TV reviews

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

The Art of More
Streaming TV

Review: The Art of More 1×1 (US: Crackle; UK: Virgin TV Ultra HD)

26 November 2015 Rob Buckley 2 Comments

In the US: All 10 episodes available from Crackle
In the UK: Thursdays, 10pm, Virgin TV Ultra HD. Starts September 20

As Powers and Yahoo’s resurrection of Community recently showed us, the arrival of Netflix and Amazon Instant Video on the scene has forced those Internet TV providers who were formerly happy to simply chuck out short-form webisodes to leave that profitless game to YouTube and move into long-form. Crackle is the latest to join their ranks thanks to The Art of More, in which former US soldier Christian Cooke (epic sh*tfests ITV’s Demons and Starz’s Magic City) manages to parlay his skills in looting Iraqi art museums into a legit job at a posh auction house run by Cary Elwes (The Princess Bride).

Groomed (in all senses of the word, probably even the horsey ones) by Elwes to be a proper sophisticate who can tie an Oxford knot, the high-flying Cooke’s world starts to fall apart quicker than you can say, “Lady Jane! Tinker! We need a divvy!”, when one of his former Iraqi comrades sneaks into the US, bringing with him more dodgy pickings and threatening to expose Cooke’s sordid past. Things aren’t helped any for Cooke by the presence on the scene of art collector and wannabe politician Dennis Quaid (Vegas), the proud possessor of ‘f*ck off money’, and Cooke’s rival Kate Bosworth (Superman Returns), both of whom want to give him a good kicking but for different reasons.

All of which might be interesting if movie-length and chopped up into Crackle-sized 15 minute episodes. It’s certainly got good production values, has a good fight scene and could easily pass for a TNT show if you didn’t know better.

The trouble is that it’s 10x45m episodes. Even one was hard-going, because it’s not a well written show. You’re not going to learn anything about art, business, politics or anything much else from it. Scenes designed to make characters seem like they know something about art read like they’ve been cramming Wikipedia a few moments earlier.

The characters are also utterly unengaging. Cooke is not someone you especially want to route for in pretty much anything he does, but here he’s playing someone who loots museums of their precious treasures so that rich people can keep them to themselves. He’s also deploying his annoying American accent.

Elwes* at least gets to be English, but while his lips may be mouthing atrocious dialogue, his eyes are screaming “Here are the details of my bank account for your wire transfer.” You can only feel sorry for him in this.

Bosworth’s character is almost a relic from the 80s. She’s the kind of female high-flyer who’s continual outfoxed by the hero and has no tangible skills. She doesn’t even get any screentime or scenes in which she could ever reveal she had the skills claimed for her, because the show’s all about the annoying Cooke. But just as in the 80s everyone knew that was very un-PC, someone male has to explain every five minutes just how awesome she is and how she definitely didn’t sleep her way to the top… yes, I am sleeping with her but she definitely got to that position… no, her position… no! her job!… through sheer talent. How dare you think otherwise?

Quaid? He thinks he’s Robert de Niro in Casino or Michael Douglas in Wall Street. He’s actually closer to Alan Sugar in The Apprentice.

Direction is pedestrian. Editing is jarring – it sometimes feels like you’ve missed something vital. I blinked and nine months disappeared just like that. Plotting generally revolves around something looking like a better movie you once saw and the show hoping you fill in the gaps using that movie, instead of whatever’s actually on-screen.

Still, it’s free, provided you register for a Crackle account and live in the US, so criticising it too much is a bit churlish. All the same, I won’t be bothering to click the link for episode 2 anytime soon. There’s Man In the High Castle to watch instead.

Here’s a trailer. Weirdly, I was even more bored by the end of it than at the end of the first episode. I wonder if Crackle’s short-form stuff is even worse…

* For transparency’s sake, I’ll point out that Elwes is a distant relative of mine. I’m pretty sure it didn’t influence my review of this, but you must decide that for yourselves

Streaming TV

Season review: Marvel’s Jessica Jones (Netflix)

24 November 2015 Rob Buckley 28 Comments

In the US/UK: All 13 episodes are available on Netflix

When superhero comic books first became popular in the 20th century, it was largely because they were fantasies. Male fantasies for boys. Superman may have been a fantasy of immigration, but it was also about a mild-mannered man who could never reveal his all-conquering power to anyone, not even the woman he loved from afar. Of course, if she knew what he was really like, then she’d fall into his arms without a moment’s hesitation.

Batman? A boy orphaned by crime who devotes himself to destroying those who would make him feel frightened. The Hulk? A ‘milksop’ scientist with a terrible temper that others better not unleash by bullying him. Spider-man? A nerdy boy with pretty much the same issues as Superman. Captain America? A man who could defeat the Nazis while remaining true and good and honourable.

You get the picture. Lots and lots of power fantasies for lonely boys.

Superheroines took a while to appear and represented different kinds of fantasy. The first, Wonder Woman, was originally intended as both a male and female fantasy – a precursor to a better, future, female-dominated world, with Wonder Woman an icon of feminine power that women could embrace and men could accept. But with a slightly kinky subtext and male authors, her popularity often stemmed from… other sources. Future superheroines didn’t fare much better, and frequently fared much worse.

Which meant for decades, many girls and women found comic books to be female-unfriendly areas that were practically a panopticon of the male gaze. There were plenty who became involved or who became readers, but they were the exceptions. And although male authors came along who tried to make female characters less fantasies than they had been before, that was pretty much the rule.

That was even the case when comic books started being adapted into movies. Think Sue Storm perpetually having to disrobe in the street in Fantastic Four. Think Black Widow in lingerie shots in Iron Man 2. That Wonder Woman movie? Only just being made, just as we’re about to get our third series of Batman and Superman movies in the past 40 years. And try to find superheroine merchandise from those movies for your daughters if you dare.

But the times have been a changing, of course. Have a look on Facebook and you’ll discover that more than 50% of the people who identify as comic book fans are women. And while only 3% of the people who’ll step into a comic book store are women, more than half of those who read digital comics are women.

Marvel, of course, has been doing rather well at the movie with its comic book adaptations. However, it’s got considerable stick over the years for not giving any superheroines their own movies – particularly Black Widow. Now that’s changing, with a Captain Marvel movie due… in 2019, a full 11 years after Iron Man came out.

On TV, of course, we’ve already had Marvel’s Agent Carter, except she’s not a superheroine, per se. But finally, we have our first, fully fledged superheroine TV show, the second of this year’s Marvel’s Netflix ‘Defenders’ shows following Daredevil – Jessica Jones. And what’s interesting about Jessica Jones is that despite being based on a character and a story created by two men, I think what we have is the first instance of an on-screen superheroine who’s there for a female audience and who’s a female fantasy.

Or should that be nightmare? It could be both. After all, it’s got David Tennant in it.

Beware: some spoilers ahoy.

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What have you been watching? Including Master of None, You’re The Worst, Arrow, Doctor Who and Limitless

21 November 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.

I’m starting to lag a bit, as you may have noticed by the fact I’m writing this on a Saturday. It hasn’t helped that Netflix put out all of Marvel’s Jessica Jones yesterday, at the same time that Amazon Instant Video decided to do the same with The Man In The High Castle, both of which I’ll hopefully be reviewing in full next week. I was also still having to deal with the second half of the first season of Master of None.

So although I managed to review Into The Badlands (US: AMC; UK: Amazon Instant Video) this week, I’ve yet to get round to either Chicago Med – a hospital spin-off from Chicago PD which itself was a spin-off from Chicago Fire – and Crackle’s auction house drama The Art of More. Hopefully, I’ll get round to them on Monday, but on the strengths of the reviews of The Art of More and the strengths of both Chicago Fire and Chicago PD, I can’t imagine they’ll be shows worth sticking with.

All the same, and despite the fact a few shows are coming to an end anyway as December looms on the horizon, I think it’s time to make some room in my schedule by deleting a few programmes from my list, since The Bridge/Bron/Broen is returning to the UK tonight, guaranteeing I have two more hours of viewing every week to get through. And I haven’t even tried The Last Panthers on Sky Atlantic yet.

So I don’t think I can be bothered to watch the second episode of Donny!, and I think The Last Kingdom and The Beautiful Lie can be dropped without the world ending – Heaven knows I’ve been patient enough with them, as they’ve taken a long time to not do a huge amount so far.

I passed a third-episode verdict on the marginally improving Agent X this week, but I don’t think it really merits a second chance in this time-constrained time, despite the presence of Sharon Stone. I’m also going to give further episodes of Blood and Water a miss, since although it’s quite a brief show and it’s started to find its feet this week by turning into a sort of ‘Chinese-Canadian Detective meets In Treatment‘, with whole episodes just multi-lingual, three-handed interrogation scenes at the police station, the actual crime being investigated just isn’t that interesting. 

I’ll let you know what happens with Ash Vs Evil Dead once I’ve watched the latest ep. Supergirl would be off the viewing list by now if it weren’t for the fact I’m watching it my wife so we can mock its atrocious dialogue and plotting. Grandfathered is just too variable but hits highs enough and is charming enough that I might stick with it for a while. Blindspot‘s on Mondays – that’s probably the only reason I’m watching it now.

But I’ll be reviewing the lastest episodes of them and Arrow, Doctor Who, The Flash, Limitless, Master of None, The Player, and You’re The Worst after the jump, so we can talk more about them there.

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Into The Badlands
US TV

Review: Into The Badlands 1×1 (US: AMC; UK: Amazon Instant Video)

19 November 2015 Rob Buckley 55 Comments


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

There is a famous paradox. Although Knight Rider claimed it was Zeno’s Paradox, it’s not. But it is at least a paradox. Here it is:

What happens when an unstoppable force hits an immovable object?

What’s the answer? Into the Badlands. How so? Because it’s an actual, real-world test of that paradox. It takes the unstoppable force that is the Hong Kong martial arts movie and confronts it with the immobable object of an AMC TV series.

Despite the likes of Indonesia’s The Raid coming along to challenge them, Hong Kong martial arts movies are, of course, the fastest genre in the world. If you have any interest in martial movies, you watch Hong Kong martial arts to see the best – and fastest – martial artists the silver screen has to offer. I’m most partial to classic Jet Li myself, but Donnie Yen, Sammo Hung, Jackie Chan et al have all formed part of my viewing habits since Jonathan Ross’s Son of The Incredibly Strange Film Show revealed their delights to me back in the 80s.

And the slowest genre in the world? AMC TV series. The network practically fetishises slowness:


Even its fastest shows – Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead, Better Call Saul – have a glacial chill to them, and that’s before we consider the almost geological time scales over which the likes of Mad Men, Hell on Wheels and Halt and Catch Fire operate.

And Into The Badlands is a deliberate attempt to bring these two genres together. Rather bizarrely the brainchild of Smallville creators Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, it stars Daniel Wu, an American actor but the star of dozens of Hong Kong martial arts movies.

The show is set in a post-apocalyptic America. This isn’t that surprising: martial arts date from before guns and are made largely redundant by the presence of guns, so a martial arts movie usually needs to have a reason for there to not be any guns – something somewhat problematic in modern-day and even historic America, but not so hard in a post-apocalyptic, post-technological society. Unles you turn the guns into a virtue, of course.

As with most other post-apocalyptic societies, everything’s become weirdly patriarchal and feudal in Into The Badlands, with seven ‘barons’ now running America, following a series of wars. Each has made their territory safe and stopped the wars by getting rid of guns. In return, everyone either learns how to be a ‘Clipper’ – martial arts soldier cops – assuming they’re male or goes to work in the fields picking poppies or getting married to the Baron.

Wu plays one such Clipper, who patrols the territories, enforcing the justice of his increasingly unstable, increasingly bewived Baron (Marton Csokas from Falcón, Rogue, The Equalizer, The Bourne Supremacy). One day, he comes across a peaceful boy sought after by another Baron, ‘The Widow’, only to discover that he gets superhero killing powers at odd moments. 

What will he do? WIll he take the boy into the lawless ‘Badlands’ between Barons’ terrorities, looking for the boy’s mother and answers to his own past? And will he do it before the Sun expands into a Red Giant and dies (aka the next AMC Upfronts)?

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The BarrometerA Barrometer rating of 2

Third-episode verdict: Ash Vs Evil Dead (US: Starz)

17 November 2015 Rob Buckley 12 Comments

In the US: Saturdays, 9pm EST, Starz
In the UK: Not yet acquired

Whatever else can be said about Starz’s Ash Vs Evil Dead, there’ll always be the fact that every week, it gives us Bruce Campbell, doing what he does best – fighting the Evil Dead. But the show has more than that. It has comedy. It has horror.

The precise ratio of comedy to horror varies with every episode. Most of the time, Ash Vs Evil Dead is quite funny but filled with a lot of gore, typically involving Bruce Campbell using his chainsaw-for-a-hand to chop off a head, disembowel something, etc. Watching Campbell do this, as his idiotic Ash character does something even more idiotic each week, is a joy to behold.

What it wasn’t until this week, though, was scary. Gory, yes. Scary no. But all credit to the show, as episode three gave us a demon rather than a zombie/Deadite, and was actually very creepy. It was less funny, but as I said, the ratio tends to vary.

What the show hasn’t yet worked out is how to make us give a toss about Campbell’s young helpers. Or the FBI agent chasing after them. And while it does have the obvious asset of Lucy Lawless in the cast, she only gets to show up for about a minute each episode – something that results from the fact each episode is only half an hour long, so there’s not much room for development or anything that properly services the main plot.

So Ash Vs Evil Dead‘s biggest asset is also its biggest problem: Bruce Campbell. It’s his show and there’s not much else that’s interesting about it. It’s fine as comedy-horror goes, and far more enjoyable compared to any other horror show on TV right now, but that comedy-horror only really works when Bruce is around.

I’ll certainly carry on watching it, because Bruce is Gold. But I can’t help but feel the show is coasting a little, getting by on Bruce when it could be doing a lot more. Maybe we’ll get that in time, once Lucy Lawless shows up in earnest to show the kids how it’s done. Then it might be dead good. See what I did there?

Barrometer rating: 2
TMINE’s prediction: Not as great as it could and should have been, but still top comedy-horror, and Starz has already renewed it for a second season.