Well, the public has spoken and who am I to argue? Weekly The Sarah Jane Adventures reviews not so much start here as carry on from part one of The Last Sontaran, which aired last week. Are you brave enough to look within?
UK TV
Month: October 2008
Tuesday’s too old for this news
Film
- Lethal Weapon 5?
- Steve Carell gets a three-year deal and Get Smart 2
- Danny Glover to be president in 2012
- Johnny Depp to get £32m for Pirates 4
- Anne Hathaway to play the White Queen in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland
Theatre
- Six musicals for the West End
- Bill Bailey’s Tinselworm coming to the Gielgud from November
British TV
- Little Britain USA gets good ratings
- As does Fringe
- BBC Wales’ High Hopes gets cancelled
US TV
- Fox to remake Absolutely Fabulous – again
- Entourage gets a sixth season
- Sons of Anarchy gets a second season
- And The Mentalist gets six more episodes
- Rachael Taylor, Amanda Walsh and Bitsie Tulloch join SJP’s Washingtonienne
- Sanctuary gets a good start in the ratings
- Kenneth Branagh to play Irish publican – in The Simpsons
US TV
Review: Valentine 1×1
In the US: Sundays, 8/7c, The CW
Valentine is one of those high concept shows that could, depending on how they’re implemented, turn out to be fundamentally excellent or fundamentally awful. “The Greek gods are alive and well and living among us”. Brilliant, hey? I’d buy that book/watch that TV show, because it’s a great idea.
But, and here’s the problem, if the gods just sit in front of the TV all day, it’s going to be very dull; if they demand human sacrifices or set nation to war with nation to reduce the excess population, it’s going to very dark and scary. So pitch is very important.
US TV tends to go for light and/or fighty when dealing with the Greek gods. Hercules (yes, I know he’s Roman) and Xena (completely made up) went for light and fighty on the few occasions when they went modern-day; Cupid (also Roman and coming around for a new series some time soon, despite having been cancelled once) went for light. They were all fun in their way, sometimes extremely imaginative, but generally nothing to make you mourn their passings too much.
Valentine (yes, not even Roman but early Christian), in which Aphrodite, Eros, Hercules/Heracles and other gods try to fix mortals up with their soul mates, goes for light in a big way. Starring Jaime Murray (Hustle, Dexter) as Aphrodite aka Venus aka Grace Valentine, it’s imaginative, quite fun, but at times excruciatingly bad – as well as instantly forgettable.
US TV
Review: The Ex List 1×1
In the US: Fridays, 9pm et/pt, CBS
What do women want? It’s a despairing thought asked by male TV executives all the time, in the hope of getting some female viewers for their networks. Sometimes they’ll look at the chick lit section of their local Barnes and Noble and go, “Oh. That’s what women want.” Other times, they’ll look at other female oriented TV programmes and copycommission appropriately.
Sometimes, though, they’ll look overseas, usually to Britain and sometimes to Canada. But for The Ex List, they looked even further afield: Israel.
The Ex-List‘s premise is dumbness in a glass: 33-year-old San Diego flower shop owner, Bella Bloom (seriously), takes her sister’s hen night party to a psychic and gets told she has a year to marry or she’ll die alone. After a series of other predictions come true, she becomes convinced the psychic is telling the truth. Thing is, she’s destined to marry someone she’s already dated, so she puts together a list of all her exes, and decides to try them out again, one at a time, to see which was really Mr Right.
So roll up, roll up for the oddball man vetting service.
Strictly Love competition winners
Time to announce the winners of the Strictly Love competition. Plenty of top-notch entries for this one so Julia Williams, Strictly Love‘s author, has had her work cut out for her on the judging (fortunately no Brucie jokes to deal with, though). But the winners are…