I’m thinking of banning all best friends from writing and starring in TV shows together. The litany of TV shows that are terribly, terribly amusing for those appearing in them but terribly, terribly tedious for those watching them is long and indeed terrible: Doll and Em, Best Friends Forever, Playing House, Idiotsitterand now Second Jen from Canada’s City network.
The title is a pun, since it’s about two Asian-Canadian women, both of them second-generation immigrants, both of them called Jen. Doesn’t quite work, though, does it? I mean, who’s the second one? Two Jens would be accurate; Second Jen is something that’s trying to be clever but that can’t quite work out how to do the pun and make the format fit, so just leaves it in a halfway house between clever and funny where it’s actually neither.
How apt.
The two best friends, a Filipina-Canadian (Amanda Joy) and a Chinese-Canadian (Samantha Wan), decide to move in together to try to escape their overbearing families. And next door to them are a couple of cute young hipsters (Munro Chambers and Al Mukadam). Who knows? Maybe there’ll be romance between the four low IQ millennials, as well as a bit of culture-clash comedy – perhaps about authentic Chinese cusine and its propensity to include unappetising bits of animal? That’s new, isn’t it?
Gosh, what fun they seem to be having together. So much fun. So much appreciation of their own jokes. So much obvious willing of the audience to laugh at what the two of them think is funny. So much hammy acting by everyone in the cast to let the audience know they’re watching a comedy, just in case.
Maybe some of the audience is laughing at yet another overbearing Asian tiger mum character (Janet Lo) who uses food and passive aggressive conversation to control her kids while her husband (Richard Tse) literally never says a word. Ever. How amusing it is for everyone that he never says anything, while everyone keeps going on about how chatty he is. That joke never once got old over the course of the first two episodes. Maybe some of the audience is laughing, too. But I doubt it.
Kudos at least to City for giving a sitcom about two young Asian-Canadian women a chance; kudos also to both Joy and Wan for having the wherewithal to write the pilot and make it, after getting bored of having to auditioning for the same old stereotypical roles.
But seriously, don’t let best friends write in and star in TV shows together. Write in. Star in. Not both. Because the only ones laughing will be the friends.
In Canada: Mondays, 9pm ET, Showcase In the UK: Acquired by Netflix
So I have to admit to really rather enjoying Travelers, Canada’s latest piece of world-beating science-fiction in which a group of time travelers from the future project their souls back into the bodies of people dying in the present day, so that they can prevent a terrible disaster from happening. They possess the skills, they know what they’ve got to do – what they don’t know is what their ‘hosts’ lives were like before they died.
The first episode was a nice, edgy but still humorous piece of work that introduced us to the team’s old hosts, before introducing in less detail the team themselves. Episode two then gave us more of an introduction to the team members and the types of missions they’d go on.
I thought that would be the pattern laid down for the rest of the series, but what became clearer in the third episode is that the show may essentially bea spy show with a bunch of sleeper agents waking up from their normal lives to undertake secret missions, but it’s also as much about relationships and character as anything else. As well as continuing to focus on the different lives of the hosts to demonstrate how much detail there is that can get overlooked and what patterns of behaviour are expected of us, it also looked at the psychological impact of knowing how the future will turn out and who will live, who will die, how and when. Could you stand back and let others perish, knowing all you had to do was say “Don’t go left there for another minute” and they could live?
What saves the show from being a gloomy, self-important piece of sci-fi is a combination of the performances and the characters. Eric McCormack of Will and Grace is cast against type as an FBI agent, and his character manages to give the show a much needed sense of humour. MacKenzie Porter’s closed performance makes her formerly learning disabled host come smart doctor a source of intrigue, while Reilly Dolman’s douchebag school quarterback turned kind engineer gives the show heart and gentility.
But there are jokes, too. No show that can use pre-pubescent children as temporal radio transmitters can take itself too seriously.
Travelers is a thoughtful, but often action-packed piece of science-fiction with feeling that isn’t that bothered with saving the future – there are dozens of other ‘travelers’ around the world so maybe they’ll do it. Instead, it’s more concerned with people. It could do with fixing a few plotholes and making its crack team of spies just a little bit better at blending in, but its focus on the little things in life is welcome in a genre so focused on the intellectual and the abstract.
Barrometer rating: 2 Would it be better with a female lead? N/A TMINE’s prediction: Should run for a good few seasons
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.
“We’re now nearing mid-Fall season/mid-Spring season (delete according to the hemisphere of your choice), which means there’s few new shows heading our way”
Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha! What fool said that?
It’s never going to stop. We’re at peak TV so it’s never going to stop. Help.
In the past week, I’ve reviewed the first few episodes of Chance (US: Hulu), Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (US: BBC America; UK: Netflix), Man With A Plan (US: CBS) and Graves (US: Epix). But that’s not really scratching the surface, since although I’ll be tackling Pure Genius (US: CBS; UK: Universal) and The Great Indoors (US: CBS; UK: ITV2) tomorrow and/or Wednesday, I’m not going to have time this week to make a dent in Amazon’s Good Girls Revolt. I’ve also had no time to watch Channel Zero (US: Syfy; UK: 5*), but since that’s an anthology horror show, I have no qualms in deciding I’m not going to watch it. I’ve also noticed that Young Pope (US: HBO; UK: Sky Atlantic) has started in the US, but since it’s already started in the UK, too, you can probably work out for yourselves whether you like it.
However, good news! I’m away for a couple of days at the end of the week, which means I can start a mid-season cull through the usual simple mechanism of asking myself “Can I be arsed to play catch up with this show when I get back?”
Accordingly, I’m waving goodbye to Kim’s Convenience, No Tomorrow, The Secret Daughter and Speechless, as well as – shock, horror! – two long-standing regulars! Find out which ones after the jump. Frequency, Lucifer, Timeless and Designated Survivor are also on the endangered list and it’ll just be case of finding out when I get back whether I can be arsed to play catch up with them.
Elsewhere, I’ve passed third episode verdicts on Insecure (US: HBO; UK: Sky Atlantic) and Falling Water (US: USA), with Insecure failing to stay on the viewing pile. We’ll see if I can be arsed with Falling Water when I get back.
That means that after the jump, I’ll be looking at the latest episodes (that I’ve seen) of Ash vs Evil Dead, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, Designated Survivor, Doctor Doctor, Eyewitness, The Flash, Frequency, Hyde and Seek, Impastor, Lucifer, Son of Zorn, Supergirl, Timeless, Travelers and You’re The Worst. I’ve not yet had time to watch the latest Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, Eyewitness and Westworld, and since Y Gwyll (Hinterland) and Humans both chose to make a reappearance last night, don’t be too surprised I haven’t manage to watch them, either.
But somehow, I did manage to find time to watch a few movies…
Central Intelligence (2016) Kevin Hart and Dwayne Johnson both went to High School together, Hart being the golden boy voted most likely to succeed, Johnson the fat kid everyone picks on. Twenty years later, Hart is an accountant while Johnson is a top CIA agent who needs Hart’s accounting skills to find out who killed his partner (Aaron Paul) and is selling top secret satellite codes. Or is he? Could it be that Johnson is really a traitor, which is why the CIA is out to get him?
Kevin Hart is normally a cast iron guarantee that a bad movie is coming your way and this has all the hallmarks of being Kevin Hart in the kind of movie Adam Sandler rejects as being too low brow. But actually, it’s reasonably funny and smarter than you expect it to be, right down to a crucial Rashomon-esque lift scene. Hart is surprisingly unirritating, too, there’s a jaunty 90s soundtrack, and Johnson manages to do both action and comedy pretty well.
Doctor Strange (2016) The latest Marvel movie sees arrogant surgeon Benedict Cumberbatch injured in a car accident and unable to operate any more. He heads East and before he knows it, as well as learning how to heal himself, he’s learning magic from The Ancient One (Tilda Swinton) and her helpers (Chiwetel Ejiofor, Benedict Wong), so that he can fight her former helper Mads Mikkelsen who wants to make everyone immortal… but in a really bad, murderous way.
On the one hand, it’s oftentimes a really visually impressive movie, with echoes of everything from Inception through 2001: A Space Odyssey, as reality warps and the action jumps between universes and dimensions. It’s got a top cast and the script, while treading often cliched ground at times, also channels Eastern philosophies to give us a slightly different take on the usual ‘great evil that must be defeated through brute force’, which is what Marvel normally gives us – squint, in fact, and you can spot a bit of Daoism, a bit of Buddhism and a bit of Kung Fu. Indeed, Mikkelsen is at times almost irrelevant to the larger personal journey that Cumberbatch is undergoing, such is the change in focus.
However, there are various production choices that undermine it all tad. Cumberbatch is saddled with an American accent he really doesn’t need and which affects his performance, fight scenes are endless shakycam and Michael Giacchino’s score is the usual strings-dominant orchestral pieces that rob the movie of the true weirdness it deserves. It’s also not as funny as it thinks it is.
On the whole, pretty good, but could have been better.
X-Men: Apocalypse (2016) Last of the three prequel movies featuring the younger X-Men cast (at least, for now…), with the action shifting to the 80s as an Ancient Egyptian mutant/god comes back to life and decides to wipe the Earth clean of weaker specimens who won’t obey him. He assembles his own team to go and fight the good mutants, which now include young versions of Night Crawler, Jean Grey and Cyclops, as well as the usual usual and some of the characters from X-Men: First Class who didn’t get much/any screentime in X-Men: Days of Future Past. And guess who also shows up…
There’s nothing that new and remarkable about X-Men: Apocalypse, with very little you won’t have seen in either the first three movies or the prequels. But if you haven’t watched those movies, you’ll be wondering about a whole bunch of things the film assumes you already know, so it’s a bit lose-lose. However, the film is good when it’s focused on the more human side of things, whether it’s Jean’s and Cyclops’ romance, Magneto’s family, James McAvoy and Rose Byrne’s 20-year-long romance, and so on, making it a surprisingly decent third act.
A bit meh, but Bryan Singer’s talents mean it’s not X-Men: Last Stand, for sure.
