If you go down to the Serpentine in Hyde Park today, you’ll see a 12-foot fibre-glass sculpture of Colin Firth as Mr Darcy from Pride and Prejudice. Read the rest of the blog before you head off, won’t you…?
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UK TV
Year: 2013
Tuesday’s “Brian Cox goes to Shetland, Sean Pertwee is Inspector Lestrade and HBO’s Utopia” news
Film
- David Hayter to adapt The Sword
Film casting
- Michael K Williams joining Kill The Messenger?
Trailers
- Clip from The Wolverine with Hugh Jackman
- Trailer for The Lifeguard with Kristen Bell
- Trailer for Sweetwater with January Jones
- Trailer for Austenland with Keri Russell, Bret McKenzie, James Callis et al
UK TV casting
- Brian Cox and Julie Graham join Shetland
US TV
- Dan Harmon’s return to Community a group effort
- Sunday ratings
- Sunday cable ratings: Ray Donovan grows
US TV show casting
- Sean Pertwee to play Lestrade in Elementary
- Three Nashville promotions
- Donald Glover to only appear in five of 13 Community episodes
New US TV shows
- HBO adapting: Channel 4’s Utopia, David Fincher producing?
Third-episode verdict: Crossing Lines (NBC/TF1)
In the US: Sundays, 10/9c, NBC
In France: TF1. No air date yet
Time to appraise the first three episodes of Crossing Lines, NBC and TF1’s bold attempt to make a eurocop thriller that doesn’t totally suck. Created by one of the showrunners of Criminal Minds, Crossing Lines sees William Fichtner’s physically challenged, burned out former New York cop for no good reason other than international co-production funding join forces with a group of European cops at the ICC in investigating cross-border crimes that manage to evade national police forces in Europe.
As we saw from the first episode, some of these cops can act, some of these cops can’t; Donald Sutherland is in the show as well, for no very good reason; and largely the show is a mass of dramatic clichés, but strangely capable of at least some local sensibilities and occasional surprises.
Episode two saw a retreat from cliché in favour of extreme boredom, with a very chatty episode involving a bit of art theft, some dodgy science and a lot of moping. The show shifted from everyone speaking their native languages where necessary to everyone, even incidental characters, speaking English without prior bidding and in the most improbable of situations. We did, also, get the first hints at a continuing story arc involving a shady Russian – who’s not yet been seen, only intimated at.
Episode three, which judging from some of the story set-up might well have been episode two once upon a time, was a markedly improved affair that gave the German character some much needed characterisation that was remarkably stereotype-free. Fichtner wasn’t the be-all and end-all of investigation, and everyone managed to have something to do, even if some of them weren’t up to the job (cough, cough, the Italian cop, cough, cough). But it did also continue the show’s reality gap issues, with a cross-border, trucker fight club that would almost certainly have made any viewer roll their eyes in disbelief.
The show is silly. That aspect can’t be avoided. But it does present a largely stereotype-free view of Europeans that is refreshing compared to the usual US TV depictions. I really want to like it, as a result, but the plots are the usual insult to rational thought that you’d expect from Criminal Minds et al. I’m hoping, given time, it can mine the numerous genuine cross-border problems Europe has for some stories that don’t insult the viewer. But I don’t have a huge amount of hope.
Barrometer rating: 4
Rob’s prediction: Will be lucky to last a season
UK TV
Photos from my Friday trip to BBC Broadcasting House
On Friday, I went uptown to see John Finnemore’s Souvenir Programme being recorded at BBC Broadcasting House. I thought y’all might like to see some photos from the experience. This is old Broadcasting House:
Next to it is the new building, completed in the past couple of years:
Want to know what you can see inside? I’ll give you a clue: cough, cough, Doctor Who, cough, cough.
Follow me after the jump if you’ve managed to crack the code and are interested…
Continue reading “Photos from my Friday trip to BBC Broadcasting House”
Streaming TV
Netflix’s ‘Classic Doctor Who’ fail
So I’m looking on my iPad for something to watch on Netflix. Although the golden rule of Netflix still applies – it’ll never have the thing you were actually hoping to watch, but it will have something that you’ll be happy to watch instead – of late, they’ve been getting some good stuff in, so it wasn’t an entirely pointless mission.
Noticing that it had the Paul McGann Doctor Who TV movie available, I decided to see what other ‘classic Doctor Who‘ Netflix had. Its ‘new Who‘ range is quite extensive, with seemingly everything from Christopher Eccleston onwards in stock. Yet this is what I was presented with when I had a look at its range.
Be warned: if you’re a Doctor Who fan, you might have a brain aneurism.
So let’s take this from the top. First, the creators of Doctor Who. CE Webber, okay (just about), but where’s Donald Wilson?
Next, Netflix has episodes from four seasons listed: seasons 21, 22, 25 and 26. Those would be Peter Davison’s final season, Colin Baker’s first season and Sylvester McCoy’s final two seasons. A quick check of the credits, though, establishes that in fact William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton will be starring in these episodes. Huh.
Netflix also doesn’t give the story titles for individual episodes, just the episode numbers. They also have only one story per season – all of them Dalek stories. With the exception of Remembrance of the Daleks from season 25, none of the episodes have the correct numbers for those seasons, since only Remembrance was the first story in its season.
Moving on, if you look above, you’ll notice that Revelation of the Daleks, which is what the story listed above is actually called, has been chopped up: it originally aired as two 45-minute episodes, but these were chopped in two for sales to some countries. Netflix is certainly not appealing to the purists here.
But lastly, I’ll just highlight the most obvious point: ‘season 26’ actually contains Genesis of the Daleks, a Tom Baker story from season 12.
Quadruple oops. Someone needs to have a word with Netflix’s librarian.