Month: January 2015

News: Minority Report and Wet Hot American Summer TV series, The CW renews 8 shows, iZombie trailer + more

12 January 2015 Rob Buckley Post a comment

Trailers

  • Two clips from Justice League: Throne of Atlantis
  • Trailer for Neill Blomkamp’s Chappie
  • Trailer for Run All Night with Liam Neeson and Ed Harris

Internet TV

UK TV

New UK TV show casting

  • Tom Bateman, Richard E Grant and Natalie Gumede join ITV’s Jekyll & Hyde

US TV

US TV show casting

New US TV shows

New US TV show casting

US TV

Review: Marvel’s Agent Carter 1×1-1×2 (US: ABC)

9 January 2015 Rob Buckley 3 Comments

In the US: Tuesdays, 9/8c, ABC

One of the biggest, medium-changing successes of the past half-decade has been the Marvel Avengers movies. Combining both the individual and ensemble adventures of superheroes Iron Man, Thor, Captain America and the Incredible Hulk, the Avengers series has taken billions of dollars around the world and launched whole new movie franchises with other superheroes in a roadmap laid out until 2020 or so.

There are superhero movies everywhere and movie producers are looking for even more superheroes to film, even as we speak.

The effect hasn’t been restricted to just films and comics, either. Series featuring Marvel superheroes are set to fill up Netflix and on TV, for example. However, those feature the likes of Daredevil, Jessica Jones and Luke Cage, rather than anyone in the Avengers movies themselves.

Which is a problem. If any of the audience wanted an Avengers spin-off TV series at all, it was featuring characters they’d grown to know and love.

On ABC, of course, we have Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD featuring Agent Coulson from the movie series, but when audiences around the world were watching (The) Avengers (Assemble), they weren’t thinking, “We’d really like a TV show featuring a bunch of whole new people and that guy who’s in three movies for about five minutes and then gets killed in this one.”

No, they were thinking, “We want a Black Widow movie.”

That’s not happening, though. Stupid producers.

Perhaps the most obvious candidate to star in a TV series who wasn’t Scarlett Johansson and commanding a double-digit million dollar salary was Hayley Atwell’s Agent Carter from Captain America: The First Avenger. A wartime spy and soldier who loved – and was loved by – Captain America, she was feisty, fun, well acted and had a tragic ending to her story – after all, Captain America ends up frozen underwater until he wakes up in modern times, never able to make that date he’d arranged with her.

Marvel puts the feelers out for a potential Agent Carter series on the Iron Man 3 DVD, giving us one of their Marvel One Shots, with Carter working post-war for a spy outfit run by Bradley Whitford, the only problem being she’s a woman and no one takes her seriously. At the end, Carter joins her wartime compatriot, Iron Man’s dad Howard Stark, in setting up the future SHIELD.

Since then, she’s popped up in Captain America 2 as well as Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD, but if you thought a full series of Agent Carter adventures was on the cards, you’d have been mistaken – the order for that is probably sitting under the long-lost script for that Black Widow movie – because coming to our screens is ABC’s now-traditional filler approach to mid-season replacements: a limited series of just eight episodes.

And if you thought it would be all about what Carter got up to running SHIELD, think again. Again.

Because despite the fact it includes footage from that DVD One-Shot, Marvel’s Agent Carter is set before it in 1946, detailing just one of her cases while working post-War for the Strategic Science Reserve. Howard Stark (Dominic Cooper) has disappeared, apparently selling weapons to US enemies, but he emerges to reveal to Carter that the truth is that some of his secret inventions have been stolen. He asks her to recover the weapons and clear his name, with the help of his butler, Jarvis (James D’Arcy) – and decidedly not with the help of all those sexists back at the SSR who just want Peggy to make the tea.

Given the period setting, Atwell, guest appearances by fan favourites, references to other Marvel properties and all the opportunities a prequel can present, you’d think that Marvel’s Agent Carter would be a slam dunk. But while it’s certainly a whole lot more entertaining and exciting than Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD was when it started, it’s still not the must-see you’d have expected. Here’s a trailer.

Continue reading “Review: Marvel’s Agent Carter 1×1-1×2 (US: ABC)”

News: Amazon green lights Guillermo del Toro’s Carnival Row, Edward James Olmos joins SHIELD + more

9 January 2015 Rob Buckley 2 Comments

Film casting

  • Alec Baldwin, Neil Patrick Harris and Jason Sudeikis join Alexander Payne’s Downsizing
  • Bruce Willis to star in adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s Bandits

Trailers

  • Trailer for Run All Night, with Joel Kinnaman, Liam Neeson, Ed Harris et al

Internet TV

US TV

US TV show casting

Classic TV

Nostalgia Corner: Rubik, the Amazing Cube (1983-1984)

8 January 2015 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

Rubik's Amazing Cube

Nostalgia is a tricky thing. We can, of course, feel nostalgic for something from our childhood. Douglas Coupland’s ‘legislated nostalgia’ enables us to feel nostalgic for a time when we weren’t even alive.

But is it possible to have anti-legislated nostalgia – to not only not feel any desire to see something again from our childhood but to feel it for something we never even saw?

Because I think there is. Because this week I discovered the existence of Rubik, the Amazing Cube.

Now, back in the 80s, the UK did import an awful lot of US cartoons tied into all kinds of commercial properties. Naturally, the creative quality of these “flog toys to kids” shows varied, ranging from the top end with the likes of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, Thundercats and Centurions all the way through to the unholy likes of the bottom end: Visionaries and Bravestarr.  

Fortunately, there was at least a quality control on these imports – the acquisition managers at the BBC and ITV. These brave souls would plough through all the shows available for purchase, decide which were the best and buy only those. Sure, Visionaries and Bravestarr got through. But look at what didn’t.

Rubik, the Amazing Cube is perhaps the best example of what happens when you try to take a commercial product singularly unsuited to dramatic storytelling – the Rubik’s Cube – and then try to use it for dramatic storytelling. For those of you who were apparently born on other worlds or are barely more than children, the Rubik’s Cube was a 1980s toy puzzle composed of smaller cubes that you could rotate around a central hub. It started with each face of the big cube the same colour, you’d jumble them all up and then try to get them back to the same state again. Here’s a Rubik’s Cube being solved – bear in mind it has about 43 quintillion possible permutations.

That’s it. No sound effects, flashing lights, computer-powered voices or anything else. Just cubes that have to be rotated.

So spare a thought for the writers of the Ruby-Spears cartoon series Rubik, the Amazing Cube, hired to devise no fewer than 18 half-hour episodes aimed at flogging Rubik’s Cubes to children across the US. These mighty heroes did the best they could, but ultimately what else could they produce but garbage?

In fact, the strategy they chose was probably the optimal solution, baring in mind they had only a 1 in about 43 quintillion chance of coming up with anything decent – have as little to do with the actual puzzle as possible. So the plot of the show gave us Rubik, the Amazing Cube. He was magic and could talk, being able to fly through air among other things. He’d been abducted by an evil magician and after three children Carlos, Lisa and Reynaldo Rodriguez rescue him and help him to evade the magician, he chooses to help them with their various problems. As it was the early 80s, this included burning social problems such as school bullies and to the writers’ credit, they did make the heroes of the piece Latinos – not just one token one in an ethnically diverse group, but a whole family and just that family, a rarity to this day.

The only catch? Rubik can only come alive when all the cubes on each of his faces match up and wouldn’t you know it, he’d get jumbled up a lot, when he got dropped or attacked by dogs, for example. That meant the three Rodriguez kids had to unjumble him or else they’d be in so much trouble.

Now you might think I’m making this up, but I’m not. Because here’s a full episode you can watch. Let me know if you feel anti-legislated nostalgia.

US TV

Review: Hindsight 1×1 (US: VH1)

8 January 2015 Rob Buckley 5 Comments

Hindsight

In the US: Wednesdays, 10/9c, VH1

There is a stereotype that Canadians are basically the same as Americans – except smarter. Unfair? Untrue? Maybe. Yet, if we were to judge how Americans and Canadians approached almost exactly the same idea, it would be hard not to think that perhaps there’s truth to the stereotype.

A few years ago, Canada’s CBC gave us the mind-bending Being Erica, in which over-achieving Erica Strange MA is stuck in a dead end job, her personal life a mess, when a mysterious proverb-quoting stranger gives her the opportunity to do over key moments in her life with the benefit of hindsight, so she can fix her problems and grow as a person.

It was a lovely, jaunty, smart little show with a lot to say for itself and quite rightly, countries all over the world acquired it. Even the US. Many countries even tried to make their own versions of it, few actually getting anywhere with it. Even the US.

But now we have VH1 – yes, the TV music channel for oldies – entirely by coincidence and in no way doing anything that would require it to pay a licence fee to anyone, giving us what is essentially a remake of Being Erica called Hindsight. Except it’s a lot stupider.

Becca (Laura Ramsey) is a 40-something secretary about to embark on her second marriage to Andy (Nick Clifford), a nice but definitely dull guy she doesn’t really love, when she bumps into a Buddhist-proverb quoting stranger. Wouldn’t you know it, she’s waking up the next day back in 1995, on the eve of her first wedding to the hot but bad Australian Sean (Craig Horner from Legend of the Seeker). How did she get there? Who was the proverb-quoting stranger? Should she tell best friend Lolly what’s happened and why they’re no longer talking in the future? Should she still marry Sean or should she go off with Andy? Will the benefit of hindsight help?

These are the questions that Hindsight poses. You’ll notice that questions about the existential nature of reality, the self and one’s career do not feature in that list.

Here’s a trailer.

Continue reading “Review: Hindsight 1×1 (US: VH1)”