In the US: Saturdays, 10/9c, BBC America In the UK: Thursdays, 9pm, BBC2
A long time ago, I came up with ‘Buckley’s Crime Show Hypothesis‘. Also known as Buckley’s ‘All producers live in Islington’ Hypothesis, this hypothesises that all TV producers live in Islington, because only people who live in Islington say things like “Of course, we don’t actually watch television. In fact, we don’t even own a television set. Ha, ha, ha!” and it’s very obvious that a lot of TV producers don’t watch TV. Or at least not TV that other people have made – I bet they all watch their own stuff.
The change in name came about because it was clear that this was true of TV producers working in genres other than crime. And with BBC America/BBC Two’s The Last Kingdom, which details how the plucky King of Wessex, Alfred the Great, defended England against the invasion of Vikings, we have proof that it’s true of those working in historical drama, too, because watching it, you can’t help but think “You guys haven’t seen Vikings, have you?”
In the US: Sundays, 9/8c, ABC In the UK: Not yet acquired
Originally, I billed this as ‘stupid Dallas‘, which given how idiotic Dallas was should tell you how stupid Blood & Oil is. Set in the recent North Dakota oil rush – the one that John Oliver did a piece about on Sunday – it sees two incompetent, newly wed buffoons (Chase Crawford and Rebecca Rittenhouse) head to the 50th most popular US state to set up a laundromat, only to seize the day and grab a slice of the oil boom, while getting into bed (only metaphorically at the moment) with oil baron Don Johnson.
And despite a momentary blip when episode two seemed to suggest that Crawford might have greater mental acuity than someone in a vegetative state on life support – he talks about ‘vertical integration’ at one point – I’m still going to go with ‘stupid Dallas‘, a show about stupid people doing stupid things involving oil.
It’s really hard to explain just how many stupid things happen each episode without giving away big spoilers, but even if you’re sitting at home, texting your friends, watching YouTube videos involving dancing cats and then look up momentarily at the TV screen to devote even 1% of your working brain to what’s going on, what you’ll notice is:
Either something will happen that will immediately suggest a future event that the show thinks will be a twist but which is entirely obvious from that point onwards
Or that thing doesn’t happen because everyone’s so stupid, it takes another episode for everything to percolate through their tiny, tiny brains.
On top of that, with the exception of Johnson (who’s one of the show’s producers so has probably engineered it that way), every single character, particularly bar-owning loan shark Brit India de Beaufort, is not just stupid but intensely irritating. Plus despite being North Dakota and there being a big oilfield on ‘Indian land’, somehow the show manages to be incredibly white, the only two non-white characters being a black couple serving the local populace with a takeaway van.
It’s hard to say which Sunday night ABC show is worse: Quantico or Blood & Oil. After all, they both get the same Barrometer rating. Yet although Blood & Oil has never sunk to the same depths as Quantico‘s pilot, Quantico has never been dull, whereas Blood & Oil almost goes out of its way to make a simple rags to riches story as unglamorous, unexciting and miserable as possible. There are no oil baron balls to enjoy, just dirt, mobile restaurants and bankruptcies.
Either way, ABC’s Sunday night line up honestly makes you want to go to church instead.
Barrometer rating: 4 TMINE’s prediction: Cancelled before the end of the first season
If I were American, I’d be afraid – at least if I believed for a second that Quantico had any resemblance to reality. Essentially How To Get Away With Murder but with FBI trainees rather than law students, it posits that the US’s future first, best line of defence in intelligence and crime fighting are a bunch of idiotic, pretty children who spend more time squabbling, playing at being mean girls and dealing with their personal backstories than training to stop the bad guys. That’s when they’re not too busy flirting with their implausible instructors, who have their own personal backstories and squabbling to do, too.
It’s perhaps only natural that it turns out that one of these trainees (or maybe even instructors) is secretly a terrorist who blows up Grand Central Station. Who is it? Well, if it was obvious, there’d be no mystery, so this class of elite idiots includes all manner of potential security risks, including a pair of twins who swap hijab at night but pretend to be one person, a guy who’s been to Gaza and pretends to be gay, a woman who has secret phone calls at night in Arabic, and our supposed heroine who killed her own father and spent 10 years in Mumbai.
To be fair to the show, Quantico‘s central mystery has become almost interesting over the past two episodes and it hasn’t been as stupid as it was in the first stupid – or at least the average density of stupid has decreased, even if it still hits the same peaks. Who is the secret terrorist? I’d almost care if I didn’t have to watch such a complete bunch of whiny, brain dead children the whole time.
However, as well as the intense stupidity of the show, there’s its woeful miscasting, particularly of Bollywood actress Priyanka Chopra. As well as her sheer implausibility at pretty much every level as a top FBI recruit, it’s the fact that the show makes it quite clear she’s the star and uses the other characters to make her look better. Chopra also appears to be acting in a different style from everyone else and clearly knows she’s the star of the show, too, despite being the emperiled heroine.
Quantico has gone from being excruciatingly awful to merely painful to watch.You can tell why Dougray Scott cleared off before the pilot even aired, can’t you?
Barrometer rating: 4 Rob’s prediction: Should make it to the end of the season but no more than that
‘Regression to the mean’ is one of those laws of statistics that gets bandied around without it necessarily meaning what people think it means. However, I’m beginning to wonder if there isn’t a regression to the mean over at NBC.
On the face of it, we have two action shows that are basically the best action shows that NBC’s done in a long time. We’re not talking Banshee- or Strike Back-level awesome, despite the presence of both of Strike Back‘s leads in these shows. But for network TV and certainly for NBC, both Blindspot and The Player are top efforts.
Both, however, had problems. Blindspot‘s biggest problems, apart from an incredibly stupid premise, was that it took itself very, very seriously. It lacked any sense of fun. Despite being about a woman with special powers who wakes up amnesiac, naked and tattooed in a bag in Times Square.
The Player, on the other hand, apparently knew it was daft from the outset and was going to have fun. Set in sunny Las Vegas, it sees a man fight crime in order to win bets for rich people. Possessing not only some great stunt coordinators but the martial arts-tastic Wesley Snipes as the ambivalent ‘Pit Boss’ of ‘the game’, The Player was never going to win any awards, but it knew it would have a laugh along the way.
Since those opening episodes, Blindspot has slowly improved, with last night’s episode being its best – and most fun – yet. Poor old Sullivan Stapleton even got to crack a smile.
Meanwhile, The Player has slowly been trying to take itself seriously, despite essentially being Hard Target set in casinos. Angsty Philip Winchester has been getting more angsty, while Snipes has been glowering a lot and has stopped doing his funny characters. Meanwhile, ‘The Dealer’, Charity Wakefield, has implausibly been revealed to be both ex-Royal Marines and ex-SAS. Despite neither the Marines nor the SAS accepting female recruits.
The result is that Blindspot has gone from being an absolute waste of time to being almost preferable to The Player, which has become a bit yawny.
The Player still has a lot going for it, particularly the locale and the cast, but especially its action scenes, which are probably the best on broadcast US TV – its second episode had some outstanding aerial stuntwork. Its ongoing story arcs are moderately intriguing, too, as we learn a little about ‘the game’ and the FBI’s investigations into it, as well as what happened to Winchester’s ex-wife.
But it needs to rediscover the fun it had in the first episode and let Winchester enjoy himself. It also needs to unleash Wesley Snipes. Let him do whatever he wants to do, guys – you’ll be grateful for it.
Barrometer rating: 2 TMINE prediction: If it continues on its current path, it’s liable to get cancelled within a season. But if it can rediscover the fun, there’s no reason it couldn’t make it to two or even three seasons
