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It’s “What have you been watching?”, my chance to tell you what movies and TV I’ve been watching recently that I haven’t already reviewed and your chance to recommend things to everyone else (and me) in case I’ve missed them.
The usual “TMINE recommends” page features links to reviews of all the shows I’ve ever recommended, and there’s also the Reviews A-Z, for when you want to check more or less anything I’ve reviewed ever. And if you want to know when any of these shows are on in your area, there’s Locate TV – they’ll even email you a weekly schedule.
After letting things slide a bit last week, I feel a bit chuffed with myself because this week, I’ve managed to watch everything in my viewing pile except for one episode of Prisoners of War and today’s episode of Old School. I’ve even put up some proper reviews of new shows:
Yay me! I even remembered that I’d watched NBC’s Night Shift last week but forgot to review it. Because it’s so bad (as one reviewer put it, it’s for people who couldn’t cope with the intellectual rigour of Chicago Fire)
Night Shift (US: NBC)
A summer medical show, in which all bunch of tedious human beings try to outdo each other at how great they are as doctors, nurses and paramedics. Literally every scene involved a new character arriving, someone flailing at medicine, and then Johnny New Arrival showing some technique he or she had learnt in Iraq, volunteering with underprivileged children in Zimbabwe while recovering from chemotherapy and the like, and then rubbing it in the face of everyone else. Bizarrely, it features Jill Flint who gave up a decent job playing an efficient hospital administrator in the enjoyable Royal Pains to play an efficient hospital administrator in this steaming pile of offal.
Even more excitingly, I’ve watched another movie:
Godzilla (2014)
A frustrating, tantalising piece of work that sees Bryan Cranston trying to work out what destroyed the Japanese nuclear power plant he worked in with his wife (Juliette Binoche), while his body-disposal expert son Aaron Taylor-Johnson tries to get back home to his wife (Elizabeth Olsen). Except it turns out that dinosaurs still roam the Earth and they really don’t care what cities stand in their way.
In many ways, a lovely tribute to original with some of the scenes recreations of scenes from the original Toho series of movies but made to look truly realistic and devastating. Some thought’s gone into making the bad monsters, why Godzilla wants to save us from them and why some giant cockroaches would even need to be able to create electromagnetic pulses (when you spot it, you’ll kick yourself). But despite a full hour of work by director Gareth Edwards (Monsters) to make you care about the humans before the fights properly start, you still don’t give a toss about them and ultimately, you’ll just want to see Godzilla punching some big monsters – except largely Edwards cuts away to a news broadcast whenever anything gets too close to being exciting. And there are whole bits that are absolutely irrelevant. The final fight is great, though, with some truly whoop-worthy moments, and the HALO drop almost atones for the lack of action in other places.
After the jump, yet more, with a round-up of the regulars, with reviews of 24, Enlisted, Penny Dreadful, Prisoners of War and Silicon Valley
In the US: Wednesdays, 10.30/9.30c, TV Land
TV seems to have a thing against women executives at the moment. To be slightly more accurate, it has a thing against women executives who in some sense ‘desert their friends’ (i.e. spend less time with them) in order to get ahead.
We recently had USA’s Playing House, in which high-flying executive Lennon Parham discovers that despite working hard for a decade, leaving behind in her home town her bestest pal Jessica St Clair to have a normal life, her career is always on a knife-edge, her male bosses don’t really respect her and actually, returning home to spend more time with her family and her friend and getting a less demanding job is more emotionally satisfying, you know? Perhaps that’s even all she really wants.
And now, over on TV Land, we have that network’s first single-camera comedy, in which high-flying executive Jaime Pressly discovers that despite working hard for a decade, leaving behind in her home town her bestest pal Missi Pyle to have a normal life, her career is always on a knife-edge, her male bosses don’t really respect her and actually, returning home to spend more time with her family and her friend and getting a less demanding job is more satisfying, you know? Perhaps that’s even all she really wants.
Cue Cheryl Sandberg to explain how women only feel they (and others) should be allowed to succeed as long as everyone – not just themselves – benefit and they’re not seen as selfish.
The big difference between the two shows? Jennifer Falls has a better cast and is marginally – just marginally – less irritating. Here’s a trailer.
Film casting
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New US TV show casting
Whenever science fiction deals with “the next step in human evolution”, it always sounds so cool and liberal. The more evolved species gets special powers but because it’s in a minority, those racist humans always try to oppress them. Let’s not be species-ist! All X-Men are created equal! Power to the Tomorrow People!
But what if the liberals were wrong and genetic advancement isn’t a cool metaphor for racism at all? What if that next step in evolution was actually as bad as the humans feared? What if the new species in fact thought of humans as inferior and wanted to wipe them out? What if Homo sapiens suddenly was no longer at the top of the food chain and was instead the prey of a superior species?
Cue the aptly titled 1998 ABC series Prey. It starred Debra Messing (Grace from Will and Grace) as an anthropologist studying genetic variation in humans. She discovers that a number of violent criminals and indeed serial killers share a number of genetic markers that render them as genetically different from humans as humans are from chimpanzees: they’re more intelligent, more aggressive and have certain psychic powers, but have little or no empathy for human beings, regarding us the same way we do animals. Importantly, the new species can interbreed with us – the women even have four uteruses and have already evolved to have children from the age of nine without complications – but the offspring are always of the superior species, resulting in the species getting the classification Homo dominant.
Messing comes together with other scientists and law enforcement officials (including Frankie Faison from The Wire and Larry Drake from LA Law) to learn more about the new species, its origins, how many there are, and to find out if peaceful co-existence is possible. Along the way, they come across a friendly Homo dominant (Adam Storke) who wants to be human and feel normal human emotions.
How do you think that works out?
Here’s the entire series for you to watch on YouTube – well, the entire series except, helpfully, the final episode – but we’ll talk more about Prey after the jump.
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