Every Friday, TMINE lets you know the latest announcements about when new, imported TV shows will finally be arriving on UK screens
No fewer than three premiere dates for you this week. First up is Israel’s כפולים (False Flag), which aired on Channel 2 there in 2015 but has now been acquired by Fox UK. An eight-parter created by Amit Cohen and Maria Feldman and inspired by the real-life assassination of a Hamas leader by Mossad agents, it sees five Israeli citizens find themselves implicated in a ruthless kidnapping operation following the disappearance of the Iranian Defence Minister while on a secret visit to Moscow. It stars Ishai Golan, Maggie Azarzar, Ania Bukstein, Angel Bonanni, Orna Salinger and Mickey Leon, and starts 31 July at 9pm.
The less said about the severely awful Blood Drive, the better, but in case my review of the first episode didn’t put you off, it starts 10 August at 10pm.
Lastly, What Would Diplo Do? premieres on Viceland on 18 October at 10pm. Coincidentally, I wrote about that this week, so I won’t repeat myself.
Things have been a bit quiet in the world of Wonder Woman this week, in part because of the July 4th weekend. But the movie is going strong, now passing $700m in box office takings worldwide to become the DC Extended Universe’s most successful movie to date at the US box office, as well as one of the 50 highest grossed movies of all time:
Wonder Woman still has a ways to go before catching Batman v Superman in the international box office ($663 million to $873 million), and it’s technically third among all DC movies, behind The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises. But Patty Jenkins’ inspiring superhero film starring Gal Gadot and Chris Pine has exceeded even the most optimistic box office projections here in the United States. It’s one of the 50 highest-grossing movies and the highest-grossing movie directed by a woman of all-time, and, unsurprisingly, the highest-grossing World War I movie ever (sorry, War Horse). Wonder Woman is expected to end its international box office run with around $800 million.
Fingers crossed, it’s now on its way to breaking a few more records, then.
Only one comic to look at this week featuring our Diana, though, but it’s a reasonably important one because we have a diversity-boosting, DCEU-marrying addition to the Justice League roster to look forward to – one quite important to Diana. Can you guess who?
On paper, Room 104 sounds like it might be quite good, even if it is set in just one hotel room. It’s by the Duplass Brothers (Togetherness) and it’s on HBO. It’s an anthology series set in a hotel room. It’s got the likes of James Van Der Beek, Amy Landecker and Orlando Jones in the cast.
Yet watching the trailer, I just thought, “Huh.” How about you guys? Does this rock your boat? (If it does, BTW, it starts July 28)
In the US: Mondays, 9pm (ET/PT), TNT
In the UK: Not yet acquired
TNT’s Will is a drama told in a bold, contemporary style and played to a modern soundtrack that exposes all of Shakespeare’s recklessness, lustful temptations and tortured brilliance.
A sentence like that is almost designed to raise the hackles of any true Englishman. “It’s American. It’s going to be rubbish,” is the knee-jerk reaction that’s almost genetically programmed in us. Some of us might even instantly head to the iPlayer to watch BBC Two’s Ben Elton Shakespeare sitcom Upstart Crow, even if we’ve never watched it before, just to show solidarity.
And yet… I have to say I loved Will. I found it really exciting in the same way that The Knight’s Tale and Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet were. Perhaps that shouldn’t be too surprising, since Will is written by and show-run by Baz Luhrmann’s long-time writing partner Craig Pearce, and directed by Elizabeth‘s Shekhar Kapur.
The show professes to depict what happened in the ‘lost years’ of Shakespeare’s life, before his eventual fame as a playwright in London. So we see the minor actor and glove maker Will Shakespeare (Laurie Davidson) depart from his wife Anne Hathaway (Man Down‘s Deirdre Mullins) and kids in Stratford then head off to the big smoke to see if he can sell his new play.
Here, Will gets lucky as he comes across Alice Burbage (Olivia DeJonge), who’s impressed enough by both him and his play to introduce him to her father, James (Colm Meaney). Burbage is looking for a new play, since Christopher Marlowe (Jamie Campbell Bower) is too busy working for ‘Her Majesty’s Secret Service’, and before you know it, Will’s first play is being staged.
As you can tell from that brief précis, Will occupies an almost quantum mechanical state of both strict historical accuracy and deliberate massive inaccuracy. Amusingly, in the style of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead but in reverse, everyone in Stratford, including Shakespeare, speaks Shakespearean English, but as soon as he hits London, he finds everyone else speaks in modern dialogue. Indeed, this is a London that is both Elizabethan and modern, the extras dressed like Early Modern English punk rock fans, the soundtrack playing punk hits of the 70s that actors on the stage even dance to.
The series has a punk-infused look and soundtrack (the Clash’s “London Calling” makes an appearance), which comes from Pearce’s belief that “theater then was like punk rock. You had 3,000 people, crammed into these open-aired, circular theaters, and people were screaming, drinking, and fighting.”
Yet the series is also clearly written by people who have done their research. London’s unmistakably a late 16th/17th town, dealing with late 16th/167th century issues. There are beggars, bears and brothels. There are no actresses, only actors in dresses, acting in a theatre that looks like The Globe. The queen’s spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham (Anton Lesser) is trying to ferret out Catholics with the help of Richard Topcliffe (Ewen Bremner), and while the play’s very definitely the thing for Will, there’s action and adventure to be had from the show’s support of the theory that Shakespeare was a secret Catholic who was liable to be tortured to death if anyone ever found out his true religion. And that first play? Edward III
Yet despite Will‘s willingness to endorse theories that aren’t 100% supported by the evidence, creditably and despite Anonymous‘s Campbell Bower presence in the cast, it’s clear that this is a show that 100% supports the idea that Shakespeare’s plays were his own. Indeed, while Anonymous and others argue that only someone with a good, aristocratic education could have written his plays, Will‘s punk aesthetic flips the idea on its head, arguing that only someone of a lower class had the earthiness and drive to write the plays and invent words like ‘bedazzle’ to suit their meters, while educated aristocrats would have been content to keep putting on the works inspired by the classics and stick to the grammar. It even gives us a glorious moment when Will is shown (temporarily) to have written one of Marlow’s plays, rather than vice versa.
The show is unable to avoid Shakespeare in Love territory, however, by showing how his ideas were inspired by real-life. DeJonge cross-dresses so she is free to travel around town unhindered, for example, planting a seed for future fun firmly in Will’s mind and her brother Richard (Mattias Inwood) is a very Falstaffian compatriot, too. Lines from the plays pepper the dialogue, as well, with Will seeing his ‘destiny written in the stars’.
But Pearce is still a talented enough writer that he doesn’t rely on Shakespeare to produce all the good dialogue and is even able to have Shakespeare duel in verse with Robert Greene in a tavern. Lines like “It seems women are only fit for ruling the country, raising children or whoring. I haven’t decided which path to follow yet”, “Thy wit is so stale worms would not eat it” and “Live hard, die young of the pox” make this more than a simple plundering of the classics.
Will‘s a genuinely exciting piece of work with good writing, a good cast and a unique visual style that manages to make Shakespeare and 16th century theatre seem young and daring. Watch it if you can.
