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 Hateful Eight, Byw Celwydd, Rebellion and Endeavour

15 January 2016 Rob Buckley 10 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. And if you want to know when any of these shows are on in your area, there’s Locate TV – they’ll even email you a weekly schedule.

Well, you can’t say I haven’t been keeping you up to date on all the new shows around the world. Or at least trying to. This week I think I’ve hit a personal record for number of new shows either previewed or reviewed in a week, since I gave you the lowdown on the following:

Which ain’t bad. Idiotsitter I previewed last week, so that doesn’t count.

I haven’t had a chance to watch last night’s The Family Law (Australia: SBS) yet, but I’ll get round to that over the weekend, fingers crossed, and let you know about it (and anything else that debuts or that’s escaped my radar) on Monday.

After the jump, I’ll be looking at the regulars, as well as those shows I thought promising enough to keep in my crowded schedule: American Crime, Byw Celwydd, Cooper Barrett’s Guide To Surviving Life, Endeavour, Grandfathered, Man Seeking Woman and Rebellion. Those keeping score will notice that I couldn’t be bothered with the second episodes of Shades of Blue, Beowulf: Return to the Shieldlands or Angel From Hell, but 100 Code will be getting a look in over the weekend, too. Probably.

But first, a movie!

The Hateful Eight (2016)
Quentin Tarantino’s latest is a Western that assembles many of his usual tropes and uses them as a framework for him to mash up Reservoir Dogs, The Thing and 10 Little Indians, into a lovely morality tail about how adversity can help men overcome their racism so they can join together to be misogynistic.

Set just after the civil war, the film sees bounty hunter Kurt Russell is taking in fugitive Jennifer Jason Leigh when a blizzard forces them – and fellow bounty hunter Samuel L Jackson and local sheriff Walter Goggins – to take refuge in a shop on the side of a mountain in Wyoming. There they meet various other characters (Tim Roth, Demián Bichir, Michael Madsen, Bruce Dern), one or more of whom could be secretly in league with Leigh. As the snows set in, the bodies start to pile up…

It takes a good half hour for the film to reach the shop, that half hour being so dull I actually fell asleep for 10 minutes. However, the remaining two and a half hours (including interval) are considerably better. While the film owes an epic debt to The Thing, even poaching some of that film’s score, it’s also its own beast. But while it doers innovate, constantly surprises, plays with audience expectations, and looks fantastic in Panavision Ultra 70mm, it never does anything quite as exciting as Tarantino’s previous efforts, particularly Inglorious Bastards. 

Funny, but mostly from its gross-out humour; tense, but mostly thanks to The Thing; a decent enough viewing, but mostly full of plot loopholes and missed opportunities. Nothing to go out of your way for.

Continue reading “What have you been watching? Including The Hateful Eight, Byw Celwydd, Rebellion and Endeavour”

French TV

Review: Spin (Les hommes de l’ombre) 1×1-1×2 (France: France2; UK: More4)

14 January 2016 Rob Buckley 15 Comments


In the UK: Fridays, 9pm, More4. Also available on Walter Presents
In France: Aired on France 2, 2012-2014

To the rest of the world, it can sometimes seem like the only TV channel in France that makes scripted French-language television is Canal+. Take your pick of shows – Engrenages (Spiral), The Last Panthers, Les Revenants, Braquo, The Tunnel – if it’s at least partly in French, it’s going to be from Canal+.

TF1? That only makes English language shows, like Crossing Lines, Jo and Taxi Brooklyn, surely?

This, of course, is not the case. TF1 makes plenty of French-language shows – TMINE’s pal Monsieur Thierry Attard will point you in their direction in both English and French, if you’re so inclined. There are also plenty of other French TV channels out there making TV in French. It’s just we’ve never really bothered importing it until now.

But having poached all its formats back in the 80s when it was just starting up and now newly awakened to its ratings potential thanks to the success of Les Revenants, Channel 4 is once again looking at French TV as a potential way to fill up the airwaves – as well as the Internet, thanks to Walter Presents. And since everyone, even BBC Four, has been a bit lax at airing anything French for the past 30 years or so, that means Channel 4 is free to pick its way through all of French TV’s archives for the cream of the crop.

So, firstly, we have to thank Walter. Les hommes de l’ombre first aired on pubcaster France 2 nearly four years ago. But despite popping up at 2013’s Totally Serialized (you could have won tickets to see it, thanks to this ‘ere blog, in fact) and featuring the Only Handsome French Actor Everyone Knows About, Grégory Fitoussi (Engrenages, American Odyssey, Mr Selfridge, World War Z, GI Joe), no one bothered with it until Walter picked it for his web site. 

And it’s a good choice. Despite its misleadingly translated English title of Spin, it’s actually quite a hard hitting political thriller looking at public perceptions, PR, deception by the state, and modern political campaigns. It stars Bruno Wolkowitch (The Tourist) as Simon Kapita, an old-school political operator of integrity, headhunted by the UN to head up one of its commissions. However, on a quick trip back to his homeland, the man he helped to become President of France is killed by a suicide bomber of Algerian descent, so everyone naturally assumes he was a terrorist. The President of the Senate (Philippe Magnan) takes over and starts to clamp down on security, but Kapita soons discovers that Magnan is hiding the bomber’s true motivation for political advantage – he wants to become the new President. 

That’s the plot for episode one. However, wisely for once, More4 aired the first two episodes on Friday, and it’s a bit misleading for me to leave things there since although that deadly secret does remain an important plot point, the show moves on. It’s then about Kapita first selecting a potential alternative candidate (Nathalie Baye), persuading her to run for office and then managing her campaign. Equally important is the fact that Kapita’s protégé, the ambitious and trendy young Ludovic Desmeuze (Fitoussi), throws aside his integrity to run Magnan’s campaign, pitting the two former friends against each other in an escalating political war.

Although comparisons to Borgen are obvious, the show is its own beast, having as much in common with that Danish show as it does with The West Wing, with Kapita’s assembling of his political team reminiscent of that show’s In The Shadow of Two Gunmen and he being almost as inspirational as Josiah Bartlett in his own, French way. 

But it’s really a much darker show than both of them. I said Spin was a mistranslation and its French title gives you a better idea of the kind of show it is: Les hommes de l’ombre. As well as being a nice bit of aural word play, this means roughly both ‘the men in the shadows’ and ‘the men behind the scenes’, and indeed, the show is very much about Wolkowitch and Fitoussi as the hidden kingmakers*, working the cogs of democracy, unseen in the shadows, alongside governmental subterfuge.

It’s also very good. While it doesn’t have the gritty realism of Engrenages – or the industrial strength Parisian swearing – it’s got a strong plot, interesting, albeit relatively conventional characters and situations, and some top acting. Although the female characters don’t come out of it very well, they do at least get lots of things to do and the political machinations that we see do have a strong stench of reality to them. Despite the lack of black characters, the show also subtly flags up public racism and islamophobia – a far more topical issue now than it was back in 2012, of course.

Unfortunately, the show’s somewhat let down by its English subtitling. The French dialogue is subtle, nuanced and economical; the subtitles are not. While they usually get most of the plot across, they often change the meaning of what’s been said in significant ways (such as changing certain characters’ perceptions of different political groups and leanings), and somewhat bizarrely do so even when a literal word-for-word translation would have been both more accurate and even better written. 

So take it from me – if the dialogue seems bad, it probably isn’t in French.  

Well done then, Walter. Good choice. Just hire a better translator next time.

* Yes, France is a republic and Wolkowitch wants to get a woman elected. You know what I mean

Billions
US TV

Preview: Billions 1×1 (US: Showtime)

14 January 2016 Rob Buckley 17 Comments

In the US: Sundays, 10pm ET/PT, Showtime. Starts January 17
In the UK: Not yet acquired

Back when Suits started on the USA Network, it was a refreshingly strong show about lawyers that took a different tack from most legal dramas – it almost never ventured into the courtroom. Instead, it was all about the moves and counter-moves that lawyers made outside the courtroom to force their opponents to concede without the cost and randomness of a trial. Unfortunately, over the years, Suits‘ real-world chess-playing fell by the wayside, in favour of relationship-based drama and comedy, but the first couple of seasons were hugely enjoyable pieces of Machiavellian manipulation.

A little known fact about Suits is that originally, it was going to be about investment bankers. The show did eventually venture into that realm, where it was clear there was a very powerful pecking order in the world that made those legal eagles look like mere sparrows.

Of course, there’s a group of people who make investment bankers look like wrens in the scheme of things: hedge fund managers. Managing billions and potentially worth billions themselves, depending on how you look at them, they’re either the oil that prevents the wheels coming off the modern financial world or sociopaths that destroy others purely for their own personal gain.

Billions is a show that gives us Suits to the max, in that a pits a hedge fund giant (Damian Lewis) against America’s top lawyer, the district attorney (Paul Giamatti) in a chess match that would make even Harvey Specter balk. Lewis is a genius of analysis, both of figures and people. He’s made billions by knowing how to combine the two, deducing who’ll do what, why and how to invest accordingly. He’s also worked out how to play the PR game – he may be worth billions, but he’s given hundreds of millions to 9/11 charities and the families of all his co-workers who died during that tragedy. 

There’s also a very strong chance he’s made at least part of his fortune through insider trading.

In turn, Giamatti has been raised since birth by his lawyer dad to think through every move and counter move white collar criminals might make. He knows whom to prosecute, when to prosecute and what it’ll get him, and he knows how to play the PR game, too.

When an SEC official brings evidence to Giamatti that Lewis might have broken the law, Giamatti has to decide whether now is the time to take down Lewis or whether he’s finally met the man who’ll break his undefeated prosecuting streak. The best legal chess match in America is about to begin.

But while Billions is in many ways an excellent drama that has all the best qualities of Suits in its heyday, with smart people doing smart things to outwit each other, it’s also just a little too Showtime for its own good.

Continue reading “Preview: Billions 1×1 (US: Showtime)”

Streaming TV

Review: Shadowhunters (US: Freeform; UK: Netflix)

13 January 2016 Rob Buckley 6 Comments


In the US: Tuesdays, 9/8c, Freeform (ABC Family)
In the UK: Wednesdays, Netflix

When The Shannara Chronicles hit our screens less than a week ago, it would have been tempting to assume that ‘peak fantasy bobbins’ for the year had already been achieved. Surely, nothing so weighed down by expositional dialogue, overly intricate world-building and general teenage angsting could be beaten. Yet here we are facing Shadowhunters, which makes The Shannara Chronicles look as uncomplicated as an episode of Pingu.

The success of Twilight and The Hunger Games in recent years at the cinema opened the flood gates for a whole bunch of dystopian young adult (YA) novels to be adapted. Some, such as The Maze Runner, fared well and continue to spawn sequels; The Mortal Instruments, on the other hand, didn’t do quite so well and the intended franchise never materialised. Yet, in an age where TV networks are hungry for more scripted drama – particularly one formerly family-oriented network that still carries evangelistic church services but that would like to go a bit darker by rebranding itself (cough, cough, ABC Family) – death at the movies for yet another (YA) YA franchise doesn’t mean the end of all adaptations.

And so we have Shadowhunters, YA2 TV series in which a teenager discovers she is the most important person in the entire world and so consequently is fought over by both all manner of forces, both good and evil – and boys. You’d think that that would be a relatively simple concept to put forth (again), but Shadowhunters is for today’s generation of wired kids, whose brains have been so sped up by constant digital communication that Buffy the Vampire Slayer is comparatively as mythos-lite as The Andy Griffiths Show.

So stick with me, grandpa/grandma, as I spell it out for you. Try to keep up.

Clary Fray is a perfectly ordinary teenager who wants to be an artist. Art college isn’t so impressed by her work, but they do like her creepy demon doodles for a graphic novel she has planned.

However, on her 18th birthday, she comes into her powers as a Shadowhunter, a human-angel hybrid that hunts demons. Yes, demons. And warlocks, vampires and in fact every other legendary beastie that likes to prey on humans, because all the stories are true. You just can’t see them unless you’re a Shadowhunter – or they let you.

So far so simple. Thing is, Clary never knew that she the daughter of a rogue Shadowhunter who used to work for a group of other rogue Shadowhunters based out of Chernobyl, the boss of whom fancied her and may even be her real dad. Her mum (Annie Wesching from 24) hid her, with the help of a warlock who wiped her memories, along with the Mortal Cup. 

I don’t know what the cup is. Sorry. But everyone seems to want it, particularly Chenobyl people.

Meanwhile, Wesching is marrying the Old Spice Guy (Isaiah Mustafa), who may be a traitor Shadowhunter and in league with ‘the Circle’. But fortunately, there’s a group of regular Shadowhunters, including hotty Jace (Dominic Sherwood), female underclad hotty Isobelle (Emeraude Toubia) and her broody brother Alec (Matthew Daddario), and they’re going to help Clary find out about her true calling. Which is going to involve rune tattooing (because of the demon venom – duh!) and stabbing people with glowy swords in reasonably competent but unconvincing martial arts fights.

But what will Clary’s best friend Simon (Alberto Rosende) make of this new life and the usually invisible Shadowhunters, particularly Jace, who finds Clary ‘interesting’? And will you be on team Jace or team Simon?

Continue reading “Review: Shadowhunters (US: Freeform; UK: Netflix)”

US TV

Review: Shades of Blue 1×1 (US: NBC)

13 January 2016 Rob Buckley 3 Comments


In the US: Thursdays, 10/9c, NBC
In the UK: Not yet acquired

If you want to know how to turn around a struggling TV network, you need to ask NBC. A little less than a decade ago, its primetime broadcasting slots filled with the likes of Knight Rider and My Own Worst Enemy, you couldn’t pay people to watch it and it was a much deserved fourth out of the four broadcast networks in the ratings. Fast forward to now and NBC has overtaken CBS to become the number one network. Just how did it do it?

By broadcasting generic, unexceptional, reasonably stupid drek. Not too stupid and not too bad, since people will still turn off. But try to cater to the average viewer – bearing in mind that in terms of gender, race, sexual orientation, age et al, the average viewer is changing from year to year, but in terms of intelligence they’re pretty much the same as always – with something that won’t offend, that can be used as background viewing in place of the radio, that you can follow while playing with your iPhone, and that is pretty much like everything else that’s been on TV forever and you’ll do well.

Could The Shield work on NBC? Not a chance. But Shades of Blue, which is basically The Shield for the average viewer? That’ll thrive.

Jennifer Lopez stars… Yes, let’s stop there. JLo. She’s the producer and the star. She is NBC’s Michael Chiklis.

Considered that enough? Right, let’s try again.

Jennifer Lopez is a corrupt New York detective working for the even more corrupt police lieutenant Ray Liotta (GoodFellas, Smith). They keep the peace between local gangsters in return for extortion money and they’re happy to plant evidence, hand over suspects for the gangs to murder et al in order to do this. Then JLo gets caught by an FBI anti-corruption squad and is forced to turn against Liotta and the rest of their unit – otherwise, she’s going to jail and won’t be able to keep paying the tuition fees for her daughter’s artsy-fartsy college.

Will she send family friend and trusted pal Liotta down to save herself and her family, or will she get killed by Liotta in the process if he finds out? Only time will tell.

Continue reading “Review: Shades of Blue 1×1 (US: NBC)”