Dare you watch Too Many Cooks?

There’s a long tradition of parodies of title sequences, particularly those from US shows of the 80s and 90s. They are, after all, relatively easy, cheesy targets. And at least they had title sequences in those days, unlike a lot of network shows, which would rather save their ad-glutted hour-long time slots for the show itself.

However, I don’t think there’s quite been a title sequence parody the likes of Too Many Cooks. Adult Swim aired this at 4am early morning for a week last month, meshed in between infomercials, before anyone noticed it. The creation of writer Chris Kelly (Squidbillies and Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell), it starts off as just a regular parody of the likes of Full House and Growing Pains, before becoming something altogether very different, alternately disturbing and comical.

I’m not sure how funny it is, but you won’t have seen anything quite like it before, I guarantee.

[via]

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What have you been watching? Including Interstellar, Arrow, Gotham, Elementary and Plebs

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 a couple of shows in the US have decided to take a wee break this week, the moving of “What have you been watching?” to a Friday hasn’t quite solved my backlog issues. So I haven’t yet watched this week’s The Affair or Jane The Virgin – which might be telling me something, or might not be. Otherwise, I’m up to date.

Elsewhere, I reviewed The McCarthys and I managed to watch a movie this evening:

Interstellar (2014)
Christopher Nolan’s latest. Christopher Nolan is, of course, a genius and Interstellar is another convention-defying, mainstream movie industry-defying blockbuster with little busting or indeed action. Three of its biggest stars are only revealed halfway through and the whole thing is set in some dystopian near future where the Earth is dying and our only hope is for Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway to travel through a wormhole to a distant galaxy and try to find a new planet. An odd combination of 2001, 2010, Silent Running, Planet of the Apes and, erm, Signs, it’s thoughtful, tries its best with science – it’s one of the few movies to even attempt to have the repercussions of relativity as a main plot point, let alone worry about whether a black hole is spinning or not in order for its singularity to be of the right kind, or try to simulate five dimensions with just two – and has some lovely outer space bits filmed in Iceland.

But I don’t know whether it’s because I’m a genius, too, because virtually all the twists and turns the movie runs through seemed blindingly obvious to me. I saw them all coming and was mildly disappointed when the movie did exactly what I expected it to do, particularly in one particularly bonkers bit towards the end. YMMV, but I’m off to watch Gravity and Inception again after this, both of which do aspects of Interstellar much much better. Still, it is a Christopher Nolan movie so automatically in the top 10% of all movies this year, despite a run time of three hours and nine minutes, and it does handles emotions and the people side of things much better than previous Nolan movies have, while still being very smart.

After the jump, I’ll be running through: Arrow, The Blacklist, Elementary, Gotham, Gracepoint, Homeland, Muianey, Plebs, Selfie and Scorpion.

Continue reading “What have you been watching? Including Interstellar, Arrow, Gotham, Elementary and Plebs”

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Review: The McCarthys 1×1 (US: CBS)

The McCarthys

In the US: Thursdays, 9.30/8.30c, CBS

With diversity being the touchstone topic of the fall season, I think it’s instructive to have a look at what CBS produces when it tries to do diversity (that’s CBS, the home of Big Bang Theory, Two Broke Girls, Two and a Half Men et al).

Let’s start with some clues: The McCarthys is set in Boston. That’s your first bit of diversity right there – it’s not New York or Los Angeles. And it’s all about a great big Irish Catholic family, who love JFK and the Celtics and all live on the same block. Can you feel the diversity yet?

Well, one of the sons – there are three sons, one daughter (how’s that for diversity?) – is gay. Ooh. Yes, on CBS. And you know he’s gay because he likes The Sound of Music, his best friend is his mum and he doesn’t like sports, unlike his straight brothers and straight sister. Yes, his sister plays basketball with her brothers but being gay means not even knowing after 20+ years in this family that the Celtics are the ones in green.

Unfortunately, gay son (he needs no name other than that) is heading off to Rhode Island (shock! horror! away from Boston) to be a counsellor at a private school and be part of the vibrant Rhode Island gay scene and maybe meet someone, since it’s kind of hard to do that with his stifling family. But his family don’t want him to leave, so they organise him a big gay party so he can meet other gay men (or men who look gay… or lesbians who look like men).

That doesn’t work. But then his dad, who is the coach of a high school basketball team, discovers a potential new recruit’s lesbian mother is only going to allow her son to sign if the school is down with the diversity thing – so the dad tells her that his gay son is actually the basketball team’s assistant coach.

Laughs? There were few and even the best of them were based on stereotypes (“Vibrant gay community? Aren’t all gay communities vibrant?”). But only a few.

There are a few points where the humour doesn’t involve stereotypes and it even tries to subvert stereotypes at times – gay son actually turns out to have a natural talent for basketball. But only a few, amidst the fighting, candle-lighting, loud-mouthed, basketball-loving Irish, flamboyant, sexless gay men, masculine lesbians – and non-existent non-white characters.

I do hope CBS gets better with practice…

A few trivia points to leave you with

  1. The show has premiered to the worst ratings of the season. It’s doomed.
  2. It was originally intended to be a single camera comedy, but that made it ‘too dark’.
  3. Gay son is played by Tyler “son of John” Ritter, Laurie Metcalf (Roseanne) plays the mother
  4. Apart from Jimmy Dunn and Joey McIntyre, who have the benefit of coming from Massachusetts, not one member of the cast, main or supporting, deemed it necessary to effect a Boston accent.

Here’s a trailer. It’s literally everything of note in the first episode, so that should save you some time.