TV reviews

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

US TV

Review: The Grinder 1×1 (US: Fox)

30 September 2015 Rob Buckley 4 Comments


In the US: Tuesdays, 8.30/7.30c, Fox

Stewart Sanderson (Fred Savage) has a problem. He’s an attorney without pizazz. He knows law as well as any attorney, but he’s got no gumption and can’t deliver arguments without using cue cards.

Stewart’s brother Dean Sanderson Jr (Rob Lowe) has a problem. A hugely famous actor from his days playing an attorney on The Grinder, he has charisma and fire but doesn’t know what to do with his life now his TV show is over.

Can you see where this is going?

Yep, it’s Pulaski and The World of Eddie Weary, except this time with attorneys, with Lowe and Savage joining forces to become one combined good attorney. As with those old UK shows, much of the humour relies on the show within a show, The Grinder, which sends up US dramatic conventions, giving us all the standard dramatic beats and excesses but played for laughs. It also sends up actors, with Lowe mocking himself and others by playing Dean as a self-centred brain donor who thinks that playing an attorney on TV makes him almost as good as the real thing.

Unfortunately, it’s not exactly rapier-sharp in its wit here. In fact, the in-show The Grinder is quite poor, not mocking anything in particular beyond an idea of legal shows from the 1980s, rather than anything more recent. At times, it looks more like an old Perry Mason, in fact.

But where the real The Grinder actually is funny is everything else. It’s quite fun when Lowe uses his ‘legal skills’ to negotiate increased popularity for his nephew at school. It does well when real life starts acting like a TV show, with Lowe learning a Very Important Lesson from some charged dialogue at a bar. It’s also good when Savage tries to act like he’s in a TV show and fails and when guest star Kumail Nanjiani (Silicon Valley) says more or less anything, but particularly when he challenges Lowe’s antics in court.

In fact, despite all expectations, it’s not either that central hook or Lowe and Savage you should be watching the show for but everything else. True, given how much airtime is devoted to Lowe, Savage and The Grinder, that’s not much by the end of the episode, but there are at least some funny moments in there.

It’s not exactly a huge recommendation from me, since I spent most of the episode wishing it was a whole lot funnier, but The Grinder doesn’t fall completely flat on its face in this first outing. Give it a try, but don’t have huge expectations.

US TV

Review: Blood & Oil 1×1 (US: ABC)

29 September 2015 Rob Buckley 3 Comments


In the US: Sundays, 9/8c, ABC

‘Rags to riches’ stories have been a popular genre for centuries, with the (literally) poor audience getting to imagine what life would be like for them if they were suddenly rich, typically showing that they have some inner morality from years of abjection and hard work that makes them in some way better than those who had been born into wealth.

Think Cinderella, Aladdin, Great Expectations, Oliver Twist or anything by Catherine Cookson, just for starters.

It’s a worthy genre, but one with rules. So to a certain extent you have to admire Blood & Oil for breaking possibly the most iron clad of them all. 

It stars Chase Crawford (Gossip Girl) and Rebecca Rittenhouse (Red Band Society) as a young working class couple who go to seek their fortune in the North Dakota oil rush, hoping to make it big with a laundromat for the no-doubt dirty workers. Unfortunately, their dream and most of their possessions soon evaporate into thin air.

More fortunately, just as things look their worst, an opportunity arises through which they might be able to make it really rich through oil tycoon Don Johnson (Miami Vice, Nash Bridges) and his wife Amber Valletta (Revenge).

Will they succeed? Will they make it big in life? Will their marriage be ripped asunder by all the temptations before them? 

I don’t know and I largely don’t care, because of Blood & Oil‘s horrific transgression. Because our heroes, the one’s we’re supposed to root for, are complete fucking idiots.

Continue reading “Review: Blood & Oil 1×1 (US: ABC)”

US TV

Review: Quantico 1×1 (US: ABC; UK: Alibi)

28 September 2015 Rob Buckley 5 Comments


In the US: Sundays, 10/9c, ABC
In the UK: Acquired by Alibi

The TV business can be risky, particularly the US broadcast TV business where a show can be cancelled after just a few episodes and lose millions of dollars in the process.

As a result, broadcast networks tend to want to play safe. If they find something that does well in the ratings, something that usually hasn’t strayed too far from the previous year’s not especially adventurous offerings, they’ll try to create something relatively similar the next year to capitalise upon it.

This isn’t a good idea, but if you’re a TV exec, you’re not likely to lose your job over it, since you can always say: “It was a safe bet. Hell, the last one did well and this was pretty similar. Who could have predicted it would tank?”

Last year’s “something quite close to lots of things you’ve already seen but which is a bit different” on ABC was How To Get Away With Murder, which was basically a remake of the 1970s law school show Paper Chase except with a more diverse cast and added murder. That was popular enough that it got renewed by the network. That, of course, means that this year we need something that’s quite close to How To Get Away With Murder but which is a bit different.

The setting and general structure of How To Get Away With Murder is this: a team of diverse recruits to a prestigious school, all competing with one another to be the best, with the action running in two timelines, one before, one after a crime. What Quantico stupidly does is think you can transfer that from a law school to Quantico and have more or less the same kinds of people and principles. 

You’ll probably have heard of Quantico: it trains the FBI, the DEA and the Marines. When you hear the name ‘Quantico’, you probably think of something like this:

What you probably don’t think of is Muslims in hijab climbing assault courses; people with lots of deep, dark, borderline felony secrets; mean girls picking on their teachers for not being sexy and marriagable enough; and an Indian superstar trying to make it big in the US as an FBI recruit accused of committing a 9/11-level atrocity and trying to prove it was actually one of her classmates.

Here’s a trailer. Be warned – the show’s single redeeming feature, Dougray Scott, has been replaced by Josh Hopkins from Cougar Town. 

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What have you been watching? Including Blackhat, 800 Words, Y Gwyll, Doctor Who and Continuum

25 September 2015 Rob Buckley 13 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.

And relax. It’s here. The Fall 2015-16 season is here. And I’ve got covered.

Elsewhere, I’ve reviewed all of this week’s new programmes in glorious detail:

Wow. Ain’t that a lot? I’m actually impressed with myself there. I’m about to be even more impressed: after the jump, I’ll be reviewing all this week’s regulars, too: 800 Words, The Bastard Executioner, Continuum, Doctor Who, Y Gwyll and You’re The Worst.

But before I even get to those, I even found the time to watch a movie. It’s like I just fed 5,000 people with some cod in breadcrumbs, isn’t it?

Blackhat (2015) (iTunes)
Although to be honest, I wish I hadn’t. I love Michael Mann. Chris Hemsworth is great in Thor. But Michael Mann directing a movie about hacking in which Chris Hemsworth is the main hacker? Oh dear.

Still, that’s not the most oh dear thing about Blackhat – that would be the fact it’s basically a Chinese co-production in which Hemsworth and Mann are almost hitchhikers, tagging along for the ride. The plot is that the two Chinese leads (Leehom Wang, Wei Tang) who work for the benevolent Chinese police come over to the US after one of their power stations blows up to find out what they can from the man who engineered the malware that caused it: Wang’s former college roommate Hemsworth. He then has to track down criminals who may be almost anywhere in the world, with any target and any aim.

Mann does his best to both understand computer crime and make it interesting, but he’s no Sam Esmail and this is no Mr Robot. Without sufficient purchase on the material, Mann just goes through the motions. There’s a perfunctory romance between Tang and Hemsworth for no good reason. The merry band just fly from SE Asian country to country on sightseeing tours, turning up in the middle of beautiful looking locations for no genuinely good reason. And the story eventually sort of ends, not like Heat but like that episode of The Wire in which Omar gets attacked in prison. You barely know the film’s finished.

It looks beautiful, of course, given Mann’s presence. But it’s soporific, mildly propagandist, doesn’t know its material and almost never manages to excite.

Continue reading “What have you been watching? Including Blackhat, 800 Words, Y Gwyll, Doctor Who and Continuum”

US TV

Review: Heroes Reborn 1×1 (US: NBC)

25 September 2015 Rob Buckley 5 Comments

In the US: Thursdays, 8/7c, NBC

It’s probably almost impossible for the kids of today to appreciate just how exciting Heroes was when it first started, all the way back in 2006, when this blog was still quite young itself and had none of those twinges in its knee.

How fabulous it was to have an intelligent TV show that took superheroes seriously. How we thrilled at its weekly cliffhangers. How we marvelled at its pacing, its interesting characters, its interlinked serial narrative. How exciting was that! Each episode we’d wait to see which characters would turn up, what secret powers would be revealed and how it would all tie in with what we’d already seen.

The BBC acquired it very quickly, created its own tie-in TV series of documentaries, promised to simulcast it with the US and more, we were that desperate for Heroes content. As was the rest of the world. The cast went on world tours, where they met people thrilled by the new show. I even ended up reviewing every single episode of the show and starting Random Acts of Ali Larter. 

And, of course, we were all waiting to see what would happen in the season finale, when Peter and Sylar finally came face to face with the full range of superpowers they’d each spent a season acquiring and learning to use, while all those disparate characters were going to join in to help out. How awesome was that going to be, hey? It was going to be Marvel’s The Avengers only five years earlier, that’s how awesome it was going to be.

Except that’s pretty much the exact moment when the series went to shit. As the finale aired around the world, time zone after time zone went at the exact same time-shifted time: “Was that it?” Whatever it was we were imagining was precisely 6×10^23 times more exciting than seeing Peter twat Sylar with a parking meter and fly off.

Who was responsible for the disaster is subject to conjecture. There were whispers that the super-duper finale, full of the best fight ever, had had to be cut because two of the cast members (cough, cough, Milo Ventimiglia, Hayden Panettiere, cough, cough) had held the show to ransom and refused to film the finale unless they got epic pay rises, resulting in a corresponding special effects budget cut. 

That wouldn’t have explained season two, though. Or most of season three.

More likely, as show creator and former Crossing Jordan creator and showrunner Tim Kring testified, was that he’d never read a comic and didn’t know how to do cool stuff. He thought origin stories were the best things about superheroes and it was those network bosses and the stupid old general public who were cramping his style by forcing him to have the same characters come back for the subsequent seasons.

Letting show and comics killer Jeph Loeb have anything to do with the show may have been the problem, too.

Anyway, that killed it. Interest in Heroes died and even the resurgence of quality in ‘Volumes’ Four and Five weren’t enough to bring the audience back.

So with many people regarding the show as one of the most promising then subsequently disappointing TV programmes in US history, it’s something of a surprise to see NBC bring it back for an event mini-series – if a 13-part series can truly be described as mini-, rather than “a standard length to quite-long-by-modern-standards single season’.

Both a continuation and a new beginning for the show, Heroes Reborn brings back everyone from the original series who doesn’t have a functioning career right now – Jack Coleman, Greg Grunberg, Jimmy Jean-Louis – manages to lure in Sendhil Ramamurthy and Masi Oka for a couple of quick cameos during their lunchbreaks, and then makes Tim Kring’s wish come true by allowing him to create a whole new set of new characters, who are much cheaper and far less interesting than the original series’.

Then, taking everything Kring failed to learn from his next epic failures, Dig and Touch, it serves up a lukewarm, slow-moving version of the original series that just occasionally tries to be heartwarming but is just plain old nauseating instead.

And there’s not even any Ali Larter in it? What’s the point of Heroes, without Ali Larter, I ask you?

All the same, despite how not good it is, thankfully, it’s still not as bad as Volume 3.

Continue reading “Review: Heroes Reborn 1×1 (US: NBC)”