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.
I’m back. You may have noticed at least some stirring of activity from TMINE this week, following my return, with a third-episode verdict on 11.22.63 (US: Hulu; UK: Fox), but the trouble with going away for a bit is that you have to catch up with all the things you should have been doing while you were away.
But I have. Just about. Okay, I didn’t make it more than 10 minutes through Netflix’s Love, despite Gillian Jacobs being in the cast. I will try to remedy that next week, although there’s a whole bunch of new shows just beginning right now, including Hap and Leonard, Damien, Slasher and The Family, that will warrant some of my time, too. I can’t imagine myself trying to watch Netflix’s Fuller House, though.
After the jump, the regulars, some of them getting a double helping of reviewing: American Crime, Arrow, Billions, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, The Doctor Blake Mysteries, The Flash, Limitless, Lucifer, The Magicians, Man Seeking Woman, Okkupert (Occupied), Second Chance, The Shannara Chronicles, Stan Lee’s Lucky Man, Supergirl,Vikings and The X-Files. I’ll admit now that I might be a bit hazy about some of them.
As well as all of those, I managed to watch the first three episodes of…
Ófærð (Trapped) (Iceland: RÚV; UK: BBC Four) Small-town Icelandic police officer (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson) has to deal with winter and his personal problems, as well as the bigwigs of Reykjavik and a ferry full of annoyed passengers, when a chopped up body is found in the sea. Is the murderer one of the passengers, who is the victim and is it all linked to something in town?
Thematically, the show has a lot in common with Fortitude (although without the horror/sci-fi twist) and not just the location of the filming. It’s all about the claustrophobia of an artic island in winter, people having to get on with one another because there’s nowhere else to go, and quirky police who’ve never had to deal with anything except parking tickets and stolen cameras having to deal with people trafficking, gangsters and vicious murders. There’s also the inevitable concern of not wanting foreign investors to be scared off by the crime.
Ólafsson is a strong, bear-like presence against the beautifully photographed and breathtaking Icelandic landscape. The characters are interesting and the show avoids the dramatic absurdities of Den Som Dræber (Those Who Kill), 100 Code, etc, in favour of a far less flashy telling of a plausible story. And there’s fun Icelandic-Danish conflicts, too. So far, it’s shaping up to be my favourite Nordic Noir after The Bridge.
At least for the first three episodes. I’ll let you know if that changes…
ITV green lights: adaptation of Bobby Moore: By The Person Who Knew Him Best
US TV shows
ABC renews: Quantico, Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal, How To Get Away With Murder, Once Upon A Time, Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD, Fresh Off The Boat, The Goldbergs, Modern Family, Black-ish and The Middle
In the US: Sundays, Hulu In the UK: Sundays, 9pm, Fox International. Starts 10 April
Three episodes into Hulu’s first long-form drama, 11.22.63, an adaptation of Stephen King’s book about a time-travelling teacher who wants to stop the assassination of JFK but doesn’t know how, and three things have become clear:
It’s possible to be very shallow while still having oodles of screen time to work with
It’s possible to be a great author and have a great idea, but to still not bother doing anything with it
That doesn’t necessarily matter that much if you can create a decent enough atmosphere
The first episode threw a whole bunch of things at us: James Franco’s teacher discovering pal Chris Cooper has a portal to the past; said portal being semi-useless as it only goes to October 1960; Cooper giving Franco the task of preventing the JFK assassination, as well as all his research, a guide to living in the 60s and a list of winners of sporting events to fund journeys into the past; and the fact that the past doesn’t like being changed so does its best to stop people from doing just that.
All of which could be the basis of a fun and exciting two hour movie. However, since then, 11.22.63 instead has given us the frankly idiotic Franco going into the past… and living there for two episodes, so that we can experience the nostalgic thrills of living in the sanitised 60s – a sort of vaccinated time travel for those who want to think about noble white men helping the grateful oppressed deal with racism, homophobia, sexism, fundamentalism, domestic violence et al, with just the occasional punch and bit of bad language, without having to worry about intersectionality or being shot as a result of increasingly lax gun-control legislation.
Since the first episode, Franco has at least picked up a native helper monkey (George MacKay) to assist him in his endeavours. We’ve also seen the arrival of Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby, with the fleshing out of them as people. Franco’s also got himself a job and whiled away a year or so, while bumping into love interest Sarah Gadon (The Border, Being Erica, Ruby Gloom).
However, more or less all of episode two was about Franco’s attempts to prevent the family of a future pupil of his being murdered. It was a dark, quite nasty interval, in which Franco was once again epically stupidly, but it didn’t really push the narrative along much.
While Franco’s performance is so muted, he seems like he’s on quaaludes the whole time, the rest of the cast are more interesting and have fun characters, so it’s much easier to spend time with them than him. It can also be quite funny when dropping in future references, such as when Franco claims to have served in Korea with the 4077th MASH.
But this is not a show intending to grip us with his plot. Neither is it in a hurry either to have any time travel fun or to really get to grips with JFK’s assassination and its fall-out. To some extent, that’s by design, since it’s a nine-episode ‘event series’, and everything is leading to a twist or two, I’m sure. But it’s relying on the King name to bolster the viewer’s patience enough to get them through to the end.
If you like genre dramas that are more about atmosphere and nostalgia than about ideas, and if you want a show that investigates conspiracy theories without saying anything much definitive about them, 11.22.63 is certainly already delivering. But if there’s anything great about it, the writers are saving it for the final episodes and I’m sorely tempted just to Wikipedia the ending at this point. I think I’ll stick with it, but the show needs to up its game soon to prevent death-by-online-encyclopaedia.
Barrometer rating: 2 Would it be better with a female lead? Yes. Or even simply a different lead Rob’s prediction: It’s a limited series so a one-off, but I can’t imagine it setting the world on fire with its one season. However, as a first effort by Hulu, it’s very good and could lead to more dramas being commissioned.
