TV reviews

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

What have you been watching? Including En Immersion, Neviditelní, Gomorra and The Collection

5 September 2016 Rob Buckley 26 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. 

Look at that – Autumn’s here. How did that happen?

Anyway, just as leaves will fall and everyone in the US is now morally obliged to stop wearing white, so TMINE returns to its usual blogging service come Autumn. More or less. Give it a week or so, anyway.

However, although I’m braced and ready for duty, the TV networks are biding their time, deploying some sophisticated form of Sicilian Defence with their schedules, which means there’s not been a lot new for me to review since the previous WHYBW?, other than the somewhat awful Four In The Morning (Canada: CBC) and a whole bunch of Amazon pilots. A few old favourites have returned, though, which means that after the jump, as well as The Last Ship and Mr Robot, I’ll be casting an eye over the first new episodes of the third seasons of Halt and Catch Fire and You’re The Worst, as well as the start of season two of Narcos.

I did manage to look over a couple of new shows, fresh off the presses, though.

En Immersion (Deep) (France: Arte; UK: Netflix)
Stylised French crime drama from Philippe Haïm (Braquo) in which Patrick Ridremont (Dead Man Talking) plays an unambitious cop and single father living in Paris. When he starts to suffer hallucinations, he discovers he is suffering from an incurable fatal neurological disease. With nothing left to lose, Ridremont joins a team of undercover narcotics agents led by Emmanuelle Meyssignac (The Avignon Prophecy), working to bring down Olivier Chantreau (Spiral) and his designer drugs.

As you can probably guess from the fact it was made for France’s arty Arte, En Immerson is more about how the story is told than what the story is, with the series shot in black and white and Haïm at times replacing dialogue with music. Visually, it’s lovely, but unfortunately, it’s also completely uncompelling, not exactly innovative in terms of plotting, and its Braquo-esque ultraviolence is as hard to palate. 

The Collection (Amazon)
Set in France just after the Second World War, The Collection sees Richard Coyle (Coupling, Crossbones, Covert Affairs) playing the owner of a fashion house that is going to give France a makeover and once more associate it with fun, haute couture and femininity. Trouble is that the talented one who can design clothes is his f*ck-up brother Tom Riley (Da Vinci’s Demons). How can the ruthless Coyle get little bro with the programme, while preventing the deep, dark, possibly wartime-collaborating family secret from seeing the light of day? Well, it ain’t going to be pretty…

Echoing the latter day production arrangements of Ripper Street, it’s an odd little thing, this, with a whole host of American actors playing moustache-twirling Americans (including Mr Robot/The Newsroom‘s Mamie Gummer), a whole host of Britain’s finest (including James Cosmo, Sarah Parish and Frances De La Tour) playing the French and a soupçon of French actors in teeny tiny unnoticable parts playing god-knows-what, with virtually every exterior shot of post-war Paris apparently shot on the same repeatedly redressed backlot in Grimsby. Coyle is as well cast as when he was a pirate or KGB assassin, and everything has the authenticity of a Hong Kong market knock off. 

There’s too little fashion to please fashionistas, too little charm or romance to please the period drama-lovers, too little action to please thriller-lovers and too little attention to detail to please historians. The Collection‘s not awful and is competently made, but there’s no USP, nothing it does that you won’t have seen done better elsewhere, no reason for its existence other than to keep another BBC Worldwide co-production agreement going. Try it if you like, but I doubt it’ll be your size.

But hey guys! This is ‘What have you been watching?’! Note the emphasis on you. Over the weeks and years, some of you have rather benevolently been letting the rest of us know about the good stuff we’ve been missing that I haven’t been picking up on. Just in case you were worried it’s all been falling on deaf ears, you can breathe more easily: in my quest to fill the empty gaps in my viewing schedule, I also looked through your recommendations to find some new shows to try. Here’s what I found.

Neviditelní (The Invisibles) (Czech Republic: CT1; UK: All4)
One of JustStark’s recommendations, this quirky little fantasy drama based very loosely on 1970s movie How to Drown Dr Mrácek is centred on the ‘Nixies’, a bunch of water-breathing people living amongst us – or at least in Prague – but doing their best not to be found out. Then one of their own, albeit someone who doesn’t know he’s a Nixie, goes and publicly commits suicide by drowning. When he promptly fails to die to everyone’s surprise, including his own, a crisis is provoked in the Nixie community. 

I haven’t got very far into it yet and the early episodes are less concerned with dynamic storytelling and more with setting up this quaint community, its politics and its rules, from its attempts to attain power through ownership of the water and sewage system through to its attitudes to bleach and its love of fermented frogs. But it’s pleasingly off the wall and amusing, and it’s significantly better once the fallout of the suicide starts, so I’ll stick with it.

No English-language trailers available on YouTube, but you can find out more over on All4, and here’s a Czech one:

Gomorra (Gomorrah) (Italy: Sky Atlantic; UK: Sky Atlantic)
One of GYAD’s recommendations, Gommora is based on the book of the same name by Roberto Saviano. Again, one I’ve not got very far into yet – there are two seasons so far, so give me time – it’s so far been a reasonably and impressively violent but smart look at the Naples mafia, wars between gangs and mafia operations at the street level. It certainly looks fantastic and the differences between UK and Italian societies, such as the greater availability of guns through official channels, take the show in unexpected directions, too. I’m not 100% in love with it yet, but I’ve been seeing it get a lot of love on Twitter, where it’s been described as almost poetic at times and comparisons have been made to The Wire, and what I’ve seen so far has been good enough to make me want to watch more, so I’ll be sticking with it as well.

Continue reading “What have you been watching? Including En Immersion, Neviditelní, Gomorra and The Collection”

Canadian TV

Review: Four in the Morning (Canada: CBC)

1 September 2016 Rob Buckley 17 Comments

In Canada: Fridays, 9/9:30NT, CBC

Were it not for the awkward scheduling of aircraft, 4am would be a time long since lost to me. To be honest, staying up after 10pm is hard enough these days and if we make it midnight, we feel like we’re as street as Idris Elba.

4am is a time for young people.

You can certainly tell this from Four in the Morning, CBC’s new alleged comedy show, in which two young couples talk about the kind of things in the kind of way over-educated young people straight out of college do at 4am in the morning. 

An alleged piece of ‘magical realism’ – as clear a sign it’s written by gits as if it had a purple ‘BANTER!’ logo stamped on its title sequence – it’s little more just this horrendous chat, arch dialogue that’s so self-satisfied, it probably thinks it’s just solved the problem of world peace while simultaneously creating bons mots that will endure the aeons like granite. Characters with implausibly twattish names like ‘Bondurant’ (“A manically intense, always well-intentioned, singularly focused trumpet player”) and ‘Mitzi’ monologue at one another and have Tarantino-esque conversations about conversations with psychic pigs. They talk about their love of jazz and quote at each other, while playing for one another’s boyfriends or girlfriends, or grouching about the state of the world and their lives. They visit late night fooderies that sell gorilla meat and throw bricks through any number of apparently unsecured Canadian buildings’ windows.

They do all of this without realising they’re being incredibly annoying. Because ha, ha! They’re young people.

The show, which has a ‘micro budget’ of CAN$300k per episode, feels like so much student improv, the kind of thing put on in so many fringe theatres to an audience of seven, mostly friends of the cast and crew. And to be fair, Four in the Morning is probably perfect for annoying, over-educated young people who love the sound of their own opinions at four in the morning.

But for everyone else, it’s yet another Canadian comedy show that’s terminally short on laughs.

Streaming TV

Pick of the Amazon pilots: The Last Tycoon, The Tick, I Love Dick and Jean Claude Van Johnson

24 August 2016 Rob Buckley 8 Comments

Normally, I don’t bother reviewing Amazon pilots for a number of reasons:

  1. They’re pilots, so there’s no guarantee they’re going to end up becoming series.
  2. Pilots aren’t always representative of shows, with some shows starting off badly and getting better, or vice versa, as the Barrometer will explain to you if you ever corner it backstage.
  3. Amazon’s ‘pilot seasons’ always seem to come at my busiest times.

However, since August’s been a bit quiet and the latest pilot season has had some intriguing entries, I decided to make an exception – just this time.

So after the jump, I’ll be providing mini-reviews of F Scott Fitzgerald adaptation The Last Tycoon, superhero comedy The Tick, Kevin Bacon love affair I Love Dick and meta action comedy Jean Claude Van Johnson. No prizes for guessing who stars in the last one.

Continue reading “Pick of the Amazon pilots: The Last Tycoon, The Tick, I Love Dick and Jean Claude Van Johnson”

What have you been watching? Including My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2, Mr Robot, The Last Ship and Outcast

22 August 2016 Rob Buckley 29 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. 

Well, look at that. I’m back blogging in August. Okay, the Daily News won’t be back until September and I’m not going daily until then for anything else, either, but there’s a good chance I’ll be peppering August with further posts, including a look at the latest Amazon pilots, such as The Tick, Jean-Claude Van Johnson and I Love Dick, I hope.

Elsewhere, I reviewed the first season of Baron Noir (France: Canal+; UK: Amazon Prime), which was my holiday project, and I left you with my thoughts on Stranger Things (Netflix) and Star Trek Beyond (2016) before I went. But surprisingly, since then, there hasn’t actually been much new TV and as I did quite a purge before the holidays, the only regulars I’ll be covering after the jump are The Last Ship and Mr Robot, as well as everything up to the season finale of Outcast. I also haven’t been to the movies, being away and all, not even to see Jason Bourne. 

But we did watch one movie rather a lot:

My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 (2016) (iTunes)
The sequel to the worldwide success that was wedding culture-clash comedy My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002), My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 brings back virtually the entire cast to just about manage to do something different, with Nia Vardalos and John Corbett’s daughter Elena Kampouris (American Odyssey) having to choose whether to go away to college or not, while facing the constant pressure to get married to a good Greek boy; meanwhile, Vardalos’ parents discover the priest at their wedding didn’t sign the certificate, meaning they’re going to have to have – you guessed it – a big fat Greek wedding.

Vardalos’ script is mostly a mother-daughter story, but is also partly a rejoinder to the original movie’s stereotypical portrayal of Greek culture, emphasising its potential for acceptance and diversity as well as the cloying conservatism shown in the original movie. Wisely, it also gives Andrea Martin far more to do. However, there are few of the original’s insights, various plot lines (eg Corbett’s relationship with his parents) go virtually nowhere, the Greek (what little there is of it, even between people who are from Greece) is atrocious, and the general message of hope and pushing boundaries of the original is destroyed, with Vardalos’ travel agency having closed between movies, forcing her to work for the family restaurant again, and her brother’s artistic talents going precisely nowhere either.

Nice to see everyone back together again, but a shame that Vardalos doesn’t have much left to say, it seems (did she use it all up on the TV series?).

Continue reading “What have you been watching? Including My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2, Mr Robot, The Last Ship and Outcast”

Baron Noir
French TV

Review: Baron Noir (season 1) (France: Canal+; UK: Amazon Prime)

18 August 2016 Rob Buckley 5 Comments

In France: Aired on Canal+ in February/March
In the UK: Available on Amazon Prime

There can be few channels around the world as reliable as Canal+ when it comes to producing quality TV. Chances are, provided it sticks to French, any Canal+ series you watch is going to be HBO-good.

A case in point is Baron Noir, a remarkably prescient and impressive political series that is everything that Les Hommes de L’ombre (Spin) and Marseille should have been but weren’t. Airing in France in February and March this year, but available in the UK on Amazon, the show somehow managed to anticipate both this year’s Brexit and the Corbyn/Smith Labour leadership competition and relocate them to France, taking in all of left-wing French politics along the way.

And when I say ‘all’, I mean all.

The show is about the mayor of Dunkirk, Kad Merad (Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis), an old-school socialist who’s spent years fighting (sometimes literally, with a baseball bat) for the poor, oppressed working classes. He’s best friends with fellow socialist and presidential candidate Niels Arestrup (Un prophète, De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté, Quai d’Orsay), to the extent that he’s willing to steal money from social housing projects to help fund his campaign. However, soon there are ructions between the two friends and before you know it, Merad and Arestrup – both sometimes helped, sometimes hindered by new-wave technocrat Anna Mouglalis (Romanzo Criminale, Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky) – are pulling strings and levers behind the scenes of French politics to block each other and further their own, the party’s and the country’s interests, all while trying to avoid ending up in prison through Mutually Assured Destruction.

While the opening episode of the show gives the impression that this is going to be a show about corruption – and certainly that is an element – most of the first season is about political dirty-tricks and manipulations at every level of politics: everything from how to disrupt a local council election through how to manipulate the media and use party rules to counter your enemy’s plans through manipulating the Assemblée nationale all the way up to the EU and how to play it off against your own national interests by threatening to leave it to ‘ensure your country’s sovereignty’. Advised behind the scenes by real-life French politicians, it’s a real eye-opener, not least because it actually manages to film inside the Palais Bourbon itself, but also because of the differences between French and British politics – it’s a long time since anyone had to take Troskyites and communists seriously here. Well, it used to be, anyway.

If Baron Noir has a message, it’s that there are no friends in politics yet if you do screw over your friends in the short-term, chances are that things will go badly for you in the long-term – you just have to know how to balance all the options and bring people back on side. Merad spends most of the season in a whirl of plots and counter-plots, playing one person against another, usually with their knowledge, often by giving inspiring speeches about the left and the need to look after the oppressed/fight the National Front – think Jeremy Corbyn if he had charisma and leadership skills.

Beautifully shot and acted with some cracking music, the show nevertheless isn’t without flaws. Merad is implausibly attractive to women of all ages and there’s one relationship involving him where not only the audience but the couple themselves are surprised it’s taking place at all. It also meanders a little, dropping interesting plotlines and characters, and focusing too much in later episodes on that housing project, which so dominates the first episode. For English speakers, there’s also the subtitling, which starts off fine but starts to lose it a little mid-season, such as by switching the French-Algerian’s Mercad’s reason for entering politics from helping ‘les Arabs’ to helping ‘minorities’ and frequently taming down some of the more interesting, fruitier language (it’s a real tragedy that the marvellous ‘putain ville de merde’ ends up as ‘this town sucks’, for example).

But if you want a House of Cards that’s not only European but better than Netflix’s, Baron Noir‘s your boy. Give it a whirl – there’s a second season on the way in France next year. Here’s a French-language trailer for you to get an idea of what it’s like.