There it is, in all its glory. Isn’t it a beauty? Here, let curator Beth Wilson tell you all about the loan and how Lieutenant Diana Prince helped bring it about.
I’m assuming it’s a Convergence artefact brought over from the post-Crisis universe, though, because as any fool knows, Wonder Woman now has an invisible chariot – a gift from her brother Hephaestus.
I mean, what other explanation is there?
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As you may have noticed, Netflix and Amazon have pretty much revolutionised concepts of quality and Internet TV over the past two or three years. No longer do you hear the words “Internet” and “TV” together and think “made by two teenagers with a camcorder and iMovie”. Now, we have the likes of Netflix’s House of Cards being put together for $5-6m an episode and receiving no fewer than 13 Primetime Emmy Award nominations.
It’s no wonder other companies have been trying to get in on the act, too, some more successfully than others. Sony’s Playstation network is an example of how not to make good TV, with its first effort, Powers, being a notable false start.
Yahoo! – or to be more accurate Yahoo! Screen – has been ploughing a slightly more sturdy course than Sony over the past couple of months. Its first move into proper “broadcast-worthy” programming was to save the always-wonderful Community from execution at the hands of NBC, giving us a sixth season and who knows, maybe a movie, too.
Now we have another comedy, the eight-episode long Sin City Saints, about a Las Vegas basketball franchise owned by an arrogant tech billionaire (Andrew Santino) that runs into trouble when its star player is run over by a golf cart. That means basketball league executive Malin Åkerman (Trophy Wife) has to come in to give the team some help – as well as come to terms with the excesses of Las Vegas.
On the plus side, the show looks good and “broadcast-worthy”, and also features a host of cameos familiar to those of us who frequent Vegas (Penn and Teller, Carrot Top). Plus Åkerman’s always fun to watch.
On the minus side, it’s all about basketball.
On the double double minus side, despite this being Internet TV n’all, in common with Community – which airs in the UK on the Sony Entertainment Channel and isn’t available on Yahoo! Screen here – Sin City Saints is a US-only affair and while you can watch the trailer below in the UK, the episodes will be a bit trickier for you to take a gander at. Oh well – maybe it’ll end up on TV over here, too, some day.
In the US: Tuesdays, 9/8c, The CW
Three episodes into Rob Thomas’s iZombie, a strange amalgam of Veronica Mars and The Walking Dead in which a zombie medical student gets to solve crimes every week by eating the victims’ brains, and it’s hard not to feel like it’s missing some vital spark.
It has all the ingredients of a hit series and appears to doing all the right things: it’s got a Veronica Mars-alike heroine (Rose McIver) who has to juggle her affliction, her loved ones and her need to do spunky voiceovers; it’s got some fun supporting characters, including David Anders as a zombie drug dealer and Rahul Kohli as McIver’s very English, humorous confidant; and it has some good ideas, including its own zombie mythology and Anders’ evil schemes.
Yet as we discovered from the first episode, iZombie feels somewhat soulless, a simulacrum of a hit show rather than a real, living, breathing thing. Since then, it’s managed to add some seriousness to its previous glibness, with the third episode in particular giving us some emotional depth to McIver’s situation, as well as giving her friend and former Hellcat Aly Michalka something to do except guilt-trip her every episode. And Anders’ scheme is very evil.
But that’s not quite been enough to make it compelling viewing. The police procedural format really neuters the show, turning it into a hodge-podge of styles with a usually not very interesting murder that must be solved before the end of the episode. None of the bolder ideas of the original comic, particularly not were-terriers and chimp-granddads, have managed to make it through to the screen, giving us something that really rests on just a few quirks. And although McIver’s zombie status robs her of some emotions, there’s almost no chemistry between her and her former fiancé, no real sense of loss or grief.
So iZombie is fun enough viewing and it’s rarely dull, but if you were hoping for a new Veronica Mars, just with a bit more gore and brain-eating, I’m afraid you’re going to be disappointed.
Barrometer rating: 2
Rob’s prediction: Not quite as impressive as it should be, so going to be lucky to make it to a second season
I offer no guarantees any of these are true…
Film casting
Internet TV
UK TV
New UK TV shows
US TV
US TV show casting
New US TV shows
It’s time for our regular look at the TV that the BFI is showing, this time in May 2015. The entire BFI TV output this month is dedicated to Noël Coward, with a season of his plays and music, including several Q&As with the likes of Keith Barron, Dame Penelope Keith, Barry Day and Kit Hesketh-Harvey all turning up to talk about the man himself.
Among the plays is Private Lives. Guess what? It’s this week’s Wednesday Play (on Tuesday) – you can read all about it after the jump or simply watch it below.
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