Articles by Rob Buckley

About Rob Buckley
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.
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What have you been watching? Including Scream, Mr Holmes, Ballers, True Detective and Mr Robot

3 July 2015 Rob Buckley 24 Comments

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.

Summer schedules are here, so another week, another batch of new programmes to review. Elsewhere, I’ve reviewed most of the new shows, I think:

I’ve also passed third-episode verdicts on:

I haven’t watched this week’s episode of Strike Back, which I usually watch with my wife, but she had better things to do this week. So that means that after the jump, I’ll be looking at the latest episodes of the usual regulars – Halt and Catch Fire, Hannibal, The Last Ship, Suits, Stitchers, True Detective, Tyrant, Westside and The Whispers – as well as newbies Ballers, The Brink, Killjoys, Mr Robot and UnREAL. At least one of them’s for the chop.

But I’ve watched one other new TV show, as well as a movie…

Scream (US: MTV)
I was umming and ahhing about whether to review Scream, given that

  1. It’s MTV so aimed at ‘those young people’
  2. I never really liked the Scream movies
  3. I have a big workload next week so might not have the time
  4. I’m slightly boycotting anything associated with Kevin Williamson, as a result of the evil that is The Following and Stalker.

But as I had nothing else to watch this lunchbreak, I decided to watch it anyway. And frankly, I was bored. Scream as a movie was moderately interesting, critiquing and subverting the horror genre with characters making explicit analysis of the tropes of horror movies, so that these could then be undermined.

The TV Scream wishes it was even half that clever, though. Not truly a sequel, given it doesn’t really follow on from the original movies or feature those characters, as far as I can see, it does however feature a ghost-masked killer who’s always on the end of a phone (or social media interaction), talking to his victim. It also starts off by doing the exact same thing as the original Scream – killing the most famous cast member in her own home while she’s on the phone to the killer.

All the same, that’s where the similarities really stop, since the rest is tedious. The show spends most of its first hour boring us witless with a bunch of cookie-cutter teens and their cookie-cutter relationships, which are so tediously unoriginal, the show tries to be clever by pointing out how tediously unoriginal they are at the end. It also tries to ‘Scream’ TV shows, name-checking the likes of American Horror Story, Hannibal, The Walking Dead et al, without adding even an iota of insight or analysis to them.

Even halfway through, I was desperate for my lunchbreak to end and the sweet relief of work to begin. Surely that’s not the way it’s supposed to be?

Mr Holmes (2015) (in cinemas)
Sir Ian McKellen plays a 90-year-old Sherlock Holmes, retired and looking after his bees, while slowly losing his faculties. At the same time, he thinks back 30 years to an old case that Watson fictionalised and whose solution he can’t quite remember.

Those going in expecting a ‘Sherlock Holmes story’ will be disappointed as there’s only two minor mysteries for Holmes to solve in the entire piece and they’re not the hardest to crack. But while it’s still definitely a story featuring Sherlock Holmes – in various forms, including the Strand magazine Holmes and Nicholas Rowe’s Holmes, Rowe having starred in Young Sherlock Holmes – Holmes here is a proxy for intellectuality without emotionality/spirituality and how it’s ultimately no comfort if you’re human and mortal.

I wouldn’t say I loved it, but it’s something that definitely leaves you thinking about it for some time afterwards, and McKellen is superb at both ages.

Also features a slightly odd excursion to Japan with Hiroyuki Sanada (Helix, The Last Samurai, Ring, Lost).

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News: Marisa Tomei to recur on Empire, drama investment halved, BBC job cuts + more

3 July 2015 Rob Buckley Post a comment

Internet TV

  • Rockmond Dunbar to co-star in Hulu’s The Way
  • Trailer for Netflix’s Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp

UK TV

US TV

US TV show casting

New US TV show casting

US TV

Review: Zoo 1×1 (US: CBS; UK: Sky1)

2 July 2015 Rob Buckley 7 Comments

CBS's Zoo

In the US: Tuesdays, 9/8c, CBS
In the UK: Acquired by Sky1

Imagine what would happen if all the animals in the world suddenly decided that humans were screwing things up and they were going to run the planet instead.

Well, we’d be screwed, that’s what. Even putting aside what would happen if it was just the ants – they’d win all by themselves – even with overpopulation, there’s only seven billion or so of us and there’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 insects, just for starters, and they’re all largely bastards to begin with.

Okay, so let’s dial it down a notch and imagine it’s just zoo animals – and only a few of them at that – as well as maybe some cats. Not quite so worrying, is it? I mean, we’ve always suspected the cats were out to get us, haven’t we?

Yet so far, that’s all the thrills and spills we’ve had from Zoo, CBS’s latest attempt to capture the summer lightning in a bottle that was Under The Dome.

Based on James Patterson’s (Women’s Murder Club) novel of the same name, Zoo is initially set in two locales: Botswana and Los Angeles. In Botswana, US ex-pat James Wolk (Lonestar) is jaded with life and off running safaris for tourists, when he starts to notice some lions acting strangely. They’re ganging up with each other to kill people and are even using battle strategies to do it.

Uh huh.

Meanwhile, newspaper reporter and conspiracy theorist blogger Kristen Connolly (House of Cards, Houdini, The Whispers) is getting all het up about some lions that escaped the local zoo, killing their keepers and some innocent bystanders. She blames the food, but person-hating animal pathologist Billy Burke (Revolution) reckons it’s all just a freak incident – until he goes looking for all the missing pet cats, that is…

Uh huh.

If that sounds ludicrously bad, then you’re right and you haven’t even been exposed to the toxic dialogue and characters yet. Frankly, with TV like this, the world probably would be better off with the animals in charge.

Here’s a trailer. Try not to laugh too hard.

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