It’s “What have you been watching?”, my chance to tell you each week what movies and TV I’ve been watching recently and your chance to recommend anything you’ve been watching. TMINE recommends has all the reviews of all the TV shows TMINE has ever recommended, but for a complete list of TMINE’s reviews of (good, bad and insipid) TV shows and movies, there’s the definitive TV Reviews A-Z and Film Reviews A-Z.
We’re now entering mid-mid-season in the US, that time when a number of shows have their November finales and a new set of somewhat lesser shows get ushered onto the scene to fill the airwaves. It beats alternating new episodes with re-runs I guess, but it does mean I had to endure S.W.A.T. (US: CBS) this week. Young Sheldon (US: CBS) has also made its return – but more on that later – and there are more to come now the likes of Will & Grace have bowed out.
Elsewhere, I reviewed Babylon Berlin(Germany: Sky 1; UK: Sky Atlantic) and the whole of Stranger Things 2 (Netflix), but there are a few new shows floating around the airwaves that I’ll be looking at later in the week. CBC in Canada has decided to staple The Murdoch Mysteries onto Miss Fisher’s Mysteries to give us (you guessed it) the ubiquitous Lauren Lee Smith in The Frankie Drake Mysteries, so I’ll be letting you know what I think of that in the next couple of days. Sperm-crimes drama Sisters (Australia: Ten) has somehow been slipping by me over the past couple of weeks, so I’ll try to play catch-up with that, assuming it’s any good.
After the jump, then, the latest episodes of the regulars: The Brave, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, Great News, Marvel’s Inhumans, Mr Robot, Professor T, Star Trek: Discovery, Travelers, Will & Grace and Young Sheldon.
I’ll also be casting my eye over one new show, Strike Back: Retribution, as well as a movie: Spider-man: Homecoming. See you in a mo.
Every month, TMINE lets you know what TV the BFI will be presenting at the South Bank in London
It’s the end of the year but it seems the BFI has saved the best for last. Following on from October-November’s bounty, we’ve got a whole host of TV events lined up for us in December. We do, of course, have the annual ‘Missing Believed Wiped’ event, which will be airing formerly missing episodes of Till Death Us Do Part and Late Night Horror.
However, the main season is dedicated to the marvellous Canadian TV producer Sydney Newman who so revolutionised British TV in the 50s and 60s. As part of that, we’ll be getting episodes of Doctor Who, Adam Adamant Lives!, The Avengers and Pathfinders, as well astwo plays from the series he helped to create for ITV and the BBC: Armchair Theatre and The Wednesday Play.
Talking of Doctor Who, there’ll be a preview of the recently reconstructed (yet again) Douglas Adams story Shada, complete with animation replacement scenes for the bits that never got filmed. That’s among previews that include one of the new League of Gentlemen episodes, ITV’s forthcoming Hatton Garden, the Beeb’s new Agatha Christie adaptation Ordeal By Innocence and the latest David Walliams, Grandpa’s Great Escape.
Did you love Alien? Or did you prefer Aliens? They are, of course, two films with a lot of similarities, including the fact Sigourney Weaver and the same HR Giger-created alien feature in both of them. Yet they also have quite different sensibilities: Alien is a haunted house movie in which a danger that the protagonists have to avoid might be round every corner; Aliens, on the other hand, is a war movie in which the dangers keep coming at the protagonists who have to do what they can to survive, largely by running away.
I point this out for a couple of reasons. The first is that Stranger Things is back. Netflix occasionally likes to dump shows like The OAinto our laptops with zero fanfare and so it was with Stranger Things, which popped into our ‘New on Netflix’ queues way back in July 2016 without so much as a kazoo to announce the fact. Indeed, all I managed to get to say about it before I went on holiday was:
I might do a longer review of this when I get back since although I paid almost minimal attention to it while it was in production and only reluctantly decided I’d give it a try this week for the sake of completeness, I’m so glad I did, as it’s an almost painfully beautiful, near-perfect recreation of the 80s, as well as 80s genre movies and TV, taking in everything from ET and Goonies through to The Thing and D.A.R.Y.L. I loved pretty much every second of it, from its title sequence and music through to the plot itself, which even though you can probably guess most of it just by extrapolating from other shows or anything by Stephen King, is delightful, with an innocence you just don’t get any more. One of my favourite TV things this year, give it a go, as it’s only eight episodes and Winona Ryder’s in it. A second season has already been commissioned.
Now we have Stranger Things 2 (not just ‘the second season’ of Stranger Things in case you’re wondering why you can’t spot it on your Netflix iOS app), which arrives with vastly more trumpeting following the success of Stranger Things. The show follows on a year after the original with the same cast as before and the same plots as before, too. Our heroes are still at middle school in Hawkins, Indiana (that’s probably somewhere near Eerie, I’m guessing). Will’s back, of course, as is the thing he coughed up at the end of Stranger Things. Psychokinetic lab experiment Eleven isn’t back, but she’s not too far away, it’s safe to say, given she’s front and centre in the poster and the trailer.
The hole in the world that leads to the parallel dimension known as the ‘Upside Down’ is back, too. That’s not good, mind, because although the ‘demogorgon’ of the first season is deceased, there’s a whole lot more on the other side of the Hawkins gateway to the Upside Down and it wants to come through. Worryingly, not only can Will see it, it can see him, too.
But it’s also the start of a new school year, and there are new arrivals in town, including a couple of uber-cool siblings from California, one of whom is called ‘Mad Max’ and soon draws the boys’ attention. Will our young heroes and heroines survive not just whatever comes out of the Upside Down for them but the social inequities of middle school life and first loves? And will they ever tell everyone what happened to poor old Babs?
Some spoilers (although I’ll do my best to avoid them) after this lovely trailer and the jump.
