TV reviews

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

The BarrometerA Barrometer rating of 4

Third-episode verdict: Agent X (US: TNT)

17 November 2015 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

In the US: Sundays, 9/8c, TNT

I’m starting to wonder this season if there’s any point in anyone reviewing just the first episodes of new TV shows. It was always a slightly questionable area, given how series can get better or worse over time. That’s why the blog gave birth to first the Carusometer and then the Barrometer to measure TV quality over time. But now shows are simply deciding to become different shows from the second episodes. Review just the first episode? You’re almost reviewing a different show now.

Agent X is a case in point. It’s not a show that’s actually got much better over its first three episodes, but it has become different. The first episode – first two in fact – was clearly an attempt to do an American James Bond, albeit with more than a hint of National Treasure, with Sharon Stone becoming vice president of the United States, only to discover there’s a secret article of the Constitution that gives her responsibility over a secret agent, who covertly sorts out US enemies, foreign and domestic. Unfortunately, said ‘Agent X’ is played by the most average US TV actor imaginable, Jeff Hephner, and the infinitely more interesting Stone gets to do little but turn up to parties and make phone calls. Meanwhile, her helper monkey Gerald McRaney tries to do Simon & Simon again, but without another Simon to help him, making it a lot less funny than it was in the 80s.

James Bond was an odd choice for inspiration, particularly given the show was created and is exec produced by William Blake Herron, who co-wrote The Bourne Identity. Indeed, both Herron and TNT seem to have thought so, too, because episode three switched from Bond to Bourne, right down to the music and the occasional shakey-cam. It also decided to add a whole new sub-plot about a secret conspiracy against the government from within, one involving Stone’s deceased husband. 

The change is probably a good idea. Unfortunately, Herron and co are the wrong people to implement it. While Hephner is better suited to the ‘average Joe’ concept of a Bourne – who in the books, at least, had surgery to make him look more average – he’s still an utterly uninspiring and implausible action lead, up there with Chris Vance’s TV Transporter in the scheme of things, but not even that charismatic or handy in a fight scene. Not that the stunt scenes are any good, being bereft of good direction or innovation. They try to be clever, but ‘man hiding behind a series of doors and then opening them’ isn’t as clever or interesting as the show thinks it is.

Stone’s still relegated to doing nothing much; McRaney just gets to growl and mentor Hephner into being duller; and it’s all still deep bobbins of the highest order. I might hang around for another episode or two to watch Stone and see if the conspiracy arc goes anywhere interesting. But to be honest, it’s going to be a bit of a chore.

Barrometer rating: 4
TMINE prediction: Cancelled by the end of the season or subjected to a major Legends-style reboot for season two

What have you been watching? Including Spectre, Master of None, Flesh and Bone, and You’re The Worst

13 November 2015 Rob Buckley 9 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.

The first of the mid-mid season shows made their way on to our screens/Internet connections this week. Elsewhere, I’ve reviewed the first episodes of Agent X (US: TNT), Donny! (US: USA) and Blood and Water (Canada: Omni). However, they’re not the only new shows that have started this week:

Master of None (Netflix)
Aziz Ansari’s best known from Parks & Recreation, but here he’s playing a thinly disguised version of himself – Dev, a small-time Indian actor living in New York and trying to get his break in a business that’s still not ready to accept Indian actors as anything except taxi drivers, doctors and convenience-store clerks, and then only with Indian accents. This is something that Ansari has one or two opinions about, which he shares with his other Indian friends, as well as his Asian friend and black lesbian friend. 

It would be tempting to assume this is basically Ansari’s version of Curb Your Enthusiasm, but actually, it’s far more reasoned, genteel, likable Curb Your Enthusiasm, with each episode almost self-contained and exploring not just discrimination against Indians by the media, but a different facet of modern life, during all of which Ansari tries to be reasonably respectful and thoughtful in extremis. The first episode looks at kids and parenthood, with Ansari discovering that being the fun uncle only works for an hour or so, and that a full afternoon looking after kids is more than he can bear. However, of the six episodes I’ve watched so far, it’s actually the least funny. 

Fortunately, things pick up after that, with some genuinely amusing episodes, particularly one that sees Colin Salmon doing a ‘Patrick Stewart on Extras‘, and Parents, which is a spot-on look at the relationships between older parents and young adults, particularly first-generation immigrant adults. Guest stars including Claire Danes, H Jon Benjamin and Noah Emmerich also give the show a greater pedigree than you’d otherwise have thought.

While Ansari’s squeaky voice gets annoying after a while, this is the first Netflix comedy so far that’s been worthy of the name, and I’ll be trying to watch the rest of it as soon as I’ve finished writing this.

Flesh and Bone (US: Starz)
Short version: Showgirls meets Whiplash at the ballet
Long version: A surprisingly loving, beautifully shot, eight-part mini-series about an abused young woman (Sarah Hay from Black Swan) who runs away from home to make it big at the ballet. Her talent is spotted by the head choreographer (Ben Daniels), who decides to make her a star, but he has very strict training methods. 

All of which is lovely and beautifully done, with some excellent acting, and even though I’m absolutely not a ballet person, some of the dancing was absolutely stunning and even moving. However, so far, the long version doesn’t sound Starz enough, does it? 

So first add in copious nudity, sex and drug-taking, lots of mean girl scenes, maybe a hint of lesbianism. Then have new girl ballerina equivocating about whether to moonlight with another ballerina as a stripper to make ends meet. Then add in some truly hilariously bad scenes, such as when the choreographer is vigorously bumming another bloke over his desk while repeating to himself things like “I am the master of all I survey.”

I think I would have watched this were it not for that kind of epic stupidity and excess that tend to dog Starz shows. But I doubt I’ll get much further with it now.

I’ve passed a third-episode verdict on Supergirl (US: CBS; UK: Sky1) elsewhere, so after the jump, a look at the latest episodes of Arrow, Ash vs Evil Dead, The Beautiful Lie, Blindspot, Doctor Who, The Flash, Grandfathered, The Last Kingdom, Limitless, The Player and You’re The Worst. But first, a movie:

Spectre (2015) (at cinemas now)
I actually saw this last week but completely forget to include it in my round-up. That should give you a clue as to what I thought about it.

As the name suggests, this introduces old Bond’s eventual arch-enemy Spectre to us, except here it turns out that it’s been Spectre orchestrating everything from Casino Royale onwards, for all kinds of pointless personal reasons involving Bond. Meanwhile, Andrew Scott (Moriarty in Sherlock) is a new surveillance-obsessed bigwig intent on unifying MI5 and MI6 and getting rid of the 00 section in the process.

It’s fine. Nothing great bar Craig and a marvellous four-minute long pseudo-tracking shot at the beginning, but fine, although there are parts of it that will make you feel like a great big chunk of story has been removed. It’s more or less the same structurally and thematically as Skyfall. There’s one age-appropriate Bond girl (Monica Bellucci), one age-inappropriate Bond girl (Léa Seydoux), a baddie who finally looks like he can take on this muscled incarnation of Bond (Dave Bautista), and Christoph Waltz does a homeopathically weak version of his usual routine, as the head of Spectre. I would give you the name of his character, but you can guess it.

Spectre‘s basically the conclusion of the Daniel Craig James Bond series, which has been setting up all the aspects of the Bond character from the previous films, just so that he can retire now it’s all been set up. Of the four Craig movies, it’s probably the second or third best, and like the previous Logan-Mendes Skyfall, it actually seems to enjoy the sexist and hokey aspects of the old series that it’s trying to reintroduce, despite the pains Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace took to try to make Craig’s Bond a modern hero.

Basically, meh.

Continue reading “What have you been watching? Including Spectre, Master of None, Flesh and Bone, and You’re The Worst”

Canadian TV

Review: Blood and Water 1×1-1×2 (Canada: Omni)

12 November 2015 Rob Buckley 6 Comments


In Canada: Sundays, 10pm, Omni

Everyone knows that Canada is a bilingual country: while most provinces are majority English-speakers, many have sizeable numbers of French-speakers and Quebec, of course, is 80% Francophone. What’s less well known is that Canada is a very diverse country – Toronto, Canada’s largest city at 2.7 million, is claimed by many to be the most ethnically diverse city in the world, with 50% of its population foreign-born; and of the country’s 35 million inhabitants, more than 1 million speak a Chinese language at home.

Not that you’d know that from the average Canadian TV show, of course. 

While the TV shows themselves fail to reflect that diversity on-screen, the country’s TV networks do their best to serve the community. The Omni network airs programmes in 20 languages to communities encompassing at least 20 cultures, ethnic programming comprises 60% of the Omni stations’ schedules. However, until now, this has largely been foreign acquisitions, sport and news.

But Omni’s now breaking out into original drama with Blood and Water, one of the first, if not the first trilingual dramas to grace Western TV screens. Shot with an almost entirely Chinese-Canadian cast in English, Cantonese and Mandarin, it’s a cop drama that sees Steph Song (Achar!, jPod and former FHM Asia #1 Sexiest Woman in the World) having to investigate the murder of a prominent billionaire’s junkie son, experiencing both political and cultural pressure from inside and outside the police force as she does so. She also has to cope with her recent diagnosis of uterine cancer, as well as the disrespect and different working methods of her more experienced white, male partner (Peter Outerbridge, who’s best known from ReGenesis but was also the original Murdoch of The Murdoch Mysteries). 

Despite being only eight episodes, neatly bundled into 25-minutes chunks, the show’s less compelling than you’d hope, almost fetishing its trilingualism, with there more drama in who’s choosing to speak which language when and to whom than there is in most other scenes. Song’s personal issues make you worry more about the quality of Canada’s much-vaunted healthcare system than they do about her, while her being the universal butt-end of both civilian and cop disrespect lacks anything by way of subtlety.

It is thoughtful, though, lovingly shot and the interrogation scenes do make you feel like you’re learning how police use psychology to get information from people. All the same, despite its virtues, I’m not sure the mystery, the characters or the politics are compelling enough to make me want to watch any more of it.

US TV

Mini-review: Donny! 1×1 (US: USA)

12 November 2015 Rob Buckley 2 Comments


In the US: Tuesdays, 10.30/9.30c, USA

“In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes”

– Andy Warhol, 1969

“In the future, everyone will have their own TV show for 15 minutes”

– Me, now

Donny Deutsch isn’t someone I’d ever heard of until Donny! I had been quite interested in seeing Donny!, thinking it might be a new sitcom starring Donny Osmond. After all, how many famous Donnys are there, and any self-titled show that ends in an exclamation mark surely has to involve someone famous and be a sitcom, right?

But no, I soon realised my mistake. “That’s not Donny Osmond,” I thought. And I was right – you don’t get much passed me.

A Google search later and I soon discovered that Donny Deutsch is a former advertising executive and a regular guest on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, a judge on NBC’s version of The Apprentice, and the former host of CNBC’s The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch and CNN’s (Get to) The Point. 

There you go – that’s me educated.

Anyway, apparently, having done all this now qualifies him to have his own sitcom. He’s not an actor, but having seen Larry David do Curb Your Enthusiasm and been an adman for years, both he and the USA Network thought he could do something similar. 

Donny! sees Donny Deutsch playing a version of himself who hosts a Dr Phil-esque/Jeremy Kyle-esque talk show called Donny! Something of a narcissistic idiot, this Donny is surrounded by much smarter women who have to pick up the pieces of the disasters he creates by sexting stalkers, offering to sleep with his daughter’s teachers to get her out of trouble or trying to boost his ratings by confessing that he once had a mole that could have become a precancerous growth.

Then, every so often, he turns to camera to try to sell us something. Not an in-show product at that, but a real product that real-world advertisers are paying him to flog to us. And everyone on the show wonders who he’s talking to.

I so hope Campbell’s soup gets in on the act.

I’m not quite sure what USA was thinking. All its recent comedies have been awful (eg Benched, Sirens, Playing House), yet here it is, trying again, with what is pretty lukewarm material at best. I’m assuming it simply thought that given that Starz (Blunt Talk), Showtime (The Comedians), ABC (The Muppets) and Lifetime (UnREAL) have all recently had TV shows about fake TV shows, it needed one, too. Oh, yes – and Deutsch stumped up $175,000 to fund his own trial episode.

Whatever the reason, despite having its heart roughly in the right place and having some traces of imagination, this is six episodes of completely avoidable narcissism that Larry David did better. Hell, Jack Dee and even Ken Finkleman did better. Not Paul Reiser, mind – I’ll give Deutsch that much.

Anyway, all the funny bits are in the trailer below.

The BarrometerA Barrometer rating of 3

Third-episode verdict: Supergirl (US: CBS; UK: Sky1)

12 November 2015 Rob Buckley 29 Comments

In the US: Mondays, 8/7c, CBS
In the UK: Thursdays, 8pm, Sky1

Supergirl has been something of a roller coaster ride. First, there was the trailer, which made pretty much everyone go “WTF?”, given how close it was to the Saturday Night Live Black Widow parody sketch. Then there was relief and excitement as the first episode revealed that the trailer had been deceptive and the show was smarter and a lot more fun than the trailer had indicated. Then we hit the downslope that were episodes two and three.

So I’m going to do something that the show itself does almost every five minutes and really shouldn’t – compare it with Superman. Or at least Smallville (and various other CW superhero shows). Despite being made by Greg Berlanti (producer of The Flash and Arrow for The CW) for CBS, a TV network that can probably spend more per programme than The CW can spend on its entire drama output, Supergirl is inept superhero fare that ignores pretty much everything Smallville and those others shows did right.

Berlanti and co probably thought they knew what they were doing from the outset, having done so well before and working with a reasonably well known property – and that’s part of the problem. Laziness. The show feels like it’s going through the motions. It’s a Smallville monster of the week show, filled with characters from the Superman universe whom we’re expected to both know about and love, despite the show putting in minimal effort.

Despite through necessity being a ‘kryptonite freak of the week’ show, Smallville worked because it obeyed some simple rules (at least at first): don’t insult your audience’s intelligence, provide characters that the audience can love, tease out the mythos but respect it, and if your budget isn’t enough to convince the audience a man (or girl) can fly, don’t try to, but instead do special effects you can afford. 

With its micro-budget, Smallville was at pains to make the relationships between its characters fun, interesting and plausible, giving us very little ‘big bad’ action per week in favour of ‘how did you feel about that?’ scenes, all of which could work nicely on Supergirl, too. Instead, we have some of the most painful superhero dialogue committed to our TV screens since Nightman, coupled with special effects that would have looked bad 10 years ago and fight scenes that appear to be performed by people who have never even been to a tae-bo class. It’s embarrassing. Maybe Arrow has used up all the good stuntmen and stuntwomen, but for a show about someone with superspeed, those fights aren’t half slow.

There’s also the constant referencing of Superman, even though we’re well into the third episode. For a show that thought it necessary to bring in Cat Grant and Jimmy Olsen from the Superman universe to give the show a headstart, to in the third episode still be making comparisons between Superman and Supergirl and then to bring in Lois Lane’s sister is to be lacking in confidence in yourself. Maybe that’s deliberate, with a character who’s still discovering herself, but it would help if Supergirl really had faith in its heroine and her ability to interest people in her own right, as well as in establishing its own mythos (or using Supergirl’s own comic strip characters).

To its credit, the show does have a lot going for it in its cast: Melissa Benoist is a perfect Supergirl, while Mehcad Brooks is a superior, convention-defying Jimmy Olsen. Calista Flockhart brings the right kind of humour to the role of the Devil Wears Prada-esque Cat Grant, although Tracy Scoggins’ Lois & Clark Cat Grant got better lines and was more believable back in the day. Laura Benanti in the dual role of Supergirl’s mother and evil aunt is normally brilliant, although not in this, so I’m hoping she’ll get the hang of the show in later episodes.

It’s also fun, rather than a gloomfest. True, that fun is at the expense of any kind of pretence at realism in any area, and while the show can obviously play the ‘it’s about an indestructible alien from another planet working as an intern on a newspaper’ card, it would be nice to think that, for example:

  • There would be some kind of resemblance to publishing as we know it
  • She wouldn’t confess her secret to pretty much anyone within earshot
  • She wouldn’t get not just one but two super well-equipped secret bases
  • She wouldn’t start running out of a room full of people removing her glasses and letting her hair down as soon as there was any hint at danger

There’s suspension of disbelief and then there’s taking the mick. 

But it is fun, at least, and although it takes constant references to Superman to show it, it does at least have a feminist conscience, which is probably enough to keep me watching. All the same, this could have been so much better than it is, as the pilot episode partially showed. I’m hoping for a reboot later down the line, or else this will be the second Supergirl who’ll get grounded too soon.

Barrometer rating: 3
TMINE prediction: Despite a record-breaking start, ratings are plummeting quickly, so this could be a one-season wonder in the making