TVSquad

There are plenty of sci-fi TV shows made up in Canada. The Stargate series comes out of Vancouver -- as does Fringe. There's a proud ongoing fantasy tradition deeply rooted up there.

But, the city's local newspaper insists the best show in production in Canada's Pacific Southwest isn't on broadcast TV. It's a web series called Riese. The Steampunk-themed action series is set in another time in the kingdom of Eleysia. The title character (Christine Chatelain) battles through the countryside with a wolf avenging the death of her family.

She's fighting off a crazed, fundamentalist religious group -- the Sect. So, you can set your watch by how long the tunnel-vision crew over at Big Hollywood jumps on Riese as some sort of attack on traditional religion. (It's not.)

Rather than make a pilot and brave the waters of network pick-ups and cancellations, the show's creators went online -- promoting aggressively at this year's Comic-Con in San Diego.

Riese's action sequences are sharp, and the production values are on par (or better) than anything you'll find on Syfy -- if you can still locate fantasy and science fiction on Syfy. We've sent out a search party. It has yet to return.

In fact, it's an outright embarrassment to all of the networks that TV's first effective Steampunk genre show had to go online to reach an audience.

Meanwhile, more riveting episodes of "Real Housewives of Fon du Lac" are on the way, folks.