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.
A little bit earlier than normal, thanks to the Easter bank holidays in the UK, but we’ll back to the usual Friday slot next week. New shows I’ve already reviewed this week:
- The Gods of Wheat Street (Australia: ABC1)
But I also watched:
Fargo (US: Tuesdays, 10pm, FX; UK: Sundays, 9pm, Channel 4, starting Sunday)
Despite the name and the Coen Brothers’ presence in the producers’ roster, rather than a straight retelling of the movie, Fargo is an anthology series, each season telling a different ‘true’ crime story from the Minnesota region, the movie effectively being just one of those stories. Indeed, despite the setting and there being a William H Macy-esque schmuck of an accountant (Martin Freeman) and a bright but unlikely female sheriff (Allison Tolman) to investigate the heinous crimes of a newly arrived criminal (Billy Bob Thornton), the show has far more in common with the Coen Brothers’ No Country For Old Men, right down to Billy Bob’s dark angel with an eccentric haircut and some nice-guy sheriffs (Shawn Doyle, Colin Hanks) who get close, sometimes too close, to a force of evil beyond their experiences.
While not a patch on the movie, Fargo is nevertheless a decent piece of work, well written, well shot, with some eye-opening scenes, and largely well acted, particularly by Doyle but especially by Thornton, who’s almost as mesmerising as Javier Bardem was. But it’s largely interested in issues of masculinity, what it means to be a man and what happens if you fall short of those societal demands, so the female characters get short shrift from the story. Importantly, the relatively inexperienced Tolman has yet to make anything like the impact that Frances McDormand did in the movie, although she’s likely to shift in importance in later episodes (spoiler)given Doyle unfortunately gets killed towards the end of the first episode.
Not truly compelling, but definitely a cut above the average and I’ll be sticking around to the next episode at least.
After the jump, the regulars, with reviews of Agents of SHIELD, Arrow, Community, Continuum, Crisis, Endeavour, Friends with Better Lives, Game of Thrones, Hannibal and Silicon Valley.
