It’s "What did you watch last week?", my chance to tell you what I watched last week that I haven’t already reviewed and your chance to recommend things to everyone else (and me) in case we’ve missed them.
First, the usual recommendations: The Almighty Johnsons, Archer, Being Human (US), BeTipul, Community, Cougar Town, The Daily Show, Happy Endings, House,Mad Men, Modern Family,Portlandia, Ringer, Shameless (US), Southland,Spartacus, Suburgatory,30 Rock and Top Gear. Assuming they’re on where you live, of course.
Now, some thoughts on the regulars, apart from Mad Men, which I’ve still to watch:
The Almighty Johnsons – I’m now on New Zealand time, BTW. The darkest episode yet but signs of light at the end of the tunnel. Loki’s getting irritating and the goddesses are getting maltreated. Not much Axl this week either, and very little Anders, too, but he’s off filming The Hobbit, so what can you do?
America’s Next Top Model – is now being officially boycotted in this house for anti-Scottish racism
The Apprentice – the same old, same old, but don’t you just love it?
Archer – the finale wasn’t as funny as the first part, but it was still a pretty good episode
Awake – again with the dull procedural. Stop it. More fleshing out of secondary characters is needed, but it’s still intelligent, moving and insightful. It needs more on why this is all happening though.
Being Human (US) – Good to see that Sally now effectively has an addiction like the others, putting her on an equally monstrous footing with the others
Community – classic Community in that it was dark and weird but not hugely funny. But some character moments of joy, including Jeff and Britta, and the return of dark Abed.
Cougar Town – a lovely get out for a thorny dilemma that’s plagued the show for a while, plus a return of the Travis-Laurie dynamic
Dirk Gently – Probably the best of the bunch: funny with decent characterisation. Still not loving it, but it’s now not bad
John Bishop’s Sport Relief Hell – I only watched a minute of it and nearly cried.
Missing – Jesus of Montreal himself Lothaire Bluteau made an appearance to not much effort. More preposterous than the opening episode, with linguistic tricks around the phrase ‘hard drive’ needed for a very uninteresting reveal. The break-in was silly, the whole Netleaks thing was even more ridiculous and the narrow squeak at the end preposterous. But still a tense hour.
Ringer: Juliette still can’t act, but last week’s episode made slightly more sense than the previous week’s
Southland – an anti-climatic ending to the season, which overall was very strong.
Spartacus – phenomenal: shocking, surprising and finally we get to see the Romans as something less than cannon fodder and more the most powerful fighting force in the world (cf Rome).
30 Rock – quite the best season since the first, I think. Some wonderful cameo appearances, including one of the Baldwins doing a great impression of Alex, and a vast amount of almost Community-level meta-ness, particularly the part where Tracey comes off his meds and (spoiler) thinks he’s in a show within a show and his real name is Tracey Morgan. Even Kristen Schaal is just about funny for once.
Touch – basically an episode of Highway to Heaven. Nice to have a mini-24 reunion, with Jude Ciccolella, even if the show does all it can to avoid the memory of Jack Bauer by having Kiefer Sutherland get his arse kicked in fights. Danny Glover basically did nothing, as did Guru M-R. The lack of regular characters also makes it hard to care about the show. But at the end of the day, despite all those caveats, quite heart-warming.
Two and a Half Men – Only watching it because Sophie Winkleman (Big Suze from Peep Show, but also Charlotte from NBC’s 100 Questions) is on it. Has to be said – not a great show and the usual American TV problem of being mildly bemused and unable to cope with the existence of foreigners, but she’s good.
The Voice – I don’t normally do reality, but with Tom Jones on it, how could we refuse? Actually quite enjoyable, although Reggie Yates and Holly Willoughby were entirely superfluous. Surprised will.i.am didn’t get more people, though. And Tom really did seem unimpressed to discover one of his was gay.
And in books:
The Go-Between by LP Hartley: bored me rigid. Sorry.
"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?
Well, last week I offered you the chance to win the Doctor Who stories Invasion of the Dinosaurs and The Android Invasion on DVD. The entries are in, the random number generator has spoken and I’m proud to declare that the winner is…
Here’s a thing you might not have realised: writers are usually not experts at much except writing. Some are experts on some things, but on a TV show, often as not, the writers will have to go and ask someone else or look it up on the Internet when they need to look authoritative on a subject. Burn Notice is mostly Internet research, for example, and that little show Star Trek: The Next Generation had a scientific advisor who would fill some plausible jargon whenever a writer wrote “Insert Technobabble here”.
When it comes to computers and computer security, it gets trickier. Computers are like magic to a lot of writers, anyway, but in an hour-long show, depicting true hacking (aka ‘cracking’ for purists) is almost impossible. There usually isn’t enough time to depict the weeks and months of complicated crafting of custom malware, SQL injection, spear phishing, etc that the average computer criminal will need to do to break through a moderately secure installation. Two-factor authentication, face recognition, etc also make it hard for writers to come up with a non-technical way of breaking through security.
So they fudge it. At one extreme, you’ll have Charlie’s Angels, which assumes computer security is practically voodoo. In its first episode, that featured someone cracking a safe’s thumbnail recognition system – by reprogramming it with her thumb. No, not metaphorically. Literally.
Oh dear. Wonder why that was cancelled? Insulting the audience’s intelligence maybe?
At the other extreme, we have the likes of Missing. Now, that’s just had Ashley Judd trying to break into the HQ of the French Secret Service. Let’s skip over the particularly poor levels of physical security that involved and go straight to the computer.
Now the producers have clearly gone to some effort here. As well as actually having an application with its window in French – “File”, “Edit”, “Window”, “Search”, “Favourite”, “Help” – in that window there is some proper UNIX, some IP6 addressing and more. Proper computer stuff, in other words.
And yet, again, we have a problem. See, if you know what that all says, you’ll appreciate the French IT security is very lax.
We start with someone logged in as “user” – that’s not good. Then we ask to switch user to the root account – the most powerful account in the entire system and which any IT admin worth his or her salt would have disabled (or never even have enabled). Worse still, Ashley Judd actually knows the password.
To connect to the local security computer or device (apparently there is one, although it’s on the same machine, being localhost yet also on some kind of Bonjour security domain. Not quite sure what’s going on there), Ashley then uses Telnet, which is incredibly insecure and again, any IT admin would have switched that off in favour of ssh.
Apparently, though, the local security device doesn’t require either an id or password. Oops. Worse still, it can’t spell ‘established’ correctly. And all she has to do then is change directory to the persistent data directory /var/lib and she’s there. She might not have opened an X11 connection to do it, but she can somehow still access a nice windowed application to start messing around with the physical security for the entire building.
Now you’re bored already by this, aren’t you? Which is part of the problem – it is boring. If writers had to deal with this properly, the audience would be bored rigged.
Basically, then, no matter what you do with computer security on TV, you’re always either going to find yourself having to gloss over the difficulties and finding at least one section of the audience (or possibly all of it in Charlie’s Angels‘ case) rolling their eyes at you, unless you really just want to bore the audience silly.
Poor TV writers. Poor TV producers. Feel sorry for them.
