Central character Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) has left The Walking Dead , and no, he wasn’t killed by a horrific zombie maul, or in a protracted scene of human to human torment. Instead he left via a succession of in-episode accidents, before a last hurrah of heroism that will cement his position as leader-most-worthy, according to ‘his people’ anyway.

I thought this week would be a good week to finally talk about Charmed (The WB, 1998-2006, The CW, since 2018). It was Halloween, and part of my rituals of the day include watching the third season episode ‘All Halliwell’s Eve’ which imagines Halloween as ‘the witches’ holiday’, i.e. the day of the year when women’s power is celebrated.

Anthology Gothic horror series American Horror Story (henceforth AHS) has, since its inception, appropriated and paid nostalgic homage to a number of horror texts drawn both from TV and cinema.

I recently retired after more than 30 years of teaching. Much of those thirty years were spent teaching about television, both making TV and theorising about it.  For the last decade I was very much a TV studies person.

The new series of Doctor Who is notable for its inclusivity.  Much attention has rightly focused on the long-overdue casting of a woman to play the Doctor and on Jodie Whittaker’s predictably superb performance.  Those of us who believed that a woman Doctor was desirable, not only for gender equality but also to refresh Doctor Who , seem to have been vindicated.

Goliath . It began last year, and the second season became available this past northern summer. It’s on Amazon Prime, and boasts the signature of David E Kelley and Billy Bob Thornton, inter alios . The second season trailer brings home so much to me. I’ve stayed in the hotel where the protagonist lives and works. I’ve poked my nose into the sawdust-on-the floor cracker bar where he drinks.

About 20 minutes into ‘The Woman Who Fell to Earth’, the probationary PC Yasmin Khan (Mandip Gill) – provoked by her own recent alien encounters – returns to the station for an update on the evening’s activities: YASMIN: I’m just wondering whether there’s been anything else out of the ordinary tonight. RAMESH : It’s the nightshift in Sheffield. Everything’s out of the ordinary.

I’ll start this piece with a confession: that in recent years I’ve fallen slightly out of love with Doctor Who . I liked Peter Capaldi’s Doctor, though I felt he was never as well served by the stories and scripts he had to deal with – new Who ’s equivalent of Sylvester McCoy, perhaps? And the series never seemed to have a stable time on Saturday nights, having to accommodate a certain celebrity dance show.

For a long time The Doctor’s Aussie fans had to wait longer than their UK counterparts for new episodes. The darkest times were around the first run of the Eccleston and Tennant era, where we once famously didn’t get our Christmas episode until close to Easter. There were, of course, other ways to time travel to achieve equality, but let’s just say this created a torrent of problems.

Jodie Whittaker’s debut as the thirteenth Doctor seems to have been a success. Among many others, Hannah Mays in the Guardian reported the high viewing figures for the first episode: An average of 8.2m viewers watched Whittaker’s first outing as the Doctor, beating the ratings for political thriller sensation Bodyguard, which attracted 6.7m viewers when it debuted in August.