In the US: Thursdays, Freeform
In the UK: Thursdays, 9pm, Syfy. Starts May 3
See that logo? That’s the logo of a moderately well-known, Seattle-based company called Starbucks. It’s also a siren. Apparently.
This is somewhat bewildering to me. The sirens in The Odyssey are scary creatures and the Greeks believed they were the companions of Persephone, the queen of the underworld. If you heard them sing, you’d be drawn towards them and probably end up dead at their feet without their caring one jot. But their sweet song in Hades might at least make your death seem more bearable.
As the marvellous Emily Wilson also recently pointed out, the sirens of The Odyssey aren’t described at all and aren’t actually sexy in the slightest; however, Greek vase art and funerary stelae show them to be half-women, half-birds. Starbucks’ idea of pretty topless mermaids singing sexy songs to lure sailors into their arms? Nope. That seems to be an invention of 19th century American sailors who’d been at sea away from women for too long.
So I’m somewhat pleased that while Freeform’s new show Siren certainly gives us a mermaid-like creature from the waters in the pacific northwest who can sing an entrancing song, the show is a far more complicated affair than a simple young adult version of The Little Mermaid.
Fola Evans-Akingbola, Alex Roe and Eline Powell in Freeform’s Siren
Handsome and the fish
Certainly, the plot synopsis would have you thinking of Siren as little more than a gender-swapped version of The CW’s Beauty and the Beast, which is probably what it would have been on that network. It sees Eline Powell (TheFear) playing a mermaid/siren who comes onto land to look for her sister mermaid (Sibongile Mlambo), who’s accidentally caught by a group of fishermen and is then in turn captured by the US military to be experimented upon. However, she soon comes across marine biologist Alex Roe (The Cut) who wants to both help and study her… and possibly something more, too.
Slightly problematically, though, he lives in “the mermaid capital of the world” – a town with a rich mermaid folklore, rather than a lot of mermaids – and one of his ancestors is famous for having fallen in love with a mermaid. Although he might in reality actually having killed a lot of them instead. Oops.
He’s also got a girlfriend already (Fola Evans-Akingbola). Oops.
Horrifying
However, while Freeform is as pitched at the young adult market as The CW is, it’s far more interested in the sort of young adults who like The Maze Runner rather than A Wrinkle in Time. Siren is actually best thought of as a horror TV show, rather than Splash 3.
The mermaids here are predators and Powell’s siren is super-strong and super-vicious, slicing and murdering her way around town as she looks for her missing sister. She’s also not one of those Daryl Hannah, pretty mermaids – thanks to some cunning make-up and contact lenses, she looks genuinely odd, and Powell makes her seem deeply uncomfortable with her surroundings. And when she’s a full-on mermaid, it’s clear that she’s more likely to have you for lunch than sing to you.
There’s also no instant learning of English and while Powell is starting to understand some of what people are saying to her by the third episode, it’s a very strangely accented English, delivered oddly. You do get a real sense of the alien from her. If Roe and Powell do end up in a relationship together, it’ll be as odd as if he’d started dating a velociraptor.
Brits at sea
All of which makes Siren a far more interesting take on things than that synopsis would have suggested. The trouble is the casting. While Powell’s fabulous, she’s the only Brit in the cast who is. And there are a lot of Brits – Roe and Evans-Akingbola are both Brits and they both have the usual problem of spending so long getting their accents right that they forget to give their characters any personality. Indeed, Roe is spectacularly dull.
Slightly more oddly, we also have the wonderful, award-winning New Zealand actress Rena Owen (Once Were Warriors, East West 101) playing the mysterious owner of a mermaid memorabilia shop who clearly knows far more about mermaids than what you’d learn from fairy tales. Owen doesn’t even try for a second to be American, so you do wonder why she’s even in this remote US town. She’s also given little to do except be mysterious and warn people about mermaids… before heading off to buy Powell fruits de mer by the sackful.
None of which makes you want to stick with the story. It’s interesting and has some good ideas, but the ideas are struggling against the casting, rather than being helped by it. You do wonder if Powell’s mermaid will wipe out the town on her quest, but will you care about any of the dead if she does?
Siren‘s a lot better, more interesting a show than it has any right to be, thanks to its embrace of horror rather than young romance. However, beyond Eline Powell’s central performance, it has little to really mesmerise the audience and keep them watching. I enjoyed what I watched but I think I’ll be turning back to port now.
I think it’s fair to say that 30 Rock was a success despite Tracy Morgan, rather than because of him. While there was a certain je ne sais quoi about his utterly spaced out performance as ‘Tracy Jordan’ that wasn’t a million miles away from real life, you weren’t watching 30 Rock for his great acting skills, line delivery or pretty much anything else that he had to offer. Jokes were funny because they were funny and could survive all of that, rather than because of anything Morgan did, and often jokes weren’t funny that should have been – thanks to Tracy Morgan.
The Last OG is almost conclusive proof that Morgan is a humour black hole. Morgan’s character in the show is a small-time idiot living in Brooklyn and dating Tiffany Haddish (The Carmichael Show). Unfortunately, his days of happiness are curtailed swiftly when he gets sent to prison. Fifteen years later, he emerges to discover that the world – and Brooklyn – have changed. Now he’s got to find his way in the world and maybe even get back Haddish using the skills he learned in prison, all without annoying halfway house owner Cedric the Entertainer (The SoulMan) too much. His only ally? One of the kids he used to hang out with who’s now all grown up (Allen Maldonado).
Aspirational
Given that Jordan Peele is the co-writer and creator of the show, you’ll know there are at least some astute observations and good jokes to be had in this first episode, most of them stemming from Morgan’s culture shock. Brooklyn has gentrified and Morgan’s prison time is no one-way ticket to street cred. He can try to pass on words of wisdom to black kids, but they’re Sex and the City gay and would rather go off shopping with their girlfriends.
There’s also some good interplay between Morgan and Cedric the Entertainer, as Morgan tries to be funny and smart, while CtE undermines him like his own Tyler Durden. Haddish’s character is also interesting, as she’s escaped the ghetto, got married and had kids, and is now an aspiring politician whose fundraisers Morgan gatecrashes.
So lots of smart social satire… all of which Morgan wanders into like a brick on a pendulum tied to the back of a bull in a Debenhams china display. Everyone else does just fine, while Morgan delivers lines of dialogue like he’s slowly translating them from Japanese washing machine instructions written in 5pt green writing on a green background.
Not that smart
All the same, it’s not that smart. There’s a whole bunch of clichés around prisons that get regurgitated. The fact that Haddish’s kids are actually Morgan’s, rather than her white husband (Ryan Gaul)’s, is inevitable. Those gay characters are borderline offensive. Sure, it’s TBS so we’re not expecting huge laughs, but we do from Jordan Peele.
This leaves us with a high concept show that has more or less expended its high concept in the first episode and a leading man who seemingly wants to lead you away from watching his TV show. There’s so little in the first episode that made me want to watch the rest and what there was was surrounded by Tracy Morgan.
YMMV when it comes to Morgan, of course, in which case you might enjoy The Last OG. Or you may just like laughing at Brooklyn hipsters.
Neither of those apply to me, though, so I think once is enough with this show. And no, I have no idea why it’s called The Last OG.
The words ‘Deep State’ and ‘Fox’ in near proximity should normally trouble you. For the uninitiated, the idea of the ‘deep state’ is that secretly, behind the scenes there’s a new world order of sorts, trying to ensure that specific policies happen. So far, so illuminati. However, in the US, Fox News, Donald Trump et al have used the phrase ‘deep state’ to suggest that anyone potentially working against President Trump – for example, to impeach him for various criminal offences he might have committed – is really a member of the deep state trying to frame him, is a traitor and should probably be executed. This includes members of the FBI and other government organisations who might be doing what others would call ‘obeying the rule of law’.
Want to know if someone’s a crackpot? If they use the phrase ‘deep state’ to talk about Robert Mueller, they’re a crackpot.
Fortunately, we’re in the UK, Fox UK isn’t Fox News and Fox Networks’ first European/African commission Deep State isn’t suggesting that Alex Younger is a pawn of Goldman Sachs. Sure, there are hints that the Iraq war was started by big business for its own needs and engineered David Kelly’s suicide, but that’s not really deep state or the government of the day, and at least it’s all fictionalised. Robert Mueller’s real. So’s Donald Trump.
Untrumped
Deep State sees Mark Strong (Low Winter Sun) playing a former MI6 officer who’s retired to France and is now living happily with his new French wife Lyne Renee and lovely moppets. Then he gets a spooky calling card from his spooky former boss (Alistair Petrie), demanding he return to London. There he’s told that son Joe Dempsie (The Fades, Skins, Game of Thrones) is dead, having decided to follow in his dad’s spying footsteps. Worse still, he’s been killed by Strong’s protégé Zubin Varla (Strike Back).
Strong’s mission, which he decides to accept: head off to Beirut to kill Varla and the rest of his team, as they’ve clearly gone rogue. But is everything as it appears to be? And whom can Strong trust?
Joe Dempsie in Deep State
Lofty ambitions
Just like dopey old The State Within, Deep State has lofty ambitions to be a smart spy show, does its best, but ends up getting drowned in a sea of spy clichés. Filmed in both Morocco and London and with a supporting cast that also includes Anastasia Griffith (Trauma, Damages, The Cazalets) and Amelia Bullmore (Big Train, Scott & Bailey), Deep State has obviously had a lot of cash spent on it. True, although Morocco works fine as Iran or Beirut, it’s less fine as France, but it’s not Scunthorpe at least and they also hired a few French speakers. The fact there are references to ‘The Section’ clearly suggests that writer Matthew Parkhill is a fan of Callan, and thus an appreciator of the classics.
But it’s spy dramas, rather than spy fact that are the reference points here and if you’ve watched some decent spy shows, almost nothing about Deep State will surprise you – other than when it goes for something blindingly stupid that seems beneath it.
You can forgive stupid names for covert sections, such as ‘the Bank’. You could even forgive the ‘key to a safety deposit box containing top secret footage on a USB drive’. But if all it contains is a minute-long confession to camera, what’s the point of that, hey? What’s that going to prove?
Then you get supposed top-tier secret assassination units learning that a member of their team is in league with the baddies (thanks to a timely observation said member should have known about) and rather than heading off their own separate ways, falling back to plan B, etc, they decide to go back to the safe house their treacherous friend knows about to discuss all of this and then pick somewhere else to go to.
Worse still, every ‘twist’ is one you’ll see coming. Do the goodies all trust precisely the wrong people, every single time? Yep. Is everyone going to fall for every single trap laid for them? Yep. I’m hoping it’s all an elaborate bluff and later episodes will play on this, revealing how the audience have been fooled. But putting it all in the first episode? That’s either brave or stupid. Or more likely, it’s not a bluff.
So, sure, it’s smart. But it’s smarter than the average generic spy show in the same way a £4.99 bottle of wine is better than a £1.99 bottle of wine. That still doesn’t make it a premier cru.
Strong enough
Strong does his best to be a stoic puncher of bad guys, jumping across rooftops and beating up guys half his age, in decently choreographed but unsurprising fight scenes. He also does well being a stoic punchbag for various wives of his, current and ex, as they berate him for being a spy.
“Tough job being a man, isn’t it, hey? But the world needs stoic, manly spies, prepared to sacrifice and not cry for their dead sons, even if women won’t understand that – until we save them,” the show might as well have stamped on Strong’s forehead. It’s not quite the worst spy characterisation since we evolved from slime molds, but it’s getting there.
But that’s virtually all the characterisation anyone gets, as the show is more geared up to deploying nonsense plotting to suggest that the ‘deep state’ is everywhere. Think you’re safe in France? Ha, ha! We can get your bank card blocked and your utilities switched off! Ha, ha again!
They could have emailed to arrange an appointment, you know?
Anastasia Griffith in Deep State
Conclusion
Strong and his strong Strong performance, as well as the production values, are the show’s main draws at the moment, although I quite like the fact that Varla’s probably a good guy for a change. But I’m not feeling enthused at all and I might not even bother with a second episode. Nevertheless, it could have been worse and given it’s already been renewed for a second season, some people clearly liked it.
Don’t go in expecting a new Bourne or even an old Bond and you might enjoy it. If The Night Manager is more your speed, again, this could be a show for you. Just don’t expect The Sandbaggers.
See that logo? That’s the logo of a moderately well-known, Seattle-based company called Starbucks. It’s also a siren. Apparently.
