TV reviews

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

What have you been watching? Including The Grand Tour, Hypernormalisation, Doctor Doctor and Hyde & Seek

21 November 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. There’s also the Reviews A-Z, for when you want to check more or less anything I’ve reviewed ever. 

Ironically, just as I’ve started catching up with everything again, we’re about to enter the lull in US TV marked by Thanksgiving December. That means that this week will probably be marked by ventures into Internet TV again, including, I hope, a return to Le bureau des légendes (The Bureau). But always expect the unexpected, since there’ll be a few new shows popping up, I’m sure. Hell, Australian Community TV just debuted the six-part ghostly Sonnigsburg, so I’m sure there’ll be something coming along I wasn’t expecting.

Elsewhere this week, I reviewed Good Behavior (US: TNT) and Shooter (US: USA; UK: Netflix). We’ve still not got round to watching any more of The Crown, Westworld or Humans, and I’ve not yet made a start on Y Gwyll, so that means that after the jump, we’ll be looking at the latest episodes of Ash vs Evil Dead, Chance, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, Designated Survivor, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, Falling Water, Frequency, Good Behavior, The Great Indoors, Lethal Weapon, Lucifer, People of Earth, Supergirl, Timeless and Travelers, as well as the season finales of Doctor Doctor and Hyde and Seek. One show’s getting promoted, at leat one show’s getting dropped – can you guess which?

But first, as well as a film review, a slight diversion from TMINE’s normal remit…

The Grand Tour (Amazon)
TMINE’s dedication to scripted shows wasn’t always so pure, back in the day. That meant I used to cover shows that included Top Gear. That stopped a while ago, in part because of the shift in focus caused by there not being enough time in the world to watch unscripted as well as scripted TV, but also in part because I stopped watching Top Gear – it had simply stopped doing anything new, and I was bored.

Following Jeremy Clarkson’s leaving the BBC, James May and Richard Hammond in his wake, the Top Gear trio signed up with Amazon to do a new show. What manner of show it would be we didn’t know, because Clarkson allegedly had a non-compete clause prohibiting him from doing another car show. Given the name, The Grand Tour, maybe it was just going to be a bunch of the old Top Gear travel documentaries.

Anyway, for old time’s sake, I decided to ‘tune in’ today to see what The Grand Tour was like.

Guess what. It’s… a car show. More so, it’s Top Gear again, just a bit swearier and a bit glossier. More or less every feature of Top Gear has, in fact, moved over to The Grand Tour (note the reversed initials in the title), with just a few changes.

For starters, in its first episode at least, it simply relocates its studio setting from an old hangar in SW London to a tent in the Mojave desert, with each subsequent episode relocating the show to another part of the world (Johannesburg and Barbados have been promised).

From inside the tent, surrounded by a native audience, the trio then do the same bickering routine as always, with plenty of races with supercars to break that up. However, everything is done on an Amazon budget, with computer graphics, travel to Portugal for races, et al. And where an element might have got copyright-infringingly close to Top Gear, the show makes changes to the format. Gone is the Stig, replaced by… The American, a tame Nascar driver, for example, and since they can’t use the Top Gear track to test cars any more, they’ve had to use a different one.

As I said, the reason I gave up on Top Gear was that it stopped innovating. Unsurprisingly perhaps, it’s all the changes, rather than the keepers from the Top Gear format, that are the best bits of The Grand Tour and remind you how good the former was before it started coasting. The celebrity guest spot was great; the new parts of the track are great; the more scripted aspects of the audience interactions are great; the celebrity guests spot was great.

Where it was at its most dull was when it was Jeremy Clarkson just driving around in a supercar to amuse himself. Nearly nodded off at that point I did.

As a show, Top Gear was at its best when it was all three of the hosts together in an engine-driven bickerfest travelogue in the style of Three Men In A Boat. The fewer of the hosts together and the more it was about cars, the less interesting it became. If the producers of The Grand Tour remember this and remember not to rest on their laurels, The Grand Tour could become what Top Gear once was – a weekly fixture in our house.

Hypernormalisation (iPlayer)
I’d already given you the bingo card, but I’ve now had a chance to watch this latest Adam Curtis documentary about why the world is the way it is. Impeccably timed to arrive in a post-Brexit, post-Trump world, it shows how attempts to create stability without politics has given us an era in which everything seems real, nothing seems true and no one wants to do anything about it through politics for fear that the boat will be rocked in ways no one can predict.

Clocking in at just under three hours, Hypernormalisation gives us all manner of brilliant and astonishing documentary footage, but is still the least persuasive of Curtis’ oeuvre so far. Ironically, given that Curtis critiques our need for simplistic answers to complex problems, his argument is probably too simplistic to be true. But it still takes us to exciting thoughts and considerations about the world that are probably close to the truth but which nevertheless are just hints at the real truth – if such a thing now exists.

All the same, simply through reminding us of all manner of things that have long since been forgotten about, as well as of the fact that what’s normal now wasn’t always, it’s well worth a watch.

Continue reading “What have you been watching? Including The Grand Tour, Hypernormalisation, Doctor Doctor and Hyde & Seek”

US TV

Review: Shooter 1×1 (US: USA; UK: Netflix)

16 November 2016 Rob Buckley 13 Comments


In the US: Tuesdays, 10/9c, USA
In the UK: Wednesdays, Netflix

I think it’s fair to say that America loves guns. Or at least has a lot of them: 300 million at last count, on a population of 325 million. And if you have a lot of guns, they tend to get used, sometimes with tragic consequences.

Which has caused all kinds of problems for USA’s Shooter, a show that loves guns rather a lot. Originally scheduled to air mid-July, it was postponed at first by a week following the shooting in Dallas. However, following the shooting in Baton Rouge, USA decided to move Shooter from its summer schedule to November. 

Shooter sees Ryan Phillipe (Secrets and Lies, Cruel Intentions) once again take on a role to which he’s slightly ill suited – a former marine sniper. Wounded in action by the Chechnyan sniper who killed his best friend, he’s perfectly happy with his wife and daughter, until his former CO turned secret service agent Omar Epps (House, Resurrection) approaches him for help. Said Chechnyan sniper has threatened to kill the President and Phillipe is one of the few people in the world with the skills to work out how he could do it and so prevent it. Except things are not quite as they seem…

Based on the 2007 movie of the same name, which in turn was based on Stephen Hunter’s book Point of Impact, this pilot episode follows the film and to a lesser extent the book pretty faithfully, meaning that if you’ve seen the movie, there’ll be almost no surprises as to what happens at the end of the episode.

That said, there have been a few tweaks. Epps’s characters might not be the obvious double-crosser that Danny Glover was, while Cynthia Addai-Robinson (Arrow, Spartacus)’s disgraced FBI agent and potential ally to Phillipe is a moderately interesting gender-change to the Michael Peña character, even if she’s not quite as interesting as he was. The fact Phillipe now has a family, rather than a Kate Mara to hook up with, also changes the dynamics of the story a little.

As I mentioned when I reviewed Graves, shows with conservative politics are relatively rare and Shooter is clearly aimed at viewers of that disposition, right down to our hero’s family saying grace before meals. Its dedication to honourable men and women, doing honourable things in service, is a refreshing change, too, even if we know a great big conspiracy is potentially looming round the corner. Its big, big, big love of guns (aka “defenders of freedom”), which it inherited from its source material, is also a little different, even if does come across like a product review page in Guns & Ammo at times.

But dramatically, it’s not really innovating much and the opening scene in which Phillipe starts shooting orthodentists because they’ve used the wrong kind of gun and rounds to hunt a wolf is astonishingly clumsy. Characterisation is weak, largely fitting people into particular plot functions rather than making them fully fleshed out human beings. Dialogue is often dreadful, particularly anything between Phillipe and his wife, who judging from her lines must have been a sniper herself. And the constant use of low-budget CGI “bullet time” shots for, erm, bullet shots makes the show look cheap and a bit silly. 

As a piece of action-thriller TV, Shooter‘s pretty good, though. Clearly, that’s mainly down to the source material but sometimes it transcendents that material to avoid some of its sillier ideas. Whether subsequent episodes, which will have far less to work with, will be as good or whether Phillipe will be shooting more dentists remains to be seen.

Good Behavior
US TV

Preview: Good Behavior 1×1 (US: TNT)

15 November 2016 Rob Buckley 2 Comments

In the US: Tuesdays, 9/8c, TNT. Starts tonight

Sometimes, I’m surprised there’s any scripted British TV at all. Who’s starring in it, given that virtually every actor in the UK seems to have nipped off to the US to try their chances at having a well-paid career for a change. Hell, even Jeff from Coupling gets to be a an ex-Russian special forces soldier over there; here, he’d be some doctor in a low-key BBC Two drama or something.

So widespread is this problem that even the cast of Downton Abbey are heading stateside. Dan Stevens has been paving the way for the others for some time but now Michelle Dockery’s there.

What’s stranger than their managing to get jobs is the kind of jobs they’re getting. Stevens has already been voicing a supercomputer in The Tomorrow People but now he’s going to be a TV X-Man in FX’s Legion. Meanwhile, Dockery is in a new TNT show starting tonight that she has no right to be the lead in whatsoever, you’d have thought.

Based on Blake Crouch (Wayward Pines)’s Letty Dobesh Chronicles, Good Behavior sees Dockery unexpectedly playing the books’ titular former con and conwoman, a drug addict who’s just been let out of jail and working in a dead-end job in roadside café. When she gets fired, she returns to her life of burglary and confidence tricks, but when she overhears two men planning a hit against a woman, she decides to do something nice and save her. 

No good deed goes unpunished, of course, and just as she’s about to end the pain with a bucketload of drugs, sexy Juan Diego Botto turns up with an offer she can’t refuse.

Read that description of the plot and tell me your first thought is “Hmm, maybe that Lady Mary from Downton Abbey would be good for the job?” Ridiculous, isn’t it?

Yet, surprisingly, Dockery ain’t half bad. True, she spends a lot of her time in her undies or implausible wigs, which might distract the viewer from her performance a tad. But she does well with what she’s got and is persuasive, as is Botto.

The problem isn’t with them, though – it’s with the source material. While it’s not stupid, it’s very much a piece of male gaze. Dockery’s character is a typical male fantasy – a bad girl with a heart of gold, who naturally does everything for the love of her daughter and her mother, rather than because she’s properly trailer trash, properly criminal or every bit the sneaky equal of Botto. Dockery’s also expected to be both put-upon victim and top con artiste, but trying to be plausibly crushed underfoot by life yet strong willed is a squaring of the circle that would be hard for anyone to attempt even unbewigged.

So little does any of this hold together that I honestly thought I’d missed bits. Wait… she was a waitress cleaning the toilets a minute ago. How is she now burgling top end hotels with her phone buddy? Was it something to do with that wallet she stole? But he can’t have had any money, surely. What did I miss?

Rewind.

Nope. Didn’t miss anything.

If anything, Good Behavior shows that if you get a good cast together and shoot something in a noirish way, it’s almost enough to fool the viewer into thinking a quality piece of work is being produced. But like sister show Animal Kingdom, Good Behavior also demonstrates the vital importance of something actually making sense, if it’s going to aspire to darkness-tinged mimesis. 

What have you been watching? Including Frontier, People of Earth, Stan Against Evil and Ghostbusters

14 November 2016 Rob Buckley 20 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. There’s also the Reviews A-Z, for when you want to check more or less anything I’ve reviewed ever. 

Made it. Backlog – cleared. TV – watched.

Okay, not quite. I skipped Dark Water because that’s now on BBC Four, so there’s not much point my previewing it now. Oops. Still, it was only a mini-series.

Also, all the new Internet shows I keep listing are going to take a little longer, as are the shows I’m currently watching with lovely wife (Westworld, Humans, The Crown). But everything else is now up-to-date. Well done me.

Given I’ve already passed third episode verdicts this week on The Great Indoors (US: CBS; UK: ITV2) and Eyewitness (US: USA), that means that after the jump, I’ll be looking at the latest episodes of Ash vs Evil Dead, Chance, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, Designated Survivor, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, Doctor Doctor, Falling Water, Frequency, Hyde and Seek, Lethal Weapon, Lucifer, Son of Zorn, Supergirl and Travelers.

In terms of new shows, elsewhere, I’ve reviewed Second Jen (Canada: City), but I have tried a few others, you’ll be happy to hear.

Frontier (Canada: Discovery; UK: Netflix)
Set in the disputed Hudson Bay territory of Canada at the turn of the 18th century, Discovery’s first scripted show Frontier sees Jason Momoa as a tomahawk-wielding go-between for all the competing interests that want to kill animals for their fur, including the English, Scottish, Americans and Canadians (who are all either English or French at this point, of course). With its terrible dialogue, motley medley of actors all sporting bad accents no matter their origin, and middling production values, Frontier is unfortunately little more than The Patriot meets Last of the Mohicans, with Momoa clearly thinking he’s in a different show from the rest of the anaemic cast. Practically unwatchable, it’s still not quite as bad as The Bastard Executioner.

People of Earth (US: TBS)
TBS apparently being where Daily Show correspondents now go to die, People of Earth gives us Wyatt Cenac as a cynical magazine journalist sent to cover an “alien abductees survivors group” – although they prefer ‘experiencers’ – where he soon begins to realise that those vivids hallucinations of talking deer might be a sign that he, too, has been abducted. So he decides to stay in town and see if he can work out what’s really happening and whether an alien invasion is really underway. 

The show is a 50/50 split between two strands. The first strand is the desperately unfunny goings on at the support group, which reminds you of Go On but with Cenac’s deadpan instead of the jokes and Matthew Perry’s sardonic quips.

The second is with the aliens themselves – for they are real – where the show is actually a properly funny workplace comedy. Yes, that’s right – a workplace comedy. I mean have you ever considered how much effort goes into faking those cover-ups?

I watched the first episodes, I might keep watching for the aliens. But I might not. 

Stan Against Evil (US: IFC)
John C McGinley reprises his Scrubs Doctor Cox role here to play a sheriff of a small town near Salem that was once the host to even more witch burnings. However, these were all real witches and demons, who vowed to kill every sheriff the town would ever have. Fortunately for Cox, his learned wife managed to use all manner of magic to protect him, making him the only sheriff to survive the job in the town’s entire history. But Cox is fired, just after his wife’s funeral, so soon a replacement (You’re The Worst‘s Janet Varney) is in town and together, they have to fight all manner of horrors together, since the demons want them both dead.

Coming on the heels of Ash Vs Evil Dead, this is a somewhat poorly timed piece of comedy horror, in which the clueless, frequently misogynistic, outspoken McGinley (“I want you to admit Starsky was gay. He wore a sweater with a belt. Come on, you’re a cop. Follow the evidence!”) has to deal with demons, women and modern society’s general pansiness, with only a suspiciously familiar book of magic to help him. Varney does offer a reasonable counterpoise to him and the plots involve her as much as him, but ultimately this is McGinley’s show and he’s naturally very good.

Unfortunately, the plots themselves are neither as funny nor as gory as Ash vs Evil Dead‘s. I watched the first four episodes of this, and while each offers maybe a couple of laughs, is a little smarter than than Bruce Campbell’s show and the demons (eg goat demons, a succubus) have a bit more variety and a bit more of a scare than the ‘deadites’, it still felt like a bit an effort to get through for some slightly pointless, slightly derivative pieces of work.

I also watched a movie!

Ghostbusters (2016)
An all-woman line-up of ghost exterminators (Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon, Leslie Hope) go into business for themselves in New York and have to deal with a bunch of spooks emerging from the afterlife who could threaten life as we know it.

Featuring cameos from all the surviving cast of the classic 80s movie, this 2016 version homages most of the first movie’s iconic moments and props, while simultaneously avoiding being a retread and finding its own sources of humour. McKinnon – best known as Saturday Night Live‘s Hillary Clinton – in particular breaks from the confines of the plot to be something a lot odder and more interesting than you’d expect.

However, the movie plays a lot younger than the original, losing the 80s version’s slightly edgier and stranger qualities, and its denoument goes on for far too long. On the plus side, though, Chris Hemsworth is very funny as the Ghostbusters’ eyecandy receptionist.

Continue reading “What have you been watching? Including Frontier, People of Earth, Stan Against Evil and Ghostbusters”

The BarrometerA Barrometer rating of 3

Third-episode verdict: The Great Indoors (US: CBS; UK: ITV2)

14 November 2016 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

In the US: Thursdays, 8.30/7.30c, CBS
In the UK: Acquired by ITV2

The worst that can truly be said about The Great Indoors – in which rugged manly outdoor activities journalist Joel McHale (Community) is summoned back to an office job by boss Stephen Fry when his magazine goes online-only, forcing him to have to work with a bunch of digital-literate millennials – is that it’s a CBS multi-camera sitcom. And not in a bad way.

When I saw the trailer and before I watched the first episode, I assumed I was going to have to condemn the show in the strongest possible terms for all the usual reasons reserved for CBS multi-camera sitcoms.

But, actually, it’s all right. Not totally hysterical, not having the cutting edge insight into its subject matter of Veep, not possessed of well drawn out characters, for sure. But it’s still more like a lighter, nicer version of The Big Bang Theory than a nastier, more predictable version of Mike and Molly. It’s a studio comedy with an audience that’s designed to make you laugh.

Three episodes into the show and although it’s clear that its heart is really with McHale and his desperate attempt to de-nerd an entire generation, it’s also clear that times have changed and there ain’t no going back – McHale has to learn from his juniors, too.

Episode two focused on the Brave New World of dating apps, and while McHale’s ability to randomly speak with strangers in real-life is something of an asset that he can teach the youngsters, it’s also clear it’s now perceived as also a bit creepy. Most of the episode therefore dedicated to teaching him how to navigate this new, more formal aspect of dating life. 

Meanwhile, episode three is a lecture in urban apartment-hunting, with McHale discovering that for millennials, there’s a clear choice between having money to live off and having a decent place to live in – you can’t have both.

The show also manages to avoid turning everyone’s favourite uncle, Stephen Fry, into yet another quaint Englishman. Here, he’s erudite, funny, travelled and a man’s man, happier drinking whisky with McHale and trading war stories, than bedding down with the millennials in their indoor tents. 

Where the show doesn’t quite gel – at least, not yet – is Susannah Fielding, who plays Fry’s daughter/McHale’s one-time girlfriend. While she’s clearly supposed to be something of a translator, able to speak both millennial and middle-aged, she’s not well served by the scripts and her delivery is reminiscent of ‘Pantomime Dame 3’ from last year’s Jack and the Beanstalk. 

Similarly, the millennials themselves are more ideas of millennials than developed characters in their own rights – this one’s sexually fluid, this one’s deadpan and inexpressive, this one’s computer-literate and so on. While each of those traits is more nuanced than you’d expect, there’s still no real background for any of them, no stories that are really about them rather than McHale.

But we’re at episode three of a multi-camera sitcom that could be on for the next decade, given it’s CBS. There will be time for The Great Indoors. Thankfully, it does at least have a good foundation to start with.

Rating: 3
Would it be better with a female lead? Different, not better
TMINE’s prediction: Could last a good few seasons, given 2 Broke Girls is still on