International TV

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

Streaming TV

What did you watch last fortnight? Including Parents, Romanzo Criminale and Drive

9 July 2012 Rob Buckley 2 Comments

Sky 1's Parents

It’s “What did you watch last fortnight?”, my chance to tell you what I watched last fortnight 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 recommendations from the first-run shows are: Continuum, The Daily Show, Suits and Prisoners of War. Hunt them down.

Here’s a few thoughts on those and what else I’ve been watching:

  • Burn Notice: Continues to tread slightly away from its formula, so I’m countenancing watching it again.
  • Wilfred: Is now just dark, not funny at all, so I gave up after the first 10 minutes of episode two.
  • Suits: Loving the Hardman narrative and that they’re starting to explore the secondary characters more. The must-see show of the week.
  • Continuum: Starting to weaken a little, now most of the SF elements have been stripped from the present-day side of things. But still a pretty good show, and Rachel Nichols is an involving lead.
  • Men At Work: Thought I’d give it a try again since Alex Breckenridge was in last week’s episode, but they gave her one funny line, and the rest of the show was as desperately unfunny as the previous episodes I saw.
  • Parents: I must remember that although Sky Atlantic is getting better, Sky 1 is merely trying to get better. Despite the presence of Sally Phillips and Tom Conti, this is a really poor sitcom about Phillips getting fired from her job and being forced to move herself and her family back in with her parents. Couldn’t even survive one episode, although Phillips is as excellent as always and it did have a few decent touches.
  • The Newsroom: Dear God, what is up Sorkin’s writing of female characters. Quite a poor episode, too, that had me yawning for most of it, and it comes to something that Olivia Munn was actually the least annoying actress on the show (Emily Mortimer and Alison Pill beating her on that score). I’m hoping last night’s episode was better
  • Line of Duty: Episode two was marginally less ludicrous than episode one, but most of the flaws are the same, particularly the lead’s lack of charisma. But it did have a very interesting cliffhanger, so I’ll be sticking around for episode three.
  • Romanzo Criminale: Sky Arts is currently repeating what is supposedly Italy’s finest TV show. This is a very low bar indeed, apparently, because this tale of the Mafia in the Rome of the 70s was so laughably ridiculous, I switched off after 10 minutes. I think there’s an intended level of humour to it, but it was just plain daft.
  • Royal Pains: Marginally improving, but the departure of Jill Flint in a typically unresolved, undramatic way signalled a sharp downturn in quality for the last episode.
  • Prisoners of War: It’s interesting to see what elements of this were retained for Homeland, since they are both similar and different. No terrorist plot and no real Carrie character for the original, but still enough elements retained by the remake that you can still see how much the remake owes to its originator.
  • Alan Partridge: The two new Sky Atlantic episodes both contained a good number of funny moments, but I didn’t think the episodes as great as everyone else seems to. But a good deal funnier than Parents.
  • Coming Here Soon: BBC3 does investigative reporting. Give me strength. Just horrendous. Like a lot of BBC3 shows, this has a good concept at its core – here, it’s let’s go and talk to the people on the ground about how the economic crisis is affecting real people in different countries – and then in an attempt to get young people to watch it, puts a suitable young person with no training or perceivable talent beyond an ability to talk to other people in the role of reporter. Here we had Stacey Dooley tackling Greece – someone who thinks the Parthenon is the Akropolips (sic) and who “totally, totally gets” the situation. While she had a certain gumption and the show did manage to speak to some useful spokespeople, it was so utterly bereft of any ability to ask any probing questions of those it had concluded had done Greek society wrong, that you might as well have sent a tape recorder instead – and then ignored it and simply passed judgement anyway. As a sample, in an interview with a Greek politician who said there were basically two ways to resolve the crisis – a bad way and a very bad way and the politicians had had to go for the first option, all Dooley could do was say after the interview was over “I don’t understand how people can do this.” What option would she have picked or does she disagree with the fundamentals of the politician’s premise? Who knows. It’s just A Bad Thing and politicians should only do Good Things using their special magic powers. Judging by the BBC3 blog on the subject, I’m not the only one who thought it was a bit of a waste of time.
  • Blackout: No, not the SyFy gameshow but BBC1 trying to do noir with Christopher Ecceleston (currently appearing as quite a poor Creon in Antigone at the National at the moment. Sigh) and apparently that means renting out an old copy of Dark City. Possibly a good script in there, although given that the way to indicate Ecclescake is an alcoholic is to have him with a drink in his hand at all times and having is wife comment on it so not the subtlest of scripts if it is, but the direction is so effected and stupid, that it’s impossible to pay any attention to its possible saving graces.

And in movies:

  • The Ghost: Essentially, one of the least thrilling thrillers ever, with Ewan McGregor as a ghost-writer hired to edit the memoirs of Pierce Brosnan’s Blair-like former PM, following the demise of the previous ghost-writer in suspicious circumstances. Sometimes funny, with one good twist, but that’s about it.

  • Drive: Starring that Ryan Gosling and Carey Mulligan, who are both so hot right now, this is a La Samourai-esque thriller about a taciturn getaway driver who’s empty existence is turned upside down by a waitress he meets and her ex-husband. Surprisingly little driving but a whole lot of ultra-violence, it’s a beautifully shot and intelligent thriller with a great cast that includes Bryan Cranston, Christina Hendricks, Albert Brooks and Ron Perlman. Not to everyone’s taste, but if you can stomach a little blood and do look the occasional tense car chase, this is one movie that is very definitely worth watching. Incidentally, it’s free on Netflix – yes a decent recent movie on Netflix: how extraordinary. The trailer does give away almost all of the movie, mind.

Still to watch: Mesrine – Killer Instinct, starring the always reliable Vincent Cassel, in a French gangster mini-series that has already aired on FX but is now on BBC4. Anyone seen it? Also on the Sky box is the latest Ken Branagh Wallander and Sinbad, which looks fun and has that nice Naveen Andrews from Lost as a baddie.

“What did you watch this week?” is your chance to recommend to friends and fellow blog readers the TV and films that they might be missing or should avoid – and for me to do mini-reviews of everything I’ve watched. Since we live in the fabulous world of Internet catch-up services like the iPlayer and Hulu, why not tell your fellow readers what you’ve seen so they can see the good stuff they might have missed?

Watch some of the US version of The IT Crowd with Richard Ayoade and Community’s Joel McHale

9 July 2012 Rob Buckley 3 Comments

The first episode of The IT Crowd is perfection apparently. At least, several other countries seem to think so, judging by the number of times it’s been remade more or less frame by frame overseas.

We’ve already had a gander at German TV’s version, Das iTeam – die Jungs an der Maus. Germany, of course, has something of a track-record of remaking things more or less identically. The US, however, either remakes a show more or less frame-by-frame at first (e.g. The Killing) or it does something almost completely different, while still using some of the original ideas (e.g. Homeland).

Now, back in 2007 with The IT Crowd, the US took the former path, choosing to recapture the apparent perfection of the first episode with an almost frame-by-frame remake. Although most of the cast were American, the producers even went to the effort of importing Richard Ayoade to revisit the character of Moss for them. But, as so often happens with US identikit copies of comedies, it still wasn’t funny, as you can see from this delightful video from the pilot episode.

Interestingly for Community fans, Joel McHale here plays the part of Roy and Richard Ayoade went on to direct an episode of Community‘s second season – I wonder if he had a hand in that.

Before The Newsroom there was The Newsroom, Drop The Dead Donkey and Dead Danes Don’t Count

27 June 2012 Rob Buckley 11 Comments

Aaron Sorkin isn’t the first person to come up with the idea of a television newsroom as a great way to look at politics. Back in the Channel 4 had Drop The Dead Donkey, a topical sitcom written the same week as it aired, that introduced the world to Haydn Gwynne, Stephen Tompkinson and Neil Pearson. Here’s the pilot episode, with its weirdly different theme tune.

Drop The Dead Donkey ran between 1990 and 1998 (go buy it on DVD), inspiring along the way the Swedish show Döda danskar räknas inte (Dead Danes Don’t Count). But over in Canada, Ken Finkleman, the man behind Good Dog, was developing a show that, like Drop The Dead Donkey, featured a TV producer called George. Called The Newsroom, it crossed Drop The Dead Donkey with The Larry Sanders Show.

The Newsroom was a surprisingly successful show by Canadian standards, running from 1996-97… and 2003-4… and 2004-5, as well as having a two-hour TV movie Escape from the Newsroom air in 2002. It featured cameos from famous Canadians, including David Cronenberg, Noam Chomsky and Atom Egoyan, playing versions of themselves in newscasts. The George character also went on to appear in other shows, More Tears, Foolish Heart and Foreign Objects, as well as Good Dog and Good God.

It’s also considered one of the greatest, if not the greatest show Canada has ever produced. So it’s ironic that Sorkin chose the title The Newsroom for his new show, given the stereotype of how little attention the US pays to Canada and Canadian TV.

So it seems while Sorkin may not have created the first TV show set in a newsroom or even the first TV show called The Newsroom, he is, at least, one of the first to have created a semi-serious drama series about the news.

International TV

On the typography of subtitles

15 June 2012 Rob Buckley 6 Comments

Subtitles are a necessary evil if you

  1. Plan to watch TV programmes from overseas
  2. Don’t plan on becoming entirely fluent with every language in the world

Nevertheless, there are problems with them. You lose a lot in the translation when phrases and words don’t have matching concepts in your own language. Then there are prissy subtitlers who don’t like swearwords or perhaps aren’t as fluent as they should be in your native language, resulting in errors. Subtitles also have to fit on-screen and progress at the same speed as the dialogue, so generally abbrievate the dialogue anyway.

A little considered aspect of them is their typography and positioning. Consider Sebastian Bergman‘s subtitles:

Nothing inherently wrong with the subtitle typeface, and you’ll notice there’s both a keyline and a dropshadow on the text so that it’ll show up well against the mixed black-white background. I tried to watch Kurosawa’s Ran which had purely white text against a bright background so was unreadable.

But have a look at the credits in the mid-left of the screen. They’re in a sort of bold Futura, all in upper case, designed to look sophisticated, discreet and intelligent – as is the show. Except the much bigger, italic Helvetica-esque text at the bottom of the screen now swamps that effect completely. The subtitles convey a rather more ordinary tone to the show, something more generic. Imagine what the screen would look like without them, to see what I mean.

As a result, the viewer can subsconsciously be led into thinking the show is something different from what the creators intended. There’s not a lot that can be done about it, although a lot of Blu-Ray releases now have custom typefaces for subtitles designed to match the feel of the show as much as possible, but it’s something to bear in mind when watching a foregin show.

Ain’t typography fun?