As lovely wife puts it, “Does Keeley Hawes really want us all to hate her?
Articles by Rob Buckley
UK TV
Review: No Heroics 1×1
In the UK: Thursdays, 10.30pm, ITV2
There’s something that baffles me about the British. Whenever Hollywood produces a comedy where Hugh Grant turns up, being all self-effacing and a bit of a klutz and lacking in confidence compared to those powerful, strident American types who are all into self-improvement and “being all you can be”*, we get on our high horses and whinge about ‘clueless bloody Americans’.
Then we go and produce half a dozen ‘comedies’ where we live down to the same stereotype. Do we have no pride? Must we really think the worst of ourselves? Must we really hate people who are, ooh, I don’t know, good at things?
Case in point: ITV2’s No Heroics. It’s British! It’s about superheroes! Yey! So they spend all their time down the pub grumbling about how crap they are and being complete dorks.
Oh, FFS.
Friday’s product placement news
Doctor Who
- And River Song was… [spoilers for Christmas special]
Film
- Jude Law to play Dr Watson in Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes
- Brett Ratner to direct new Conan the Barbarian?Robert Zemeckis to adapt Eoin Colfer’s Airman
- Robert Zemeckis to adapt Eoin Colfer’s Airman
- David Duchovny and Demi Moore to play product placement family The Joneses
- Vince Vaughn, Jon Favreau and Jason Bateman to star in Couple Retreat
- Luke Wilson and Giovanni Ribisi to star in Internet porn historical Middle Men
- Four minutes of Simon Pegg’s How To Lost Friends and Alienate People
- William Shatner responds to JJ Abrams
Commercials
- Seinfeld and Gates ads pulled
British TV
- Rob Brydon’s Arbie to make BBC4 comedy pilot about wealthy Russians
- Bill Bailey to leave Never Mind the Buzzcocks
- 200 complaints about EastEnders paedophile storyline
US TV
- SciFi’s Warehouse 13 goes to series
- Wade Allain Marcus joins Gossip Girl
- Fox orders pilot of un-PC Save Us Then The Whales
- ABC has visions of the future with Flash Forward
- Shark‘s Sarah Carter joins Dirty Sexy Money
Friday’s product placement news
Doctor Who
- And River Song was… [spoilers for Christmas special]
Film
- Jude Law to play Dr Watson in Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes
- Brett Ratner to direct new Conan the Barbarian?Robert Zemeckis to adapt Eoin Colfer’s Airman
- Robert Zemeckis to adapt Eoin Colfer’s Airman
- David Duchovny and Demi Moore to play product placement family The Joneses
- Vince Vaughn, Jon Favreau and Jason Bateman to star in Couple Retreat
- Luke Wilson and Giovanni Ribisi to star in Internet porn historical Middle Men
- Four minutes of Simon Pegg’s How To Lost Friends and Alienate People
- William Shatner responds to JJ Abrams
Commercials
- Seinfeld and Gates ads pulled
British TV
- Rob Brydon’s Arbie to make BBC4 comedy pilot about wealthy Russians
- Bill Bailey to leave Never Mind the Buzzcocks
- 200 complaints about EastEnders paedophile storyline
US TV
- SciFi’s Warehouse 13 goes to series
- Wade Allain Marcus joins Gossip Girl
- Fox orders pilot of un-PC Save Us Then The Whales
- ABC has visions of the future with Flash Forward
- Shark‘s Sarah Carter joins Dirty Sexy Money
Third-episode verdict: Raising the Bar
Time to have a proper look at Steve Bochco’s new series about young lawyers, Raising the Bar. Not much to add since the first episode, since everything’s more or less the same: young lawyers cocking up and getting more impassioned about their cases than their older colleagues do; same lawyers finding it’s hard to be friends with their old school friends when they’re on opposite sides and getting all impassioned.
The second episode was marginally better than the other two episodes, with a hint of drama creeping in. But there’s nothing dreadfully good and exciting it, bar Malcolm in the Middle‘s Jane Kaczmarek as a cranky judge.
So The Medium is Not Enough has great pleasure in declaring Raising the Bar a three or ‘Minor Caruso’ on The Carusometer quality scale.