Archive: US TV

In the US: Thursdays, 10/9c, CBS
In the UK: Five. No air date yet

Out of all the new shows in the US last year, there was one big winner, the conclusive champion triumphing over all others: The Mentalist. Created by Rome‘s Bruno Heller, it sees former ‘psychic’ Patrick Jane (Simon Baker) join up the the California Bureau of Investigation to hunt down the serial killer, Red John, who killed his family and offer his unique services to solve other crimes while doing.

Jane isn’t a ‘real’ psychic, but uses all the powers of those frauds – cold reading, misdirection, observation, etc – to deduce who the guilty party is. Although it might not be called Sherlock Holmes, that’s essentially what Jane is – a man whose ability to observe and deduce is so powerful, he knows who the guilty person is within seconds and just has to spend the rest of the episode proving it.

Despite the Red John storyline, The Mentalist is essentially a standalone show in which every episode has little to do with Red John. Instead, unlike all those serial shows that were so hot a few years ago, The Mentalist made it to the top of the ratings through not requiring the viewer to know anything or to pay that much attention: instead, you can dip into and out of The Mentalist whenever you want, content in the knowledge that you’ll just get to see that nice Simon Baker being very charming and quite clever while solving a generic crime story.

And frankly, as pleasant as that is, I’m bored of that now.

Continue reading “Review: The Mentalist 2×1”

In the US: Mondays, 8.30pm, CBS

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Beautiful blonde media type is on a girls’ night out with her sister when she bumps into an aimless slacker, who’s out with his equally slack friends. They hit it off, they dance, they go back to his place together. And they don’t use a condom.

Lo-and-behold, just a few weeks later, blonde media type lady finds she’s pregnant, decides to keep the baby then realises she has to carve out some kind of relationship with the baby’s father – and his friends.

Yes, it’s Knocked Up. Except it’s also CBS’s new sitcom, Accidentally On Purpose, a vehicle for Dharma & Greg star Jenna Elfman.

But while it’s not the funniest show in the world or the most original, it has just enough heart – and just enough Jenna Elfman – to make it watchable. Just about.

Continue reading “Review: Accidentally on Purpose 1×1”

In the US: Tuesdays, 10/9c, ABC

For every hit like the CSI franchise that Jerry Bruckheimer produces, there’s a flop like Eleventh Hour or a Justice seemingly waiting in the wings to cancel it out.

You could already hear the sound of extreme flopping from The Forgotten before it even got to our screens. Featuring five citizen investigators who try to identify missing bodies for the police, the pilot for the episode starred Rupert Penry-Jones and Reiko Aylesworth and was officially classed, even by those in it, as ‘not very good’.

With a quick recasting of those two leads that saw Penry-Jones replaced with Christian Slater (just off previous flop My Own Worst Enemy) and Aylesworth with no one at all (they just dumped the character), the pilot was reshot and now here it is.

And it’s still rubbish.

Since ABC haven’t gotten around to creating a promo for the show that features Christian Slater, here’s one with Rupert Penry-Jones; I’ll have a Slater clip later for you. Close your eyes and pretend it’s him for now though, because it’s basically the same.

Continue reading “Review: The Forgotten 1×1”

In the US: Mondays, 10/9c , CBS
In the UK: Oh, the usual places. You know, Five, Five USA, Living – them lot

CSI: Miami, as we all know, is science fiction. It’s set in a distant future, where impossible science allows us to solve improbable, futuristic crimes with undreamt of techniques, and where a robot called Caruso (aka the Carusobot) is allowed to run a crack crime fighting team of scientist-cops.

Yet for the opening episode of this eighth season of CSI: Miami, in which the (not very) brain damaged scientist-cop Eric Delko is close to death and begins to hallucinate, we find ourselves cast backwards in time to the dim and distant past of 1997 where we discover how this crime-fighting team was assembled and the most important fact of all – how the Carusobot got its Shades of Justice.

It’s a strange world, this 1997. Strange, in the sense that it’s exactly how the real world is in 2009. Suddenly, the technology’s the same as our technology, the crimes are the same as our crimes, police officers work in police stations that actually look like normal police stations, and there are procedures that almost correspond to normal police procedures. How can this be? Is CSI: Miami really set in some alternative reality where 1997 is our 2009, and our 2009 is 2021? It’s a hard one to fathom.

But the strangest thing of all is this: in 1997, the Carusobot was still able to act like a real person.

Continue reading “Review: CSI: Miami 8×1”