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.
Around August, things get a bit weird with the BFI’s scheduling and it starts putting out brochures for a month and a half at a time. As I was away on holiday in August, I missed out on September/October, but now we have October/November, which gives us a fair few events from the tail end of October together with a copious number from November.
The highlight of the list is an afternoon with Dame Diana Rigg to celebrate 50 years of Emma Peel and air a couple of episodes of The Avengers, including the superb The House That Jack Built. However, there’s also a preview of ITV’s Jekyll and Hyde, talks on romance and race and disability on TV, Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard’s reunion in Staying On, showings of all seven episodes of Bouquet of Barbed Wire, and a season on the evolution of the TV documentary.
All that and more after the jump. But first, do yourself a favour and if you haven’t watched it already, watch The House That Jack Built. It’s aces.
Assuming you all aren’t too busy studying your statue of Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman from Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice for potential plot clues, it’s time for our weekly round-up of the Amazon princessqueen’s latest appearances in DC comics.
Surprisingly, last week’s theme was radioactivity. First, we had the culmination of Celsia 451 in Wonder Woman ’77, which gave us the eponymous villainess’s nuclear-fuelled origin.Meanwhile, over in the continuation of the Darkseid War in Justice League #44, Superman took some bad radiation and went all bad. Lastly, somewhere over the gods’s new home on Paradise Island in Injustice: Gods Among Us, the missiles are flying. Hallelujah, Hallelujah.
If there’s a message to take away from the latest crop of medical dramas that the networks have foist so far on us this autumn, it’s that the American public like their doctors to be dicks. Dicks who are right and will make you better medically, but fundamentally, who are complete dicks with the bedside manner of a marine drill sergeant. We’ve already had lone-wolf racist surgeon dick Jennifer Beals over on TNT’s Proof and an entire hospital of nurse and doctor dicks over on CBS in Code Black – particularly Marcia Gay Harden. And now we have ‘actually used to be a doctor in real life’ dick doctor Ken Jeong in Dr Ken.
I’m not sure the cause of this. Maybe it’s ‘the Donald Trump effect’ making viewers crave a complete dick to order them about. Maybe it’s nearly a decade of House that’s conditioned everyone to be expect doctors to be misanthropic geniuses. Or maybe it’s a realistic reflection of the US medical system. After all, Alec Baldwin was kind of a dick surgeon in Malice all the way back in 1993.
Whatever the reason, that’s what we’ve got in Dr Ken. Now admittedly, Ken Jeong has made a career out of being a dick, first as a doctor (I’m assuming), then as a stand-up, then as the insane teacher, Chang, in Community and then as the funny naked crime lord, Leslie Chow, of The Hangover and its sequels.
He’s funny and edgy. However, beyond the fact he’s been a doctor in real life and he’s also a producer and writer for Dr Ken, it’s not clear why he should be shoe-horned into a multi-camera family sitcom in which he makes proctology jokes. Beyond the fact that TV doctors are apparently all now dicks and Jeong’s good at playing a dick, even a mild dick.
And he is quite mild in this. The show dwells on two areas: home and office. Home is home. It’s the same as any other sitcom family, with Jeong and his therapist wife (Suzy Nakamura) tusselling for control over home and children, Jeong being less sympathetic to his kids than she. Because he’s a mildly dickish TV doctor, but also because that’s how US family sitcoms work.
At the office, Jeong spends his time being dickish to his annoying patients, quarrelling and gossiping with his diverse, joke-playing co-workers, and tusselling for control over patients and staff with administrator Dave Foley (Kids In The Hall, How To Be A Gentleman, SpunOut). Even though Jeong and the cast do their best, the script never really delivers the funny in either domain, although Foley’s inadvertent racism almost manages to raise some chuckles. Unfortunately, it crosses a line and just becoming unpleasant. The only other joke of note? Jeong looking for his daughter, Molly, in a night club and finding something quite different instead. And I’ve just spoiled that one for you.
Perhaps the only point where the show ever really becomes interesting is when Jeong acts and talks like a doctor. It may be dry stuff, for just for a moment, you might find your sleeping brain cells stirred into life.
