Year: 2014

News: Syfy to adapt 3001, Sky Arts acquires comedy and Scandi drama, Fox hires martial arts cops + more

4 November 2014 Rob Buckley 2 Comments

Film casting

UK TV

UK TV show casting

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New US TV shows

What have you been watching? Including The Anomaly, Constantine, Chef and Doctor Who

3 November 2014 Rob Buckley 13 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.

Sunday’s overload of TV, as well as a generally busy weekend, means that I’m very slightly behind on my viewing. That means that still in the viewing queue are the latest episodes of The Affair, Homeland, Mulaney and Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD. I’ve also got the first episode of The McCarthys to watch as well. As a result, I think “What have you been watching?” should shift to Friday again for the next few weeks, to deal with the latest schedule fun.

I did give The Knick (US: Cinemax; UK: Sky Atlantic) a brief try. This is Steven Soderburgh’s little project, starring Clive Owen, which aired in the Summer while I was away on holiday. Set in a turn of the 20th century American hospital, it appears to exist mainly to allow Soderburgh to play around with a brilliant surgeon who’s a racist drug addict and for Owen to try out an American accent that doesn’t fit him very well. It didn’t inspire me to watch any more of it anyway.

Before I get on to the regulars, though, I’ll briefly mention a few films I watched this week.

Chef (2014)
Jon Favreau is a cook who ends up having a fight with a restaurant critic (Oliver Platt) and getting fired. He decides to go back to basics by driving around the US in a van, but thanks to the fight going viral – and his son tagging along for the ride helps out a lot there – he soon becomes incredibly popular. Largely, the movie exists as a metaphor for Favreau’s experiences of going from independent movie making to big franchise movies (eg Iron Man) and back to indie movies again, and he’s got a lot of acting pals along with him to help (eg Sofia Vergara, Scarlett Johansson, Dustin Hoffman, Robert Downey Jr). But it feels very self-satisfied, not least to the effect the portly Favreau has on women, and ultimately very predictable.

How Do You Know (2010)
Reese Witherspoon is a baseball player who hooks up with fellow athlete and ‘playa’ Owen Wilson. But should she really be with lawyer Paul Rudd, who’s a little bit too ready to commit. How will she know? Why should you care? You shouldn’t and won’t. A fabulous cast that also includes Jack Nicholson, and directed by TV comedy super-director James L Brooks, but the funny bits are all in the trailer.

The Anomaly (2014)
A strange futuristic little movie, in which Noel Clarke from Doctor Who is a soldier who keeps waking up to find himself in all kinds of strange situations, only for him to lose consciousness again after 10 minutes. Cue the next strange situation. Over time, he begins to piece together what’s going on – at least, when he’s not being punched a lot by Ian Somerhalder (Lost, The Vampire Diaries) – and it could change the world. Directed by Clarke and also featuring Alexis Knapp (Pitch Perfect, Ground Floor), it looks surprisingly good for a low budget indie movie and has some good ideas: in its own way, it’s the Megaville of this decade. But it’s somewhat sabotaged by some well choreographed but poorly shot, impactless fight scenes, a decision that all the female characters should be topless/naked at some point or other, and by leaving Brian Cox to almost literally hang around with nothing to do. Blink and you’ll miss Freema Agyeman as Clarke’s wife.

That’s it for new new shows, though, but after the jump, I’ll be running through: Arrow, The Blacklist, Constantine, Doctor Who, Elementary, Forever, Gotham, Gracepoint, Homeland, Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD, Muianey, Plebs and Scorpion. Will I be dropping any this week?

Continue reading “What have you been watching? Including The Anomaly, Constantine, Chef and Doctor Who”

The BarrometerA Barrometer rating of 1

Third-episode verdict: The Affair (US: Showtime)

3 November 2014 Rob Buckley 3 Comments

In the US: Sundays, 10pm ET/PT, Showtime

I’m three episodes into Showtime’s The Affair, in which Dominic West and Ruth Wilson each tell their side of their affair to a particularly interested bystander (spoiler alert: someone’s been murdered and they’re both being interviewed by a cop), and it’s still relatively easy to summarise: it’s outstanding, quality television, intelligent, thoughtful, emotional, incisive – beautifully acted and written.

The show is enjoyably slippery with the truth, with no objective only subjective reality presented, with West and Wilson’s stories having either different perspectives or outright contradicting each other, with no real clues unless you watch very, very closely as to who might be lying and when. Even then, there might be double bluffs, meaning we’ll have to wait to the end of the series (or perhaps even never) before we find out what really happened.

The writers do a good job of giving us the two sides of the story, although West’s is the harder to watch: he’s self-obsessed and bitter and the affair (as he describes it) comes more from disaffection, dissatisfaction and obsession; by contrast, Wilson’s story is about a woman coming back to life after the death of her son, and feels more joyful as she finds pleasure in life again. How much of that is because Wilson’s character is the better liar remains to be seen, though.

But you’ll note that I wrote ‘three episodes’, even though four episodes have now aired, and you’ll get a hint of the problem: it’s a hard watch. It’s rarely joyful or fun. It involves people who probably deserve an Amish-style shunning from society (especially the rich ones). It’s also paralysingly slow, taking three episodes before anything really happens. That means it’s taking me a week to summon up the enthusiasm to watch each episode. Once I do, I’m glad I did, but it’s a real struggle.

So while I do recommend this, as with the likes of In Treatment (from the same writers) and Rectify, I would say be prepared to have to work at The Affair. Whether it’s better to save up all the episodes for a binge watch or whether the drip drip drip of one a week will work better for you, only you can say. Certainly, you’ll need to be – in the words of many a job advert – a motivated self-starter. But, so far, it’s certainly been worth the effort I’ve put in, even if, being a remarkably lazy, couch potato-like creature, finding that effort has been harder than normal.

Barrometer rating: 1

The BarrometerA Barrometer rating of 3

Third-episode verdict: Marry Me (US: NBC; UK: E4)

3 November 2014 Rob Buckley 2 Comments

In the US: Tuesdays, 9/8c, NBC
In the UK: Acquired by E4. Will air late 2014/early 2015

Romance is officially dead. Manhattan Love Story was the first of the US Autumn shows to get cancelled, and A To Z has just been given its marching orders, leaving the not-especially-romantic Selfie and NBC’s Marry Me as the last of the potential suitors, forlornly looking around in the hope that their dates are going to show up some time soon.

To be honest, though, I’d be surprised if Marry Me wasn’t stood up soon, too. Based on the real-life meeting and eventual marriage of writer David Caspe and actress Casey Wilson, it runs through the gamut of relationship events that can occur leading up to and following a marriage proposal (episode one), from moving in together (episode two) through to, erm, Halloween (episode three). And with Caspe (Happy Endings) writing and both Wilson and Ken Marino (Party Down) starring, it should be good.

Unfortunately, the most it ever does is make you admire it and occasionally smile wryly. As I said in the first episode, it clearly wants to be the new I Love Lucy, to the extent – it turns out – that Marino and Wilson actually dress up as Arnaz and Ball for Halloween. But really, despite some good writing, it’s never actually very funny. It tries hard to be edgy, to the extent of, say, blurring out the screen and beeping over dialogue to avoid nude and verbal indiscretions. But it’s that knowing edginess and the writers’ tendency to take what could be a good short, one-scene joke and then milk it for an entire episode that undermines its efforts.

It’s not without value and it’s enjoyable in its own way. But I’m not sure it’s a keeper.

Barrometer rating: 3
Rob’s prediction: Will last a season but not more than that unless it’s very, very lucky.

The BarrometerA Barrometer rating of 3

Third-episode verdict: Jane The Virgin (US: The CW; UK: E4)

3 November 2014 Rob Buckley 2 Comments

In the US: Mondays, 9/8c, The CW
In the UK: Acquired by E4. Will air in 2015

As I mentioned when I reviewed the first episode of Jane The Virgin, The CW’s adaptation of a telenovela about a miraculously inseminated young woman called Jane, there’s a right and a wrong way both to do diversity and to adapt telenovelas. And the first episode of the show was very much the right way to do it. A fun, clever meta little story, possessed of one of the best, most knowing narrators on TV, it knew what it was and played with the genre and convention to give us a wonderfully ludicrous piece of soapy fun.

The trouble from the show since then has been living up to the high standard of the first episode. Because knowing-soapiness is fun, but soapiness by itself can be a bit dull. While episode two redeemed itself in the final five minutes with some wonderfully exciting and bizarrely improbable twists, those five minutes sat at the end of an otherwise conventional bit of soap opera plotting. No moustache twirling, minimal “hey, I’m in a telenovela!” self-awareness and even the narration felt a bit limp.

Unfortunately, episode 3 continued this downward escape from escaping from reality, with a somewhat conventional attempt at farce and intrigue as Jane attempted to lose her virginity. The narrator did his best to salvage it, but overall you could have been watching a pretty standard soap opera and not noticed the difference.

When Jane The Virgin is good, it’s very, very good – a fun, knowing, innovative show for those who are fans of telenovelas and those who biggest exposure has been Ugly Betty. Unfortunately, more often than not, it’s a regular old soap opera running through plot lines and ideas that you’ll have seen before. To some extent, that familiarity will provide comfort to some telenovela fans, but to others – as indeed the ratings have borne out – it’ll be something of a turn-off.

I might stick with Jane, but telenovelas aren’t really my thing and it’s been harder to justify watching it. We’ll just have to see how it goes.

Barrometer rating: 3
Rob’s prediction: Will be lucky to last more than a season