Netflix in the US is a massive force. Kind of like Lovefilm, it has a TV and film DVD rental service as well as an online streaming service, but it makes so much money, it can now afford to make its own programmes, including a remake of House of Cards with Kevin Spacey.
Now it’s come to the UK. Available on your laptop, your Apple TV, your iPad, your iPhone, your PlayStation, your Wii and probably your cooker as well, Netflix is simple to use, integrates well with social networks, and delivers a true multi-platform experience, all for £5.99 a month.
It’s just a shame there’s bugger all to watch on it.
In the UK: Thursdays, 10pm, ITV3. Available on the ITV Player In Denmark: Aired last March. Cancelled after the first series
Foreign TV is a funny old thing. What you get to see of another country’s TV is usually the cream of the crop, some nice purchasing person at your local TV network having viewed it all and decided what’s good and what isn’t. So it’s easy to think as a result, based just on what you see on TV of it, that another country’s television output must be great.
French TV looks good thanks to Engrenages. Canadian TV looks good thanks to Being Erica and The Border. Danish TV looks awesome thanks to The Killing and Borgen. UK TV looks good because of Downton Abbey and Doctor Who. US TV just looks good all round. Israeli TV looks amazing thanks to all the adaptations like In Treatment and Homeland.
Italian TV, thanks to Inspector Montalbano, just looks silly. Some things I guess you just can’t polish.
But if you have to wade through it and start delving into the lower reaches of TF1, CTV, Sky Living, TBS, et al, you soon start to realise that not all foreign TV is good. Equally, you start to realise that other countries watch other countries’ TV and try to emulate that.
Now, here in the UK, we’ve had something of a Scandinavian TV love-in thanks to BBC4 and the rise of the ‘Nordic noir’ genre of books and movies. The Killing, Wallander and Borgen have convinced people that Scandinavian TV is universally brilliant. So ITV3, the home of old crime shows, has been trying to get in on that action and has bought in Danish TV network TV2’s Den Som Dræber aka Those Who Kill.
On paper, this should be cracking. It’s written by bestselling crime-author Elsebeth Egholm and Stefan Jaworsk, the writer of several award-winning and critically acclaimed features and TV series. The show stars, among others, Lars Mikkelsen from The Killing, and comes from the producers of several of the Wallander movies, and when it aired in Denmark last year, was watched by a record-breaking 50% of the adult population.
Yet, unfortunately, Those Who Kill is laughable old toss. Here’s a trailer:
In the UK: Thursdays, 10pm, SyFy In New Zealand: Already aired. Season two coming soon
New Zealand has pedigree when it comes to fantasy TV. There was Children of Fire Mountain in the 70s and the award-winning Children of the Dog Star back in the 80s. But you’d be forgiven for thinking that’s where it ended.
Not so. For now we have The Almighty Johnsons, a winsome little comedy-drama from the creators of New Zealand show Outrageous Fortune (which became Scoundrels in the US) about four brothers who are the reincarnations of Norse gods. Which ones, what powers they have and why they’re stuck inside the bodies of a bunch of New Zealand lads – well, that’s something we learn all about during the first episode… as well as who wants to kill them.
Did you know there’s this tribe in Africa called the Dogon? There really is – this is true. What’s particularly interesting about the Dogon is that they have this weird relationship with the star, Sirius – aka the Dog Star – which is the brightest star in the Northern Hemisphere. Exciting astronomy fact of the day: Sirius is actually a binary star – there’s a great big star and around it orbits a tiny white dwarf star that’s impossible for the naked eye (and even most telescopes) to detect: its presence was only inferred mathematically in 1844.
And the Dogon knew that there was a second star there. In fact, they reckon there’s a third star there, too. And in 1995, some evidence emerged that there might well be a brown dwarf in orbit around the two main stars.
Freaky, huh?
Now there are various explanations for this that I won’t go into, but back in in 1984, enterprising New Zealand TV station TVNZ created a six-part children’s TV series, Children of the Dog Star, in which it was suggested the Dogon know all this because they were visited by an alien probe from Sirius thousands of years ago that told them all this. That wasn’t the only probe, however, and out in a New Zealand swamp, the remains of another probe might still exist, waiting to be reactivated.
Ha ha. Fooled you. That’s obviously Sarah Lund from Danish TV’s The Killing, not the US The Killing. This is Sarah Linden from US TV’s The Killing.
See? Easy mistake to make. They even have similar sweaters.
That’s not all. You see, it seems a vast batch of carbon paper has been sent over to the US (and Canada) of late. You may recall my complaining that the US-Canadian remake of Being Human, in which a vampire, a werewolf and a ghost houseshare, was practically identical to the British original. Well, in comparison, this remake of the Danish version of The Killing makes the Being Human remake look like it was really about five talking rabbits in sombreros on a cycling tour of Kenya, because we have here something that, bar the fact it’s in English and there have been a few, very slight name changes and alterations to dialogue, is a frame-for-frame, note-by-note remake of the original – because they even use the same music. Yet, somehow, it’s not quite as good. Good, just not quite as good.
Cue the trailer that might seem a little familiar to those who have seen the original…
