decades after that war between the angels. Humanity is now living in semi-feudal socities sealed off inside gated cities, while humans possessed by lower angels, particularly those in league with the evil archangel Gabriel (cough, cough, The Prophecy, cough, cough), try to assail those cities and infiltrate them.
Meanwhile, there’s a prophecy of a saviour child who will come to end the stalemate and the war (cough, cough… oh, done this already). Except no one’s quite sure where the good archangel Michael hid him.
Throw in something about nuclear reactors, Anthony Head from Buffy and Alan Dale from Neighbours as human leaders pairing their offspring off with each other, missing dads with angelic script on their bodies, a bit of Battlestar Galactica, a bit of Mad Max, an angelic orgy, some sword fights, some gun fights, some anti-aircraft batteries, some Las Vegas cage-fighting and a cast of British, Australian and South African actors faking US accents for no good reason and without much success and you have just the first two episodes of Dominion – a candidate for the title of ‘worst TV programme ever made’.
Here’s a trailer.
