CBS sitcoms almost perfectly divide into two camps: the first are executive produced by Chuck Lorre (eg Mom, Two And a Half Men, The Big Bang Theory) and are surprisingly diverse in terms of ideas, if not their general hatred of all that is good and pure in the world. The second, by contrast, normally revolve around overweight blue collar men married to much more attractive, younger women and who have trouble adapting to modern life as they’d much rather be spending their time sitting around with their mates, knocking back beers. Such men are usually Kevin James (eg King of Queens).
Kevin Can Wait falls squarely into camp two, with Kevin James – for it is he – playing a just-retired cop married to Erinn Hayes (Childrens Hospital, The Winner, Worst Week, Guys With Kids) and having to deal with greater intimacy as he hangs around the home with his two younger school-age kids. Then his high-achieving eldest daughter (Taylor Spreitler) announces she’s dropping out of school to support her nerdy British boyfriend Ryan Cartwright (Alphas) while he develops his app, prompting all manner of soul-searching by James.
I was expecting the worst of this and to be fair, you can probably guess pretty much all the tragic attempts at comedy in the first half of the episode. But things marginally improve once Spreitler shows up with Cartwright in tow. It’s also worth noting that Hayes can do this kind of sitcom standing on her head, and that although James may be best known these days for being besies with Adam Sandler and starring in near-horror movies such as Here Comes The Boom, he’s also a decent enough actor and an appealing presence in this kind of multi-camera comedy. Despite co-creating a character who wants to spend all day playing around in go-karts and drinking beers with his buds, his creation is a warm-hearted guy, willing to let his daughter and her fiancé move back in with him, if it’ll stop her dropping out of school and potentially ruining her future.
That said, despite the cast’s best efforts, there’s only a smattering of gags that ever manage to hit home (“That’s every stripper’s backstory!”) and viewing is frequently only bearable at times on fast foward. I doubt I could summon up the strength to view another episode, to be honest. But having watched this first episode, it does at least make me think twice before totally writing off anything James is in in future.
We’re all going to die. Well, maybe not the Scientologists and at least one person from the Planet Zeist is going to live forever (if he wants). But the rest of us are going to kark it at some point.
What happens next is a matter of debate, with numerous religions promising all manner of outcomes, most of which are incompatible with one another. Who’s right? After all, it’s kind of important, don’t you think?
Well, according to The Good Place, Hinduism, Christianity, Buddhism, Islam et al have got it about 5% right. The person in all of recorded history who managed to guess most accurately was a Canadian stoner called Doug who got high on mushrooms in the 70s and got it about 92% right.
It turns out, though, that it’s not whom you worship or how many blood sacrifices you make each week that counts – it’s the quality and number of the good things and bad things you’ve done that on balance contribute to your final destination. And to get to The Good Place, you have to have done an awful lot of extremely good things, because it’s very, very exclusive. Unlike The Bad Place. And you don’t want to go to The Bad Place.
This is the dilemma facing Kristen Bell (Veronica Mars, Gossip Girl, Party Down, House of Lies, Frozen)when she dies and finds herself in The Good Place. She actually wasn’t a good person at all, having been rather selfish, as well as impressively good at selling fraudulent medical products to the elderly. But a mix-up with a human rights lawyer who also did volunteer work in the Ukraine means that she’s now gone to a much better place than she deserves – an exclusive new neighbourhood in The Good Place created by newly promoted afterlife apprentice Ted Danson (Cheers, CSI, CSI: Cyber, Bored To Death), one that’s filled with whatever your heart desires, particularly frozen yoghurt outlets. Here, she can learn to fly, go to parties and never have hangovers, and live with her soul mate in her dream home. Well, someone else’s soul mate and dream home – it is a mix-up, after all.
Trouble is that this utopia is precisely engineered for good people, but before even a day’s passed, Bell’s stealing things, thinking bad thoughts and generally doing the sorts of things that should have had her going to The Bad Place. She is the snake in this particular Garden of Eden, and before you know it, it’s raining garbage, giant stolen shrimp are hurtling through the sky, giraffes are roaming free and everyone’s dressed like bees.
If she’s to avoid being found out and sent ‘elsewhere’, Bell has no choice but to work together with her alleged soulmate, Senegalese ethics professor William Jackson Harper, to learn how to be a good person. But it’s going to be hard going – and somebody else already knows she doesn’t belong there…
Here’s a trailer. I promise it’s not stolen. Much.
It’s “What have you been watching?”, my chance to tell you what movies and TV I’ve been watching recently that I haven’t already reviewed and your chance to recommend things to everyone else (and me) in case I’ve missed them.
The usual “TMINE recommends” page features links to reviews of all the shows I’ve ever recommended, and there’s also the Reviews A-Z, for when you want to check more or less anything I’ve reviewed ever.
Après lui le déluge. This week marks the proper kicking off in the US of a big selection of the Fall schedule, so brace yourself for a flotilla of reviews as the likes of Designated Survivor, Notorious, The Good Place, This Is Us, Lethal Weapon and Pitch head down the pipes towards. I’ve saved myself some of that burden by previewing a couple of shows already, including Speechless (US: ABC) and Son of Zorn(US: Fox);I’ve also reviewed the first episodes of Quarry(US: Cinemax; UK: Sky Atlantic) andBetter Things(US: FX), and passed a third-episode verdict on Four In The Morning (Canada: CBC).
I’ll do my best to keep up, but I might get caught up on some rapids somewhere – maybe by deciding to watch the rest of saison 2 of Le Bureau Des Légendes (The Bureau) (France: Canal+; UK: Amazon).
After the jump, I’ll be reviewing the regulars, Halt and Catch Fire, Mr Robot and You’re The Worst, as well as the second episode of newcomer Quarry. But if you think that the list above is all I’ve been watching, you don’t know me very well:
Home From Home (UK: BBC Two) I tuned into this comedy pilot purely for old times’ sake, since it starred my TV wife Joanna Page. It sees Page married to Johnny Vegas for some unfathomable reason and the two of them deciding to buy a cottage in the Lake District and dragging their kids along to stay with them. Unfortunately, in the transit down the motorway, they forgot to bring any jokes with them. Somehow, I doubt it will make it to series…
Hooten and the Lady (UK: Sky1) There can’t have been many people who, when they first heard of Lara Croft, thought to themselves “Wouldn’t she better if she were split in half – one half an aristocratic archaeologist, the other an adventurer who likes diving off things and grunting?” Yet Tony Jordan (Life on Mars, Hustle) apparently did, as can be seen from his new Sky1 show Hooten and the Lady.
As nominatively determined to dreadfulness as its spiritual predecessor Bonekickers, it sees Ophelia Lovibond – last seen ruining Elementary – deciding the best thing to do to fight government cutbacks at the British Museum is throw aside over a century of archaeological best practice, revive the good old days of Empire and cultural insensitivity, and head off down the Amazon a-lootin’ ‘n’ a-pilligin’. There she meets American petty criminal Michael Landes (Love Soup, Save Me) and they strike a pact to combine his brawn and her brains in an effort to get rich and save museums.
The show wants to be a sort of Indiana Jones meets the screwball comedies of the 40s and 50s, but in reality is a near-unwatchable fan fic version of Lara Croft meets Relic Hunter, but without the charm, stunts or wit of either. The decade and a half’s age difference between the two leads doesn’t help conjure an air of romance, either, even assuming there were more to either character than a thinly sketched character background more suited for a murder-mystery weekend.
Everybody involved looks like they’re having fun out on location somewhere sunny. The rest of as we sit through their irritating, by the numbers, ‘flirtatious banter’? Less so.
Doctor, Doctor (Australia: Nine) After taking over most of Australia’s TV channels, the omnipresent Rodger Corser (The Doctor Blake Mysteries, The Beautiful Lie, Party Tricks) now makes his moves on the Nine Network with this surprisingly enjoyable Australian redo of Doc Hollywood that also feels like it’s here to stick two fingers up at Seven’s somewhat clunky 800 words, which has just returned for a second season, as well as wave in passing at ABC Australia’s Rake and USA’s Royal Pains.
Corser plays a top Sydney heart surgeon who’s got one too many addictions for his own good. An incident at a party ends up with the arrogant Corser being stuck on probation for a year but, with few friends and the Australian health service in desperate need of GPs in rural areas, Corser finds himself sent back to general practice in his home town.
There, he has to deal with his politician mother, the fiancée he stood up and who’s now married to his brother, his uninterested father, his gun-mad foster brother and everyone he grew up with. Oh yes, and not remembering any general medicine any more, so having to Google everything, half his patients being a plane-ride away, not being able to do any surgery or else he’ll lose his licence, and an Irish nurse who’s not going to help him quit substance-abuse any time soon.
Doctor, Doctor is actually a lot more charming yet simultaneously harder edged than you might think. Corser’s character is as big a dick as Rake‘s, yet Corser is engaging enough to make you like him. The fact he’s a coke-head who likes to party-hard on whatever other substances you might have to hand is also a lot darker than someone with a single incident behind him. There’s also the coming to terms with general practice, as well as the denizens of the local hospital, which is pretty entertaining.
It’s unlikely ever to make it to the UK, given Nine’s strapped enough for cash as it is, but I used to think that about Hulu, too, and look what happened there. Give it a whirl if you can.
High Maintenance (US: HBO; UK: Sky Atlantic – probably) Originally a Vimeo web series and maintaining a lot of that feel, High Maintenance sees its co-writer-creator Ben Sinclair playing a pot-delivering, New York cyclist who encounters new and odd customers in every episode.
While billed as a comedy, it’s probably better to think of it as a frequently amusing series of vignettes skewering characters, the first a katana-wielding strongman who seems reluctant to pay, the second a gay man who realises he’s spending too much time with his fag hag flatmate rather than other gay men. With Sinclair an in-story Rod Serling, don’t be too surprised to discover there’s a twist in the tail with each vignette, the first having an absolute kicker of a resolution. But also be prepared for a lot of cringe comedy along the way, as the drug-focus of the piece means the show goes to some dark and uncomfortable places along the way.
In the US: Fridays, 10pm, Cinemax In the UK: Sky Atlantic. Starts October
As fans of The Great British Bake Off have recently discovered, format rights are very important these days. In fact, there have been 60-odd legal disputes over format rights around the world, over the years.
This is odd, since legally, there’s no such thing as format rights. After all, it’s one thing to argue that as you created suave British superspy James Bond, someone else writing books about suave British superspy James Bond without your permission is doing something untoward; it’s quite another to argue that no one else should be able to make a TV show that involves amateur cooks making cakes.
Of course, there’s a grey area somewhere between those two extremes. How about books featuring British superspy? Or superspies of any nationality? Or just regular spies? What about baking competitions that have a host called Mary Berry and all the same rounds as The Great British Bake Off, that’s called The Pretty Good British Bake On?
It’s somewhere lurking in this middle ground that we found Quarry, Cinemax’s latest excursion into adventure, drama, things being shot and ladies getting naked. It stars Logan Marshall-Green of Traveler, Dark Blue and Prometheus fameas a soldier returning home to Memphis after the Vietnam War, where he discovers not only that veterans aren’t that welcome, particularly ones implicated in rather heinous massacres, but also that jobs aren’t that common. However, the rather mysterious Peter Mullan (Miss Julie, Red Riding, My Name is Joe, Tyrannosaur) is willing to pay him and fellow war buddy Jamie Hector (The Wire) rather a lot of money to put their soldiering skills to work killing people, and before you know it, the body count is piling up.
If that sounds a bit familiar, it’s because of one of two things.
You’ve read Max Allen Collins’ Quarry series of books on which the show is based
You’ve seen ITV’s The Fixer, in which a war veteran who’s done some bad things ends up killing people for Peter Mullan.
The shows aren’t exactly 100% identical and the Quarry series was written way before The Fixer. But with the very Scottish Peter Mullan playing a very Southern but otherwise identical ‘tough bastard boss’? Hmm. That does not to me coincidence say.
If only format rights were real, ITV might be having some quiet words with Cinemax right now.
As well asbeinga relocated Fixer, Quarry also has a lot in common with Cinemax’s own Banshee, beyond simply the involvement of Greg Yaitanes. ‘Quarry’ – as Marshall-Green soon becomes known – is returning to a lost love whose love he might have lost (Jodi Balfour); he’s come back brutalised by his experiences and has to adapt to normal life again; there’s the lure of criminal life and its rewards but the acknowledgement of its costs, particularly in the lives of people we care about as well as of normality; there’s a sexually fluid and amusing fellow criminal (Damon Herriman – last seen as a trans spy in Australia’s Secret City); and practically everyone in the cast is from outside the US (Mullan – British; Balfour – South African; Herriman – Australian; Nikki Amuka-Bird – Nigerian-British).
But the tone’s different – whereas Banshee was pure pulp that both transcended and embraced its trashier qualities, Quarry wants to be something greater, something more noirish, something more philosophical. As well as lapping up its period setting, the mid-70s being a respite from the omnipresent 80s nostalgia we’re currently experiencing, Yaitanes also gives us all the directorial tricks he can throw our way, ranging from flashforwards and dream sequences to odd camera angles and compositions. And both Marshall-Green and that non-American cast list are top-tier acting talent – they’re not here for the shootouts.
While the feature-length first episode was a little too long and a little too exploitative for its own good, Quarry made a good start, clearly setting itself up to be Banshee mark 2, a more refined show that should still appeal to the same audience but which isn’t going to dwell in the realm of the hyper-violent and could draw in more discerning viewers as a result. The producers need to work a little on making the characters more appealing, as pretty much everyone is either too messed up or too criminal for you to want to spend much time with them. But they have the foundations they need in place, plenty of source material to work with (including The Fixer) and a decent story to tell, so I’ll be tuning to see waht they do with it all.
In the US: Wednesdays, 8.30/7.30c, ABC. Starts September 21
In the past few years, ABC – already the home of a considerable amount of female-oriented programming – has been doing its best to diversify its diversity, through shows such as black-ish, Quantico, Fresh Off The Boatand Cristela. With Speechless, it’s now trying its hand at disabilities.
Minnie Driver, forever consigned these days to the role of ‘spunky mum’ (cf About A Boy), is a spunky mother of three kids, one of whom (Micah Fowler) has cerebral palsy, is wheelchair-bound and can only communicate with an assistive device. Forever spunky, Driver spunkily drags her family from neighbourhood to neighbourhood, new house to new house and school to school, in an effort to find the perfect location for her differently abled son – a location that might offer a full-time assistant who can act as her son’s ‘voice’.
Like Son of Zorn, it’s a high concept that sounds a bit awful on paper, but actually works much better in practice thanks to a diversity of diversity and a nuanced approach. While the show is happy to have Driver lecture everyone about correct language, the eventual ‘voice’ for her son (Cedric Yarbrough) is black and there’s a tension between him and Driver about whether being black is a bigger disadvantage than being disabled in the upmarket, virtually all-white neighbourhood in which Driver and family end up.
The school might want to celebrate diversity and achievement, particularly the ‘brave’ Fowler, but Fowler doesn’t think he’s actually done anything to be celebrated. Neither does the faculty know how to talk to him and the handicapped access ramp also doubles as the garbage ramp.
Meanwhile, the daughter of the family Driver is a keen athlete who’s fed up with everything being celebrated as being special, when she’d rather just win by being the best at something. Driver’s spunkiness is seen as being as much a problem for the family as it is an asset. On top of that, middle son just wants some attention, too, being tired of all the attention Fowler gets and the constant upheaval.
Speechless has some obvious flaws and potential problems ahead of it. The father of the family (John Ross Bowie) is amusingly long-suffering and the show does its very level best to make him interesting in his own right. But Bowie doesn’t have a fraction of Driver’s presence or energy, and the character has no real desires of his own, making his presence almost superfluous to requirements.
And as with black-ish, there’s going to come a point, probably quite soon, where the show runs out of ‘profound and important’ things to say about disability and diversity, and has to stand on the strength of its characters and situations. At the moment, I can’t quite see the show managing to do that, and it’ll likely very quickly revert to being any other family comedy.
All the same, a surprisingly good first episode that smartly addresses topical issues, and worth a try.
