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.
As you may have gleaned once, twice or even thrice, I’m a big fan of both Duneand Dune. However, both are probably too adult in tone for your average child, which makes this particular movie tie-in I’ve just discovered so thrillingly bonkers.
Both Dune and Dune are hard sells for kids at the best of times – not only complex and layered with subtext on subtext about ecology, the Middle East, oil, religion and more, but also a paean to mind-expanding drugs. That’s probably why Dino de Laurentiis’ 1984 effort to create a franchise on a par with Star Wars probably floundered. That and getting David Lynch to write and direct the movie adaptation.
Full marks for effort, though.
De Laurentiis’ plans meant that there was a merchandising aspect to his franchise ambitions. Star Wars set the template for this, of course, and de Laurentiis followed where Lucas had pioneered. Now I’m not sure if you could ever buy yourself a stillsuit – I suspect not – but here’s a perfect example of why Dune was a bad idea as a potential kids-friendly franchise.
The Dune colouring in and activities books. Now, these boys pretty much speak for themselves, so I don’t feel I need to comment that much on them. Only to wonder exactly what anyone involved was thinking beyond “Star Wars has colouring-in books. Therefore we need colouring-in books.” If you want to see even more of the pages of these delights, you can find them over here.
I have to admit I’ve never watched much Downton Abbey: what I have seen makes it look like it’s just a period ITV soap opera in which posh people are the saviours of the poor working class people who toil for them.
But it’s very big right, particularly in the US. Part of the charm is that the English accents make it seem like a very ‘classy’* show. Now Steven Colbert’s got Michelle Dockery, Hugh Bonneville and Allen Leech to try to do a scene of the show with American accents, to see if losing the accents affects the US viewer’s perception.
It basically all sounds as badly written as I suspected, but how about you, American readers? Does it reduce Downton‘s classiness to hear it in a variety of US accents?
TNT green lights: series adaptation of the Letty Dobesh conwoman novels as Good Behavior with Michelle Dockery, and criminal family drama Animal Kingdom with Ellen Barkin
USA developing: faux true crime documentary 8 Years Lost
Fox green lights: series of racial shooting drama Shots Fired, with Sanaa Lathan
In the US: Mondays, 8.30c/7.30c, NBC. Begins January 4 In the UK: Not yet acquired
Don’t know what a telenovela is? Well, I’ve already written quite a bit about them, so why not head off to my review of a much better show, Jane The Virgin, to find out what they’re all about. Then come back here.
All clued up? Cool.
Right, now you know what a telenovela is, you might be annoyed at having done all that cramming to learn that despite the name, Telenovela is not really a telenovela. Jane The Virgin is. Jane The Virgin understands telenovelas. Telenovela doesn’t.
Or at least it doesn’t want to be a telenovela. It wants to cash in on the name. It wants to ‘homage’ telenovelas. It wants to have evil twins, passionate romances between ex-lovers and rivalries between jealous women. But it wants all those things as sidelines to an otherwise very conventional TV sitcom.
And by TV sitcom, I mean a sitcom set behind the scenes of a TV show. Eva Longoria (Desperate Housewives) plays Ana Sofia Calderon, the star of fake telenovela Las Leyes de Pasión. In a bid to boost the ratings, network executive Zachary Levi (Chuck, Thor 2, Heroes Reborn) hires her ex-husband Jencarlos Canela (Más Sabe el Diablo, Pasión prohibida, Mi corazón insiste en Lola Volcán) in the hope that sparks will fly – or that the paparazzi will, at least.
And for the first episode at least, when it’s actually working that plotline, Telenovela isn’t half bad, is semi-appealing and clever, and is even funny at times. Eva Longoria may have spent the past few years behind the camera producing shows rather than starring in them, but she’s not forgotten what it takes to be a real screen presence – she makes everything look effortless while working the funny for all it’s worth, happy even to Sandra Bullock up and fall down a lot if the plot requires it. Canela is a good foil for her and the supporting cast, which includes Amaury Nolasco (Prison Break, Work It, Chase), isn’t exactly going for subtle (how could they be?), but services the needs of the script well.
The trouble is that what makes a telenovela a telenovela is a fixed story: a beginning, a middle and an end, with a plot that takes everything from A to Z driving each episode, usually through insanely mental territory. And Telenovela doesn’t want that. So as soon as we clear the first episode, we’re immediately in standalone territory. Yes, there’s an evil twin to deal with, but it’s a b-plot that affects only that episode and the almost touching rekindled romance between Longoria and Canela from the first episode is thrown aside in favour of a dafter plot about his having a stuntwoman rather than a stuntman for his scenes.
In fact, it’s readily apparent that the show has no real foundation, no real idea what it wants to be doing with its life, rather than to say ‘telenovela’ a lot and hope that people will watch it as a result. Liked all that joking in the first episode about Longoria not speaking Spanish fluently, while everyone else, even Levi, can? It’s gone. Romance? Gone. Politicking behind the scenes? Gone. Jokes? Gone. Pratfalls? Gone. Collapsing dresses? Gone… but not like that.
That’s traditional US TV, not telenovela territory.
So it’s a distinct thumbs down from me. Longoria and pretty much everyone in the cast can do a lot better than this. And so can you – watch Jane The Virgin. That’s on Mondays, too. This is just the evil twin.
