Month: July 2014

The BarrometerA Barrometer rating of 3

Third-episode verdict: Welcome To Sweden (TV4/NBC)

25 July 2014 Rob Buckley 3 Comments

In Sweden: Aired starting in March on TV4 in Sweden
In the US: Thursdays, 9/8c, NBC

Three episodes into the TV4-NBC English language co-production, Welcome To Sweden, and the big problem I had with the first episode is still true: it’s just not as funny as it should be.

The show does pretty much everything right in terms of production in this romcom based on American Greg Poehler’s real-life attempts to adapt to life in Sweden when he emigrates there to be with his girlfriend. It’s shot in Sweden, has Swedish writers and has Swedish actors. It’s got a decent array of characters. It has a bevy of guest stars, from both sides of the Atlantic, including Will Ferrell and most of the cast of Parks and Recreation. It plays with stereotypes but knows enough to transcend them. It’s not afraid to have half the show in Swedish, half in English. There aren’t even any male-female stereotypes to deal with, despite its being a romcom.

But the joke count in both Swedish and English is remarkably low, and most of the situations on the show can be found in any romcom, whether it’s “having sex in the room next to the parents” to “passing the immigration department’s tests”, without really doing anything innovative with one. Each episode gives perhaps one or two laughs at most, usually from the Swedish side rather than the American side, although episode two saw Poehler having to pretend to be Canadian when some American-hating Iraq war refugees turn up at his language class. And when the laughs aren’t coming from the Swedes joking about Poehler’s height, it’s from the guest stars playing versions of themselves, whether it’s Will Ferrell’s hopelessly well adjusted, Swedophile who learnt Swedish by listening to husky-toned language tapes, or Parks and Recreation’s Amy “Greg’s sister” Poehler and Audrey Plaza playing themselves as self-centred, vapid druggies.

In other words, the central set-up isn’t that great; it’s the few things in each episode other than that that actually provide the very gentle comedy.

If you like Parks and Recreation’s first season, you’ll probably love Welcome To Sweden. If you speak Swedish, you’ll probably love Welcome To Sweden. Otherwise, you’ll almost certainly want to love Welcome To Sweden, but you just won’t find it that funny.

Rating: 3
Rob’s prediction: Unlikely to get a second season, but funnier things have happened

News

News: Amazon’s Man In The High Castle, Sky Arts marks Kiefer Sutherland, 50 Shades of trailer + more

25 July 2014 Rob Buckley 2 Comments

Ben Affleck as Batman

The Daily News will return in September

Film

Film casting

Trailers

  • Trailer for Fifty Shades of Grey [NSFW?]
  • Trailer for Hot Tub Time Machine 2 [NSFW]

Australian TV

Internet TV

UK TV

New UK TV shows

US TV

US TV show casting

New US TV shows

New US TV show casting

US TV

Mini-review: The Divide 1×1-1×2 (WEtv)

24 July 2014 Rob Buckley Post a comment

The Divide

In the US: Wednesdays, 9/8c, WEtv

I’d like to write a really long review of The Divide. After all, it’s the first scripted drama on a channel hitherto known best for reality TV – WEtv. It’s a thoughtful look at the grey areas of morality, the US legal system, the death penalty, how forensic science affects process, and how politics, race and the politics of race can warp everything. It’s got two members of the cast of The Wire in it – Chris Bauer and Clarke Peters – as well as Homeland’s ‘evil blonde female muslim terrorist’ Malin Ireland. It’s from AMC Studios, was originally developed for AMC by long-time producer David Manson (House of Cards) and is show-run by the Emmy-winning John Tinker (Judging Amy).

It all sounds good and important, right? Except my mind’s a total blank. The show’s good but utterly uninspiring. It was hard to bring myself to watch the double-length first episode; the third episode was on last night and I really couldn’t be arsed to watch it.

Trying to put my finger on why I can’t be arsed isn’t easy. It’s all very good quality, just generic good quality. The characters have standard issues – Ireland is studying to join the bar but works in her spare time to reprieve the wrongly convicted because her dad is on death row. She has a slightly self-destructive relationship with a cop, but whenever there’s an issue, the cop wants to talk it through, quickly dispelling any real drama.

Equally, the show is at extreme pains not to have heroes or villains. It doesn’t want to take sides on capital punishment, essentially giving members of the audience justification for their beliefs, whatever they might be: it even claims at one point that ‘no one in the US has ever been executed for a crime that they were proven not to have committed’. Everyone’s dedicated to doing the right thing, just interpreting that differently for different reasons. The twist – (spoiler alert) Bauer was present for the crime but didn’t commit the crime and there’s been a cover-up to protect the person who was actually there – is just astonishingly obvious that you’ll spend the whole of the second half waiting for everyone on-screen to catch up with you, even though they have all the same facts you do.

It’s worthy and dull. It’s so dull that even AMC rejected it, but not so mesmerisingly dull that it could find a home on Sundance TV. It’s too smart for network TV, too stupid for basic cable. If you like a generic thriller that’s a cut above TNT’s Murder In the First but nowhere near as entertaining, here’s your boy. Otherwise, steer clear.

The BarrometerA Barrometer rating of 4

Third-episode verdict: Extant (CBS/Amazon Prime)

24 July 2014 Rob Buckley 4 Comments

In the US: Wednesdays, 9/8c, CBS
In the UK: Available on Amazon Prime

Three episodes into Extant – essentially Solaris meets Rosemary’s Baby mixed with just a hint of AI, Gravity and Moon, in which astronaut Halle Berry comes back to Earth after a year alone in space hallucinating her dead boyfriend and discovers she’s pregnant – and it’s clear that this is less science fiction, more an exercise in coming up with this year’s Under The Dome. It’s certainly got as much plot as Under The Dome, because after filling the first episode with every card it had it in its derivative pack, it’s slowly been eeking out those few puzzles and mysteries over a somewhat dull and unexciting chase-around storyline for the following two episodes.

Every episode has been pretty much the same: Berry runs around a bit in an effort to verify everything that the audience already knows and/or suspects, while artificially holding off from jumping to any logical conclusion or entrusting anyone with any new secrets. After experiencing minimum peril, she then discovers… not much.

Meanwhile, she and scientist husband Goran Visnjic watch while their creepy robot son acts creepily and yet fail to spot anything is awry. Of course, Visnjic and robot son have secrets, too, and none of them are in a sharing mood either. If anyone talked to anyone else, this would all be over a lot quicker.

As I pointed out in my review of the first episode, the show misses out on doing anything truly interesting with its quasi-futuristic setting, too. Following the pilot, which did at least make a stab at futurology, ever since we’ve had a future where we can send people up into space regularly, create an artificial intelligence that can be placed into a human-looking body, yet doesn’t have self-drive cars and has everyone carrying around mobile phones that do little more than what last year’s iPhone could. There’s definite intelligence behind the scenes in the writing staff, but it’s clear that because of either the budget or a belief that the audience isn’t that smart, the show would rather not push anyone too far intellectually and would rather wave its hands distractingly when ‘the science bits’ come up. Hell, in this episode we’ve just had someone talking about ‘sending postcards’ – does anyone even do that now, let alone in a world that should have 7G-enabled contact lenses and invisible tooth and ear implants for instant communication and information access?

So despite a pilot that did at least have a little promise, it’s time for me to leave Extant. So far, it’s all promise with no pay-off. Hell, I’m not even sure what it’s promising, it’s so frustratingly coy about letting us know what the aliens, corporate entities, et al are really interested in doing: communication, invasion, control? So many secrets and I’m not sure I really care what the answers are. So given what happened with Under The Dome, I think I’m going to bow out early rather than get strung along again. And if I ever change my mind, the whole thing will be on Amazon Prime forever so I can play catch-up.

Barrometer rating: 4
Rob’s predication: Is supposed to be only one season and hopefully it’ll stay that way