Nordic TV

News and reviews of Nordic TV

What have you been watching? Including Spotlight, The Americans, Second Chance, The Magicians,

21 March 2016 Rob Buckley 7 Comments

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. 

Can you feel it? It’s springtime, everyone, and that can only mean a changing of the TV seasons. Some current shows are finishing their runs, while others are just starting, and there are more on the way. Others are just lounging around, eating chocolate eggs.

This week, I’ve reviewed Underground (US: WGN America) and Criminal Minds: Beyond Borders (US: CBS; UK: W), and if you cast your minds back to last year, I previewed Crowded (US: NBC), which has just started airing in the US. In the next couple of days, I’m going to be reviewing the entire second season of Daredevil (Netflix), which I somehow managed to binge-watch over the weekend, as well as anything else new that comes my way. Either that, or I’ll be toasting my eminent good sense in not bothering to watch ABC’s Of Gods And Prophets, given it was cancelled after a mere two episodes of Wicked City-bad ratings.

That means that after the jump, I’ll be looking at the latest episodes of 11.22.63, Billions, Damien, The Doctor Blake Mysteries, Flaked, Limitless, Lucifer, The Magicians, Okkupert (Occupied), Second Chance, Stan Lee’s Lucky Man, Supergirl and Vikings. One of those is probably not long for this world, one is getting a demotion, but surprisingly, two that had surprisingly awful beginnings are getting promoted to the recommended list. Can you guess which ones?

Oh yes. The Americans is back, too.

But first, a movie!

Spotlight (2015)
Journalism always seems exciting to outsiders, but if you actually look at what it involves, even if the results can be exciting, to be honest, the actual process is pretty monotonous. I use Excel in my day job just as much as I use Word – that should tell you something. Certainly, the most realistic movies and TV shows about journalism point out that it mostly involves endless note-taking, fact-checking, research, dead-ends and meetings, with even All The President’s Men being a major snoozefest most of the time – I think only the TV version of State of Play has ever managed to be both fun to watch while depicting something that a journalist would recognise as been similar to his or her day job. 

So it is with Spotlight, a meticulously exacting recreation of how the Boston Globe‘s investigative journalism department revealed in 2001 that nearly 100 local Catholic priests had abused as many as 1,000 boys and girls in their charge over the years and the church had covered it up. Featuring a star-studded but unflamboyant cast (Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams, Liev Schreiber, Stanley Tucci), the almost pre-Internet story largely consists of Ruffalo, McAdams and Keaton setting up spreadsheets, looking in books, sifting through legal documents and trying to find evidence, all without a gunshot, car chase or even fist fight (it is Boston) along the way.

The film just about manages to keep the viewer’s attention, helped in part by the sheer horror of the story, but also by the attention to location, the period details – yes, it really does feel like a period drama – and the exploration of the politics of the situation, with powerful pressure being applied to the paper and its journalists through subtle means, as the social interconnections between the paper, the church, the police and other institutions worked to try to prevent anyone rocking the boat. But there were times when even my desperate need to nitpick the movie’s accuracy (I couldn’t) wasn’t quite enough to stop my attention from wandering.

Don’t get me wrong – this is undoubtedly not only the second best journalism film ever made, but the second best film about a member of the Bradlee clan (Mad Men‘s John Slattery plays Ben Bradlee Jr). It’s also marvellous to have a grown-up film, telling a grown-up and important story, in which journalists are the good guys for the change. It just would have be nice to have a car chase, too.

PS It’s coming up to the Easter double holiday here in the UK, which means this will be the last WHYBW until 1st April. Or maybe the 2nd. Or maybe, just to be wacky, 30th March. It’ll just appear at some point around then, anyway.

Continue reading “What have you been watching? Including Spotlight, The Americans, Second Chance, The Magicians,”

Walter’s got another show on the way: Blå Ögon (Blue Eyes)

17 March 2016 Rob Buckley 6 Comments

It seems like British TV now obeys some sort of ‘law of conservation of Nordic Noir’ – when one show disappears, another must come to replace it. As a result of said law, for example, with Iceland’s Ófærð (Trapped) now done on BBC Four (no spoilers!), Denmark’s Bedrag (Follow the Money) is being thrust forward to take its place.

But what’s that you say? Norway’s Okkupert (Occupied) has just finished on Sky Arts? Does that mean the law’s broken? Not at all, you doubter of science. Because coming to More4/Walter Presents next Friday is Sweden’s Blå Ögon (Blue Eyes). Synopsis time:

In the lead-up to the national elections, Sweden is thrown into a state of unrest. When politician Annika Nilsson is found murdered, her daughter Sofia launches her own investigation to discover the truth. With her mother’s right-wing views on the government in contention, Sofia unearths an extremist plot that links the right-wing political party ‘Trygghetspartiet’ with the terrorist movement, known as Veritas.

Meanwhile, in the Ministry of Justice, Elin Hammar (Louise Peterhoff – The Bridge III) is appointed as the new Chief of Staff for the Ministry of Justice. However, Elin becomes aware that something is not quite right in her department. Important documents go missing and the fact her predecessor has vanished under unexplained circumstances raises questions. As Elin’s curiosity and fear pull her deeper into the unknown, she is lured to the town where Annika Nilsson lived, Uddevalla.

Along with Sofia, Elin’s suspicions unveil a bizarre conspiracy that points to her predecessor’s sudden disappearance. As the election gains momentum and a series of terrorist attacks erupt across the capital, Veritas sets its sights on the climax to its cataclysmic campaign: the bombing of the Stockholm Stock Exchange.

Blue Eyes stars Louise Peterhoff, Sven Nordin, Karin Franz Körlof and Kjell Wilhelmsen.

Here’s your typically uninformative More4 trailer:

Here’s the trailer from when it aired on Sweden’s SVT1 back in 2014. Your Swedish had better be good to cope with it. I tried YouTube’s auto-subtitles for it… which were in French. That was a total mind f*ck, as I doubt the country’s problems with China have anything to do with some woman’s husband. Although you never know.

And here’s the helpfully subtitled trailer put out by the international distributor that’ll leave you a lot saner than the previous one.

News: Keanu Reeves’ Swedish Dicks; Shadowhunters, Outcast renewed; Sharon Horgan’s The Circuit; + more

15 March 2016 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

Internet TV

New UK TV shows

US TV

US TV show casting

New US TV shows

New US TV show casting

What have you been watching? Including Flaked, The Intern, Lucifer and Billions

14 March 2016 Rob Buckley 21 Comments

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*. 

As you might have noticed, things are hotting up in the tele stakes. In the past week, I’ve reviewed the first episodes of:

But that’s by no means all the new shows. In the next few days, I’m hoping to give Underground (US: WGN America) a look over, as well as – assuming it’s not cancelled before then, given its ratings – Of Kings And Prophets (US: ABC), which sees one ‘Ray Winstone’ playing King Saul of Israel, who has to deal with some bloke called ‘David’. Careful – no spoilers, please.

I still haven’t got round to watching Netflix’s Love, but I did manage to watch a couple of episodes of…:

Flaked (Netflix)
Will Arnett is Chip, a furniture store owner in Venice Beach, California, who spends a lot of his time:

  1. Hanging around at AA meetings
  2. Cycling everywhere, because he’s been banned from driving, having killed someone while on drugs
  3. Having sex with/fancying much younger women on popular types of mattresses
  4. Lying about pretty much everything

And that’s about it, really. Just as Master of None didn’t have much plot and was really just a series of character moments, so Flaked is really a character study of a complete tosser who screws over everyone he meets, albeit in very small ways, for his own selfish needs. There also aren’t many jokes, either.

Despite that, it’s actually quite watchable, in part thanks to Arnett, in part because it’s smarter than this otherwise standard ‘edgy’ comedy format would suggest. The Venice Beach location is different from the usual standard settings for sitcoms, too.

There’s also a certain knowingness about the show similar to Arrested Development‘s (perhaps because of exec producer Mitch Hurwitz) that makes it less of a male fantasy: Arnett may be sleeping with hot young women a lot, but his unattractive male friends aren’t, and even Arnett is finding it all a bit empty and pointless, having nothing culturally in common with the woman he professes to love. 

I’ll try to watch the remaining episodes this week – Daredevil season two is on the way, very soon, so I’m going to need to clear the decks – and let you know how the rest of it goes. If you can’t wait, don’t go into it expecting big laughs. Instead, just expect to enjoy a lot of Will Arnett hanging out with a bunch of people and having a little sex.

I haven’t managed to watch any more episodes of Ófærð (Trapped), unfortunately, but after the jump, the regulars, including a couple of season finales and some double-episode rundowns: 11.22.63, American Crime, Billions, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, The Doctor Blake Mysteries, Limitless, Lucifer, The Magicians, Man Seeking Woman, Okkupert (Occupied), Second Chance, Stan Lee’s Lucky Man and Vikings. At least one of the recommended shows is being demoted – can you guess which one?

But first, a movie:

The Intern (2015) (iTunes)
Four things in the credits made me think this was going to be absolute unwatchable: the title, which in combination with Anne Hathaway’s presence, made we think I was going to be getting The Devil Wears Prada 2; writer/director Nancy Meyers, whose It’s Complicated was so unimaginably bad and dull, I nearly fell asleep in the cinema; and Robert De Niro, who has been working purely for the cash for what feels like decades now.

However, I needn’t have been worried, since it seems like everyone involved induced everyone else to raise their games. De Niro looks like he’s actually putting some effort in as the 70-year-old retired widower who takes an internship at an Internet start-up to give himself something to do and ends up becoming friends with CEO Hathaway. Hathaway is likable and believable as the perfectionist workaholic businesswomen, while Meyers (who, in case we forget, also wrote Private Benjamin, Irreconcilable Differences, Jumpin’ Jack Flash, Baby Boom, Father of the Bride and The Holiday) turns in a surprisingly authentic look at both twentysomethings and seventysomethings in modern business.

The first half of the movie is better than the second, with my lovely wife (who set up and runs her own company) finding a lot to identify with, but the second half adds an unnecessary dramatic twist that ruins a lot of the good, frequently (unpreachy) feminist work the first half develops. De Niro’s romance with in-house masseuse Rene Russo doesn’t quite work and a lot of plots are developed but ultimately go nowhere. The firm’s grasp of business isn’t totally top notch either, such as the question of why Hathaway’s firm needs a new CEO, rather than a halfway competent COO for Hathaway to delegate to.

Nevertheless, frequently moving, frequently funny, with a good range of characters and surprisingly smart, The Intern is that rare breed of movie: one aimed at adults that is entertaining, enjoyable but untaxing. I also think it speaks to my age that I identified far more with De Niro than with any of the 20something man-boys he works with.

  • If you’re wondering where all the references to Locate TV have got to this week, turns out they’re shutting down on Wednesday. Can’t say I’m totally surprised, given the effort v reward potential of the idea, but it’s a shame all the same.

Continue reading “What have you been watching? Including Flaked, The Intern, Lucifer and Billions”

A trailer for Denmark’s Bedrag (Follow The Money) on BBC Four

10 March 2016 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

Bedrag (which actually means deception, but is titled Follow the Money here) starts on Saturday 19th March and here’s the synopsis:

Drama series set in the world of economic crime in the banks, on the stock exchanges, and in the board rooms.

When a dead body is found in the sea near a wind farm off the coast of Denmark, Mads, the police detective assigned to the investigation, refuses to believe that it is just an accident. The deeper he digs, the more suspicious he becomes of quickly expanding energy company Energen and is drawn into a morass of financial and legal shady dealings…

It is the story of speculators, swindlers, corporate moguls and the crimes they commit in their hunt for wealth. It is the story of ambition that corrupts, and of the way organized criminals launder their ill-gotten gains. A story of our world the economic crisis almost overturned five years ago, and which is still holding its breath as it waits for the next bubble to burst and for the next economic tsunami to strike. And of course it is the story of us human beings, the rich, the poor, the greedy, the fraudulent, the robbers who’ll go to any lengths to build the lives of our dreams. It is the story of greed: Theirs and ours….

Follow The Money is created by Jeppe Gjervig Gram (co-writer of Borgen) and directed by Per Fly (Monica Z, The Inheritance, The Woman Who Dreamt Of A Man).

The series stars Thomas Bo Larson (Mads), Nikolaj Lie Kaas (Alexander), Natalie Madueño Wolfsberg (Claudia) and Esben Smed (Nicky).

Here’s the BBC Four trailer:

And if your Danish is up to the job, here’s the DR1 trailer – the show began in January in Denmark: