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.
I spent most of the weekend not watching a lot of things I was supposed to be watching, instead watching season one of Daredevil again – it’s so much better than the second season, which is starting to feel more disappointing with every passing day. But that doesn’t mean I’m not up to date. It just means I still haven’t watched Ófærð (Trapped) yet.
Elsewhere, I’ve reviewed Containment(US: The CW; UK: E4) and passed a third-episode verdict on The Detour (US: TBS). I’ll be passing a third-episode verdict on Game on Silence either tomorrow or Wednesday. That means that after the jump, we’ll have a look at the latest episodes of The Americans, Banshee, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, The Flash, Limitless, Lopez, Lucifer and The Tunnel (Tunnel), as well as the season finale of Supergirl. HBO’s also just brought back Game ofThrones and Silicon Valley , so I’ll be looking over them, too.
But first, a movie:
Bridge of Spies (2015) (iTunes) Slightly soporific Spielberg biopic of Cold War lawyer James B Donovan (Tom Hanks), who defended notorious spy Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance), and ended up helping in negotiations in Berlin to exchange Abel for U2 pilot Gary Powers. He does that by talking about the Constitution and what it is to be American. All solidly made but that summary is really all you need to know, in what is basically a not very subtle commentary on post-9/11 US attitudes to human rights, treating enemy combatants civilly, etc. If you do watch it, don’t be surprised that there’s a chunk in the middle in German without subtitles, as that’s deliberate. Don’t worry – they’re just talking about how expensive his coat is.
In the US: Tuesdays, 9/8c, The CW In the UK: Acquired by E4 for Summer airing
Normally, the way this blog works is that I scour the world looking for TV shows that you all might want to watch (or avoid) and review them. Then, at some indeterminate point in the future, maybe a few months later, maybe not at all, eventually they’ll arrive on some UK TV channel or Internet service and, maybe you’ll look back and read what I said about them, to see if they’re worth watching (or avoiding).
As you can imagine, with that kind of top editorial USP and universal appeal, TMINE has become one of the top traffic destinations on the Internet, as well as a veritable ad magnet, and I’ve become famous. Normal people can hardly spend a day without mentioning how much they like TMINE in regular conversation down the pub, launderette or wherever. Why just today, I was talking to someone I’ve worked with for about four years about top US TV shows and I mentioned that I always watched the first three episodes of any TV show to see whether it’s good or bad.
“Do you?” she said, obviously bewildered why anyone would do that.
That’s how famous the Carusometer and Barrometer have made me.
Anyway, with Containment, most of you will probably be able to turn the tables on me. The CW’s latest show – its third and final new one this year – sees the outbreak of a lethal new disease in Atlanta that can be communicated by bodily fluids or contact. So quickly does it spread, the government decides that everyone walking four to six feet apart from one another isn’t enough and it needs to quarantine the outbreak, so sticks a great big fence round it.
Some people, most of them young and pretty, get stuck on the outside; some people, most of them young and pretty, get stuck on the inside – usually, relationship partners get stuck on the opposite sides of the fence (what are the odds of that?). Is that going to be enough to stop the virus? Will everyone be reunited after a couple of days when the fence comes down, as the government promises? And just how many relationships will get started or ended by the quarantine?
Well, if the flashforward to Day 3 at the start and end of the first episode is anything to go by, it’ll be just three small notches down the Bad Things scale from ‘Zombie Apocalypse’ by that point.
So why will you be able to turn the tables on me? Well, what if I give you the hint that everyone keeps talking about a ‘cordon sanitaire’ and ‘inside the cordon’?
Yes, that’s right. It’s an adaptation of Belgian drama Cordon, which you all probably watched on BBC Four last year:
I didn’t. I’d tried Salamander. That was the best Belgium had to offer. It was rubbish. Cordon was second choice, so why bother with that, hey?
So was it good then? Does it end well? I’ve read Wiki about it now, and this seems pretty close to it so far, which means you probably know better than I do whether Containment is going to be good, as I’ve only seen the first episode.
Anyway, this is semi-pants, semi-good, and I say this as someone with a repeatedly self-professed love for the ‘killer virus’ genre. Despite largely having a cast of Brits, Australians and Canadians all struggling to survive, it’s basically a CW/American-isation of a more adult Euro-thriller.
David Gyasi (Apparitions, Cloud Atlas, Interstellar) is the noble cop struggling to keep his community and his relationship together, while he tries to work out the true agenda of the ambivalent and strangely stern government doctor running things, Claudia Black (Stargate, Farscape); Chris Wood (The Vampire Diaries) is his pal cop, oddly resentful he’s trapped inside the hot zone with cute single parent teacher Kristen Gutoskie (Beaver Falls, Republic of Doyle); Hanna Mangan Lawrence (Spartacus) is the pregnant teenager on the run who’s now trapped in the city; and George Young (The Brian Jackson Show)is the plucky Brit doctor trying to come up with a cure.
The show is often at pains to do the least interesting, most soapiest thing possible, cutting away as soon as “the science part” begins to have someone sulking like a teenager who’s not allowed to play on the XBox again until they’ve done their homework because killer viruses are, like, just so unfair, dad. Vectors and proteins aren’t anywhere near as interesting as wondering how this 100% fatal killer virus outbreak makes you feel about your relationship, is it, not when those relationships are so 100% completely predictable?
There is a slightly offensive part (imported and translated into ‘merican from Cordon‘s Afghan) that has the killer virus, which turns out to have been weaponised, being brought into the US by a Syrian refugee. From both Wiki and the show’s own production notes, which reveal that journalist Trevor St John (One Life To Live) is going to pop up in later episodes, suspicious of the government’s story, it seems this is a bit of a ruse, so I’m not going to get too het up about it, but it’s notable that the muslim family are the first ones under suspicion and carted off to quarantine.
But those problems aside, it’s not as much of a clunker as it could have been, certainly not compared to Between,the almost platonic CW ideal of Containment. It’s a bit more gruesome and death-filled than you might expect; it is actually filmed in Atlanta and while it’s not quite 54% black and no one’s doing a Georgia accent, the cast is reasonably diverse; there is some science in there; some of the dialogue is occasionally pretty good; and there’s the occasional scene that touches on the frightening. I’m sure the conspiracy theory is going to turn out to be insanely ridiculous, but we’ve not had to endure that yet, and it all seems moderately enticing at the moment.
If there’s nothing better on and you’ve not seen Cordon, give Containment a go to see if it’s to your liking – it’s a ‘limited series’ so hopefully won’t take up too much of your life if you decide to stick with it, too. But Containment is a low-rent US adaptation of a low-rent Belgian TV show in the scheme things, so don’t have great expectations going in – especially not if you already know how the original ends.
In the US: Mondays, 9/8c, TBS In the UK: Not yet acquired
You know how some parents of young kids get? They spend all their time with their kids or doing things for their kids and their social life disappears completely. Blessed is the night off if they finally manage to get a babysitter and they’re not too knackered to do anything. Except now, instead of politics and culture and sports, all they can talk about how is fun their kid is in that video, look this video, see how hilarious he is, now see it again, look he can’t say ‘chihuahua’ right, isn’t that adorable?
That’s basically the problem with The Detour,Samantha Bee and Jason Jones’ new comedy series in which Jones and on-screen wife Natalie Zea go on holiday with their two kids, except Jones has been fired from his job and so they have to drive instead of fly. It’s basically National Lampoon’s Vacation, but with a slightly more convoluted storytelling his device, with Jones ultimately arrested by the FBI and retelling his adventures in flashback during his interrogation.
As I highlighted in my review of the first two episodes, most of the humour stems from the outrageous!behaviour of the kids and terrible!! parenting by Jones and Zea, as well as Jones and Zea’s marital strife. The trouble is, it’s tame – the kind of humour that you come up with when you’ve been stuck in your family bubble with nothing but your kids for company for months at a time. Gosh, isn’t that funny, telling your kids about oral sex? Well, no, it’s not exactly even Deadpool in its audacity, is it?
To be fair, the show is getting quite good at physical comedy, too, with episode three giving some chuckles from car problems. But you always feel that a far more uproarious punchline could have been delivered, rather than the PG-13 version that Bee and Jones always manage to come up with.
The Detour is funny, but only a bit and certainly not enough to make me want to watch it every week. There have been worse shows on TBS, but that’s about the best thing I can say about it.
Barrometer rating: 3 Would it be better with a female lead? Yes (Zea’s there and does a few things, but the show’s not really about her) TMINE prediction: Already renewed for a second season, but lucky to have got that. A third season seems unlikely unless it really finds its mojo
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.
I promise it’s not deliberate: “What have you been watching?” has not gone fortnightly. But work got a bit silly on both Friday and Monday and I couldn’t string two sentences together by the end of the day, so WHYBW had to take an enforced break.
It’s back now. You can exhale.
I’ve been doing my best to catch up with all the new shows, although I’m afraid to say that a certain ‘can’t be arsed’ feeling has permeated my viewing schedule. I have at least reviewed the following new shows in the past two weeks:
I’ve also passed a third-episode verdict on TV Land’s Lopez. However, I really just couldn’t be arsed to watch:
Dice (US: Showtime; UK: Sky Atlantic) The new eponymous Andrew Dice Clay comedy, because it stars Andrew Dice Clay
The Path (US: Hulu) This cult drama (no, not like The Tripods) has managed to air four episodes so far and I got through a minute of it before I decided to do more enjoyable things and gave up.
The Girlfriend Experience (US: Starz) This may be a beautifully directed drama produced by Steven Soderbergh and based on his film of the same name, but it’s still on Starz and it’s still about New York escorts, so is basically going to be porn, isn’t it? I managed 5 minutes of internship interviews at various attornies (oh, how will she make ends meet?) before giving up.
The Ranch (Netflix) Ashton Kutchner stars as one of two brothers trying to run a business together on a Colorado ranch. It looked potentially interesting until it turned out to be a multi-camera comedy with an audience, at which point I gave up.
The Durrells (UK: ITV) Keeley Hawes takes her family of future authors to live on Corfu in the 30s. I gave up, mainly because of Keeley Hawes. However, I might come back to it at some point.
Watch those trailers (or even an episode) and tell everyone if you could be arsed, why don’t you?
I also couldn’t be arsed to watch any more episodes of:
Blå Ögon (Blue Eyes) (Sweden: SVT1; UK: More4) As I said in the previous WHYBW, the show has two plot threads: a conspiracy thriller and a right-wing terrorist drama. The latter is great, the former is bobbins. Unfortunately, the third episode was 75% of the former, only 25% of the latter, so I gave up after 15 minutes.
The Catch (US: ABC; UK: Sky Living) I almost can’t remember what the episode was about, but the desperate attempt to do Ocean’s 11 with a cast desperately under-equipped for the challenge was more than I could bear.
That means that after the jump, we’ll be looking at the final episodes of 11.22.63, Billions and The Magicians, as well as the latest episodes of Arrow, The Americans, Banshee, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, Limitless,Lucifer and Supergirl. We’ve also had the return of both 12 Monkeys and The Tunnel(Tunnel) – how well will they hold up in their second seasons, I bet you’re wondering.
Before that, though, a movie, and I should also offer as a side-note that Netflix has acquired RTÉ One’s Rebellion, which makes my decision to review the first few episodes not quite as insanely stupid as it looked at the time, hey?
Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (2010) (Amazon Instant Video) The movie that almost killed off director Edgar Wright’s Hollywood career before it began – the fuss behind the scenes over Ant-Man eventually did that – is a comic book adaptation that has so many things going for it yet ultimately never quite works. A fusion of comic book and gaming logic and visuals with the real world, it sees nerdy inadequate college student Scott Pilgrim (Arrested Development’s Michael Cena) wanting to date new girl Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) but finding he has to fight her seven evil exes first. Literally.
We did try to watch this a couple of years ago, but we switched off, bored, after the first 40 minutes or so. Giving it another go last weekend, I have to say that wasn’t an entirely incorrect decision, but it does get a lot better in the second half. It has many individually visually beautiful moments, dozens of nerdy heady nods to the expected and the unexpected (Flash Gordon), and is frequently hilarious, but stuck together, none of it quite works – the narrative falters like watching all the narrative scenes from a video game stuck together.
All the same, six years on, it’s fun to see not only its influences (I’m pretty sure The World’s End owes a lot to it) but also what a marvellous supporting cast it had, with people who were already quite big to start with or who went on to many big things later on (Alison Pill, Anna Kendrick, Aubrey Plaza, Chris Evans, Brie Larson, Mae Whitman, Brandon Routh, Jason Schwartzman, Thomas Jane).
My wife’s been vegan for the past few months and this clip is now her new favourite thing, too – I’ll make sure she doesn’t drink any half-and-half, don’t worry.
In the US: Thursdays, 10/9c, NBC In the UK: Not yet acquired
For some time now, I’ve been banging on about how Turkey was the new hot country for adaptations in the US: Son, The End and The Edge were all being worked upon for US TV just a couple of years ago. Of course, you must have been thinking I was barking mad because there have been literally no US adaptations of Turkish TV shows since then.
But look! Here’s one! I was right! I was right! I’m not crazy at all!
Game of Silence is based on Show TV’s multi-award winning 2012 show Suskunlar, which ran for 56 episodes over two seasons. It, in turn, was based on the true story of four boys who were sentenced in absentia to nine years in prison for (allegedly) stealing baklava. Yep. Kids. Nine years. Baklava. That’s a pudding, in case you didn’t know, and that’s Turkey for you, in case you don’t remember Midnight Express.
Anyway, all manner of horrible things happen to the kids while they’re in prison, including a whole bunch of things they don’t want to tell anyone about. Then a couple of decades later, one of them comes across one of their abusers in the street and before you know it, kills him. He’s arrested and so he and his friends call their errant upmarket lawyer friend to defend him. Except it turns out that the dead man had all manner of criminal friends and… well, you can guess the rest.
Here’s a trailer for Suskunlar:
Relocating the action to Houston, Game of Silence is pretty faithful to Suskunlar, giving us the same format of three poorer boys/men (Michael Raymond-James, Larenz Tate, Derek Phillips), one lawyer boy/man (David Lyons from Revolution and Sea Patrol), one girl/woman (Bre Blair from The Unit) they grew up with, one nasty child prison (the daftly named ‘Quitman’) and all manners of secrets catching up with them all in the present day. The boys cause a fatal car crash in the US version that winds them up in the jail, and we get frequent flashbacks to before and after.
But it’s also a modern day thriller, as Lyons tries to persuade his childhood friends when they come to him for help that killing everyone is probably a bad idea and that they need to build a legal case against the former governor of the prison (Conor O’Farrell) and his various cronies. They, in turn, are being chased by both cop Deidrie Henry, who suspects they have secrets, and their now grown-up fellow dormie and criminal gang leader Demetrius Grosse (Banshee, Justified).
Despite all the odds, Game of Silence is pretty good and while it has a few problems, quite a lot of them stem from the bits of the original that don’t quite work in the US – US prisons have a lot of problems, Turkish prisons have a lot of problems, but those problems aren’t necessarily the same. Maybe I’m wrong, but prison-organised fight clubs, murders and child abuse parties with local dignataries probably weren’t going down in the late 80s, even in Texas.
That aside, I did enjoy the slow pace of the show, the insistence (at this stage) of not going revenge-happy but sticking to the characters’ beliefs, the nostalgia-tinged, almost Stephen King-ish flashbacks to the 80s, complete with Depeche Mode et al soundtrack. I also like the surprising daring of the show – sure, it doesn’t show everything happening, but it really doesn’t pull any punches in terms of what it implies. Indeed, it’s almost a 15-rated Sleepers:
The trouble is that there’s not much about it that’s enjoyable. Everyone’s miserable. Fair dos – who wouldn’t be? But unless your idea of fun is a joyless revenge thriller about childhood abuse, with subdued, non-descript, traumatised characters, Game of Silence is going to be a hard slog over numerous hours of TV, rather than just a single movie. Still, as joyless revenge thrillers go, this is definitely one of the better ones.
