Nevertheless, US TV has arguably had three great eras: the ‘Westinghouse era’, the Steve Bochco era and the HBO/post-HBO cable renaissance, and I do genuinely think we are almost certainly living in a golden age of US TV.
Do I have proof? Well, I think if we look at the following collection of title sequences for US TV shows that debuted as part of the 1995 season, we can see that things have definitely improved. Apart from the fact that you almost certainly remember none of them, they’re just plain shoddy. Particularly Burke’s Law, which was a revival of a show you’ve almost certainly forgotten from the 1960s but which nevertheless still had a better title sequence than the revival did.
There are a couple of outliers: there’s Due South, of course. No one say anything bad about Due South. Party of Five many people rated, although I never watched it.
But you’ll almost certainly remember Diagnosis Murder and Touched By An Angel not because they were good but because they’re either perpetually repeated on daytime TV or/and they were memorably awful and cheesy.
Of course, we need to compare and contrast with more recent times to prove our general hypothesis that TV is getting better. So let’s pick a relatively recent season at random: the 2008 season. That was a mere seven years ago now but 13 years after the 1995 season. Sigh.
So how many of these shows do you remember and turned out to be timeless classics?
Actually, quite a few were classics of varying degrees when they debuted, including Generation Kill, Sons of Anarchy, Leverage, Fringe, True Blood and The Mentalist, as well as arguably Dollhouse – although that doesn’t mean they didn’t get worse as time went on. There were also several memorable shows, although not always for the right reasons: Life on Mars (US), My Own Worst Enemy and Knight Rider – I’m looking at you here. Indeed, although it’s no excuse, many of the duffest shows can be laid at the door of NBC, which was then notoriously going through one of its worst ever creative periods thanks to a change in management.
So, yes, I think we can conclude that US TV is getting better. Thanks science!
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.
Life is good. Summer is here. I’ve watched loads of tele. Elsewhere, I’ve reviewed and previewed:
I’ve also passed verdict on the first four episodes of UnREAL (US: Lifetime) and the first three of Between (Netflix). That means that after the jump, I’ll be looking at the latest episodes of: Game of Thrones, Halt and Catch Fire, Hannibal, Sense8, Silicon Valley,Stitchers, Westside and The Whispers.
But before that, not only have I watched a movie, I’ve been to the theatre again:
Movies
Big Hero 6 (2014)
The first Disney animated movie to be based on a Marvel comic, Big Hero 6 sees a group of nerds come together to become science and technology superheroes when they’re faced with a man with an army of tiny robots. Led by a teenager called Hiro, they’re also helped by an inflatable healthcare robot called Baymax who can’t quite get to grips with this fighting thing superheroes do…
It’s actually quite a sweet little film, albeit with slightly traumatic moments that might disturb little children, with ironically Hiro learning from the caring Baymax how to be a better person and hero. Despite being a bit ‘boys and toys’, there are also a few good female nerd roles and some bits that will make you laugh out loud. The East meets West location of San Fransokyo is brilliantly realised, too.
Theatre
I’ve already reviewed The Oresteia (Almeida) elsewhere.
The Audience (Apollo Theatre)
Once a week, in a tradition that goes back to the time of Queen Victoria, the reigning monarch of the UK meets with the current Prime Minister to be updated on current events and to discuss matters of relevance to the both of them. In the hands of playwright Peter Morgan (The Queen), what could be purely a matter of historical interest instead becomes a song of praise to both the institution of the monarchy and the Queen herself.
The play flits between historical periods, giving us Prime Ministers from Churchill through to David Cameron, with the Queen acting as a fixed point in time who can compare Anthony Eden’s misadventures in Suez with Tony Blair’s in Iraq, Cameron’s small majority with Wilson’s, and act as a confessional for all of them. But it also looks at how the Queen herself changes over time, starting from a young, independent woman wanting to be involved in matters of state through to the mature monarch who accepts the needs of the constitution for her to back the government in everything, whatever she might feel personally. She also gets to have her own sounding board. Who, you might ask? Well, who could possibly provide the Queen with an audience except herself?
Rather than put the boot in as The Queen perhaps did, the play, which has been updated since its original run with Helen Mirren to include both Blair and Cameron at the expense of Callaghan, humanises both the Queen and all the Prime Ministers: Churchill is the traditionalist who mentors the new queen but also wants to postpone her coronation for political purposes and forces her not to change her name when she marries; Eden was right about Mussolini and Hitler and is convinced Nassar is the same; Wilson is the upstart socialist from Huddersfield with the eidetic memory who becomes paranoid as Alzheimer’s starts to rob him of his faculties; and Brown is the economics expert who believes his destiny was to lead the country – but who knows that he’s not got the right skills for the job. Even Major is redeemed: the man everyone remembers as little more than the tail end of Margaret Thatcher’s regime is here the man who brokered deals between warlords in the Balkans but who’s constantly undermined by his supposed allies.
And then there’s Margaret Thatcher…
Kristin Scott Thomas is excellent as the Queen, having to endure numerous quick changes of costume and jumps between time period, yet still surely making even the most ardent republicans feel something for the most powerful woman in the world, the firm proponent of the Commonwealth who was happy as a mechanic in the war and who would probably vote Labour if she could. In this she’s helped considerably by Izzy Meikle-Small as her younger self, who’ll make you wonder if the Queen is really just a grown up Arya Stark.
Hats off also to David Calder (Star Cops) as Churchill, Gordon Kennedy (Absolutely) as Gordon Brown, Michal Gould as John Major, Nicholas Woodeson (Rome) as Harold Wilson, and Highlander’s David Robb as Anthony Eden.
I’ll happily confess that both my wife and I wept buckets during the play and would happily go and see it again.
The procedural is killing mainstream US TV. It really is. On the face of it, there’s nothing wrong with a procedural, whether it’s cops, doctors, firefighters or soldiers. As a format, the procedural is versatile since if you’re going to produce 13-24 episodes of something that doesn’t necessarily have a linking narrative, you’re going to want to have a reason for things to happen – and if your characters’ job is to go and find things, that really does help.
Trouble is when everything has to be crowbarred into that format, even when there’s really no good reason for it. You can just about forgive something like Stitchers – who else would bother trying to insert themselves into dead people’s fading consciousnesses every week apart from a shadowy government agency? Once would be enough for most people and you’d probably pick people who hadn’t died traumatically, which would be dramatically dull, of course.
But now we have the ludicrous Proof on TNT, a network that I thought was trying to get away from the fact that 90% of its content is procedural but here are showing that like some teenager after a break-up, they can’t quite get over their first love.
Jennifer Beals (Flashdance, The Chicago Code) is a powerful, high flying surgeon who is a sceptical woman of science. However, following the death of her teenage son, her family isn’t quite so happy, with Beals and husband David Sutcliffe (Cracked) getting divorced and her teenager daughter being none too happy with her either.
Then one day, tech billionaire Matthew Modine (Full Metal Jacket, Weeds) bribes hospital administrator Joe Morton (Terminator 2, Grace and Frankie) into ordering Beals to meet him. Modine is dying and hasn’t long to live, but being the prepared type, he wants to know exactly what’s going to happen to him afterwards. So he offers to give Beals his entire fortune on the event of his death – provided she can bring him proof of what happens, be that ascent to Heaven, everlasting blackness or partying in Valhalla until Ragnarok. And rather than investigate plausible cases in a long-drawn out research project, she’s going to look at a different phenomenon every week.
Yes, that’s right, we have the first ever ‘investigate the afterlife’ procedural. That’s… plausible.
It’s a relatively quiet week this week for Wonder Woman, with just two appearances before next week’s epic roll out of the DC You universe begins in earnest for the Amazon princess. Over in Injustice: Gods Among Us, there’s rather a lot of Wonder Woman, with the gods deciding that Superman needs to vacate the planet – or else. Meanwhile, appropriately enough, Sensation Comics – and Batman – take a week to give Diana a moment of peace. I wonder how that’ll work out?
