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.

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

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

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"

So we've been hanging around for Caprica to turn up for ages now. I reviewed the pilot episode (an extended version of episode one with extra nudity and fun) back in April of last year, so this has had a lot of gestation time.

Yet, despite all that planning, this prequel to Battlestar Galactica is really quite desperately dull and uninvolving. Now, I do like the fact it's trying to do some proper sci-fi: this has both ideas and real characters with real emotions.

But the characters are simply dull and uninspiring. I don't care about them at all. The kids are all gits and terrorists who are going to end up causing an epic war; the adults are insipid and stupid. Despite the fact the apocalypse and destruction of humanity isn't for more than 40 years, no one can tell a joke, go shopping or have fun – okay, everyone's bereaved and/or a fundamentalist, but all the same, there should be a few people enjoying themselves during the heyday of the colonies, surely?

Minor niggles

1. The Taurons have mysteriously become Greek – although they call their gods by their Roman names (despite BSG using the Greek names) and can't work out whether they're speaking Ancient Greek or Modern Greek (because Lord knows that's not how you pronounce Αδελφός μου in Modern Greek yet shop signs are in Modern Greek). How did that happen? It's no biggie, since it's not as if Caprica, which is increasingly American in its vision of the home worlds, is depicting the home worlds identically to America. It's just odd that they're doing it right now, and messing up the gods' names when they were so consistent before.
2. Please stop Peter Wingfield from doing American accents. He's a great actor with his own accent, so why does he keep trying to be American?
3. The theme music is awful and reminds me of Friday The 13th: The Series way too much
4. Why, if the 12 colonies are capable of interstellar flight, hyperspace jumps, virtual reality and artificial intelligence, are they still using wobbly VHS tapes to record things?
5. After BSG steered so pleasing clear of technojargon, why, on the soap opera family version of it, are we suddenly being treated to reams and reams of the stuff?

I do admire certain aspects of the show: it's doing some interesting riffs on the nature of soul, how we treat machines, etc. The switch between Zoe and the Cylon to demonstrate her soul is still there is creepily ghosty. It manages to depict a convincingly futuristic world on a small budget. The idea of having the monotheists as religious nuts who want to kill people and the polytheists as nice types who wouldn't hurt flies is challenging.

But it's just so boring and worthy. I know how the story ends already, so it's the journey that counts, but I'd like my fellow travellers to be a little more interesting if I'm going to go on it.

PS Interesting to note a police reunion here, since Wingfield and Brian Markinson, who plays one of the 'FBI' types, were partners on Touching Evil.

Carusometer rating: 3
Rob's prediction: Probably will last a season, but I wouldn't bet there'd be much more than that. The BSG factor might be enough to keep it going though.

Read other posts about: Battlestar Galactica

In the US: Mondays, 9/8c, The CW

To maintain a sense of consistency with my first-episode review, I'm about a week late with this third-episode verdict. But hell – let's do it.

So as we all recall, Life Unexpected sees a precocious teenager who's been through seven foster families track down her birth parents so that she can be emancipated and lead her own life, free of adults. However, despite leading separate lives now, they decide to be 'Lux's' parents for real.

Now, the first episode was actually quite good: it played a little with the darkness of the concept, had some reasonably witty dialogue and moments and the characters were broadly likable. Trouble was, it was pretty much a self-contained concept – where was the show going to go from there?

Continue reading "Third-episode verdict: Life Unexpected"

I haven't heard an awful lot about Justified, but it starts in March on FX in the US, stars Timothy Olyphant and is based on the Elmore Leonard short story, Fire in the Hole. It looks passable at least, but I'll reserve judgement until I see it.

[via]

Fox's new action-adventure show Human Target started as something of a damp squib. The first episode aired to as much hype as humanly possible, and was bound to disappoint no matter what. With its combination of Hong Kong-style martial arts fights, zero proper characterisation, comic book plots and dialogue, and Thunderbirds scenarios, it was never going to be truly satisfying as a drama, more a way to pass time.

Since then, it's kind of settled down and now wants to be a genre action movie of the week in a mere 40 minutes. Episode two saw our anonymous hero on board a crashing plane, trying to find who's he supposed to protect and who's trying to kill them, while episode three saw him mole-hunting in a Russian embassy.

It's still very comic book – knowingly so. It's got itself an interesting title sequence and a diabolical theme tune. Our hero is still stoic and a bit dull, despite Mark Valley's best attempts, with most of the script flair going to Chi McBride and Jackie Earle Haley instead. There's been the welcome arrival of CSI: NY's Emmanuelle Vaugler as a potential love-interest/partner/frenemy for Valley. To string us along, there's a little bit of character background added to Valley's character every week, although he's not been built up so much that when we eventually find out who he actually he is, the inevitable anti-climax won't be too great.

But it's still really visual bubble gum: some decent fights, some bad CGI stunts and a bit of male camaraderie to appeal to a male teenage audience. It passes the time, won't challenge you too much, will occasionally make you roll your eyes, and if you have something better to do, you'll probably skip it in favour of something else.

It's okay for what it does.

Carusometer rating: 2
Rob's verdict: Might last a season or two, but will get cancelled sooner rather than later if it doesn't up its game