Every Friday, I let you know the latest announcements about when new, imported TV shows will finally be arriving on your screens – assuming anyone’s bought any, of course.
It’s splurge time! Lots of acquisitions and premiere dates this time, although today’s big one – BBC Four’s first ever Canadian acquisition, Cardinal – doesn’t have a fixed date yet.
In the US: Wednesdays, 10pm ET/PT, FX In the UK: Thursdays, 9pm, Fox UK. Starts tonight
Oh good. Another superhero TV show based on a Marvel comic. Because we’re so strapped for them right now, aren’t we?
Don’t pretend you’re not thinking that, just like me. I know you are. Yes, you. Don’t try to hide. I can see you right there. I so can. We’re thinking the same thoughts.
But Legion is different. Very different. It’s ostensibly based on the Legion comic, which features the somewhat mentally disturbed David Haller (aka Legion), the son of X-Men boss Professor X, who has a different superpower for each of his multiple personalities.
Chuck that fact out the window, though. Just screw it up and throw it out that window right over there next to you. Yes, that one. Which one did you think I meant?
What you have to remember is that this is a show written and directed by Noah Hawley, the creator of Fargo, and this first episode at least is actually more like watching One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest while on LSD.
It stars Dan Stevens (Downton Abbey) as Haller, here a once-promising boy whose life falls apart in his teenage years once he starts to hear the voices and be able to move things with his mind. Or at least he thinks he can (don’t we all?), since he’s subsequently diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and put on medication. After college, though, everything falls apart again and before he knows it, he’s locked away in a mental hospital for his own good.
There he meets his new best friend Aubrey Plaza (Parks and Recreation), but everything stays more or less the same until Rachel Keller (Fargo) turns up. Keller’s almost as odd as him, not wanting to be touched by anyone, but soon the two are inseparable. Gradually, though, the possibility dawns on Stevens that maybe he’s not mad and that actually he really can move things with his mind and those voices might be other people’s thoughts.
To say the first episode is trippy is to really sell the series short. Every frame and scene seems designed to alienate you and make you wonder if it’s real or the delusion of a schizophrenic. One minute someone will be using an iPad, the next we’ll be in a perfectly designed set from the 1970s where someone’s living inside a tree, the next we’ll discover that person over there we assumed was real is an hallucination, the next we discover that an hallucination was actually perfectly real but a ghost. There are dream sequences and French dance numbers. Time jumps around.
Sure, there are superpowers but not of the “look how hard I can hit you” kind but “I can enter your memories” and “I can swap bodies with you” kinds designed to make you question reality as it warps and twists. Plaza’s channelling David Bowie, Hawley’s character is named after Roger Barrett from Pink Floyd and to help the geniusly twitchy Stevens understand Haller’s mindset, Hawley gave him a 160-track playlist that included “everything from experimental French sound design to people screaming into bins”.
It’s insane. But in a good way. Right, snuggle buddy?
All of that is quite alienating at first, but there’s also humour in Legion, as well as a pleasingly innocent love affair between Stevens and the possibly imaginary Keller.
Unfortunately, it’s the end of the episode that makes me worry. Because that’s when the superheroes with their “look how hard I can hit you” superpowers turn up. Is the rest of the series going to be like this episode or are we going to be getting more of the hitting?
I really, really hope the former because that would be just amazing. Same time next week at your place? I’ll bring my night vision goggles like last time.
Although crime rates have been falling for years now across the US, the fear of crime hasn’t. Neither has the number of TV shows about crime. Are these two facts related, I wonder? We can discuss that some other time.
One of the results of that fear is that people want to know not only how to catch even more criminals but also what’s wrong with the current system. On the whole, one might argue that nothing major is wrong and there are all manner of minor, systemic issues that need fixing. Sit down and watch The Wire and Homicide from start to finish and you’ll get an idea of how complex an issue policing drugs and murders is.
A simple, easy fix? There isn’t one.
That hasn’t stopped TV shows suggesting that there might be and APB is the latest in a long line of cop TV shows that do just that – in this case, privatisation.
If that sounds familiar, you’re probably being reminded of Robocop, a classic 80s action movie portraying an horrific dystopian future that believes technology and the private sector is the solution.
But unlike Robocop, which was a cautionary tale, APB thinks it’s onto something.
Taking not just a leaf but more or less the first two chapters out of the book, Iron Man, it gives us billionaire playboy philanthropist and engineer Justin Kirk (Animal Practice, Tyrant) showing off his new tech to assorted billionaires, before heading off with his token black friend. On the way home, though, he’s attacked and his friend dies saving his life.
Weeks later, with the killer still to be found, Kirk dares the Mayor to give him Precinct 13 (yes, another reference to a better TV show or movie – there are lots) to run. In exchange, he’ll fund the Precinct with $120m of his own money to pilot a new, better way of policing. One that involves lots and lots of technology.
Now immediately, you can see this is nonsense, in exactly the same way anyone watching Pure Genius could see it was written by someone who knew next to nothing about healthcare but liked the idea of tech billionaires, private sector innovation and shiny things. The annual Chicago police department budget is $1.3bn so all Kirk has done is boosted the budget by 10% for one year. Not insubstantial, but transformative? Probably not and if all it took was money to end crime, the war on drugs would have been won long ago.
More to the point, all his tech consists of is minor improvements to existing technology, many of which are already being used or in development: taser guns with more than one shot; better bullet-proof vests; better-armoured, faster patrol cars; a 911 system based on a smartphone app that can send pictures and location information; GIS systems for mapping crime patterns; and drones for surveillance.
But as Kirk himself points out, there’s one cop for every 212 inhabitants in the city, yet he makes no new hires, merely installing a kooky tech support girl (Caitlin Stasey) and himself in the precinct, so he can fly his drone about and watch what Natalie Martinez (CSI:NY, Under the Dome, Secrets and Lies, Kingdom) – ‘Officer Murphy’ no less, Robocop fans – does in her investigations. One drone for the whole precinct and one pilot. Hmm. Even more hmm when you realise that during this pilot, all the other cops sit around watching Kirk flying his drone, rather than trying to solve the 10 unsolved murders per month they get.
Maybe there is a show to be made about how innovative, disruptive, private sector thinking could be used in policing, but it’ll have to involve things like ‘change management programmes’, and APB isn’t interested in actual private sector methodologies or anything below the surface. It just likes gadgets.
Even so, as with Pure Genius, by the end of the first episode, APB itself has realised that actually, its entire premise is ludicrous. Too much of police work is about human interaction, there will be privacy issues aplenty with drones flying around and peeking through windows (one particular drone scene is a clear reference to Blue Thunder, in fact), and none of what Kirk is planning can scale up in the slightest. When the show itself realises it’s so ludicrous it points them out itself, that show has problems. And that’s even before the audience starts wondering if maybe shooting innocent civilians with tasers is such a good idea.
APB is a bog-standard, not particularly smart cop show that tries to cover up the stupidity of its own premise and limited ambitions with a decent cast and whizzy shiny things. But when a bunch of 80s action movies are more intellectual than you are, you probably need to think again.
