The Walking Dead apparently doesn’t need Rick Grimes to survive AMC’s apocalyptic ax. It’s doing well enough on its own, according to the network, which has renewed cable’s premier zombie drama for a tenth season. 

AMC made the announcement on Twitter with a video featuring Samantha Morton’s Alpha and her creepy band of flesh-wearing Whisperers. Check it out below:

The renewal should quiet skeptics who have been wondering since the beginning of season 9 whether the show still has the legs to shamble on. It’s no secret that the last few years have been rough for The Walking Dead in terms of viewership. After the show posted its weakest ratings for a season premiere since season 2, with only 9.36 million viewers watching the season 9 opener, the viewership has continued to decline over the weeks, falling to 4.79 million during episode 7 before a slight improvement during the midseason finale, which posted 5.09 million viewers. 

But while it’s been a weak year in the ratings — although not as bad when compared to many of AMC’s other, more niche offerings — the show has continued to improve its storytelling. Under new showrunner Angela Kang, the series has seen three major shakeups that have brought back a bit of energy to the post-apocalyptic proceedings: the year-and-a-half time jump in the season opener, Rick and Maggie’s exit in episode 5, and a six-year time jump directly after that. 

Let’s not forget the introduction of the Whisperers, a new faction of villains that fans of the show have been clamoring for since last season. The debut of this twisted group left a major character dead and the lives of a few other beloved characters in limbo. The second half the season will flesh out the story of these knife-wielding maniacs and introduce their ruthless leader, Alpha, the show’s new big bad. It’s likely that we’ll get a few more deaths along the way, too…

The Walking Dead season 10 air date

The Walking Dead season 10 will arrive in October 2019. 

When you try to conjure an image in your mind that sums up Tom Clancy’s The Division 2, the upcoming second instalment in Ubisoft and Massive Entertainment’s RPG/shooter series, the first thing you think of probably isn’t an underground car park in the middle of Paris. That is, however, exactly where we went for a preview event of the game during the cold snap at the end of January.

Improbable as it may seem, this subterranean structure that once housed stationary vehicles was transformed into a post-apocalyptic bunker of sorts, with journalists from around the globe – wearing more layers than Joey from Friends when he donned Chandler’s entire wardrobe – huddled around portable heaters in between hands-on sessions with The Division 2.

With the pleasantries out of the way, and a presentation completed that promised big things, Den Of Geek was dropped into an early stage of the game on an Xbox One X. Picking up after the prologue (which we didn’t get to see), we were greeted by an ethereal montage of clips and concepts, which set the stage nicely and recapped the state of the world.

Seven months after disease brought society to its knees, Washington (the new stomping ground for this title) is divided between nice folk that want to rebuild and a triumvirate of street gangs that all want to rule the chaos. One of these gangs is attempting to take over the White House, which is currently housing a sizeable community of well-meaning survivors, and that’s where the brand new player character comes in.

Having selected a character design we were happy with (there seems to be an endless array of skins, spanning male and female options), we were dropped into a simple mission: reach the White House and defend it from these marauders. The game, assuming you already know the ropes thanks to The Division’s first instalment, throws you straight into combat. There’s no waiting around, which is fine by us.

It quickly becomes apparent that, whether you’ve played the first game or not, you’ll want to stick close to cover at all times. Whichever weapons and skills you’ve acquired – and there does seem to be loads of them, spanning familiar old-faithful options from the first game and heaps of fresh ideas – running straight towards your enemies rarely ends well. A gung-ho approach leads to your death, basically, pretty much every time.

You’ll want to stay hidden, then, inching closer to your enemies and taking them down when the opportunity presents itself. Once you’ve got to grips with these mechanics, which will come easy to seasoned veterans of the franchise, you shouldn’t find it too hard to halt the attack on the White House and put the community within it at ease. With that out of the way, you can take a look around the settlement, upgrade a couple of items and pick up your first proper mission. This task will send you out onto the streets of Washington DC, where danger is waiting at basically every crossroads.

Once you’ve fought and/or sneaked your way across town, and made a quick pit stop at another settlement (this one is an old theatre), the mission awaiting you is a fun one: battle your way to the top of a hotel, like a gun-toting reimagining of The Raid, and take down a big armoured baddie.

Fighting through the hotel’s various rooms and levels provides a neat early test of the player’s abilities, as well as showing off some decent graphics and imaginative mini-arenas. Some rooms are littered with smash-able items, while others provide only very limited places to cover. You’ll find yourself quickly sizing up a location and rushing to the best defendable vantage point, before picking off your enemies one by one.

Playing as a member of The Division, of course, means that you get a vast array of weapons and gadgets. There are some really fun ones, which we won’t spoil here, that come in very handy in tight spots. (The gadgets aren’t always easy to control, though, it’s worth noting.) You’ll also want to watch out for different sorts of enemies – some will stay at a safe sniper distance, while others will try to flank you and a handful of utterly unhinged adversaries will sprint and scream straight to your location.

The skills you honed on the way up come in very handy on the hotel’s roof, as you team up with another Division agent (and any online chums you might’ve brought with you) to take down a few waves of goons and their leader. He doesn’t go down easy, and will stalk you around the map, so you’ll want to move regularly and keep firing until his armour smashes off. It took us a few goes to get that bit right, but it sure did feel like an achievement – a triumph of the will and of sheer tactics – when we finally managed to fell him.

After a bit more open world exploration (there seems to be loads of side missions to pick up, and lots of ways to assist communities and save random strangers), we broke for lunch while the consoles were rejigged. Once we were done scoffing, it was time for something entirely different: checking out some endgame antics, which will keep players occupied after they’ve completed the main story.

As it turns out, the endgame content on The Division 2 will pit players (you can play in teams of four through online co-op) against an evil organisation known as Black Tusk. Remember in Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation when Simon Pegg dubbed The Syndicate an “anti-IMF”? There’s a similar vibe going on here, with the elite agents of Black Tusk clearly intended as the greatest challenge yet for the Division agents. Random street thugs they are not, packing an arsenal of heavy weapons and some very tactical thinking.

In the endgame, you’ll be able to visit two new locations to battle Black Tusk, as well as revisiting earlier locales and missions that have now been invaded by their villainy. In our hands-on preview, we got to see some really snazzy places: one area had an underground nightclub feel, with big flashing boxes that change colour scattered around; and, in a different mission, we got to fight Black Tusk in a planetarium’s picturesque observatory. Certainly, these skirmishes threw up new problems to solve, and they felt nicely different to the White House and hotel battles we’d tried in the main game.

Again, the difficulty was pitched just right, with a couple of casualties (rather than a frustratingly massive amount) occurring along the way to our eventual victory. Playing as a co-op team of four, which you can do on any of the missions in the game, we were able to revive each other in times of need and chat tactics throughout over headsets – well, in our case, the chat mainly consisted of swearing and apologising.

The co-op missions we tried were packed with plenty of enemies, numerous eye-catching environments and just the right amount of challenge to keep us engaged but not annoyed. There were lots of different types of danger peppered throughout, from foot-soldiers to drones to sizeable armoured adversaries, and this variety kept us on our toes. We never felt overpowered or overstocked with ammo, and we can easily imagine ourselves diving into these co-op missions again and again in the hope of properly mastering them.

We can imagine this endgame content being a really enjoyable experience for mates to tackle together, especially with the different classes of character you can select at this stage – in the endgame, you can either be a health-happy Survivalist, a bomb-chucking Demolitionist or a sniper-wielding Sharpshooter. Black Tusk may be made of tough stuff, but you’ve got plenty of options when it comes to taking them on.

There were a few moments during our time with the game in which The Division 2 didn’t quite feel fully polished, but perhaps that’s to be expected in a pre-release build of the title. The frame rate wasn’t always top notch and some of the dialogue felt quite stilted, and you could argue that the world doesn’t feel all that realistic given that the apocalypse is only supposed to have started seven months ago, but there certainly weren’t any fatal flaws here that put us off the game.

If anything, our main takeaway from this event is that it made a very strong case for The Division 2’s existence. The previous game in the series may not seem that old, especially given all the post-release support it received, but the big new world and all the fresh toys in The Division 2 – along with all those fun co-op missions – make this feel like a necessary addition to the Tom Clancy gaming franchise. And with the addition of Black Tusk, this sequel is sure to challenge gamers in ways that The Division didn’t.

We look forward to playing the whole thing, in the hope that a few of the kinks will be ironed out and that the elements we enjoyed will be stitched together well. The Division 2 is set for release on March 15th 2019 across PS4, Xbox One and PC, and, in the meantime, you’d better prepare yourself for some epic co-op action. 

Supernatural is about to join an elite group of scripted live action shows – those that have produced 300 episodes of television. Here, we celebrate some of those shows and the episodes they produced to mark milestones along the way.

We’re looking at scripted, live-action Western English-language shows aimed at general or adult audiences only (no soap operas, game shows, children’s cartoons, panel shows etc.). Both The Simpsons and Family Guy have run for well over 300 episodes and both have found innovative ways to celebrate them, but that’s another topic for another day.

Law & Order

Law & Order has a simple hook. The first half of each episode is a simple crime drama, following detectives solving a crime. However, rather than stop there, the second half of each episode shows us the court case – so the episode’s tension hinges not just on whodunnit, but whether justice will be served or not. The series aimed to be as realistic as possible within the confines of television drama, and often featured stories inspired by headline news.

While many of the scripted dramas we’re looking at have heavy soap opera style elements and arc plots relating to the relationships between characters, one thing many of them have in common is a core structure based around standalone episodes and stories told over just one hour (45 minutes if you take out the adverts). This means that viewers can dip in and out of the show if they choose to – they might miss some of the details of the characters’ relationships and development, but anyone can follow the basic story of any episode without needing to know the background. This means that new viewers can join in at any time, viewers who had drifted away from the show can come back to it, and viewers with busy lives can dip in and out without having to spend time catching up on every single episode. This is part of the key to Law & Order’s success, and on of the reasons its spin-off series Law & Order: Special Victims Unit has reached more than 400 episodes as well, and is still going.

100th episode: Law & Order didn’t really go in for celebrating milestone episodes, and several are fairly basic instalments of the show. In this 100th episode, a former Catholic priest is involved in the murder of an abortion doctor; based on the real life case of former Presbyterian minister Paul Jennings Hill.

200th episode: A man kidnaps is two children after being denied custody and has entirely controlled their lives and brainwashed them – a rather depressing episode.

300th episode: The team investigate multiple crimes on the same day – this is a bit more out of the ordinary, but it was a format they’d already used in an earlier Season 4 episode.

400th episode: The team investigate a con artist. The Law & Order team really don’t go in for celebrating milestone episodes. Law & Order: Special Victims Unit made a bit more effort with their 200th episode, which guest-starred Robin Williams, but that’s about it.

Original cast members in the 300th episode: None.

Probably jumped the shark when: Jerry Orbach left, shortly before his death from cancer.

CSI: Crime Scene Investigation

CSI is basically a cop show with a pseudo-scientific spin. Technically it’s not science fiction and anything featured in the show should be possible in reality, though anyone involved in forensic science – or any branch of science – will quickly tell you that it strays into the realm of fantasy more often than not. Still, while the method of detecting the crimes relies on sometimes fantastical forensic science, it remains at its heart a simple, fairly straightforward cop/detective show, with on-going story arcs surrounding the main characters and a Case of the Week format.

Cop shows are one of the two most promising genres you can make if you want a long-running series. By having the cast solve a new mystery each week, you keep audiences hooked for the duration of the episode, and keep them coming back for more on the promise of more mysteries to solve. The show can tackle a reasonably wide variety of subject matter, and CSI has often highlighted particular subcultures, special interest groups, careers and so on over the course of its stories (not always in a flattering way, considering it’s a crime drama!). Create a compelling enough main character or two and write some decent mysteries, and you’ve got a show that will run and run. And spawn half a dozen spin-offs. And then run some more.

100th episode: The team investigate the murder of a transgender woman. This one is really just a standard episode.

200th episode: A former student of Langston’s is murdered near a Mexican wrestling ring. This one makes some effort, with a victim connected to a principal character, and a special guest director, William Friedkin (director of The Exorcist) returning to direct a second episode following Season 8’s Cockroaches.

300th episode: The team investigates a cold case, and flashbacks show former main character Catherine Willows along with other team members from the era the show first started. The number 300 also appears at various points throughout the episode, and clips from earlier episodes were shown at the end.

Original cast members in the 300th episode: Paul Guilfoyle, Jorja Fox, Greg Sanders, Al Robbins, and Marg Helgenberger returned to guest star in the 300th episode.

Probably jumped the shark when: Grissom left in Season 9.

NCIS

NCIS (Naval Criminal Investigation Service) is a spin-off from JAG (Judge Advocate General), both created by US Marine Corps veteran (and Quantum Leap creator) Donald P. Bellisario. One of Bellisario’s skills as a writer is his ability to combine what is clearly fantasy with a grounded feeling. In his science fiction work, the elements of fantasy are more obvious; in his non-science fiction work, not unlike in CSI, the fantasy element consists of incidents that tend to be far more exciting than the day to day reality of the job depicted. Bellisario’s own experience in the Marine Corps in the 1950s allows him to ground these shows in just enough reality to make them feel real, while allowing the demands of television drama to enhance, enliven and shake them up.

JAG (very popular, but not quite as long-running as NCIS) had a format similar to Law & Order with a focus on courtroom drama but in the navy (something Bellisario had already explored in his Quantum Leap episode A Leap For Lisa). NCIS, however, follows civilian agents responsible for investigating crimes involving the navy. This means it follows a more traditional cop show format, which (like CSI) partly explains its longevity. NCIS also includes plenty of humour, which helps to keep audiences tuning in week after week. Mystery + unusual setting + humour = big success.

100th episode: Bit of an odd one, this – the 100th episode to air was Chimera, in which the team investigate a top secret research ship abandoned and left with one dead body on it. However, the episode intended to be the 100th was Requiem, in which Gibbs is visited by a childhood friend of his late daughter, and has a vision of his deceased wife and daughter while unconscious. The episodes were switched around because the 100th episode would air on October 30th and it was felt that Chimera was more suitable for Halloween.

200th episode: Gibbs is shot and his life flashes before his eyes, as well as an alternative future. This is classic celebratory milestone episode stuff, allowing for the return of departed cast members (including those whose characters had been killed off) and lots of character work for the show’s lead.

300th episode: The team must question a marine suffering from PTSD who is the sole survivor of an ambush during which a long distance sniper rifle was stolen. Although the main characters in NCIS are civilians, the show is based around the military, so it was good to see the show highlight a real military programme for helping veterans in a moving episode.

Original cast members in the 300th episode: Mark Harmon, Michael Weatherly, Pauley Perette, David McCallum.

Probably jumped the shark when: NCIS has shown an unusual ability to hang on to core cast members for a long period of time, but a couple have left over recent years, leading some viewers to feel the show is no longer the same.

ER

The other prime candidate for a long-running show is a medical drama, and ER is the quintessential medical drama. Like CSI, the series would highlight various subcultures and special interest groups from time to time. Each episode would cover several medical cases with reliably unpredictable outcomes – if audiences weren’t convinced that anyone could die by the attempted suicide of a major character in the pilot episode, the Season 1 episode in which a mother and baby both die in labour will have driven the message home.

Meanwhile, long-term viewers were hooked by the soap opera side of the show, with long-running storylines between various characters, dealing with romance, family life, dealing with the pressures of the job and so on bringing audiences back year after year. Although the cast turnover was fairly high, the cast was large enough that despite major high profile departures, there was a decent likelihood that there was at least one character remaining the viewers were interested in.

100th episode: The hospital invites its oldest living patient, who was born there 100 years earlier, for a tour to celebrate its centenary.

200th episode: Carter has a bad day but Pratt has a better night, and the two stories are spliced together in an innovative bit of formatting.

300th episode: The ER treats 300 patients in one day. The ER writers really liked to play with numbers in these episodes – and of course, the 300th patient ends up being a recurring character (Frank).

Original cast members in the 300th episode: None, though Yvette Freeman had been a recurring character since Season 1 and is in the 100th, 200th and 300th episodes.

Probably jumped the shark when: Of course, for a lot of people, the show was never the same after George Clooney left, others hung on until Julianna Marguiles left the following year, but one of the more popular opinions is that it really started to decline after Anthony Edwards’ departure in Season 8.

Grey’s Anatomy

Grey’s Anatomy is a bit like ER on steroids. It’s a medical drama with a heavy focus on the personal and romantic lives of the main characters, but with the ‘medical’ side of the medical drama scaled back a bit and everything else scaled up, though it’s a little less out there than it used to be. There probably won’t be another running storyline about a woman hallucinating her dead fiancée, including having intimate relations with him. We think.

Essentially, Grey’s Anatomy is as close to soap opera as scripted drama gets, and it keeps going for the same reasons as long-running soap operas. People get attached to characters they like and enjoy following their story, while the sometimes melodramatic storylines and unpredictable plot developments keep things interesting.

100th episode: Meredith and Derek are supposed to get married, but when Izzie is diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour, they give her and Alex their wedding. High soap opera drama was entirely suitable for this show’s 100th episode.

200th episode: The doctors throw a fundraising gala – essentially, everyone has a big party. So, pretty appropriate for a celebratory episode.

300th episode: Easter eggs for fans were hidden throughout the episode – most prominently, the doctors treated patients who reminded them of departed cast members, and Meredith saw a vision of her mother after winning an award.

Original cast members in the 300th episode: Ellen Pompeo, Justin Chambers, Chandra Wilson, James Pickens Jr.

Probably jumped the shark when: Of course the killing off of McDreamy lost a lot of viewers, but many others would say the rot set in earlier than that, perhaps as early as Season 6.

Doctor Who

Do we need to introduce Doctor Who and explain it to the readers of Den of Geek? No, I didn’t think so! As we all know, the show’s ability to tell stories set anywhere in time and space and to have its lead character entirely change their appearance and gender makes it pretty much evergreen.

Being British, Doctor Who doesn’t celebrate episode milestones, but rather anniversaries of 10, 20, 30 years and so on (incidentally, the tenth episode of the serial Day Of The Daleks is the 100th episode of Classic Who, while The Crimson Horror is the 100th episode of New Who).

These are nearly always multiple Doctor stories, in which timey-wimey shenanigans bring multiple incarnations of the Doctor together. Generally speaking, the Doctor will not entirely get along with his other selves, but will learn something from coming face to face with the person he used to be, and seeing multiple Doctors together is always a treat for long-term fans.

The Three Doctors: The Time Lords bring together the First, Second and Third Doctors to help defeat a vengeful Omega.

The Five Doctors (Children In Need special): Time Lord President Borusa drags the First, Second, Third, fourth (briefly) and Fifth Doctors into his quest for immortality.

The Two Doctors: The Sixth Doctor works to save the Second, and preserve the timeline.

Dimensions In Time (Children In Need special): The Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Doctors end up in a crossover with Eastenders.

The Day Of The Doctor: The War, Tenth and Eleventh Doctors come up with a plan to save Gallifray by bringing together the Doctor’s first thirteen incarnations (i.e. the First to Twelfth plus the War Doctor).

Original cast members in The Day Of The Doctor: None (except in still images) but William Russell, who played original companion Ian Chesterton, appeared as a security guard in the related drama special An Adventure In Space And Time.

Probably jumped the shark when: Every time the Doctor regenerates, some fans feel the show has entered a decline and will never be the same again. Overall, the Classic series declined in popularity following some of the writing choices around Colin Baker’s Sixth Doctor. New Who lost some viewers after the departure of Russell T Davis and David Tennant at the same time, though for the most part it is still going strong.

Supernatural

So what has helped Supernatural to join this elite group of scripted drama shows? It has a few things in common with some of these shows. For one thing, it has elements of a cop show. Laying ghosts to rest often involves solving the mystery of how they died, and Sam and Dean frequently pose as FBI agents (which is also an homage to The X-Files – exactly how Sam is qualified to perform an autopsy is never really explained). The high stakes drama of the medical shows is replicated in their attempts to save innocent victims from demons (plus the regular threat of the end of the world). Although Supernatural features complex ongoing plot arcs, it has never abandoned standalone episodes, so that viewers not caught up on the current storyline can still join in for special highly publicised episodes like last year’s Scoobynatural.

But perhaps most importantly, Supernatural also maintains the balance between fantasy and reality that we see in all these shows. The fantasy setting means that the fantastical elements are all the more obvious, but for all their dealings with djinn and dragons, Sam and Dean are grounded, down to earth characters who eat junk food, stay in terrible motels and hustle pool to make money. They feel real and relatable, and that’s what has allowed Supernatural to achieve a truly extraordinary feat – although third and fourth regular cast members have come and gone (Bela, Ruby, Castiel, Crowley) Supernatural has made it all the way to 300 episodes with the exact same core cast of two people that it started with. Considering how often fans feel a show has jumped the shark because a beloved original character has left, this is a key part of the series’ longevity.

100th episode: The 100th episode came in the middle of a particularly intense story arc, so the plot continued with that arc, but it did include some major developments and the death of a recurring bad guy. Dean was also in motel room 100 at the beginning.

200th episode: Sam and Dean investigate mysterious disappearances at a high school musical production based on their first five years of hunting together (it makes sense in context!). Not only an hilarious love letter to the fans, but a musical episode to boot!

300th episode: Now that would be spoiling it!

Original cast members in the 300th episode: Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki of course, but another recurring character from the pilot will be making a long-awaited return as well…

Probably jumped the shark when: Many fans feel the show has never been the same since creator Eric Kripke left after the intended series finale at the end of Season 5, but it’s worth remembering as we carry on through Season 14 that the non-Kripke years far outnumber the Kripke years by this point.

Okay, campers, rise and shine, and don’t forget your booties ’cause we’ve got some cool news for you today. And it’s a story that we definitely weren’t expecting: as it turns out, there is a sequel to Groundhog Day on the way, and it will be a VR game.

The original film, starring Bill Murray and directed by Harold Ramis, was released in 1993 and still has a sizeable place in our hearts. The news of this VR game sequel’s existence was announced on February 2nd 2019, aka this year’s actual Groundhog Day.

The game is called Groundhog Day: Like Father Like Son, and it will put players in the shoes of Phil Connors Jr., the son of Murray’s movie character. You can watch the first teaser trailer right here…

And we also have this teasing synopsis, that came with the trailer…

“In Groundhog Day: Like Father Like Son, you’ll play as the charming but arrogant Phil Connors Jr., who grew up in the shadow of his father — a man who spent a lifetime repeating a single day until he had made it perfect. But for Phil Jr., today is the worst day of his life. He’s trapped back home in Punxsutawney, the small town he thought he’d escaped, where he can’t even get a decent cappuccino — and he’s going to have to repeat the day over and over, until he learns the true value of friends and family.”

It hadn’t dawned on us before, but the small town setting and task-perfecting nature of Groundhog Day are both kind of perfect for virtual reality gaming, aren’t they?

Sony Pictures Virtual Reality is publishing and producing the title, with Tequila Works handling the development. The game will release for PlayStation VR, Oculus Rift and HTC Vive later this year, and we’ll be sure to keep you posted as more news emerges from its burrow.