TV reviews

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

US TV

Review: Telenovela 1×1-1×2 (US: NBC)

9 December 2015 Rob Buckley 4 Comments


In the US: Mondays, 8.30c/7.30c, NBC. Begins January 4
In the UK: Not yet acquired

Don’t know what a telenovela is? Well, I’ve already written quite a bit about them, so why not head off to my review of a much better show, Jane The Virgin, to find out what they’re all about. Then come back here.

All clued up? Cool.

Right, now you know what a telenovela is, you might be annoyed at having done all that cramming to learn that despite the name, Telenovela is not really a telenovela. Jane The Virgin is. Jane The Virgin understands telenovelas. Telenovela doesn’t.

Or at least it doesn’t want to be a telenovela. It wants to cash in on the name. It wants to ‘homage’ telenovelas. It wants to have evil twins, passionate romances between ex-lovers and rivalries between jealous women. But it wants all those things as sidelines to an otherwise very conventional TV sitcom.

And by TV sitcom, I mean a sitcom set behind the scenes of a TV show. Eva Longoria (Desperate Housewives) plays Ana Sofia Calderon, the star of fake telenovela Las Leyes de Pasión. In a bid to boost the ratings, network executive Zachary Levi (Chuck, Thor 2, Heroes Reborn) hires her ex-husband Jencarlos Canela (Más Sabe el Diablo, Pasión prohibida, Mi corazón insiste en Lola Volcán) in the hope that sparks will fly – or that the paparazzi will, at least.

And for the first episode at least, when it’s actually working that plotline, Telenovela isn’t half bad, is semi-appealing and clever, and is even funny at times. Eva Longoria may have spent the past few years behind the camera producing shows rather than starring in them, but she’s not forgotten what it takes to be a real screen presence – she makes everything look effortless while working the funny for all it’s worth, happy even to Sandra Bullock up and fall down a lot if the plot requires it. Canela is a good foil for her and the supporting cast, which includes Amaury Nolasco (Prison Break, Work It, Chase), isn’t exactly going for subtle (how could they be?), but services the needs of the script well.

The trouble is that what makes a telenovela a telenovela is a fixed story: a beginning, a middle and an end, with a plot that takes everything from A to Z driving each episode, usually through insanely mental territory. And Telenovela doesn’t want that. So as soon as we clear the first episode, we’re immediately in standalone territory. Yes, there’s an evil twin to deal with, but it’s a b-plot that affects only that episode and the almost touching rekindled romance between Longoria and Canela from the first episode is thrown aside in favour of a dafter plot about his having a stuntwoman rather than a stuntman for his scenes.

In fact, it’s readily apparent that the show has no real foundation, no real idea what it wants to be doing with its life, rather than to say ‘telenovela’ a lot and hope that people will watch it as a result. Liked all that joking in the first episode about Longoria not speaking Spanish fluently, while everyone else, even Levi, can? It’s gone. Romance? Gone. Politicking behind the scenes? Gone. Jokes? Gone. Pratfalls? Gone. Collapsing dresses? Gone… but not like that.

That’s traditional US TV, not telenovela territory. 

So it’s a distinct thumbs down from me. Longoria and pretty much everyone in the cast can do a lot better than this. And so can you – watch Jane The Virgin. That’s on Mondays, too. This is just the evil twin.

What have you been watching? Including The Bridge, Arrow, The Flash, Legends and You’re The Worst

4 December 2015 Rob Buckley 22 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.

December’s here, Christmas is nearly upon us and a lot of series are coming to the end of their current seasons or have had their mid-season finales. The only new shows hitting our screens now are either trying to get in under the wire by box-setting us or are mere previews for shows that will get their full runs next year. Cases in point are South of Hell (US: WE tv) and Superstore (US: NBC), which I reviewed earlier this week. 

That means that after the jump, given I’ve already passed a third-episode verdict on Into The Badlands (US: AMC; UK: Amazon Instant Video), I’ll only be looking at Arrow, Bron/Broen (The Bridge), Doctor Who, The Flash, Grandfathered, Legends, Supergirl and You’re The Worst. I’ve made a start on The Man In The High Castle but I’ve only got a couple of episodes in, so I’ll save them up for a full review next week or the week after. Some time before Christmas anyway.

Continue reading “What have you been watching? Including The Bridge, Arrow, The Flash, Legends and You’re The Worst”

US TV

Mid-week mini-reviews: South of Hell (US: WE tv) and Superstore (US: NBC)

2 December 2015 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

What’s this? ‘Mid-week mini-reviews’? Is this something new? Could this be Rob, having a new idea, some genuine innovation for a change?

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHA. 

HA.

Not really. It’s basically a couple of short reviews of programmes I watched this week that normally I’d save to Friday, because they’re not worth full reviews, but decided not to this week. 

South of Hell (US: WE tv)
Benjitek did herald this as being “about as bad as TV can get” and he wasn’t wrong. Mena Suvari (American Beauty, American Pie) plays an exorcist-for-hire who wanders round the US South expelling demons. The trouble is that a demon lives inside her, feeding on the evil Suvari exorcises from others and threatening to take her over.

Now I’m not a big fan of Eli Roth (Cabin Fever, Hostel). In fact, I’m not a fan of Eli Roth at all, but he has something of a rep in the horror genre and was given the honour of exec-producing Netflix’s second original TV series, Hemlock Grove, as a result. Clearly, he knows a thing or two about horror.

Which almost makes me think that maybe South of Hell is some cunning piece of satire that eluded me, because it’s astonishingly bad and ineptly made, with no hint that Roth was doing anything but reading a magazine while sitting 1,000 miles away behind some drone controls, directing on auto-pilot. In fact, it’s so laughable – I was literally laughing in places – with kids with badly glowing eyes to indicate possession, there were times I thought the show had to be deliberately bad and almost comic in the vein of Supernatural.

Except it’s clearly not. It’s just bad, virtually unwatchable, with no redeeming features. Cliched plot, abyssmal acting, cheap effects. Pity the poor, wretched souls forced to work on it.

Superstore

Superstore (US: NBC)
So on the one hand, well done to NBC not only for continuing to try to be diverse in its casting and plotting, but also for harking back to the days of Roseanne by giving us a blue-collar comedy with touches of workplace classics such as Parks and Recreation and The Office (US). On the other hand, it would help with a situation comedy if the comedy actually came from the situation or indeed the writers really ever indicated they’d worked in a supermarket before. The Office (US)? Think Outsourced instead. Just less racist. 

The basic set-up is that America Ferrera (Ugly Betty) is a supervisor in a hypermarket and Ben Feldman (A to Z) is the new employee with airs and graces who finds her attractive but makes an immediate bad impression on her, which leaves her with little patience for him. The result is that he keeps making costly mistakes, such as marking everything as costing $0.25 rather than 25% less, resulting in Black Friday levels of customer in-fighting. An obvious training issue that needs to be addressed? Something that needs HR’s involvement? A simple tannoy announcement that legally, the store doesn’t have to sell anything at the marked price if it doesn’t want to, so stop clubbing each other with the electrical goods or you’ll have to pay full price?

Nope. Just hilarious consequences.

The show’s saving grace is that while there are other employees and plenty of customers who are white trash idiots, Ferrera isn’t an idiot and Feldman’s not truly a dick, just a little unfortunate, so the show usually feels like it’s laughing with its characters, rather than at them. It’s even sometimes sympathetic towards them.

All the same, without jokes, a comedy show is for naught, and while frequently it’s smart and comes perilously close to being funny and sometimes even witty, nothing ever really lands home, bar a joke about a cubic zirconium knock-off. Still, it’s better than South of Hell. And Sky’s Trollied, for that matter.

The BarrometerA Barrometer rating of 3

Third-episode verdict: Into The Badlands (US: AMC; UK: Amazon Instant Video)

1 December 2015 Rob Buckley 9 Comments

In the US: Sundays, 10/9c, AMC
In the UK: Tuesdays, Amazon Instant Video

The famous physicist, Richard Feynman, used to talk about ‘cargo cult science’:

In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to imitate things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.

I’d like to propose ‘cargo cult television’ to describe shows like Into The Badlands – they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of television or specific genres of television, but they’re missing something essential. In the specific case of Into The Badlands, it’s trying its level best to be a Hong Kong martial arts movie. It’s got a star of Hong Kong martial arts movies (Daniel Wu). It’s got a script derived from a work of classic Chinese literature (Journey Into The West). It’s even got trademark manoeuvres and stunt scenes lifted almost wholesale from Hong Kong martial arts movies. It’s even got a bit of magic.

But it’s just not a Hong Kong martial arts movie. It’s missing something essential. 

Some things, actually. Enough fights per episode. Speed of execution. Engaging, original scripts. Even the magic’s been used only once in the three episodes we’ve had so far. 

Don’t get me wrong – it’s very beautiful to look at. The fight scenes even achieve a level of beauty themselves. But just like The Matrix before it, every blow lands without weight. Unlike The Matrix, though, there’s nothing to fill the gap beyond a feudal society where everyone goes around punching everyone as a ‘Clipper’ or a ‘Colt’ (Clipper in training), works in a bar or a field, or is a sex slave. And because it’s AMC, we’re already halfway through the first season of six episodes and we haven’t even entered the Badlands*. I’m assuming that’ll be somewhere around season four. 

The show has at least improved a bit since the first episode, having remembered women exist and might not all want to be prostitutes or wives in our dystopian future. There were times when I even became engrossed at points.

But ultimately, this is a poor imitation of a genre that throws out 50 or so movies a year, almost all of them more interesting and more exciting than Into The Badlands. All the same, it’s on Sunday, so what else you going to watch?

Barrometer rating: 3
Rob’s prediction: It’s AMC. Like a dinosaur, it’ll take about two years before it realises it needs to cancel the show

* Confusingly, we may already be in the Badlands and we actually have to leave the Badlands on our future journey

What have you been watching? Including Chicago Med, Ant-Man and The Bridge

29 November 2015 Rob Buckley 27 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.

All these new shows coming out at the same time is not very helpful. Even with Thanksgiving in the US knocking a whole bunch of shows out of action, I haven’t got further than the first episode of The Man In The High Castle, and the Black Friday dumping of WE TV’s South of Hell means I haven’t watched any of it. I also haven’t had a chance to watch last night’s Doctor Who and The Bridge. Oh well. 

I might discuss this phenomenon more on Monday.

But this week, I did watch the first episode of The Art of More (US: Crackle) and review the entire first season of Jessica Jones (Netflix), which ain’t bad. And after the jump, I’ll be reviewing the latest episodes of Ash vs Evil Dead, Blindspot, Grandfathered, Into The Badlands, Legends, Limitless and Supergirl, as well as last weekend’s episodes of Doctor Who and The Bridge.

I also watched the first episode of another new show.

Chicago Med (US: NBC)
A spin-off from Chicago PD which itself was a spin-off from Chicago Fire, this hospital procedural from the Dick Wolf school of entirely predictable institution-revering has already had a backdoor pilot in Chicago Fire and now it’s heading off all by itself. I barely need to describe the set-up – it’s an emergency department, in which very poor character actors turn up each week pretending to be ill, so that various medical professionals can work their hardest to defeat the system, cure whatever illnesses they have and show how damn awesome they are, without having to fill out a single form or charge a dime.

Surprisingly, every illness also presents an Important Moral Issue – here’s a surrogate mother who signed a contract giving medical attorneyship to the parents of the baby… except now she needs an operation to save her life that might kill the baby! What choice will the parents make and how will it affect the Pregnant Doctor?

As well as the cameos from Chicago Fire cast members, including David Eigenberg who’s now done all three shows, we have a regular bunch of competitive doctors, all trying to out-awesome each other. Central to all this is newbie Colin Donnell (Tommy Merlin from Arrow), who’s just so awesome, although his ‘fluent Spanish’ seems to consist mainly of speaking Spanish for two sentences with someone who only speaks Spanish before switching back into English to force them to carry on falteringly in English, too. There’s also Oliver Platt and S Epatha Merkerson, Laurie Holden having jumped ship twixt pilot and series. There’s also a bunch of young ‘uns whose job is to be rubbish so they can be told what to do by Team Awesome and some honourary members of Team Awesome, who we’re supposed to think are awesome, but who largely patronise and interrupt their patients, rather than listen to them.

Probably the best thing about it, about from a thoroughly entertaining cameo by Rahm Emmanuel to open the new ED, is that it’s thoroughly ludicrous, with Donnell rescuing everyone in a crash on The Loop and then sewing stitches into his own arm, to show how awesome he is, despite being surrounded by an entire team of trained nurses and doctors, all of whom have two working hands and aren’t in a lot of pain. It’s also reasonably likeable, unlike ‘Dick Central’, aka Code Black. Otherwise, utterly generic, which seems to be NBC new policy – to be fair, it also seems to be working for them.

I also watched a movie:

Ant-Man (2015) (iTunes)
The latest Marvel movie continues efforts to raid the B-team of characters, here with Paul Rudd playing the titular Ant-Man. He’s a social justice warrior sent to prison for burgling big companies, and comes out unable to get a job. Fortunately, former 1980s Ant-Man Michael Douglas’s slightly mental pupil is trying to create an army based on Douglas’ shrinking technology, so Douglas enlists Rudd to steal the technology back and make sure it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands. This is despite having a daughter (Evangeline Lilly from Lost and The Hobbit movies) who’s so much more qualified for the job than Rudd, she has to spend the entire movie teaching him what to do.

The film is somewhat unusual in being one long heist movie, albeit involving a criminal who can shrink in size and enlist ants to do his bidding. It also eschews some of the standard Marvel tropes, in having a relatively sedate Big Battle at the end, one that’s played for laughs and which rapidly and even more unusually turns into the final act of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Most of this oddness can probably be laid at the door of the movie’s original director, Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Scott Pilgrim, Spaced), who was ejected from the project for creative differences, and while replacement director Payton Reed doesn’t do a bad job, Ant-Man is a bit too ordinary in its ordinariness, right down to removing all the references to the superhero’s dumb name that were interspersed throughout the trailers.

For Marvel fans, there’s plenty of cameos and references to both the other movies and the comics, but this feels like a somewhat ordinary addition to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, one that could quite easily have been a Black Widow movie to greater effect.

Continue reading “What have you been watching? Including Chicago Med, Ant-Man and The Bridge”