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: All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace, The Apprentice, The Apprentice: You’ve Been Fired, Come Dine With Me, Endgame, The Shadow Line 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:
- All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace: A bit of a damp squib of an ending. Essentially 55 minutes of interesting facts, beautifully constructed, finished with “And that’s why no one tries to change anything.” Feels like some working out was left off.
- Lead Balloon: Still not loving it – by which I mean finding it even slightly funny – but Sophie Winkleman is in it now, so I might keep watching.
- The Shadow Line: More ludicrous fight scenes. Are they doing it deliberately now? And MRI-ing the head of someone who has a bullet lodged in his brain? That’s not a good idea… And for a full 10 minutes it looked like we were going to have a strong, interesting female character. Oh well.
- Undercover Boss: Bit dull really, and it wasn’t even the boss this week
Didn’t managed to get through Single Ladies, which should tell you something about that. Haven’t watched Teen Wolf or Switched At Birth either, although that’s more because I’m probably too old for them. In With The Flynns I’m going to give a go some time this weekend, though.
But queued up in my pile are Case Histories – two episodes aired this week, two more next week – and Injustice – five episodes aired this week. Guess where they’re probably going to stay and get deleted, because I haven’t got the time to watch that much TV in one go. Stupid scheduling. I miss “one episode a week” scheduling on British TV so much.
And in this week’s list of movies:
- The Hangover 2: While The Hangover was actually very funny, seeing the exact same story played out again and with fewer jokes isn’t actually funny at all. Who knew?
- In the Loop: weird to see the entire cast of The Thick of It playing almost exactly the same characters in exactly the same situations but with different names. Very funny and the American perspective was a refreshing addition. And Peter Capaldi was as sublime as always.
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 and films 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?
