It's "What did you watch this week?", my chance to tell you what I movies and TV I've watched this week that I haven't already reviewed and your chance to recommend things to everyone else (and me) in case I've missed them.

First, the usual recommendations:

• Arrow (The CW/Sky 1)
  
• Continuum (Showcase/SyFy)
  
• The Daily Show (Comedy Central)
• Doctor Who (BBC1/BBC America)
• Elementary (CBS/Sky Living)
• Hannibal (NBC/Sky Living)
• Modern Family (ABC/Sky 1)
• Vegas (CBS/Sky Atlantic)

These are all going to be on in either the UK or the US, perhaps even both, but I can't be sure which.

Still in the viewing queue: new show The Goodwin Games, which I'll be reviewing on Monday, and I'll be playing catch up with New Zealand show Harry, too.

I did give Life of Crime a go, too, in which Hayley Atwell plays a cop in three different time periods at different stages of her career. Entirely fits the template of ITV crime dramas and you could predict virtually everything that happened in each time period, with the corresponding Attitudes written in neon lights all over every character.

Now, some thoughts on some of the regulars and some of the shows I'm still trying:

• Arrow (The CW/Sky 1): No League of Shadows, surprisingly, but everything played out in the finale pretty much as you'd expect, beyond the final twist. Overall, a very decent season, although it started to lost its edge and become a tad more Smallville than Batman Begins by the end. One to look forward to next season, certainly.
• Continuum (Showcase/SyFy): There I was complaining there wasn't enough cool sci-fi in the show, when up it pops in spades. For my next trick, can we have some more intelligent schemes from the terrorists, please. 
  
• Elementary (CBS/Sky Living): Everything played out pretty much as I expected in terms of revelations, but in many ways better than Sherlock's handling of similar Sherlock Holmes facets. I also liked the fact they made Irene Adler and Moriarty one and the same. It'll be great if they bring her back and make her a maths professor, too. A good explanation for an in-story bad accent, too. PS, New York can try to pass itself off as London, but it will always fail.
• Hannibal (NBC/Sky Living): I'm not convinced that Hannibal should be that good in a fight, particularly not up against Demore Barnes who was in The Unit. All the same, another fascinating episode, Gillian Anderson getting more to do this week. What surprises me is that the show, which I'm thinking more and more of as a cross between Touching Evil (US) and David Cronenberg's oeuvre, is actually capable of instilling dread in me, which is a very novel emotion of a TV show to be able to create in its audience. Magnificent, but its fate is in the balance at the moment. Please renew it, NBC.
• Vegas (CBS/Sky Atlantic): And so it's gone, in a somewhat underwhelming finale that mostly just tied up loose threads, left a couple dangling and let everyone pat each other on the back and say goodbye, all while Carrie Anne Moss had nothing to do, which was par for the course. A shame, since it started off with so much fire.

"What did you watch this week?" is your chance to recommend to friends and fellow blog readers the TV and films that they might be missing or should avoid - and for me to do mini-reviews of everything I've watched. Since we live in the fabulous world of Internet catch-up services like the iPlayer and Hulu, why not tell your fellow readers what you've seen so they can see the good stuff they might have missed?

Read other posts about: Arrow, Continuum, Elementary, Hannibal, Smallville, Touching Evil, Vegas

Plays can come in all shapes and sizes. They can be several hours, sometimes even days, or in the case of the new Twilight Zone episode A Small Talent For War, they can be as short as eight minutes.

As remarked previously, Rod Serling's original Twilight Zone turned in some of the finest works of short drama ever to grace US TV screens. With a revival of Alfred Hitchcock Presents proving popular in the 1980s and a Twilight Zone movie doing reasonably well at the cinema, too, so The Twilight Zone was resurrected for three seasons of largely original scripts between 1985 and 1989. These included contributions from Harlan Ellison, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C Clarke, Stephen King, George RR Martin, David Gerrold, J Michael Straczynski, Rockne S O'Bannon and others, with directors Wes Craven, William Friedkin and Joe Dante all getting a turn behind the camea, too.

One of the revival's most novel features - for the first two seasons, at least - was to forego the mandatory half-hour or hour-long episode length, with many episodes airing in tandem or triplets with others to make up the full run-time. While it never quite reached the heights of the original, one of the new series' very finest short pieces was A Small Talent For War, starring John Glover (Brimstone and Smallville) as an alien who delivers an ultimatum to the world. It's a lean piece of brilliance, entertaining, funny, chilling and in its own way profound. Enjoy!

Read other posts about: Smallville

In the US: Thursdays, 9/8c, The CW
In the UK: Acquired by E4
In Canada: Thursday 9:00pm ET/6:00pm PT

You know, if I hadn't just tried to watch Nashville, I would have described this as the most painful new drama on TV this season. But I have, and since Nashville was like having bleach poured into both ears while having my eyeballs scrubbed with an electric sander, I'm going to be relatively charitable to Beauty and the Beast, even though it almost certainly doesn't deserve it.

For those with long memories like me, Beauty and the Beast isn't just a Disney movie*. It's also a 1980s CBS TV series starring Terminator's Linda Hamilton as Catherine (aka The Beauty) and Sons of Anarchy's Ron Perlman as Vincent (aka The Beast). Thorny gender politics to one side for a moment, what was interesting about the series was that it asked the question: can you truly love someone who's just downright ugly? Okay, Vincent looked like a fluffy lion crossed with Jon Bon Jovi - and they'd have been better off leaving Ron Pearlman au naturel if they'd wanted to really go for the beast angle - but bestiality isn't exactly the flavour of the day now any more than it was then:

25 years on, CBS is remaking its old show at The CW's behest. Not such an eccentric idea - in fact, ABC was considering making a live action version of the Disney movie this year, too, but eventually decided not to.

But a quarter of a century later, ethics and aesthetics have moved on. Twilight has come and is just about to go. Manscaping has arrived, moisturiser is everywhere and any man who hasn't had a protein shake in the last two days isn't a real man. So the question is, can a show in which a woman falls in love with a man who isn't hunky, smooth and glittering but because he has a nice personality, possibly get off the ground?

The CW asked the computer, the computer said 'No', and lo and behold, for the modern day Beauty and The Beast, we have something a bit more Twilight - a man who turns into a bit of an animal when the adrenaline flows but otherwise is king of the pretty boys beyond a bit of a scar on his cheek. 

Beast? More like an 8, maybe a 9.

Here's a trailer:

Continue reading "Review: Beauty and the Beast 1x1 (The CW/E4)"

Read other posts about: Smallville