TV reviews

A complete archive of The Medium is Not Enough’s reviews of TV programmes since 2005

The BarrometerA Barrometer rating of 2

Third-episode verdict: Legion (US: FX; UK: Fox UK)

23 February 2017 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

In the US: Wednesdays, 10pm ET/PT, FX
In the UK: Thursdays, 9pm, Fox UK

Legion, FX’s new superhero show based on a Marvel X-Men comic of the same name, has one big problem: it’s a superhero show based on a Marvel X-Men comic of the same name. Were it not for that singular problem, the show would be able to avoid some of the now colossally well worn tropes of that ‘universe’ and be able to plough its own wonderful furrow unfettered. Instead, despite its majestic wildness, psychedelic directorial vision, and focus on the psychological and just plain old insane, and despite also foregoing much of the original source material, Legion still has to have mutants at war with the government, exploring their abilities, feeling oppressed, yadda, yadda, yadda.

Other than that, though, Legion is really a joy to behold, although the degree of joy depends on how much show creator Noah Hawley (Fargo) is involved in it. Episode one, which was both written by and directed by Hawley, is absolutely amazing, a mind-bending, reality warping piece of 70s-style trippiness. Since then, Hawley has been less involved, only writing the second episode and neither writing nor directing the third, all of which has resulting in slightly diminished returns that rely considerably on what Hawley set up in the first episode, but without innovating too much themselves.

Nevertheless, while considerably less visually inventive – although all credit to whomever thought having a little boy with a Frank Sidebottom-style paper head would be scary – and not having as strong a sense of plotting as before, Legion has remained quality viewing, effectively becoming a mystery story of the mind, as we try to work out what’s been going on in Dan Stevens’ head – and everyone hopes that if they do find out, it won’t cause him to accidentally destroy reality in some way with his amazing mental powers. Characterisation for everyone except Stevens is weak, with the show revolving almost exclusively around its titular character and his issues, and the show effectively only has two real locations, in which people mostly sit and chat a lot each week. But somehow it doesn’t really seem to matter, since the show manages to remain almost constantly fascinating, never truly revealing what’s real and what’s imagination or distortion. It’s also frequently quite frightening, as we deal with Stevens’ various internal nightmares.

I do hope that the show manages to avoid the pitfalls being part of the X-Men universe brings. But even with its superheroic problems, it’s still a great piece of weekly viewing.

The BarrometerA Barrometer rating of 2

Third-episode verdict: Imposters (US: Bravo)

22 February 2017 Rob Buckley 9 Comments

In the US: Tuesdays, 10/9c, Bravo

So it turns out that despite being about con artists and their victims, Imposters is quite nice and quite funny. The basic story is that Inbar Levi (The Last Ship) is a conwoman who gets men – and women – to fall in love with them, marries them, steals all their money with the help of her accomplices (Katherine LaNasa, Brian Benben), and then moves on to her next mark. However, over the course of the first three episodes, a group of her jilted exes (Rob Heaps, Parker Young, Marianne Rendón) slowly discover the existence of one another and like a slightly sad and broken, slightly more incompetent, but considerably more likable Magnificent Seven, they head off in pursuit of Levi in the hope of getting their money back – and maybe even Levi herself.

The show oscillates between sadness and hilarity. Episode one, which gives us sensitive Heaps’ sudden descent from bliss to despair, is suicidally miserable; episode two, on the other hand, gives us the knuckle-headed Young and the slow forging of a partnership between Young and Heaps; episode three adds Rendón and veers between melancholy and mischief, as we see how Young might have slightly greater depths and Rendón is a therapy-addicted hipster.

Imposters also has two converging but separate storylines, with Levi trying to trick her current mark, the rich, sweet but dull Aaron Douglas but thinking she might have a real relationship with the handsome Stephen Bishop instead. While Levi is having second thoughts about ‘the life’, Heaps, Young and Rendón are starting to learn the art of the con (some might already know a little about it) in order to boost their penniless existence. Eventually, they might all meet in the middle of a grey morality and be suitable for each other

Where Imposters is most interesting is its commentaries on relationships. Levi makes people fall in love with her, by giving them what they want – her marks all want to believe her. Meanwhile, when Levi genuinely wants to settle down, she can’t because she can’t stop acting and so setting off warning sirens with other people’s intuition.

But the show’s nebulous con organisation is also quite a fun invention, with episode three giving Benben a bit more to do (which is nice – you remember Dream On, don’t you?)…

…as well as introducing Uma Thurman as the organisation’s enforcer, who’ll go full Kill Bill on Levi if she gets out of line.

Imposters is at its best when it’s being slightly silly, but it’s still no shirk when it comes to dealing with the rawer aspects of the emotions. The cast are good, Levi is impressive and while it doesn’t exactly have the hard edge of a Noir, it does have a bit more of a proximity to reality than Leverage did. It’s not really doing anything that new in terms of plotting, but it’s an amusing exploration of ideas, characters and emotions nevertheless.

Shawn Doyle and Anna Paquin in CBC's Bellevue
Canadian TV

Review: Bellevue 1×1 (Canada: CBC)

21 February 2017 Rob Buckley 5 Comments

In Canada: Mondays, 9pm, CBC

They say one of the reasons that Denmark likes its horrific murder-mysteries on TV so much is that it’s one of the nicest places in the world to live. With no emotional darkness in their lives, allegedly, the happy old Hygge-filled Danes have to live vicariously through Nordic Noir.

I’m assuming that’s why lovely, happy Canada appears to be developing its own equivalent. We’ve already seen CTV’s Cardinal firmly embracing the darkness to pioneer ‘Canadian Noir’ and now we have CBC plummeting into similar territory, although putting its own, very CBC spin on it. Here, we have Anna Paquin (The Piano, X-Men, True Blood) playing a cop in the small town of Bellevue, investigating the disappearance of a trans teenage hockey star. Has he been beaten by homophobic fans or is something more sinister afoot?

Suspecting a known paedophile who’s moved into town, she’s surprised when her suspect is expecting her and even more surprised when he hands her a note that appears to be from her father. Or at least whoever it was who pretended to be her father after he died. Because when Paquin was just a kid, a teenage girl was killed and posed as the Virgin Mary in the nativity, outside the local church. Paquin’s cop dad was in charge of finding the killer and when he failed, he committed suicide. Except a few years later, Paquin started receiving riddles addressed to her by her dad…

Bellevue is a bit of a botch job. One moment it’s trying to be The Killing (and failing). The next it’s trying to be The Exorcist III (and failing). The next it’s trying to be Broadchurch (and failing). It’s hard to know what mood the story will be in from moment to moment, and everything joins together as smoothly as if the writer had been given a bucket of fish and a crochet kit and been asked to turn them into a Ford Fiesta.

To its credit, its efforts to show small-town Canadian life make it a little bit different from other shows, but the dialogue is pretty cringe-worthy, especially anything involving new cop in town Sharon Taylor (Stargate Atlantis). It has a fine cast, too, particularly Paquin who’s given a chance to show off her Oscar-winning range, but also Shawn Doyle (Endgame, Frequency, Vegas, This Life) as her boss and substitute father-figure.

However, Bellevue has very little else to go for it, so if you are going to watch some of this new breed of Canadian Noir, Cardinal is a superior choice by far.

The BarrometerA Barrometer rating of 4

Third-episode verdict: APB (US: Fox)

21 February 2017 Rob Buckley 3 Comments

In the US: Mondays, 9/8c, Fox

There was never much chance that APB would ever be much good, but with Matt Nix (Burn Notice, Complications, The Good Guys) taking over as showrunner midway through the pilot, there was at least the possibility it might be. Fox’s attempt to do for policing what Iron Man did for World Peace, it sees Justin Kirk adopt the Robert Downey Jr mantel to become a billionaire playboy philanthropist engineer who discovers crime is bad and decides to bring his private sector technological expertise to bear on a problematic police district in Chicago. Can smartphone apps, drones and GPS information – as well as $120m of investment – bring an end to crime, or will it turn out to be a bit more complicated than that?

The first episode was phenomenally stupid and derivative, but with the occasional bit of fun. Episode two gave us a mix of stupids: on the one hand, we had Kirk once again back at HQ trying to bring to book a road racer who is smart enough to work out that drones can’t fly where there’s no decent signal; on the other, we have cops going dewey eyed over kids who have been mowed down and police dogs who have been blown up (“No!”). But it wasn’t quite as stupid, and there was an element of fun and excitement, with Kirk dicking around with motorbikes for most of an episode to give us his own version of Street Hawk, complete with street chases. We also had The Tall Guy from ER turn up, hugely probably, as a former pro-wrestler with an PhD in electronics, to give Kirk his own Jarvis to talk to when he’s doing some remodelling.

Just for a glimmering moment, it seemed like the show understood how stupid it was and was going to have some fun instead, giving us a piece of programming that teenagers can watch, be excited by and decided to become engineers. Because this is a show trying to make engineers look sexy. Even Justin Kirk.

Sure, there was the daftness of having the vengeful mayor of Chicago putting the husband of Kirk’s right-hand woman in charge of the anti-Kirk task squad, but soapiness we can ignore. However, episode three was simply moronic and soporific. While the first episode had Kirk giving us his solutions to existing problems and the show demonstrating how they’d work in practice, both episodes two and three flipped that formula: new problem turns up, Kirk devises a solution to it. And episode three’s problem was the age-old issue of interrogation – how to get a criminal to tell you the truth? Now here, people have already seen the problem and come up with a technical solution: the lie detector. And we know its limitations, as well as the civil liberty implications. We know reality and its nuances.

But since the format demands that Kirk be a brilliant inventor, he has to come up with a costly technical solution, too. Here, he gives us… the lie detector chair! You sit in the chair and people know your vital signs and therefore whether you’re lying! You don’t even have to touch any electrodes or anything! Just as long as you’re sitting in that chair, everything will be fine. It’s nonsense, of course, and probably illegal nonsense, too. It’s also a nonsense that any sane grown-up can watch, compare with reality and see it’s nonsense.

Coupled with that, we had a really bad attempt to give all of Kirk’s helper monkeys some characters and some background, with dialogue and plot devices that would curdle milk. And for a show supposed to be about the virtues of bringing private sector mentality to the public sector, Kirk’s employees have an interesting approach to time-keeping, the rule of law, chains of command and even not provoking people to commit crimes. 

Three episodes in, with Kirk wasting millions on gadgets, discovering policing is more about people than technology and generally coming up with things that just don’t work in practice unless a billionaire CEO gives us running his rocket-making company indefinitely so he can sit and fiddle with a joystick all day, I’m starting to think APB is really just a paean to the public sector. We’re supposed to watch and enjoy seeing Kirk play with his gadgets, but ultimately discover that the police do things the way they do things for a reason and that they’re a lot more dedicated than someone just in it for the big pay cheque. So off he goes with his tail between his leg.

But I’m not sticking around for that, because I can’t bear any more of it.

Imposters
US TV

Review: Imposters 1×1-1×2 (US: Bravo)

17 February 2017 Rob Buckley 10 Comments


In the US: Tuesdays, 10/9c, Bravo

Con artists aren’t very nice people. They lie, cheat and steal from people to benefit themselves, those people typically being old, trusting and/or not very rich, and who therefore typically end up penniless, destitute, futureless and/or suicidal.

What. A. Downer. Huh?

It’s no surprise, therefore, that shows that have focused on ‘flim flam’ men and women, such as Leverage or Perfect Scoundrels, have usually taken no time at all to give their anti-heroes epiphanies in which they realise that their ways are indeed wicked. Before the end of the first episode even, they’re off fleecing the deserving – aka people who are both rich and dicks.

Shows that don’t? Downers.

That’s certainly how you think Imposters is going to be during its first episode. It sees Rob Heaps playing a sensitive young Jewish man who works for his family-owned firm. He sacrificed everything for his family, including his dreams of seeing Paris, and ends up thinking his life will never amount to anything. Then along comes Belgian breath of fresh air Inbar Levi, the two fall madly in love, and before you know it, they’re married and Heaps dares to dream once more.

But before you know it (again), she’s emptied their bank account, maxed out the credit cards, taken out a second mortgage on their home and stolen cash from the firm, leaving a parting video explaining that a folder of incriminating evidence will be used to destroy his parents’ marriage if he comes looking for her.

All looks bleak and Heaps even tries to commit suicide. Then comes a knock at the door… and the show changes.

Had I not fallen a little behind with my viewing schedule, I might not have bothered watching episode two of Imposters, that first ep is so fundamentally miserable. But since I hadn’t watched episode one by the time episode two aired, I ended up watching both en masse. Surprisingly, this is actually probably the best thing you can do, since episode one is less the foundation to the show than its prologue; it’s only in episode two that you find out what it’s really doing.

It would have helped if the show had stuck to its original title of My So-Called Wife, because oddly enough, Imposters is a buddy-buddy comedy. At Heaps’ door is another of Levi’s victims – Parker Young (Suburgatory, Enlisted), a knuckle-headed former quaterback and alpha male car salesman. Together, he and the equally penniless and heart-broken Heaps are going to go on a road trip together to find Levi and get their money back. Along the way, they’re going to learn the ways of the con artist, be spectacularly bad at them, develop their own code of honour, help each other to get over their former wife, and get on each other’s nerves. A lot.

Meanwhile, Levi has moved onto the next job allocated by mysterious boss ‘the Doctor’ to her and the rest of her team, who include Katherine LaNasa (Deception, Satisfaction) and Brian Benben (Dream On). With their help, she has to woo a seemingly dickish, cuckolded darts-playing bank CEO (Battlestar Galactica‘s Aaron Douglas. Yes, it’s filmed in Canada – how did you know?), who turns out to be surprisingly sweet. But she’s distracted by the possibility of true love with coffee-shop chance encounter Stephen Bishop (Being Mary Jane). Is it time to get out of ‘the life’ or will the Doctor punish her and Bishop if she tries?

All this is good frothy fun that manages to find both a little depth and a lot more jokes amidst everyone’s misery. Levi, who did little as a button-downed Israeli commando on The Last Ship, here demonstrates a really surprising range and is hugely appealing, even when she tricks and misleads everyone she meets. Young and Heaps’ routine is both funny and suitably dorky, and their slow crossing over to the dark side is entertaining to watch as they foul up time and again but slowly get better. Their ‘code’ also shows how morality can blur when you need it to, as they initially write off children and old people as potential marks, settle on ‘assholes’ as their preferred targets, then decide that ‘asshole>old people’ in their moral hierarchy when spying a particularly dickish senior with an attractively bulging wallet.

Later episodes are set to add Uma Thurman to the mix, as well as another former spouse of Levi’s – a wife this time (Marianne Rendón) – which is bound to change the dynamic of the show once again. Despite its subject matter, while black, Imposters is certainly still a comedy and well worth a try. But you’ll need to commit.