Archive: Recommended

The TV shows recommended by The Medium is Not Enough

Streaming TV

What have you been watching? Including Severance and Bel-Air

21 February 2022 Rob Buckley 6 Comments

It’s “What have you been watching?”, your chance to recommend to fellow TMINE readers anything you’ve been watching this week

It’s been Half-Term here in the UK, which means I’ve been taking some time off. Which was nice. But never fear, not only did a load of TV shows have the same idea, I still managed to watch a couple of new shows, as well as finish off two of the regulars

But first…

…three shows I didn’t manage to get around to watching

From (US: Epix) only started last night, so I’ve not had time to watch it yet. It doesn’t sound (or even look) very good, though, so I might skip it.

“In a nightmarish town in middle America that traps everyone who enters, unwilling residents fight to stay alive and search for a way out. But they are plagued by the threats of the surrounding forest including terrifying nocturnal creatures.”

The Fear Index (UK: Sky Atlantic) is another one of those glossy transatlantic things with big(ish) US stars that Sky makes (cf Riviera). It’s based on the Robert Harris novel of the same name and “is set in a period of roughly 24 hours from the 6 May 2010 – the date of the British general election and the Flash Crash. It follows the interactions of a group of employees at Hoffmann Investment Technologies, a fictional hedge fund operating in Geneva.”

Couldn’t. Be. Bothered.

I mean, generic or what? Although the trailer did make me hope that The Champions would show up.

Inventing Anna (Netflix), on the other hand, is simply a show I didn’t get around to watching, but which I really do hope to watch when I have time, as it stars the rather awesome Julia Garner as the eponymous Anna (The Americans, Ozark). It’s also based on a true story. So fingers crossed for next week.

“A journalist investigates the case of Anna Delvey, the Instagram-legendary heiress who stole the hearts and money of New York elites.”

The regulars

Superman & Lois (US: The CW; UK: BBC One/iPlayer) were clearly taking a couple of weeks off together to have some quality time away from their annoying teenagers, so that just left The Peacemaker and The Book of Boba Fett for me to enjoy.

The Book of Boba Fett (Disney+) managed to have a reasonably thrilling and at times touching finale, filled with fights and Boba Fett for once. Plenty of Mandalorian and tiny Yoda, though, which given the season has only been seven episodes and they’ve been the focus of three of them, hasn’t really given Boba much to do.

However, by the end of it, it was all feeling a bit… childish, you know? Sure, it’s Star Wars, but honestly, with the biker gangs, the tired western clichés, baby Yoda, the big beastie, etc, it just all felt like a kids show. I might not bother with season 2, but we’ll see.

The Peacemaker ended with a couple of not bad episodes. Some decently amusing dialogue, some really daft helmets (you’ll understand when you see it) and some decent plot twists, plus a really awesome cameo or two right at the end meant it was definitely worth the viewing time. But it felt like after a really excellent start, the show ran a little out of the bizarre steam that made the first couple of episodes so different and exciting. John Cena remained awesome throughout and Freddie Stroma’s switch from pretty boy (UnREAL, Time After Time) to idiotic psychopath was a real eye-opener. But I no longer feel totally comfortable recommended the whole season as a must-see. Maybe the first couple of episodes.

After the jump, though, let’s talk about the new shows I did watch: Severance (AppleTV+) and Bel Air (US/UK: Peacock). And I’m really glad I watched both, you’ll be glad to hear.

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Streaming TV

What have you been watching? Including Hawkeye, Hot Zone: Anthrax, Titans and Lost in Space

20 December 2021 Rob Buckley 9 Comments

It’s “What have you been watching?”, your chance to recommend to fellow TMINE readers anything you’ve been watching this week

I’ve been goaded. Well, prodded really. There were some actual movie reviews last week, so I guess I’d better do some TV reviews. Apparently, that’s what TMINE’s supposed to be for. Tarnation.

Fortunately, I’ve been watching a decent amount of TV, so I won’t simply be doing shadow puppets for you and pretending that it’s a review for this last WHYBW of 2021.

First up, the return of two regulars, and then after the jump, we can talk about two new shows: Hawkeye (Disney+) and Hot Zone: Anthrax (Disney+)

Lost in Space (season 3) (Netflix)

Lost in Space (Netflix) is back for its third and final season… and I’m confused. Every season more or less is a build up to showing us how the Space Family Robinson got ‘lost in space’ with the evil Doctor Smith (Parker Posey). It then ends with them… ‘lost in space’. And then with the next season, it resets and we have to watch them get lost in space all over again.

Season two ended especially well in that regard. They’re on the spaceship, they’re there with the robot and evil Dr Smith, they don’t know where they are but they are in the middle of space, nowhere near anyone else or a planet that looks a lot like Canada.

Good build-up. Surely they’re not going to reset again are they?

Well, hot damn. Guess what? Season three starts with them all stuck on yet another planet that looks like Canada with all the other kids. Again. What the hell? Even if we hadn’t already had a show that’s almost exactly the same as that (The 100), why are we doing it for the third season in a row for Lost in Space?

I managed to watch about two episodes before I just gave up. I’ve now seen this story twice – I don’t need to see it for a third time. And can’t the whole family actually be in the same place together for so much as an entire episode?

Titans (US: HBO Max; UK: Netflix)

You probably won’t remember this – why would you? – but I made it through the first four episodes of season three of Titans back in September, then gave up as it was so horrid and all the characters I cared about got killed off.

Well, it’s comics, so guess what? One of them came back from the dead, it turned out, something I discovered this weekend, so I figured that as this was now on Netflix in the UK, I’d give it a rewatch from the point from when said character returns.

So… episodes nine through 13 of Titans are bad. Not outright terrible, but pretty close. It’s all meaningless, inconsequential namechecking of comic characters but none of the characters act like either themselves or even slightly coherently thought-out human beings (or aliens). The acting seems to have got a lot worse, too, and the fights don’t have that grittiness to them that they used to. What it does have is trite teen romances and outright sadism.

I would say that if I was looking for positives, seeing (spoiler alert) the Amazons, as well as Donna Troy and Raven again was great, as they were by far the most interesting characters and interpretations of DC lore. But it’s all just so comic-strippy, so lacking in any real depth, and actually downright silly at times that it just felt like I was losing IQ points watching it.

Plus how high-stake are your perils when at least half the cast have died and come back?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ttU1iKSpdA
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US TV

Review: Devs 1×1-1×2 (US: Hulu; UK: BBC Two)

10 March 2020 Rob Buckley 7 Comments

In the US: Thursdays, Hulu
In the UK: Acquired by BBC

Most TV dramas are written by people without much knowledge of science and technology. The resulting mistakes annoy people who do have knowledge of science and technology. But as Mr Robot demonstrated, there is a market for TV dramas written by people who do understand science and technology. And as the title suggests, Devs is such a show – Devs is short for developers, as any IT fool knows.

However, Devs also demonstrates that a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, both for audiences and for writers. Even the title is a trap for those who know about technology. Does Devs actually stand for developers or is that what the show wants you to think? Because one of the many mysteries that Devs builds up in its first two episodes is the mystery of what devs actually stands for – even the show’s collection of emotionless IT staff aren’t sure.

Devs

From the brain of Alex Garland

What Devs definitely is is the first TV show both written and directed by Alex Garland (Ex Machina, Sunshine, 28 Days Later), meaning it’s very ‘hard SF’. It’s also one of the first “FX on Hulu” shows released so far, meaning it’s a bit more niche and a bit darker than the standard Hulu fare.

It sees Sonoya Mizuno and Karl Glusman playing a happy couple of super-brained developers working for bearded Nick Offerman (Parks and Recreation) and his ultra high-tech San Francisco tech company. They’re the kind of people who argue over breakfast about the right mathematical functions to use for encryption protocols to avoid being vulnerable to cracking by quantum computers – which given that they live and work in a near future when quantum computers are both viable and useful isn’t quite as theoretical a worry as it might at first seem.

When AI researcher Glusman demonstrates to Offerman a neural model of a nematode that accurately predicts its behaviour for 10 seconds, he’s rapidly promoted to Offerman’s Devs division – a division so secret no one actually knows what it does and so advanced that it works in an area inside a Faraday cage that’s vacuum sealed away from the rest of the universe.

But that same day, Glusman disappears and Mizuno is tenacious enough to start investigating what’s happened to him, even after she’s seen CCTV footage of him setting fire to himself and burning to death. Soon she finds a mysterious app on his phone that really isn’t the Sudoku game it claims to be…

What is Devs? What happened to Sergei? What is the app really? What is Offerman planning to do? Why does he have a giant statue of his dead daughter looming over his house?

And does knowing too much about physics turn a rather good show that knows quite a bit about physics into something more annoying?

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Hunters
Streaming TV

Boxset Tuesday: Hunters (season one) (Amazon)

25 February 2020 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

In the UK: Available on Amazon

On the whole, you don’t get a lot of Jewish TV. You certainly get Jews on TV. Israel, of course, is currently sending us plenty of fine programmes it’s made itself, too. But there’s not really a lot of Jewish TV – TV’s that’s concerned purely with Jewish concerns, that’s packed almost exclusively with Jewish heroes and that’s self-conscious and explicit about that, without apology. That in and of itself makes Amazon’s Hunters almost unique.

You also don’t get a lot of Quentin Tarantino TV. Sure, he has been known to cross the movie/TV divide to work on the occasional episode of CSI, and there is the occasional imitator. However, there’s not much of both categories that really captures Tarantino’s love of pulp fiction, elaborate dialogue and genre-transformation. And again, that in and of itself makes Amazon’s Hunters almost unique.

Because Hunters is probably the closest you’ll ever get – short of Quentin Tarantino himself developing a TV spin-off of Inglourious Basterds – to a Jewish Quentin Tarantino TV series. Set in 1970s New York, it sees Logan Lerman (Percy Jackson) playing a stupidly bright Jewish boy who lives with his grandmother (or ‘safta’ in Hewbrew). Harvard and MIT have offered him places, but he wants to stay with his safta and look after her.

However, one night, in what seems like an ordinary burglary, his safta – who survived the Holocaust no less – is murdered, setting Lerman on the path of vengeance. But it’s not long until no lesser person than Al Pacino turns up and reveals that his safta was actually killed by Nazis. Because they are among us – and they want to start a Fourth Reich.

So why doesn’t Lerman join his top squad of elite Nazi hunters and stop them before they succeed?

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Impulse Season 2
Streaming TV

Review: Impulse (season two) (YouTube)

28 October 2019 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

In the UK: Season available to buy on YouTube. New episode free every Wednesday

Science-fiction is very rarely a ‘hard watch’. Sure, there can be science-fiction that taxes the brain or grosses you out, but it’s not often that it’s hard to watch because of its emotional resonances or difficult subject matter.

The fact that Impulse was also not only a YouTube TV series but also based on the same books as the terrible movie Jumper – and was simultaneously genuinely very, very good – therefore meant it was up there with unicorn tears.

Impulse

Don’t curb this Impulse

The first season followed annoying teenager Henriette (Maddie Hasson) who’s moved to a small town with her blue-collar mum (Missi Pyle), who’s gone from boyfriend to boyfriend, job to job, ever since Henry’s dad left her. Soon, mum’s got a new boyfriend (Matt Gordon) and Henry’s got a new quasi-sister (Sarah Desjardins) as a result.

One night at a party, Henry is sexually assaulted by the local jock (Tanner Stine). Unbeknownst to her, however, the fits she’s been having are the onset of something incredible – and the assault causes her nascent power of teleportation to emerge violently. In an instant, she’s back in her bedroom and Stine is crushed and paralysed by his truck.

The rest of the season then plays out across two strands. On the one hand, it’s a season of Friday Night Lights, with the effects on the victim, the rapist, their families and the communities of the crime explored in terrible detail. On the other, it’s a superhero origin’s story, as Henry begins to explore her powers with her sister and Aspie sidekick (Daniel Maslany) – and learns that superheroes tend to get supervillains to match (Callum Keith Rennie).

Given that thanks to a change in YouTube’s pricing policy, you can now stream the entire first season for free, you should do so right now if you haven’t already, since it was easily one of TMINE’s Top 14 shows of 2018. It’s right here, after the trailer:

Act on Impulse

And now we have season 2, which can already pay to watch in its entirety, but a new episode of which will be available to watch for free every Wednesday.

Is it a hard watch? Yes. Is it still good? Yes. It a big change?

Possibly. Because as Maslany says at one point in the season, “I thought I was a superhero’s sidekick, but I think I might have been a supervillain’s henchman instead.”

The hard question this time round: at what point does the victim of a sexual assault lose our sympathy?

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