Anna Silk (Lucy Lawless meets Diana Rigg)

If I could place a bet in Vegas on the biggest surprise hit in American television for 2012 I’d bet the house on “Lost Girl,” which debuts on the SyFy Channel tomorrow night, Monday, January 16^th, at 10pm (EST).

Kris Holden-Ried as Dyson

I spent quite a bit of time in the summer and fall of 2010 at our cottage in Nova Scotia and saw one night on Showcase (the network of Canadian-originated commercial television) the debut of a gothic fantasy/sci-fi series. Within five minutes I knew I was watching would be the biggest independent hit in the States since Buffy Vampire Slayer and Xena.

The lead character in Lost Girl, Bo, is half human and half Fae. The entire series revolves around Bo’s refusal to take permanent sides with anyone or anything in her quest to do what is right, which means she is in constant conflict with the left and the right, the day and the night, the powerful and the powerless and, of course, her sexual attraction to both men and women.

(Hi, Alexandra Waring, I thought.)

Zoie Palmer as Lauren

Like Xena and Buffy there is a marvelous undercurrent of tongue-in-cheek humor which somehow converts the considerably violent action sequences into the sensibility of a 1940’s monster or 1950’s sci-fi flick.

Unlike Buffy and Xena, Lost Girl was created by, and is still largely shepherded by, a woman writer name Michelle Lovretta.

Anna Silk as Bo

The Xena Lucy Lawless/Avengers Diana Rigg of the Fae world is an actress largely unknown to the States, Anna Silk, who has that ineffable small-screen “something” that will vault her to stardom here. Her male love interest is played by Kris Holden-Reid (whom we know from The Tudors) as Dyson, a Fae police detective; her female love interest is played by Zoie Palmer (a British actress) as Lauren, a human research physician; and Bo’s (Desperately-Seeking-Susan-esque) sidekick, Kenzi, is played by (Black Swan) actress Ksenia Solo.

For a year and half I have been bemoaning the failure of an American network to import this series but now the SyFy network has done it.  I hope everyone involved makes a kazillion dollars and lives happily ever after because the show is such fun.

Ksenia Solo as Kenzi

And, of course, I’m writing this just to show everyone I’ve been bugging about this for the last year and a half that I was right (lol).  Have fun everybody!

Lost Girl on SyFy 

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