Month: July 2014

US TV

Review: Taxi Brooklyn 1×1-1×2 (NBC/TF1)

7 July 2014 Rob Buckley Post a comment

Taxi Brooklyn

In France: Aired in May on TF1
In the US: Wednesdays, 10/9c, NBC

Take a look at that title. Go on. Take a look: Taxi Brooklyn. What does that even mean? It’s two words just stuck together, isn’t it?

Indeed, never has an international co-production so obviously signalled both its complete inability to understand an international market, or that it’s really hoping that people will want to watch it if it just sticks random things together. The latter, so far, has been French TV channel’s TF1’s implicit aim with first Jo and then Crossing Lines and now, pretty much explicitly, with Taxi Brooklyn.

So here are the random things stuck together:

  • Luc Besson’s Taxi series, France’s most successful movie franchise ever, the first of which got remade with Queen Latifah and Jimmy Fallon in 2004.
  • Olivier Megaton, director of Taken 2 and Transporter 3
  • French actor Jacky Ido, who you may remember from Inglorious Basterds or even from the first series of Spiral/Engrenages where he played ‘Personne’.
  • Brooklyn
  • A necessity to do everything in English

These aren’t just the pieces of some long-lost jigsaw puzzle sitting at the back of your cupboard – these are the pieces from someone else’s jigsaw that have mysteriously got mixed in with three others you have no recollection of ever even asking for.

Putting it all together was clearly an impossible challenge and the writers therefore obviously decided not to even bother trying to make it look like a show that’s supposed to hang together coherently. The plot – if it can be described as such – is thus utterly ridiculous.

Caitlin “Cat” Sullivan (Chyler Leigh) is a tough cop, so no one wants to partner with her. She’s also a terrible driver, so she gets her driving privileges revoked. How’s she going to solve crimes and do her job on public transport? What a dilemma!

But when she arrests a French taxi driver speed demon, Leo Romba (Ido), who’s been forced at gunpoint to act as a getaway driver in a bank robbery, serendipity has clearly struck. Ido agrees to help her solve the crime – and to drive her around – if she’ll clear his name. And since he was arrested and put in jail back in France so had to enter the US illegally, Sullivan agrees to help him with the US immigration authorities if he’ll continue to drive her around on future cases.

Forced, much? Absolutely. Excitement? Laughs? Not at all.

Because despite Megaton’s presence on the pilot, as well as supporting cast that includes Jennifer Esposito (Samantha Who?, Blue Bloods), Ally Walker (Universal Soldier, Profiler) and José Zúñiga (Law & Order, CSI), the show is unredeemed by excitement comedy, good characters or logic. Zut alors!

Here’s a trailer.

Continue reading “Review: Taxi Brooklyn 1×1-1×2 (NBC/TF1)”

The BarrometerA Barrometer rating of 2

Third-episode verdict: The Last Ship (TNT)

7 July 2014 Rob Buckley 3 Comments

In the US: Sundays, 9/8c, TNT

So let’s lay our cards on the table: TNT’s The Last Ship is not the best TV programme ever made. It’s a show in which a lone US naval warship is the world’s last best hope to prevent humanity’s extinction, following a global pandemic that’s already wiped out 50-80% of the world’s population – how could it be?

Add on dialogue that drips patriotism/jingoism at every turn, perfunctory/insulting characterisation and a cast that’s largely ‘adequate’ – even Adam Baldwin – and, last but not least, has Michael Bay as a producer, and again it’s obvious this isn’t going to be winning any writing awards, at least.

But I can still say, without any hesitation, that it is absolutely the best original TNT show of the past decade. Because even putting to one side the fact that for me, killer virus + naval action = awesome, The Last Ship is packed from start to finish with full-on naval and land warfare, great action scenes, genuine tension and adrenaline rushes from start to finish.

Indeed, unlike other shows which tend to pack their pilot episodes full of fun, run out of budget and fill the rest of their seasons with talking, the Michael Bay connection seems to be working well for The Last Ship, since if anything, the hardware demonstrations and fights seem to have increased in number not decreased since the first episode. What the show’s producers cleverly seems to have done is realised that:

  1. Ships and naval warfare are great
  2. But you need enemies to fight if any weapons are ever going to be used
  3. But unless you’re fighting aliens, you’re going to need a world-changing event for naval warfare to take place regularly between human beings and countries.

So far, beyond the obvious biological warfare of the virus itself, we’ve had helicopter battles, land battles, nuclear strikes, torpedoes, 5” shells, sniping, stealth warfare, terrorists, RPGs and a whole lot more, some of it CGI, obviously (I don’t think TNT have the budget for a nuclear war), but a surprising amount done with real ships on the sea and in exotic locales. Characters have died and been wounded, and there’s been real peril. Because it’s the end of the world and it’s every ship for itself.

It’s not been 100% authentic – launching a torpedo at almost point blank range and not getting any waves? I don’t think so – and there’s not a huge amount of veracity to the behaviour of those on any of the ships we’ve seen so far. The dialogue of the British characters has also clearly been written by Americans (we don’t need to say ‘the Queen of England’. If we’re talking about a Queen, it’s implicit that the Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland – i.e. our Queen – is the one we’re thinking of, unless we say otherwise).

But who cares? Halt and Catch Fire is great, brilliantly written drama but is it fun? No. The Last Ship is not brilliantly written, but hell is it ever fun, and it’s now the show I look forward to the most every week.

Barrometer rating: 2
Rob’s prediction: Should get at least another season, maybe more

News: Frank Cottrell Boyce’s Doctor Who, I Live With Models, E4 acquires Almost Royal + more

7 July 2014 Rob Buckley Post a comment

Doctor Who

Film casting

French TV

International TV

UK TV

New UK TV shows

What have you been watching? Including Reckless, The Last Ship and Crossbones

4 July 2014 Rob Buckley 7 Comments

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.

Despite the fact that a few shows have finished and I’ve decided to drop a few others from my regular viewing, I have a wee backlog of NBC’s new comedy-action show Taxi Brooklyn to get through. Fingers crossed, a review of the first two episodes of that later. I’ve already reviewed some new shows elsewhere, though:

I’ve also given another new show a try:

Reckless (US: CBS)
Absolute bobbins. As soon as you say the word ‘southern’ to an American from one of the northern states, apparently, through some form of word association, ‘sexy fun times’ is the first thing they think of, because what we have here is a desperate attempt to get in predominantly female viewers with a cop show set in the south that sees lots of cops and lawyers having sex and flirting with each other. Being CBS, though, it’s so tame and old hat that when people start sexting pictures of themselves, they still use email and no naughty bits are exposed, yet despite that, the female cop in question (Georgina Haig) gets fired. She decides to sue and hires lawyer Anna Wood to prosecute the police department; the PD hire her flirt partner Cam Gigandet (The OC, Never Back Down, Twilight), prompting muchos sparks. Except it turns out that another cop might have been raped by a bunch of other cops and things take a serious left turn.

There’s a good cast, including Adam Rodriguez (CSI: Miami), Shawn Hatosy (Southland) and Gregory Harrison (Logan’s Run). But the script is dreadful, perhaps even knowingly so at times – legal eagle Gigandet sails a motor boat to work in the morning, wearing his suit under his waders the whole time – and the gang rape of a woman by police officers after they’ve drugged her doesn’t exactly equal the sexy fun times the producers are after.

After the jump, a round-up of the regulars, with reviews of 24, Crossbones, Halt and Catch Fire, The Last Ship, Murder In The First, Old School, Penny Dreadful and Undateable.

Continue reading “What have you been watching? Including Reckless, The Last Ship and Crossbones”