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.
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. And if you want to know when any of these shows are on in your area, there’s Locate TV – they’ll even email you a weekly schedule.
It’s the last round-up before TMINE takes its Christmas break, but as I was away for a couple of days at the start of the week and I’m about to head off to YA Christmas party, I’ve not yet caught up on The Bridge.Otherwise, though, I’m up to date with all the regulars, so after the jump, we can talk about the latest episodes of The Expanse,Legends, Limitless and Supergirl.
Elsewhere, I’ve reviewed the first episode of Syfy’s The Magicians but I’ve also been watching a new Syfy mini-series, although I’m only up to episode two (of three), so not too many spoilers if you’ve seen the rest, please. Although it’s based on a book I’ve already read, so they might not be spoilers, if you see what I mean.
Childhood’s End (US: Syfy) This adaptation of the classic Arthur C Clarke novel sees aliens come to Earth promising to turn the world into a utopia, by helping humanity to end poverty, inequality, global warming, etc, etc. To make things easier, since they don’t think humans will like their true appearance, they pick on an American farmer (Mike Vogel) to be their official spokesperson, turning his life upside down. But various people, including one of the few remaining scientists Osy Ikhile and newspaper proprietor Colm Meaney, who dubs the aliens ‘the overlords’, think the arrivals have an ulterior motive. And maybe they do…
Although the narrative is compressed from the original decades-long story to something a bit shorter to allow the same cast and characters to appear throughout, the show is nevertheless pretty faithful to the original, mulling over what would happen to humanity if we ever did get a utopia, particularly from an extraterrestrial rather than religious source, and whether we’d even like it. The story also plays with the fear of the unknown and the different, religion, and the perils of science, which it constantly subverts, with the aliens seemingly benevolent at each twist of the story. Well aware that numerous similarly-themed, more conventional movies and TV shows have appeared since the original was written (such as V, Signs and Independence Day), the adaptation uses them to its advantage, even referencing them at points (“What do you think their weakness will be? In Signs, it was water…”).
Filmed in Australia and written by Matthew Graham (Life on Mars, Doctor Who), it’s replete with Aussie and British actors including Ikhile, Julian McMahon (Charmed, Fantastic Four, Nip/Tuck), Daisy Betts (The Player, The Last Resort, Persons Unknown), Don Hany (Serangoon Road), Charles Dance (everything), and various members of The Doctor Blake Mysteries cast. Knowing how everything winds up does ruin it a little for me, female roles do feel a bit 1950s and I’m finding the second episode a bit poorly paced at the moment, but it’s a jolly decent and even surprisingly funny effort by Syfy (which is now committed to its new ‘fewer, bigger, better‘ mantra) that harks back to the network’s halcyon days of projects such as The Lost Room. Matthew Graham for next Doctor Who showrunner?
In the US: Mondays, 10/9c, Syfy. Starts January 25 2016 In the UK: Not yet acquired
From many points of view, most of them commercial, Harry Potter was a great franchise. It made it to seven books and eight movies for starters, which very few other franchises managed to achieve; it also managed to reach that end point without getting worse – in some ways it even got better – which is practically unique, unless you’re a dyed in the wool Fast and the Furious or Friday the 13th fan.
But it did finish, which is an obvious problem. It was also for kids and starred kids, who as well as appreciably getting older over time, precluded any possibility of sexy time except in the darkest, nastiest niches of Internet fan fiction. It was also about English people.
As such, The Magicians is an obvious attempt to fix all those issues while sticking as close to the Harry Potter template as possible. Based on the series of novels by Lev Grossman, it sees the daftly named Quentin Coldwater (Jason Ralph), a fantasy-book reading college graduate, discover that magic isn’t just tricks involving coins – it’s real.
As there’s a university that offers a postgraduate course in magic, he enrolls at this ‘Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy’ to be trained as a magician and to maybe make sexy time with the witches. Unfortunately for Quentin, his childhood friend Julia (Stella Maeve from Golden Boy) flunks the entrance exam, so doesn’t make it to Brakebills. Instead, she gives up on her previous life, and instead goes searching for magic elsewhere.
Little does either Quentin or Julia know, however, that there’s an arch enemy no one will talk about at Brakebills who’s laid waste to a lot of the magic community, reducing the final year of pupils to a class of four. Is he related to the group that want to recruit Julia? Only time will tell…
Despite being an obvious Harry Potter knock-off with delusions of having subtext, The Magicians isn’t half that bad and bears more than a few similarities to Ursula Le Guin’s far superior to A Wizard of Earthsea that help to lift it. Unlike Potter, the story is at its worst at Brakebills, when it’s dealing with Quentin’s fellow pupils – they may all be graduate students but they still act like they’re in High School, and the show even gives us a 10 Things I Hate About You style introduction to all the campus’s various social groups. They’re all completely insufferable and Quentin’s not that much better, being as full of himself ‘pre incident’ (you’ll know what I mean when I watch it) as Le Guin’s Ged was before that night on Roke Knoll.
But when it’s dealing with both the real world and the darkest aspects of the magical world it’s conjuring, the show actually soars and the final few minutes of the first episode are genuinely disturbing and adult. It also clever enough to know its own heritage, with a ‘book within the book’ that’s clearly a Narnia knock-off, but like The Neverending Story, one that blurs into the ‘real world’ of the story.
If The Magicians can avoid its most Harry Potter-esque and its more ‘adult’ aspects in favour of its genuinely adult qualities, it could be a really good show. But I have a suspicion that it’s much more in love with its mean girls, cliques, nerds and sexy time party!! thoughts than with telling a seriously interesting story.
