In the US: Tuesdays, 10pm, FX
In the UK: Starts next month on Five USA

Miss Walker: Texas Ranger? Then have I got the show for you.

Actually, that's kind of unfair. That comparison might have you thinking Justified isn't any good, when actually it's very, very good. I mean, it's based on an Elmore Leonard story so how bad do you think it could be?

In something of a break from FX's traditional dark, manly shows about manly men doing manly things, Justified is a light, manly show in which manly men do manly things. In this case, Timothy Olyphant plays a US Marshall working in Miami who really quite likes shooting the bad guys he's chasing - and as a result gets shipped back to his home town in Kentucky.

There, he's faced with catching up with his backstory, which apparently involves lots and lots of women. Which is no surprise, given it's the charismatic Timothy Olyphant playing our hero Raylan Givens.

Here's a promo for you.

Continue reading "Review: Justified 1x1"

Parenthood has had a reboot. Yes, another one. After a bit of recasting after the pilot episode, the show came to our screens as a supposed dramedy: a bit of comedy but mostly drama. Unfortunately, the comedy didn't work, leaving it like a show that wanted to be a combination of Modern Family and Brothers and Sisters, but which was actually just Brothers and Sisters.

Come episode two, it's all change. Now we're a comedy with a hint of drama. Given the cast includes a number of people best known for their lighter touch (Peter Krause, Lauren Graham, Monica Potter, Dax Shepard), that shouldn't have been a surprise, although one could have argued that sticking the comedy in the first episode as well would have been a good idea.

The second episode was actually a lot better than the first episode. The first tried to simply say that parenting is hard. Look everyone, parenting is hard. But we knew that and showing us a bunch of people we can't really relate to having trouble parenting isn't going to make the message any deeper.

Episode two, however, managed to give us more relatable characters involved in situations that we could at least empathise with: working mum finds stay-at-home dad has closer relationship with kid than she does and feels threatened by the hot stay-at-home mums who he's friends with; single mum finds it hard to date and get a job after years out of the workforce; and guy finds he has a young kid he never knew about and doesn't know how to be a father.

Episode three continued more in that vein, although it started to veer dangerously close to clunky drama at times. Working mum (former swimming champion) finds she's not involved in teaching her daughter to swim and tries to help out; single mum has dating issues; new dad has to look after his son for a few hours and doesn't know what to do. Some of these were a little painful, with working mum's attempts to teach her child woefully bad, as though someone had simply said "Hey, how do dads cock up when trying to help their kids? Let's give all that to her. It'll be the same, right?" But on the whole the episode wasn't bad.

Running as the main plot strand throughout the episodes is Krause's/Potter's discovery that their son has Asperger's Syndrome. For mainstream US TV, which has something of a bad record of portraying autism and autistic spectrum disorders, this has actually been surprisingly well handled and accurate. It's a little odd – so much so that the couple's teenage daughter points it out in episode three – that in San Francisco of all places, a child with Asperger's wasn't spotted until he was six or seven and there aren't many places except private schools that have the expertise to deal with it, but hey, it's TV. The American pathological model of ASD – OMG there's something wrong with our child, he's broken – is also jarring to UK eyes.

But here's the problem with the show. Everything we see is pretty much from a male point of view and reflects mainly male concerns about parenting. None of the female characters have female friends that they talk to, and when they have a problem, they talk to one of the male characters about it. When a male character has a problem, he talks to a male character about it. As a result, the women are simply more problems or sources of problems for the male characters to deal with rather than vice versa or characters in their own rights.

So the show feels emotionally unsatisfying because of this lack of character interaction and development. Although it has some interesting aspects to it, it doesn't really speak to things as well as it should do. I'm enjoying it to some extent because of the cast, particularly Erika Christensen and Monica Potter (even though yet again she has very little to do) and the comedy when it works. But it feels like it's not quite firing on all cylinders yet.

Carusometer rating: 3
Rob's prediction: It'll last a season, but this is NBC so who knows what'll happen after that.

When people (by which I mean Doctor Who fans) think of 'lost stories' and Colin Baker, they generally think of those stories from the original season 23, such as The Nightmare Fair and Mission Magnus, that got replaced with Trial of a Timelord thanks to Michael Grade and his 'hiatus'.

However, those stories weren't the only Colin Baker stories that fell by the wayside. Here we have Leviathan, a story written by the late veteran TV writer Brian Finch for season 22. Despite getting as far as a rehearsal script, the story never got made, probably because it would have been too damn expensive to make.

In the story, the Doctor and Peri land in a medieval forest near a castle. They come across some villagers who are being pursued by Herne the Hunter.

Cue the Celtic charms of Clannad and the theme to Robin of Sherwood? No, because this Herne is mean and he's out for blood…

Continue reading "Review: Doctor Who - The Lost Stories - 03 - Leviathan"

Read other posts about: Big Finish

In the US: Tuesdays, 9/8c, NBC

The average number of children per family in the United Kingdom is 2. In the United States it's 3.1.

I mention this purely because of the above picture. Seriously, that's one pair of grandparents, their children and most of their grandchildren and partners - at least in the US show Parenthood. Really, some kind of Chinese-style child-reduction policy is needed here because, at the very least, keeping track of all these characters is way too difficult. Look, NBC have even had to create this family tree for us to deal with all the characters in Parenthood, and they're not all on it. There are more than this:

Parenthood, as you may recall, was an 80s comedy about the 'Buckman' family that looked at the trials and tribulations of being a parent. Apparently, being a parent isn't easy - who knew? Oh wait - everyone. That's the correct answer. Everyone knows.

This TV series, exec produced by the movie's original producers Ron Howard and Brian Grazer, is an at-best loose adaptation of that movie, with the Buckmans having become the Bravermans, and comedy having become misery.

I'm not going to lie to you - it's not fun and it's not great, but RGBE denizen Monica Potter in it, so it might worth a look-in.

Here's a trailer, but you'll notice that Maura Tierney is in it. She's been replaced by Lauren Graham off Gilmore Girls, as you can see from the behind-the-scenes featurette beneath it, and the teenage girl's been recast/hair-dyed as well. But you get the idea.

Continue reading "Review: Parenthood 1x1"

Read other posts about: Numb3rs

You know, when Steven Moffat sat down to work out how the next series of Doctor Who was going to work, I'm sure he had many, many things to consider. Not least of these was the kind of companion who was going to accompany the Doctor.

Now Big Finish can be a little off the wall sometimes, but usually they're quite conventional. However, this time – for three plays only – they've done something that I bet Steven Moffat never, ever considered: they've given him a racist, fascist, time-travelling Nazi scientist as an assistant. Yeah, beat that Stevie, you no-talent hack.

For those of you who haven't been listening to the Big Finish plays for the last decade or so, Colditz has probably slipped under your radar, especially since it's a Seventh Doctor/Ace play, so likely to be languishing at the bottom of any collection/bargain bin. Just to jog your memory, it's the one with David Tennant doing the bad German accent.

You probably won't recall the actual plot, however, so let me remind you: the Doctor and Ace land in/near Colditz; they do lots of dumb things; the Nazis capture them and the TARDIS; a Nazi scientist called Klein takes the TARDIS into the future where the Third Reich have won the Second World War; through timey-wimey machinations the alternative future gets undone, Herr David Tennant gets killed off, and Klein is left lurking around somewhere in the world, possessing knowledge of science and the alternative future that she shouldn't have.

A Thousand Tiny Wings picks up where Colditz left off by plopping the companionless Seventh Doctor down into 1950s Kenya at the time of the Mau Mau uprising. Here he comes across a bunch of posh English people stuck in a house and slowly being killed off by a mysterious poison. And Dr Elizabeth Klein.

Sounding good yet? No? Thought not.

Yet, despite sounding extremely bad on paper, it's actually a pretty decent play in practice.

Continue reading "Review: Doctor Who - 130 - A Thousand Tiny Wings"

Read other posts about: Big Finish

Starring: Meryl Streep, Amy Adams, Stanley Tucci
Writer/Director: Nora Ephron
Price: £19.99 (Amazon price: £12.98)
Released: March 8th 2010

Calling all foodies! Slight departure from the normal TMINE fare, I know, but I refuse to be confined to one little box - here's your chance to win a copy of Julie & Julia, starring Meryl Streep as famous US TV chef (ah, see the TMINE link now?) and writer Julia Child and Amy Adams (you know, off Enchanted, Sunshine Cleaning et al) as a blogger who tries to make all the recipes in Childs' magnum opus Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a year.

Review and competition details after the trailer.

Continue reading "Review and competition: Julie & Julia"

There's almost no point doing this since the show's so obviously doomed, but seeing as I've watched the first three episodes now, I might as well tell you what I thought about it.

After a pretty dismal first episode, which saw our team of newbie lawyers thrown in at "the deep end" of legal practice in an insane LA law firm run by Clancy Brown and Billy Zane, things actually started to improve. Although the second episode was no great shakes, the third episode was actually quite nice, as we saw the buddy romance between the Australian sex-mad lawyer who used to be on Neighbours and the the blonde female lawyer who actually had some charisma start to take off. It was sweet and amusing, took various turns, and didn't quite turn out to be as obvious or as stupid as it looked like it was going to be.

The show's weak point is the law cases themselves, and blonde lawyer's fight against her dad in episode two alternated between interesting (she threatens to have him disbarred at one point) and cringeworthy (trying to get a witness to testify); ditto the sexual harassment suit in the third episode and the slightly offensive deportation suit, which featured Anna from Chuck pretending to be Chinese.

If it focused more on the relationships and ignored the law cases, this could have been a pretty good, light comedy-drama. There are a few too many dull and ppor leads in it to be truly good, but it has enough glimmers of talent and good writing in the later episodes to distinguish it from the pack.

Unfortunately, it's pretty much dead, so it doesn't matter. Hopefully, the decent parts of The Deep End will get jobs elsewhere.

Carusometer rating: 3
Rob's prediction: Only seven episodes made so far, not great ratings and the Hollywood Reporter giving this a 5% chance of survival. I'm saying it's not long for this world

It's been nearly four years since I wrote the original version of this for Off The Telly, but seeing as Off The Telly is busily playing the National Anthem and getting ready to turn the lights off, I thought I'd move it to its natural place - here, on Lost Gems. Besides, I can add video and pictures to it here.

For most of its history, children’s television has been childish. Shows with simplistic plots and large casts of children have long dominated the afternoon schedules, with dreary adaptations of classic novels the only real exceptions.

Yet during the 1970s, commissioners slowly began to experiment with more mature programming, bringing in adult themes in disguise through science-fiction and fantasy shows such as Ace of Wands, The Tomorrow People and Timeslip. Sapphire and Steel even went from being a show for children to a show for adults, through the simple exclusion of juvenile leads and child-friendly characters.

By the late ’70s and early ’80s, this pushing of boundaries meant it was possible to have a programme on children’s television that was firmly embedded in an adult genre, with mainly adult leads and adult dialogue, and for it still to be accepted as a children’s show.

Codename: Icarus, which aired on BBC1 in 1981, was the purest examples of this new breed of programme. It's only available on DVD in America not in the UK, although you can watch it on YouTube (or below) if you want - it's a Lost Gem. But I'm also going to be covering a few other shows along the way, including Knights of God, Dark Season, Chocky's Children, the 90s remake of The Tomorrow People and Press Gang, complete with videos, so stick around.

Continue reading "Lost Gems: Codename Icarus (1981)"

In the US: Tuesdays, 9/8c, Fox
In the UK: If Living doesn't pant at it like a dog in a desert, I'll be surprised

Underneath its logo, Fox should really have etched like a motto below a family crest, "Never knowingly avoiding a formula." All the other networks have sitcoms - it has to have sitcoms, even though it's very bad at them. Other networks had cop shows, medical shows, comic book shows: it had to have them, too.

Now, other networks have had for quite some time shows in which people, usually cops, investigate and solve old crimes and bring justice to bereaved families. There's obviously Cold Case, but ABC moved in with The Forgotten in the fall, so Fox clearly had to get some of that action. Here's its mid-season stab at the same idea.

Being Fox though, and although there are exceptions to the rule, it's gone for something supremely rubbish and tasteless. In Past Life, 'psychologist' Kate McGinn with the aid of former police officer Price Whatley helps people who find themselves remembering past lives to discover who they used to be, and who murdered them.

Would it be obvious and cliché to say that this one is pretty much "dead on arrival"?

Continue reading "Review: Past Life 1x1"

It's hard to know what the makers of Spartacus: Blood and Sand think they're doing. It could be the show is intended as a way:

• to exploit the liberal regulatory regime on US cable television to push the boundaries of acceptable taste
• to show us what a graphic novel, complete with rubbish dialogue and plotting, would be like if it were turned into a TV series
• to replace traditional dialogue with nothing but swearing
• to give Lucy Lawless some work
  
• to give lots of bad New Zealand and Australian actors work
• to educate and inform viewers who missed HBO's Rome about what life was like in Roman times
• to homage I, Claudius.

No matter, three episodes in, it's time to decide whether to keep watching or not.

Continue reading "Third-episode verdict: Spartacus - Blood and Sand"