In the US: Fridays, 9/8c, Fox In the UK: Wednesdays, 9pm, Syfy. Starts October 19
Over the past couple of years, it’s become very apparent there’s a big difference between two groups: people who movies and TV shows, and the people who make the trailers for them. Last year, of course, we had the horror that was the Supergirl trailer, which made us think we were getting that spoof Black Widow solo movie from Saturday Night Live. Except the pilot turned out to be a lot of jolly fun instead.
Then, this summer, we had Suicide Squad. Now, by all accounts, that was never going to be a great movie, but such was Warner Bros’s concern that it was going to tank at the box office, when a trailer for the movie got people all excited for it, the company actually got the trailer makers to edit the final movie. The result? A nonsensical disaster.
Don’t trust trailers, seems to be the lesson.
Now, one of the big US TV trends of late has been the remaking of old horror movies, with A&E’s terrible sequel to The Omen, Damien, already having crashed and burned this year. So I guess it’s no surprise that Fox would eventually get round to a remake of perhaps the most famous of them all – the one Mark Kermode himself reckons is also the best movie of all time – The Exorcist.
“Of course, it’s Fox,” we all thought. “It’s bound to be rubbish.” And then we saw the trailer, which basically just confirmed our worst fears: the remakers didn’t understand the source and were just going to do a generic horror show.
Well, guess what – the trailer lied. Again. The Exorcist not only understands what made the original work, it’s genuinely good and even scary… so far. Here’s the misleading trailer – more after the jump.
In the US: Wednesdays, 8/7c, Fox In the UK:Acquired by ITV. Will air this autumn
I love Lethal Weapon. I really do. Despite the constant repeats of Die Hard at Christmas and a general moving by society away from movies associated with Mel Gibsonsince his ‘incidents’, to me, it’s the best and most important of the 80s action movies.
I could probably even write a thesis about it, it’s so important. Written by Shane Black (Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Iron Man 3), ostensibly it’s a buddy-buddy cop movie in which the ‘lethal weapon’ of the piece – Gibson, a former special forces soldier who’s now suicidal following the death of his wife – is partnered with the soon-to-retire Danny Glover, eventually becoming friends after fighting drug smugglers. In actuality, it sees aimless American men wondering what their purpose in society is, now that the Vietnam War is over, with Gibson’s burn-out on one side, Mitchell Ryan and Gary Busey’s amoral army of mercenaries on the other. It debates the nature of the ‘new man’ and whether unreconstructed men should aspire to be what society needs, and eventually crafts out a purpose for the left-behind: Gibson’s trailer park trash who was ‘only ever good at one thing’ (killing) is able to put aside his suicidal tendencies by using those skills to help others when needed.
Of course, that was the 80s and the debate has now evolved. So did Lethal Weapon, itself evolving from a semi-serious piece into an almost outright family comedy that could comfortably accommodate Chris Rock, Joe Pesci and Rene Russo in its ranks.
It’s this latter incarnation of the franchise that Fox’s new TV adaptation is largely channelling, but pleasingly, there are still traces of that original darker tone to the show. Based loosely on Shane Black’s original script, it sees Clayne Crawford (Rectify) take on the Gibson role, Riggs now being a Texan former Navy SEAL sniper turned cop who’s on the verge of becoming a father when his pregnant wife is killed in a car crash.
Relocating back to his wife’s home town of Los Angeles, he’s partnered with Damon Wayans (In Living Color), an older cop just returned to work after having a heart attack. Neither’s keen to work with the other at first, particularly once Wayans learns that Crawford has a death wish, but through various developments and stunt scenes directed by series exec producer McG (Charlie’s Angels), they slowly forge a bond together.
Although the Lethal Weapon movies eventually became one big family with a continuing ensemble, don’t be too surprised that for a series, that ensemble becomes even larger. The Murtaugh family comes through the transition intact, albeit with different ages. Jordana Brewster (Dallas, Fast & Furious) takes on the late Mary Ellen Trainor’s role as Crawford’s psychiatrist, while Tony Plana (Ugly Betty, Madam Secretary) takes on the new role of Crawford’s father-in-law.
Given that Wayans is largely known for comedy, you might be expecting the show to be nothing but buddy-buddy laughs. However, Crawford is the main focus of the show. As well as capitalising on Riggs’ sharpshooting and martial arts skills, the TV adaptation still puts his death wish high on the show’s feature list.
As you might expect, given the 30 years’ time difference, there are tonal differences, particularly in the attitudes to former military. Special forces aren’t as mysterious as they were and attitudes to the armed forces are different – the wounds of the Vietnam War to the American psyche are different to those from Iraq. Wayans’ son wants to enlist ‘for the experience’, and Crawford is ‘happy’ to point out that’s a great idea if the experience you want is seeing your best friend shot in the head.
Also new is the culture gap between California and Texas, with Crawford a more well spoken Southern gentleman than Gibson. Meanwhile, Wayans’ comedy talents are instead used most when dealing with his wife (Keesha Sharp) and family, rather than with Crawford.
All the same, despite death wishes, a dead pregnant wife in the first five minutes and the copious number of car chases and shootouts, Lethal Weapon the TV series is a decidedly lighter affair than it probably should be and is nowhere near as compelling as it should be, either. Crawford, who is still undoubtedly the show’s biggest asset and does fine at both the dark and the light, doesn’t have the same manic energy that Gibson had once he had a target in his sights. The script is all over the place, despite the fine template, and its reinventions of old scenes are virtually nonsense.
And despite McG’s presence behind the camera, the action is mostly badly choreographed, underwhelming and empty, other than a couple of fight scenes. Indeed, among all the other damage he undergoes in the episode, one of the lead characters is shot twice and the only trace of injury at the end is his arm in a sling. This is action because it can look cool, rather than because it has any real meaning.
Crawford is good enough and the character still Riggs enough that I’ll tune in for episode two, at least, in the hope the show pulls itself together in later episodes. But this feels like an adaptation that either only loosely understands its original material or doesn’t feel it can fully exploit it in a primetime show. Whichever it is, it also can’t create something of its own that’s as good or even half as engaging.
In the US: Wednesdays, 10/9c, ABC In the UK: Netflix. New episode every Thursday
Like most people in Britain, I get virtually all my knowledge about how the US government works via The West Wing. Screw Newsnight – I’ll tell you the first five amendments to the US Constitution and the episodes in which they featured right now, if you want.
So when I heard about Designated Survivor, no explanation was needed: after all, not only had the Mayor from Buffy The Vampire Slayer been President Barlett’s ‘designated survivor’ in He Shall, From Time To Time…, Laura Roslin would never have become President of the 12 Colonies in Battlestar Galactica were it not for a constitution specifying the exact list of people who would assume the position in the event of some terrible tragedy.
Designated Survivor is neither of those two shows. Instead, it’s roughly half-Dave (that delightful movie in which ordinary punter Kevin Kline becomes President and behaves very nicely and decently, unlike the other politicians), half-24 (that less delightful TV series in which highly trained anti-terrorist agents have a very limited amount of time to shoot and torture lots of people to prevent terrible atrocities taking place).
It sees the lowly Secretary of Housing, who’s just about to be fired by the sitting President, accepting the duty of ‘designated survivor’ during the State of the Union. Except then Congress gets blown up and this decent – possibly too decent – pushover family man and educator instantly propelled to the top job, where he has not only to bring the country together and keep it stable, he has to prevent all out war with other nations, find out who was responsible for the bombing and what they intend to do next, and avoid a coup d’êtat from people who think he’s just not up to the job or even eligible for it, given he was unelected.
Can he do all that? Hell yeah. Because that man is Kiefer Sutherland. Yes, boys and girls, Jack Bauer is finally President.
Calling your show This is Us is a bold move. It implies a certain universality of the human experience, which in an age of identity politics is hard enough in a single city of the US, without TV producers having to think about how much of the New York City cultural experience transfers to South Africa, for example.
Yet that’s what This is Us is going for. You probably have to look back to Parenthood and before that thirtysomething to find shows that were so convinced of their universal applicability and smartness.
This is Us – or perhaps that should be This is US, given it’s American focus – tries to demonstrate its pancosmic thesis through the conceit of three storylines, each involving one or more people who all have the same birthday: a married couple (Milo Ventimiglia and Mandy Moore) who are about to have triplets; an actor brother and a love-lorn sister (Justin Hartley and Chrissy Metz); and a rich trader (Sterling K Brown) whose drug-addict father (Ron Cephas Kones) abandoned him as a baby after his mother died.
A title card preceding the drama says that according to Wikipedia, people who share the same birthday aren’t guaranteed to have anything else in common. But how much do you want to bet that it’s hinting at a “universality of the human spirit”, that universality being love, predominantly for family, predominantly in an American way? And that on top of that, that there’s a secret link between the three storylines that will become immediately obvious by about two-thirds of the way through? One that involves a bit of cheating involving Milo Ventimiglia’s physique?
They say ‘write what you know’, but if everyone in TV does that, we’re going to be in a sorry state very soon. I’ve already lost track of the current number of shows airing, just having aired or that are in development that are based on the lives of one of the executive producers. There’s even a Judge Judy drama on the way. Do we really need that? I don’t think so.
I guess the idea is that it not only gives an air of verisimilitude to the show, as well as a built-in audience and ideas for stories that might otherwise never have occurred to the writers, it also insulates the writers from accusations of racism, implausibility and so on – “But that’s what actually happened!” they can say.
Trouble is that with a lot of these shows, either people’s lives are already remarkably similar to TV shows or somewhere in development, people’s life stories get squeezed into formats that allow the shows to run for 10, 13 or 24 episode seasons, hopefully up to a syndicatable 5-7 seasons or more. The result is they all still end up looking the same as one another and what you see is probably not what actually happened?
Take Bull, CBS’s new show, which is based on the life of Dr Phil McGraw. You know Dr Phil, right? Well, before being a stalwart of Oprah and then getting his own show, he was a ‘trial scientist’. Here he is explaining what that is to Bull star Michael Weatherly.
I say ‘based’, but the show’s creators say ‘inspired’. That suggests that it bares very little resemblance to watch Dr Phil’s life used to be like. Yep, development squeezed the real life out of it while it was shoving the story into a CBS procedural formatting box.
Nevertheless, there might be something true about it. I mean if you think Dr Phil is just a trite regurgitator of homely platitudes with little scientific basis that are designed to further his TV career rather than actually truly help people, which would be impossible anyway, Bull will just confirm your suspicions as it’s just a trite regurgitator of homely platitudes with little scientific basis that are designed to further a very standard legal procedural.
All the same, real or not, seen Justice? Seen Shark? Seen Lie To Me? Then you’ll have seen a whole bunch of very similar shows that were all better than Bull. There’s the standard older, slightly troubled central eponymous white guy who everyone thinks is brilliant and spends most of their time admiring. There’s the diverse team of slightly less brilliant, slightly more personality-free helper monkeys who are going to get significantly less time for character development over the course of the series. There’s the endless stream of supposed pieces of wisdom that are actually just blunt over-simplifications. There’s the never-ending series of false trails before the eventual resolution. There’s blunt talking at anyone who’s not ‘with the programme’.
About the only thing different is the inclusion of a slightly punky computer girl (Annabelle Attanasio), which is more of a head nod to the NCIS audience Weatherly is hopefully taking with him.
If this is an advert for ‘trial science’, it’s also a big epic failure. While it may (or may not) be an accurate representation of what goes on behind the scenes with ‘mirrored juries’ (seen them in Justice and Shark – soz) et al, trying to pass off “she’s thinking of him as being like her son” as profound is a surefire loser. If people are paying big money for this, I’ve got this great wire transfer scheme they might want to hear about.
Bull‘s not without the occasional innovation: I quite liked the way the various members of the jury Weatherly was analysing from afar seemingly spoke their inner desires to him and his ‘too long, didn’t read’ was a nice rejoinder to something from a millennial.
But those moments are fleeting. Unless you like watching TV shows that are just like all those other TV shows that you like – well, it is CBS – give Bull a wide berth.
