Time for “What have you been watching this week?”, my chance to tell you what I’ve been watching this week and your chance to recommend things to everyone else (and me) in case we’ve missed them.
My usual recommendations for maximum viewing pleasure this week: Cougar Town, The Daily Show, Doctor Who, Endgame, Happy Endings, House,Modern Family and Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle. Watch them (and keep an eye on The Stage‘s TV Today Square Eyes feature as well) or you’ll be missing out on the good stuff.
Now to the irregulars and new things, as well as a few thoughts on some of those regulars:
The Apprentice: They seem to be making the tasks almost sensible this year. And they’re chucking out rubbish people early. It’s almost like a proper contest. How odd.
Chuck: A reasonable enough way to wrap everything up when you have no budget for anything exciting. But, the reboot of the show ready for the final season doesn’t really make me want to watch it. Sorry.
Happy Endings: Oh FFS. It’s one thing to show episodes out of order – it’s quite another to show episodes 2 and 3 as episodes 10 and 11 when they follow on directly from episode 1. What’s up there, ABC? All the same, really funny – funnier than the aired episodes 2 and 3 in fact – subtly tonally different from later episodes, filled in lots of details about the various friends and almost acts like a manifesto for the show. Watch it!
House: a whole five minutes in the middle that was just too gruesome for me to watch. Sorry. Just ugh! Bit of a limp season finale (and indeed season), but more intriguingly structured than usual, and Chase and 13’s bonding gave me hope for the show.
Running Wilde: Was that the finale or the penultimate episode? Almost funny, with a few Peter Serafinowicz moments to lift it, but didn’t quite make it to laugh out loud funny, apart from an Arrested Development joke.
The Shadow Line: the plotting was a bit off on this one, with some really horribly boring, drawn out bits, interspersed with some really very good exciting bits. The dialogue wasn’t so dreadful this week and Stephen Rea is awesome, but it also suffered quite the most moronic fight sequence since the UNIT slapping matches of the 70s, as well as a few research problems and the female cop is just horrendous. But some good twists and turns that should keep me watching next week.
But what have you been watching?
“What have you been watching this week?” is your chance to recommend to friends and fellow blog readers the TV that they might be missing or should avoid – and for me to do mini-reviews of everything I’ve watched this week. 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?
At the moment, CBS is top of the US ratings, able to deploy any old rubbish (Mike and Molly, Two and a Half Men) and people will watch it happily, while NBC is currently drilling a hole in the ratings basement so it can go and live in a new sub-basement it’s planning on building, even though many of its shows (well, Community and 30 Rock) easily trump whatever CBS has to offer.
But go back 25 years or so, and it was NBC that was the ratings juggernaut, crushing CBS with its peacock feathers and shows such as The Golden Girls, despite CBS turning out more than a few decent shows itself. CBS did, of course, have private detective show Magnum PI, which amazingly ran from 1980 through to 1988. But in 1987, with Magnum‘s fortunes waning, CBS went on a great mental trek and asked itself what kind of show it could replace Magnum with and came up with the astounding idea of… a private detective show.
However, in contrast to other private detective shows of the 80s (Magnum, Simon & Simon, Riptide, Tucker’s Witch), this one would be a little more realistic and star a woman – Margaret Colin, then famous as a comedy actress from shows such as Foley Square, but better known now for Gossip Girl, Now and Again and Chicago Hope. What a feminist move, echoing the likes of Honey West? Nope. This was a show for men and to let men know they were allowed to watch it, the producers called it… Leg Work. And focused a lot on Margaret Colin’s legs.
Eschewing gun fights and car chases in favour of humour and wit, the show was actually quite good. Colin played Claire McCarron, a former New York district attorney who becomes a private detective because of her skills at tracking down people and information. Keeping it real, the show regularly had McCarron in meetings, dealing with admin and interviews, suffering from a poor personal life, never having any money, dealing with creditors and having to track down her own clients so she could get paid.
Assisting McCarron were her father, a retired cop, and her PR cop brother Fred, played by Patrick James Clarke of Saracen fame, as well as her best friend/roommate, former fashion model Willie (played by Frances McDormand of Fargo fame). And she drove a rather nice Porsche 911, as well.
“The scripts are great,” Colin says. “The best of all possible worlds would be for us to be able to do a small picture each week. With a lot of emotion, a lot of character and conflicts that are real and not manufactured. Our stories are more Europe. They’re not as tidy as most American shows. The focus is on emotion and the characters. And the writers have hooked into my sense of humor.”
Nevertheless, up against NBC’s Golden Girls, Leg Work only managed to squeeze out six of its 10 episodes before it was cancelled, although the whole run aired in the UK on ITV. While not a classic of TV, it was still a cut above some of its more ludicrous rivals and should have made Margaret Colin a whole lot more famous than she ended up. Anyway, here’s a trailer for it and the title sequence, which has a very Mike Post-ish theme tune.
Got a picture of David Tennant sitting, lying down or in some indeterminate state in between? Then leave a link to it below or email me and if it’s judged suitable, it will appear in the “Sitting Tennant” gallery. Don’t forget to include your name in the filename so I don’t get mixed up about who sent it to me.
The best pic in the stash each week will appear on Tuesday and get ten points; the runners up will appear on Friday (one per person who sends one in) and get five points.
You can also enter the witty and amusing captions league table by commenting on Tuesday’s Sitting Tennant photo, the best caption getting 10 points, everyone who contributes getting five points.
