I’m Rob Buckley, a journalist who writes for UK media magazines that most people have never heard of although you might have heard me on the podcast Lockdown Land or Radio 5 Live’s Saturday Edition or Afternoon Edition. I’ve edited Dreamwatch, Sprocket and Cambridge Film Festival Daily; been technical editor for TV producers magazine Televisual; reviewed films for the short-lived newspaper Cambridge Insider; written features for the even shorter-lived newspaper Soho Independent; and was regularly sarcastic about television on the blink-and-you-missed-it “web site for urban hedonists” The Tribe. Since going freelance, I've contributed to the likes of Broadcast, Total Content + Media, Action TV, Off The Telly, Action Network, TV Scoop and The Custard TV.
Every Friday, TMINE lets you know when the latest TV shows from around the world will air in the UK
Lots of acquisitions this week, but only a couple of premiere dates, which I’ll be covering after the jump: Mrs America and Lovecraft Country.
One thing I should add before that though is that I’ve just noticed that Condor has actually moved in the UK from StarzPlay to Sky 1 – season one is now available as a boxset, while season 2 will start on July 15 at 9pm.
Acquisitions
Alibi has acquired CBS All Access’ Why Women Kill, CBS’s Tommy and CBS’s Evil. They’ll all air by the end of this year
A temporary replacement for TMINE’s Orange Thursday feature in which I review a readily available movie you’ve probably already seen
It seems surprising in this day and age, when Michael Bay is a director best associated with astonishingly stupid, hardware-based, explosion-packed summer blockbusters with a serial killer’s attitude towards women, but there was a time when he was an enfant terrible ready to transform cinema with a unique kinetic visual style.
Similarly, Will Smith was not the action movie star he is today but was merely the Fresh Prince of Bel Air – a singer/comedian in baggy clothes with as much right to big pecs and a gun licence as Ant and Dec.
The thing that changed both their careers was Bad Boys (1995), a funny but also hugely exciting, genre-changing action-comedy directed by Bay, in which Smith and fellow comedian Martin Lawrence played Miami detectives.
The movie catapulted all three onto the Hollywood movie A-list. Lawrence then bounced straight off into some frankly terrible comedies, with not even the frankly terrible but successful Bad Boys II (2003) being able to redeem him.
Bay continued to do well right up until The Island (2005), which flopped horribly. Bay took away precisely the wrong lesson from its failure – no more intellectually interesting content (the first half), only smash-crash-brain dead content (the second half), for his films in the future. After that, there was no saving him as a director.
Smith’s career continued to be strong for longer, right up until 2013 when he made the mistake of starring with his son in After Earth. Since then, he’s had numerous flops, but his career has started to head back towards more stellar heights of late. And now he’s returned to where it started for him – the second sequel to Bad Bays, Bad Boys for Life (2019).
Lawrence is back, too, but you’ll be glad to hear that the only thing Michael Bay has to do with Bad Bays for Life is that he makes an acting cameo as a wedding announcer.
I’ll let you know if it’ll do anything for anyone’s career after the trailer and the jump.
