It’s “What have you been watching?”, my chance to tell you each week what movies and TV I’ve been watching recently and your chance to recommend anything you’ve been watching. TMINE recommends has all the reviews of all the TV shows TMINE has ever recommended, but for a complete list of TMINE’s reviews of (good, bad and insipid) TV shows and movies, there’s the definitive TV Reviews A-Z and Film Reviews A-Z. But it’s what you have you been watching? So tell us! Tell us if you want to live
As the temperature outside starts to get colder, things start to hot up again in the world of tele, which means new shows are starting to pop up again on both network TV and Internet TV. Elsewhere, I reviewed the hilarious Get Krack!n (Australia: ABC) while in the new ‘Boxset Monday’, I reviewed Amazon’s Comrade Detective.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. I’m currently four episodes into Sky Atlantic’s slightly bonkers Canadian-set Tim Roth revenge thriller Tin Star, but I’ll Boxset Monday that next week so you’ll have to wait until then to hear my opinion.
There have also been three other new shows in the past week: TVNZ (New Zealand)’s Rake-ish Dear Murderer, S4C (UK)’s bilingual gun drama Bang and Fox (US)’s The Orville. I’ll be covering all of them after the jump, as well as the regulars – כפולים (False Flag), The Last Ship and the premature season finale of Shooter. See you in a mo.
Breakfast and morning TV shows are almost self-parodies, even the ones that don’t feature Piers Morgan. Having to fill up hours of the day during which the viewers are typically doing housework, they’re like televised versions of the stupidest parts of the stupidest women’s magazines, filled with banal segments with no quality filters and staff who are hoping to use them as the next step in their upward progress towards better jobs.
So you’d think that a comedy programme mocking morning TV wouldn’t have to do much work. The makers could just coast along, putting out easy gags that are mild exaggerations of what already exists.
Yet Get Krack!n, ABC (Australia)’s latest comedy show, has clearly put the work in to produce something that’s vastly funnier and cleverer than you’d ever have expected. Indeed, I think if Chris Morris and the rest of The Day Today team had been starting out today in Australia – and had been women – they’d have made something almost identical to Get Krack!n. It’s that good.
Every Friday, TMINE lets you know the latest announcements about when new imported TV shows will finally be arriving on UK screens – assuming anyone’s bought anything, of course
A little bit earlier expected, I know, but hey – it’s nearly September and there have been a few announcements, so I figured easing back into the swing of things with a round-up of all of August’s acquisitions and premiere dates might be a good idea.
First off, in acquisitions:
The Good Doctor (US: ABC; UK: Sky Living)
Freddie Highmore is an autistic savant surgeon. Hasn’t aired in the US yet
Reformation (Germany: ZDF; UK: BBC Four)
Martin Luther biopic. Hasn’t aired in Germany yet!
Snowfall (US: FX; UK: BBC Two)
Cocaine drama set in 80s LA. I watched the first few episodes but it wasn’t that great.
Episode reviews: 1, 2, 3
The Valley (Germany: TNT Serie; UK: Shudder)
A young man who has lost his memory wakes up near the corpse of a young woman hanging in the harvested grapes.
Ronny Chieng: International Student (Australia: ABC; UK: BBC Three)
Ostensibly Daily Show correspondent Ronny Chieng in a semi-autobiographical comedy about life at an Australian University – but basically Oz’s answer to Spaced. I ended up recommending it
Episode reviews: 1-2, 3, 4, 5, 6
In Australia: Thursdays, 8.30pm, ABC
In the UK: Not yet acquired
One of the best lines in this week’s episode of Will was “It’s 1589, Will – everything’s been done. It’s how you do it that counts.” I was reminded of this as I was watching Pulse, ABC (Australia)’s new medical procedural, as I tried to work out why it was so incredibly boring. It wasn’t for want of trying, certainly.
Based on an apparently true story, it’s the tale of high-flying financial analyst Claire van der Boom (Hawaii Five-0) who suffers kidney failure but receives a transplant so survives. She subsequently decides to retrain as a transplant doctor herself. Years later, she finds herself a trainee on the cardio-thoracic and renal wards of a major teaching hospital, learning how medicine actually works in practice. But as she’s still on immune-suppression drugs, any patient she meets could make her sick – she could make others sick, too.
So Pulse immediately gives you those three points of empathy – she’s a doctor but she knows what it’s like to be the patient as well; she’s determined to fight the patient’s corner, even if the more seasoned doctors are more calculating and blasé about the whole thing; and everything’s as life-threatening to her as it is to her patients.
On top of that, she’s both expert and trainee, so we have the tensions between those with the knowledge and experience and van der Bloom’s more impulsive tendencies. There are critiques of the Australian health system, including male dominance of the Australian surgical profession.
There’s co-worker Andrea Demetriades (Seven Types of Ambiguity) soft-porn shagging her boss, Blessing Mokgohloa (Spartacus: Blood and Sand). There’s her super-firey Welsh boss Owen Teale barking universal truths about healthcare – he’s also the man who gave her her transplant for a double-shocker.
Surprisingly, there’s even Spartacus himself and part-time weathermaster Liam McIntyre as an ex-soldier turned doctor and possible love interest for van der Bloom.
And that’s just the set-up – in the first episode, we’ve got people passing out after being sent home too soon, we have an organ lottery and we have transplant kidneys being snatched away at the last minute.
Much peril! Very wow!
And yet it’s absolutely tedious. Which brings us back to that line of Will‘s. It made me cast my mind back to when I last actually watched – and continued to watch – a procedural. On the medical side, it’s House; on the police side, it was the CSI franchise. I think in both cases it’s because they actually did something different, House being a combination of philosophy and Sherlock Holmes detective story, CSI being more like a series of scientific experiments. Everything since has singularly failed to grab my attention.
Which makes me think that I:
Simply dislike procedurals.
Like new things and constant repetition of the same format is intrinsically tedious to me
Might not dislike procedurals when they’re actually something else in disguise
And despite throwing everything but the kitchen sink into the mix, Pulse is a meat-and-two-veg medical procedural, no different from Casualty, predictable, with nothing new to say that House et al hasn’t already said, no great and unusual new characters to love, no amazing performance to lift the show out of its rut (although Teale’s great, of course). It’s not terrible, it’s well made, plenty of people love that kind of thing. I just don’t like something where I can guess more or less everything that happens before it happens. I suspect you don’t either.
It’s “What have you been watching?”, my chance to tell you each week what movies and TV I’ve been watching recently and your chance to recommend anything you’ve been watching.
First up, it’s a warm welcome to the returning “TMINE recommends“, which went missing in action during the recent TMINE redesign while I worked out how to reproduce it in WordPress. To be honest, though, I hadn’t updated it in a couple of years, so it wasn’t quite as useful as it was before. But I spent a little bit of my weekend recommending things in the system, so it should now be as complete a list as it was in its glory days.
I’ve also been working on some variably useful A-Z indexes of reviews, including ones for all the TV reviews, audio play reviews and Internet TV reviews. More to come when I’m not exhausted. With all of these, though, I’ve yet to work out a good way of including the weekly mini-reviews from WHYBW, so they’re not 100% complete, but they’re the best they’ve ever been all the same.
Trawling through them reminded me of all manner of shows that I’d completely forgotten about, too. Remember Mr Sunshine and Pepper Dennis? Of course you don’t.
Right, now the admin’s out the way, let’s talk TV.
Things are starting to hot up again in TV around the world so expect some actual reviews later in the week and the start of next week. You’ll certainly be getting a third-episode verdict of Will tomorrow and I’ll probably be doing you a third-episode verdict of Snowfall next week, since I haven’t got round to watching last night’s episode yet. After the jump, I’ll be looking at the latest episodes of the now very short list of regulars: Ronny Chieng – International Student, Twin Peaks and the returning Game of Thrones. I’ve also managed to work my way through the whole of GLOW and I’ve tried two new shows: I’m Sorry (US: TruTV) and Friends From College (Netflix). See you on the other side!
