International TV

An archive of blog entries about international TV programmes and production, including co-productions and shows from countries other than usual

Classic TV

Nostalgia Corner: The Wanderer (1994)

23 May 2013 Rob Buckley Post a comment

The Wanderer

There are few better known, more successful sitcom writers than Roy Clarke. The creator of Last of the Summer Wine, Open All Hours, Oh No, It’s Selwyn Froggitt! and Keeping Up Appearances, genteel, Northern, comedies of manners and silliness are his forte.

Which makes The Wanderer, a short-lived 1994 series about reincarnated medieval knights in modern times on an eternal quest for one of their graves, somewhat of a surprise. The show starred Bryan Brown (FX: Murder By Illusion, Cocktail) as two twin brothers, the good Adam and the evil Zachary. Originally born in the 10th century, the two are fated to fight each other at the turn of each millennium, the winner influencing whether the next millennium will be ‘good’ or ‘evil’.

Reincarnated in the 20th century, Zachary wants revenge on Adam for killing him a millennium previously, but he also wants to take advantage of the growing superstition arising from the turn of the current millennium, planning to have Adam die in front of witnesses so that he can pose as his dead brother. But for his plan to work, he needs a magic item from his 10th century grave, and only Adam knows the location of that. Or at least the original Adam did – modern day Adam? Not so much, although he’s prone to the occasional flashback to his original self, which helps him on his quest to retrieve the artefact first so he can stop Zachary.

Both have helpers in the modern day: Beatrice (Kim Thomson), Zachary’s lover in the 10th century, has been reincarnated as well and accompanies him on his journey, helping him with her witchy magic; while Adam’s helper, Godbold (Tony Haygarth), was a monk in the 10th century but is now a wrestler and plumber. And then there’s Clare (Deborah Moore), Adam’s lover in both centuries.

A co-production between YTV and Sky in the UK, ZDF in Germany, and Antena 3 in Spain, the show ran for 13 episodes, with Adam wandering the world each episode looking for Zachary’s grave, Zachary occasionally cropping up to be extrovert and annoying in comparison to the introverted and dull Adam. Indeed, the whole show was intensely annoying: as well as Brown’s acting and the light entertainment vibe that Clarke apparently couldn’t escape adding to the show, The Wanderer had ‘Into The Labyrinth syndrome’, with the first season concluding with Zachary’s grave being found, the two brothers ready for their clash to begin… only for it to be revealed that another artefact needed recovering and a new quest had to begin. Cue the second series that never materialised.

The show hasn’t been repeated or released on DVD since it originally aired, but you can at least have its title sequence and some clips, unfortunately mostly dubbed into various foreign languages. The last collection is in English, though, so you can judge the quality of the acting for yourselves.

French TV

Review: Jo (Fox) 1×1

20 May 2013 Rob Buckley 5 Comments

Jo with Jean Reno

In the UK: Sundays, 9pm, Fox

Over the past few years, a new trend has started to emerge in television drama: the overseas cop show. Now, in a sense this is nothing new: The Persuaders! and other shows all filmed in exotic locales in the 70s and even earlier shows such as The Man From Interpol had been set overseas, even if they’d never actually gone there for filming.

But the new trend, seen in the likes of Wallander, Zen and Falcón, has English-speaking actors playing other nationalities in overseas locations. Wallander had Ken Branagh, Tom Hiddleston and sundry other Brits being quintessentially British while pretending to be Swedish, while Rufus Sewell got to drink lots of espressos in Italy in Zen, and Marton Csokas and Hayley Hatwell were as English-sounding as can be while solving crimes and romancing each other in Barcelona in Falcón.

France’s TF1, meanwhile, is looking to be a bit of an international player at the moment and, taking this trend on board, has gone one step further: rather than wait for some foreign broadcaster to start shooting a French cop show with English-speaking actors, it’s decided to do it itself and get a whole bunch of international actors over to Paris, get them all to fake American accents (except for the Americans, obviously) in a ‘quintessentially French’ cop show, and then sell the results to the rest of the world through the Fox International channel. It also managed to recruit famous French film star Jean Reno (The Professional/Leon) in his first lead TV role as the eponymous Jo of the series’ title – a cop in the famous Brigade Criminelle (what Spiral calls ‘the crime squad’) with more than a few issues. On top of that, they got in as show runner René Balcer, the creator of TF1’s late 90s cop show Mission Protection Rapprochée and Paris enquêtes criminelles, the French version of Law & Order: Criminal Intent.

Unfortunately, they also got French production company Atlantique Productions to make it. To be fair, Atlantique has been around for 30 years, making English-language productions such as Deadly Nightmares (aka The Hitchhiker), Death in Paradise and Counterstrike, not to mention Borgia for Canal+ and Transporter: The TV Series. What TF1 failed to notice was that largely, these programmes are all rubbish.

Here’s a trailer for Jo. We can talk more after the break – spoilers ahoy!

Continue reading “Review: Jo (Fox) 1×1”

Thursday’s “Scarlett Johansson and the duelling Chefs, Riddick returns with Starbuck and BBC1’s new Norse Noir” news

16 May 2013 Rob Buckley Post a comment

Film

Film casting

Trailers

  • Trailer for Riddick with Vin Diesel and Katee Sackhoff

International TV

UK TV

US TV

US TV casting

New US TV shows

New US TV show casting

US TV

A proper trailer for FX’s remake of The Bridge

15 May 2013 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

The Bridge

The Bridge is probably my favourite of all the Nordic Noir TV series that have so far come our way in the UK. With gripping direction and scripts and stand-out performances from Sofia Helin and Kim Bodnia, it knocks most other series for six. Here’s a trailer for it, in case you missed it:

As well as garnering itself a second series, the show is also set to be adapted around the world. The show’s premise of a dead body found on the exact border of two countries lends itself well to international co-production – indeed, the original was a bilingual Swedish-Danish co-production – so the UK and France are working together on The Tunnel (guess where that is set) while in the US, FX is remaking it as… The Bridge, although it’s set on the Mexico-US border rather than the Swedish-Danish one, obviously.

We’ve had a few teaser trailers so far…

…but now we have a proper trailer for the show, which stars Diana Kruger and Demian Bichir:

Diane Kruger and Demian Bichir

And here it is – you can see that a lot of the scenes are the same as the original’s. Kruger doesn’t register as well as Helin did, but I’ll wait till series proper for full judgement:

Classic TV

Your handy guide to true religions on TV

10 May 2013 Rob Buckley 13 Comments

Herne the Hunter with Robin Hood

We’re going to have a little departure from our normal Nostalgia Corner this week as part of my somewhat unplanned ‘Pagan Week’ on the blog. Today, we’re going to look at all the scripted shows (or as many as I can remember) on Western, English-language TV that have not just featured religions but have actually shown them to be true in some way or other.

Now, it might be tempting to instantly think that Christianity would dominate here – and certainly it shows up a lot, particularly on US TV. When it does it appear, it’s also taken more seriously and is dealt with largely more accurately than other religions.

But TV is largely secular, either because the writers are atheists or agnostics or because they’re afraid of offending or marginalising other religious groups, particularly when it comes to overseas sales. As a result, religion often lies unexamined in drama or when it does, it deals with ‘safe’ religions, doesn’t make claims for the ‘truth’ of a particular religion or is ‘fantasy’ so doesn’t pretend to say what it depicts is true.

Nevertheless, a few shows have done just that and I’m going to be running through them today. A few I’ve already covered in much greater detail elsewhere, so I’ll link to those posts if necessary, but I’ll still be looking at them from the point of view of religion, rather than as dramas, so there probably won’t be much overlap with what I’ve already written.

To be included on the list (and these aren’t 100% firm rules), the show has to fit into one of the following categories:

  1. It has to say a tenet of or an entire religion is true in some way, be it through the appearance of a figure from that religion or by the manifestation of their powers
  2. It features a follower of a religion actually performing important acts of that religion or explaining aspects of it, which are not later disproven or shown to be naive and which might even be proven right.

I won’t be including shows that

  1. Include figures from a given religion but reveal they’re aliens, spacemen, con men, etc (cf Star Trek)
  2. Made-up religions, except synthetic/reconstructionist religions that employ figures from other religions (so yes to Wicca but not to any alien’s religion, for example)
  3. Feature ghosts, the supernatural, magic, etc, unless those things are caused by/stem from a particular religion.
  4. Merely include worshippers or the iconography of a particular religion, but don’t claim that it’s true or demonstrate any aspects of it (so no Father Brown or Lost).
  5. Are cartoons (e.g. Family Guy, South Park, Lost Cities of Gold)

Before we leap straight into the list, though, I’d like to give a big thanks to Jim Smith, Stuart Douglas, Dave Hoskin, Simon Bucher-Jones, Naomi Jacobs, Philip Purser-Hallard, Ian Mond, SK and Jon Arnold for their invaluable help in its compilation. Cheers, everyone!

The list
I’m going to break this down by religion. There are a number of ‘mixed faith’ shows out there, that have shown more than one religion to be true, but these generally show one religion to predominate and so will be listed according to that primary religion.

If I’ve left out any shows or religions, leave a comment below or on the relevant entry and I’ll update the list accordingly.