TV reviews

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

Streaming TV

What have you been watching? Including The Magnificent Seven, Shooter, Lucifer and The Man in the High Castle

23 January 2017 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

It’s “What have you been watching?”, my chance to tell you what movies and TV I’ve been watching recently and your chance to recommend anything you’ve been watching. 

I know there are a lot of new show coming soon. They really are. They’re just not here yet.

That means that in the past week, I’ve only reviewed Six (US: History) and passed a third-episode verdict on Emerald City (US: NBC; UK: 5*). I’ll be deluged again soon and complaining about it, I know….

Anyway, a few oldies are back in the schedules again, which means that as well as The Great Indoors, Lethal Weapon, Man Seeking Woman and Son of Zorn, I’ll be covering Lucifer and Timeless and the season finale of Shooter. I also managed to squeeze in a few episodes of The Man in the High Castle. And I watched a movie.

The Magnificent Seven (2016)
Antoine Fuqua’s insipid remake of the classic 1960 Western, in which black-clad gunslinger Denzel Washington puts together a group of similarly iconic gunslingers to help protect Haley Bennett’s village from powerful rich guy Peter Sarsgaard.

The film goes through most of the same motions as the original, from the introduction and recruitment of each of the remaining seven (Chris Pratt, Ethan Hawke, Lee Byung-hun, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Vincent D’Onofrio and Martin Sensmeier) through the training of the villagers to the eventual battle with the baddies, but without ever really making you care about any of them, beyond the fact they’re Lee Byung-hun, Chris Pratt and Vincent D’Onofrio. Indeed, unlike both the original and the film’s ultimate antecedent, Shichinin no Samurai (The Seven Samurai), the film only really comes alive when it’s an action scene, the characters proving otherwise unendearing or even interesting.

A few lines from the original (“If God had not wanted them shawn, he would not have made them sheep”) manage to sneak in, but they only sure up the rest of the script’s ultimate emptiness, and the frequent clichéd homages to Westerns in general only serve to make the movie look hackneyed.

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US TV

Review: Six 1×1 (US: History)

20 January 2017 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

In the US: Wednesdays, 10/9c, History
In the UK: Not yet acquired

Why is it that dramas about Special Forces aren’t that special? On the face of it, making an exciting show about the Special Forces shouldn’t be that difficult. As A Bit of Fry and Laurie once pointed out, the SAS (and presumably other Special Forces) exist purely to be masturbatory fantasies for backbench MPs, so putting together a TV show involving Special Forces should inevitably result in something very exciting and, erm, climactic.

Yet, whether it’s Ultimate Force, The Unit, Strike Back or now Six, somehow the resulting shows never quite hit the spot – they’re close, but they’re never really as satisfying as you think they’ll be.

Six is interesting in this regard. Ten years ago, if you’d made a show called Six, the most anyone would guess you were doing was remaking The Prisoner. But thanks to their sterling work in dealing with Osama Bin Laden, the US Navy’s SEAL Team 6 is the latest pin-up of the Special Forces world. That means you can call a TV show Six and it’ll induce as much Pavlovian tumescence as if you’d called it Scarlett.

Trouble is, despite this launchpad, Six is all tease, no pay-off. The first episode follows a SEAL Team 6 team to a mission in Afghanistan where there’s plenty of shooting and leader Walton Goggins (Justified, Vice Principals, The Hateful Eight) starts to blur a few boundaries by shooting prisoners. Two years later, Goggins is out of the SEALs and in Africa, working for a private contractor, while the rest of the team are thinking about doing something similar and/or having problems with their wives and/or the bottle and/or money.

Then Boko Haram come along and kidnap a group of school girls, as well as Goggins, and the team are pulling themselves back together to rescue him.

Six takes all the worst bits of The Unit and few of the best bits. It tries to mix up the personal and the military, but without having any idea how to create distinguishable characters, particularly not women, who are a never-ending parade of “why aren’t you here for me and your children?”

Which might almost be excusable if it could do action, except it can’t. Shoot-outs and action scenes are surprisingly few and far between, and when they turn up, they’re nothing special. Name an action TV show, any action TV show – you’ll have seen better and something probably more realistic.

But even little details let the show down. Maybe it’s me, but giving your SEAL team the radio sign of “Delta 1” is only going to lead to confusion in the audience. And sure, kudos for managing to go with Boko Haram as your main bad guys, rather than ISIS (although a reveal at the end of the first episode shows Six is trying to have its cake and eat it), but having to have an officer explain to one of the world’s premier anti-terrorist units who Boko Haram are is not a way to create verisimilitude.

More importantly, Goggins is just wrong as the leader of the team. Not for a second can you picture him as either a morally ambivalent hero or a SEAL. Now to a certain extent, that’s not his fault – he was brought in not merely at the last moment but two episodes of filming after the last moment, which is when Joe Manganiello walked off the show with health problems. You can imagine Manganiello as “Rip Taggart”:

Goggins?

Walton Goggins

Not so much.

It’s like casting Vinny Jones as a wedding cake designer – it’s simply not believable. So even though the rest of the cast of SEALs are (indistinguishable) butch manly types who look the part, little seems plausible as a result of Goggins’ presence.

If you have to watch a Special Forces show, there were at least a few good episodes of The Unit (Dark of the Moon is excellent) and Strike Back, so stick with them rather than Six, since Six won’t have yours. Six that is.

The BarrometerA Barrometer rating of 3

Third-episode verdict: Emerald City 1×1-1×2 (US: NBC; UK: 5*)

19 January 2017 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

In the US: Fridays, 9/8c, NBC
In the UK: Acquired by 5*. Will air early 2017

Grimdark is one of those words that can stop you taking an entire genre seriously. In this case, it’s a mocking moniker for the prevalent idea that by making something dark and humourless, it’s not only more adult, it’s also better. 

That’s certainly been the approach of the producers of Emerald City, a beautifully directed but ultimately empty grimdark reimagining of The Wizard of Oz. It sees Dorothy a modern day Kansas nurse who gets whisked off by a tornado to the land of Oz, where she meets grimdark versions of familiar characters, ranging from the Munchkins (Icelandic speaking barbarians who paint themselves like they’re in Braveheart) through the Scarecrow (murderous former soldier who’s had his memories removed) to the Wizard of Oz (prostitute-visiting genocidal bully). The witches are there in varying degrees of drug-using, murderous, torturing depravity, too.

Oh so serious and important.

But grimdark. Tee hee. 

Tell you what grimdark never manages to do: it never makes you care about a character, just their situation. And that’s been consistent across all three episodes so far, with all manner of bad things happening, yet nothing ever making you care about the victims, beyond the fact they’ve been pushed to their doom by their gender-swapping childhood best friend or whatever miserable incident they’ve had to endure.

Other than the semi-decent cast assembled for the piece, what elevates the show from simple disgruntled teen’s fan fiction to the point where it’s almost watchable is the direction by Tarsem Singh, who makes the whole show genuinely beautiful to watch, something he’s helped in considerably by the Spanish location shooting. Even while someone’s emoting about some ancient prophecy concerning The Beast Beyond or dancing a ritual for dead witches, the viewer can simply drink in the mise-en-scène, admire a beautiful piece of Islamic architecture or Antoni Gaudí’s Park Güell, and ignore the tedious dialogue.

Emerald City is imaginative and good to look at, but despite its best efforts, unlike The Wizard of Oz, it fails to make you care about the protagonists, antagonists or anyone else.

Barrometer rating: 3
TMINE’s prediction: One season and one season only

What have you been watching? Including Workin’ Moms, Sherlock and The Great Indoors

16 January 2017 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

It’s “What have you been watching?”, my chance to tell you what movies and TV I’ve been watching recently and your chance to recommend anything you’ve been watching. 

Although Amazon’s finally got round to releasing the first season of Sneaky Pete, there’s not been a whole lot that’s new new in the past week, which means I’ve only had Pure (Canada: CBC) and Emerald City (US: NBC; UK: 5*) to review since the last WHYBW. Sorry about that. I’ll try to watch some boxsets when I have the chance.

All the same, for sures, later this week, I’ll be passing a third-episode verdict on Emerald City, which means that after the jump, I’ll be looking at Lethal Weapon, Man Seeking Woman, Sherlock and Shooter, as well as the return of The Great Indoors. 

But there has been one another new show that I watched this week:

Workin’ Moms (Canada: CBC)
Three Canadian mums who have just had babies are ready to start working again. And that’s about it really for plot, although given one’s a high-flying career woman and first-time mother (the show’s creator, writer and director Catherine “daughter of Ivan” Reitman), one’s a no-nonsense psychiatrist mother-of-two (Dani Kind), and the third is a slightly unstable lesbian realtor who carried her partner’s child (Juno Rinaldi)*, you can see there’s a certain variety of experiences being catered for the show. 

And indeed that’s really what the show is: a comedy-drama very specifically about the experience of returning to work after having had babies. And when you think about it, while there are shows that have had single mums as heroines and there have been shows that have had mums as characters in the backgrounds, they’ve mostly either got families already or it’s all about the babies and what it’s like to have a baby. It’s almost never been focused on what work is like once you have a baby.

And to be honest, it’s that interestingly specific viewpoint that’s the show’s main and in fact only selling point. The show thinks it’s quite exciting and innovative, such as when it has topless, normal-looking older women in the first five minutes of the episode, which is punningly titled Bare (which works on lots of levels – eg there’s a bear later, there’s a grizzly mum and, of course, they’re laid bare by the experience of being a mum). But it’s not quite the treasure trove of anecdotes and insight that it thinks it is, and frequently it just bubbles along, not doing much. All the same, it was insightful and offered some nuggets that I’d not seen elsewhere on TV. The characters were well drawn and avoided stereotyping, even the men. Plus it had a bear.

Not bad. Not great. Not to be confused with CBC’s Newborn Moms, either. 

* There’s a fourth mum (Jessalyn Wanlim) but she wasn’t in the first episode, as far as I noticed.

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Pure (CBC)
Canadian TV

Review: Pure 1×1 (Canada: CBC)

12 January 2017 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

In Canada: Mondays, 9pm, CBC

Everyone knows about the Amish, right? They’re the German-speaking, pacifist Christian fundamentalists who shun all things modern in an effort to be as godly as possible. You may remember them from a little known 80s film called Witness.

Less well known unless you watch a lot of reality TV are their neighbours, the Mennonites, an equally German-speaking, God-fearing group although they aren’t quite as strict as the Amish – they can own cars, go to High School on the school bus and mix with the Ausländer and everything.

But even less well known than them are the Canadian Mennonites, a bunch who fled to Ontario from the US when the War of Independence broke out. And oddly enough, they’re the stars of CBC’s new drama – a sort of Breaking Bad for Mennonites. It stars the ubiquitous Ryan Robbins (Continuum, Arrow) as the delightfully named Noah Funk, the newly appointed pastor of the (fictitious) Mennonite town of Antioch who has to work out how to deal in a Christian manner with what seems extremely unlikely to the casual viewer but turns out to be based on a true story – the Mennonite mob, a group of dangerous drug runners ferrying cocaine from Mexico to Canada and the US.

The mob have killed one family escaping from a Mexican Mennonite ‘colony’ and when Funk takes in the surviving young son, he ends up having to deal with both the mob and slobby cop AJ Buckley (CSI: New York), who’s after this previously unsuspected snake in the community. Also involved is Texan DEA Agent Rosie Perez (Do The Right Thing, White Men Can’t Jump), who’s well aware of what’s going on with the Mennonites, both in El Paso and on the other side of the border.

Watching Pure, it’s hard to know exactly how realistic the Mennonite side of things is. Show creator Michael Amo is the grandson of a Mennonite, for sure, but every bad accent and poor piece of German sets off warning klaxons, and the whole idea boggles the mind to begin with, let alone when the Mennonite kids are wandering around school, working out the intricacies of ‘Auslander’ (non-Mennonite) life and whether it’s okay to say ‘My God’ as an expletive.

The criminal side of things is a bit pedestrian, too. Buckley’s cop, intent on recruiting Funk to help him penetrate the close-knit mob, lacks any of the skills to do it yet still manages to accomplish it somehow. Surprisingly, for a godly man, Funk sure finds lying easy. And in general dramatic terms there are problem, too, with pretty much every Mennonite indistinguishable and undifferentiated from all the others, bar the nicely-hatted mob boss Peter Outerbridge (the original Murdoch in The Murdoch Mysteries, Blood and Water), who forces Funk to work for him to save his family.

But all those issues to one side, as with Blood and Water and Shoot The Messenger, Canada is at least showing that it can offer crime shows that aren’t just the same old formula and that involve different communities from those we’re used to. I probably won’t stick with it, but it’s nice to know that the show’s out there.