Month: November 2016

The BarrometerA Barrometer rating of 2

Third-episode verdict: Travelers (Canada: Showcase; UK: Netflix)

1 November 2016 Rob Buckley 3 Comments

In Canada: Mondays, 9pm ET, Showcase
In the UK: Acquired by Netflix

So I have to admit to really rather enjoying Travelers, Canada’s latest piece of world-beating science-fiction in which a group of time travelers from the future project their souls back into the bodies of people dying in the present day, so that they can prevent a terrible disaster from happening. They possess the skills, they know what they’ve got to do – what they don’t know is what their ‘hosts’ lives were like before they died.

The first episode was a nice, edgy but still humorous piece of work that introduced us to the team’s old hosts, before introducing in less detail the team themselves. Episode two then gave us more of an introduction to the team members and the types of missions they’d go on.

I thought that would be the pattern laid down for the rest of the series, but what became clearer in the third episode is that the show may essentially bea spy show with a bunch of sleeper agents waking up from their normal lives to undertake secret missions, but it’s also as much about relationships and character as anything else. As well as continuing to focus on the different lives of the hosts to demonstrate how much detail there is that can get overlooked and what patterns of behaviour are expected of us, it also looked at the psychological impact of knowing how the future will turn out and who will live, who will die, how and when. Could you stand back and let others perish, knowing all you had to do was say “Don’t go left there for another minute” and they could live?

What saves the show from being a gloomy, self-important piece of sci-fi is a combination of the performances and the characters. Eric McCormack of Will and Grace is cast against type as an FBI agent, and his character manages to give the show a much needed sense of humour. MacKenzie Porter’s closed performance makes her formerly learning disabled host come smart doctor a source of intrigue, while Reilly Dolman’s douchebag school quarterback turned kind engineer gives the show heart and gentility. 

But there are jokes, too. No show that can use pre-pubescent children as temporal radio transmitters can take itself too seriously.

Travelers is a thoughtful, but often action-packed piece of science-fiction with feeling that isn’t that bothered with saving the future – there are dozens of other ‘travelers’ around the world so maybe they’ll do it. Instead, it’s more concerned with people. It could do with fixing a few plotholes and making its crack team of spies just a little bit better at blending in, but its focus on the little things in life is welcome in a genre so focused on the intellectual and the abstract.

Barrometer rating: 2
Would it be better with a female lead? N/A
TMINE’s prediction: Should run for a good few seasons

 

US TV

Review: Pure Genius 1×1 (US: CBS; UK: Universal)

1 November 2016 Rob Buckley 2 Comments


In the US: Thursdays, 10/9c, CBS 
In the UK: Wednesdays, 9pm, Universal. Starts 16th November

Healthcare research is an important topic. It is literally life-saving – or life-destroying if done wrong. It’s no surprise that billions of dollars are spent around the world to develop novel techniques and medicines, but always subject to strict ethical controls and procedures to ensure as few problems occur as possible.

Of course, if you’re from a completely different industry sector, such as computing, this speed of innovation can seem problematic, and Pure Genius gives us the somewhat odd scenario of a Silicon Valley tech genius setting up his own hospital, packed full of top doctors, so they can try out cutting edge procedures – all with the bare minimum of ethical oversight. Of course, the rules are there for a reason, and the entire first episode is almost a cautionary tale of why those rules are there. Fancy giving someone an experimental ingestible piece of technology without a control group and while she’s pregnant? Let’s just see what happens when that goes wrong then…

Indeed, the show feels like someone recently went to a blue sky healthcare tech show, saw all manner of whizzy gadgets being simulated and tried to work out a TV show where all these things could be demonstrated in the (more or less) here and now, no matter how impossible it would be in practice unless every patient were a billionaire, too.

There’s certainly very little attention paid to any of the characters. We have a plethora of female doctors famous from other TV shows, including Royal Pains‘ Reshma Shetty and House‘s Odette Anable, picked because presumably it’s easier for us to assume they’re the same characters as before than to actually give them lives, proper histories, or relationships. Dermot Mulroney (Crisis) gets most of the attention, as a genius surgeon wondering if he should take a job in the hospital and then being persuaded by a 3D printer that prints out plastic hearts he can practise surgery on before dealing with the real thing – you can buy them down the shops now, Dermot, so don’t be so hasty.

But even Dermot is there just to show off the whizzy things. Likewise Augustus Prew (The Borgias), the show’s surprisingly stupid genius, who’ll Google something on the Internet that sounds like an epic white elephant (brain to brain communication technology) and buy the entire company for millions. He may be a bit poorly himself and have built the hospital largely to fund research that will save himself, but he’d really be more at home at Comdex 2016 on stage demonstrating a smartphone than talking to another human being about the prognosis following a radical but failed new course of treatment, which is where he starts to get a bit sad. Maybe you should have read up about double-blind treatments first, Augustus, hey?

By the end of the first episode, I’m surprised the whole bunch of them haven’t been sued and the hospital shut down due to serious malpractice, but given the levels of reality-warping needed for some of the things that take place to be realistic, I wouldn’t be surprised if the FDA is now a bowl of petunias and a very surprised sperm whale. 

Pure Genius? Pure nonsense more like it.

Weekly Wonder Woman

Weekly Wonder Woman: Wonder Woman (Rebirth) #9

1 November 2016 Rob Buckley 4 Comments

A relatively quiet week for Diana last week. Sure, you could look at the first page of the new Snickers-sponsored comic featuring ‘the Trinity’…

…but that looked quite dull, didn’t it? You could also have got a few tips on how to draw Wonder Woman from Jill Thompson and Nicola Scott.

To help Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, Jim Lee’s put a bit of Wonder Woman artwork up for auction and you can watch him drawing Wondy, too:

But really, last week’s big fun was to be had with Wonder Woman (Rebirth) #9, which was a partial celebration of Wonder Woman’s 75th birthday, as well as a recasting of the status quo. A review after the jump, but for now, see if you can spot all the tributes in this rather special splash page. And see who doesn’t get a mention, too…

A tribute to Wonder Woman's writers and artists

Continue reading “Weekly Wonder Woman: Wonder Woman (Rebirth) #9”

US TV

Review: The Great Indoors 1×1 (US: CBS; UK: ITV2)

1 November 2016 Rob Buckley 12 Comments

In the US: Thursdays, 8.30/7.30c, CBS
In the UK: Acquired by ITV2

For those not in the know, CBS is a channel largely watched by older folk. The home of numerous procedurals and family sitcoms, it does, however, try to attract a younger audience from time to time, often with comedies such as The Big Bang Theory. And The Great Indoors is an interesting example of a comedy pitched at both the young and old – interesting in the sense that you can probably tell whether you’re young or old based on which characters you most empathise with.

Community‘s Joel McHale (45) is a craggy magazine journalist, used to filing his copy from out in the field following close encounters with mountains, bears, Indian yogis and death. He’s summoned back to the office by proprietor Stephen Fry – yes, STEPHEN FRY (59) – where in common with untold numbers of other journalists around the world, he’s told the print version of the magazine is being shut but it’ll continue online. The slight hitch is that he’ll be office-bound and working with Christopher Mintz-Plasse (27), Shaun Brown (29) and Christine Ko (don’t ask) – the millennials that run the digital division of the company and whose idea of an experience is watching a YouTube video of an experience. Compounding the discomfort caused by his complete lack of experiental overlap with these mere foetuses is the fact that he’ll be working for Fry’s daughter, Susannah Fielding (31) (I Want My Wife Back, The C-Word), whom he probably slept with relatively recently, despite there being a slightly icky age gap.

Now, given it’s CBS – the home of cheap laughs at other people’s expenses, as well as of old people – you’d be forgiven for expecting The Great Indoors to be an excuse for the network to marry two disparate but related strands of humour: older, wiser people laughing at callow youth; and rugged manly types laughing at nerds. You’d also be forgiven for thinking that the show would know next to nothing about journalism or magazines, and that it would have the IQ and literacy of an angry letter to a local newspaper.

But, despite the trailer below suggesting just that, surprisingly The Great Indoors is more of a meeting of minds. While most laughs are at millennials’ behaviour, ranging from the speed at which they take offence at things through to their need to selfie their every waking moment, this is a meeting of minds in which McHale learns to be a better person and to understand online while the millennials learn how to put their smartphones down for a moment or two. Fry isn’t the usual stereotypical Englishman and his dialogue is often erudite and subversive. There’s even a suggestion that there has been some actual research done into magazine journalism, with job titles such as ‘digital curator’ and listicles about surviving the Zombie Apocalypse hinting that a day or two may have been spent at Buzzfeed at some point.

Of course, the show is creating a false dichotomy between the digeratti and the digital illiterate: I started working on newspaper web sites back in 1995 and any journalist my – and McHale’s – age will have been well acquainted with online publishing for years, if not decades. I’ve also seen that video featuring the bears in the swimming pool, too, and I have four Twitter accounts, a LinkedIn account and a Facebook account. Millennials working in journalism can still talk to sources and go outdoors; 40-somethings aren’t the same as 60-somethings. But, hey, it’s a multi-camera sitcom – you might as well critique mistakes in the maths in Big Bang Theory.

On the plus side, the pilot episode also features Stephen Fry nursing a bear cub and both McHale and Fry deliver the goods; on the minus side, the live studio audience seems to make Fielding think she’s in a pantomime and the millennials don’t really work as individual characters, rather than personifications of ideas of millennials.

If you like Fry and McHale, The Great Indoors might not wow you, but you certainly won’t come out of it feeling like you’ve been robbed of a great comedic opportunity. If you’re a millennial, you might not see yourself in the show, but what are you doing watching TV rather than Snapchats anyway?