TV reviews

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

US TV

Preview: Limitless 1×1 (US: CBS)

21 September 2015 Rob Buckley 31 Comments

Limitless

In the US: Tuesdays, 10/9c, CBS

One of the best things about Dexter, Showtime’s little-known show about a serial killer who only kills bad people, was Jennifer Carpenter. A foul-mouthed force of nature, she was both fun and clearly having fun in the show – for the first few seasons at least.

Post-Dexter, her career hasn’t taken off, unfortunately. An attempted USA Network pilot, Stanistan, failed to make it to series, meaning she had to pin her hopes this year on CBS’s Limitless spin-off.

Park that thought for a second because the progress of Limitless from book to TV series is instructive. It originally started life as The Dark Fields, a novel by Irish novellist Alan Glynn about a down-and-out writer who takes a new drug, NZT, that can expand his mental powers. Effectively a metaphor for how people on cocaine feel, it sees the hero turn his life round, become rich and powerful, and ultimately completely dependent on the drug, which turns out to have horrific side effects for those who stop taking it. Unusually for a European writer, though, the moral of the book was ‘don’t do drugs’ and ‘Eddie Spinola’ (spoiler alert) ends up dying alone in a motel room.

The book was eventually adapted by Leslie Dixon of all people. Until Limitless, Dixon was best known as the screenplay writer of Outrageous Fortune, Overboard, Mrs. Doubtfire, Freaky Friday and Hairspray. However, for Limitless, although largely faithful to the original, Dixon actually improved on it in several ways: she added action scenes, a new female character (Abbie Cornish) and changed the ending. In her hands, hero Bradley Cooper also discovers the good side of drugs, solves NZT’s side-effects and ends up running for senator, thanks to the power of NZT. Director Neil Burger and cinematographer Jo Willems also gave the movie a unique visual appearance.

And now we have the TV version, which is both a sequel and an adaptation of the movie. In a script by Elementary producer Craig Sweeny, we get Jake McDorman of you’ll-have-forgotten-it-existed-until-I-mentioned-it-again Manhattan Love Story as a down-and-out singer who ends up taking NZT and with the help of Bradley Cooper, becomes a vital FBI asset, using his vast mental powers to solve crimes no one else can. His helper and biggest support? Jennifer Carpenter.

And two things are clear:

  1. Although adaptations can improve on the originals, they can also make them worse
  2. You can be too slavish too the original when you adapt it

Why do I say that? Because although Limitless isn’t all that bad and is actually quite fun, mainly thanks to all the things it lifts straight from the movie’s script and direction, it lifts too much – by having a Bradley Cooper-esque hero, it overlooks the fact the show would have been about 1,000 times smarter and better if Jennifer Carpenter were the heroine on NZT, McDorman the straight-laced FBI helper.

Here’s the trailer.

Continue reading “Preview: Limitless 1×1 (US: CBS)”

What have you been watching? Including Blunt Talk, The Island/Το Νησί, Y Gwyll/Hinterland, Impastor, Continuum and You’re The Worst

18 September 2015 Rob Buckley 11 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.

Can you feel it? Can you? It’s coming. It’s nearly here. It’s the Fall 2015-16 US TV season! Hoorah!

But not until next week. Not properly, anyway, which is why the only new US TV show I’ve reviewed this week is FX’s The Bastard Executioner and the only regular US shows I’ll be examining after the jump are the season finale of Impastor and the latest You’re The Worst. In desperation, I even went back a few weeks to give Patrick Stewart’s new August-debuting series a go, too.

Blunt Talk (US: Starz)
Patrick Stewart plays a former British marine turned US chat show host whose ratings are on the down turn. He ends up high on drugs and alcohol, and in the arms (and bosom) of a young, transgender prostitute, and is promptly arrested – well, once he’s stopped beating up the cops. What will happen to his career now?

This is a comedy by the way. It’s not one of those crazy old-fashioned things with jokes, but instead mainly seems to get by on seeing Stewart not being a ‘English gentleman’. This might amuse Americans, unused to English people doing such things, but as Stewart himself points out in the show, we’re a bit more used to idiosyncratic Englishmen here.

The only rays of hope in the show are the moments Stewart has by himself with Adrian Scarborough (Gavin & Stacey, Plebs), his former Falklands batman, which are actually pretty good fun, even if filtered through a strange US prism.

Overall, by the end of the first episode, I really wasn’t sure what the point of the show was. It’s not satirising anything, it’s not doing a The Newsroom or a The Larry Sanders Show. It’s just Stewart being a mild-mannered, self-harming dick.

Here’s a trailer.

But that’s it for US TV. Oh well.

However, there’s more to the world than America. Indeed, elsewhere, I’ve reviewed the first episode of Australia and New Zealand’s new 800 Words, and after the jump, I’ll be looking at the continuing adventures of Canada’s Continuum and the return of Wales’ Y Gwyll/Hinterland. There’s lovely, hey?

And as if all that wasn’t enough, I broke a rule and took a look at some Greek TV.

The Island/Το Νησί (Greece: Mega)
The reason for my rule-breaking is that this year marked the 10th anniversary of the publication of Victoria Hislop’s The Island, a novel set in the first half of the 20th century on the Greek islands of Crete and Spinalonga. On Spinalonga is a fortress where Greece used to send people with leprosy until a cure was discovered in the 1950s and the story is about various love affairs, some of which involve people who end up on the island, and how that affects their families.

As well as a Q&A with Hislop, the night featured an airing of the first episode of Το Νησί, Greek television’s 2010/11 24-part adaptation of the novel, which despite being made for €4m and a couple of bottles of raki, is actually very lavish and emptied the streets when it aired. Indeed, it has only ever been beaten in the ratings twice, both times by sporting events, one of which was the opening of the Athens Olympics.

The adaptation is pretty faithful to the book, right down to the modern-day London bookending, which features a pre-Downton Abbey Dan Stevens. It’s all very lavish and well made in Greek terms, too, although equally, it’s very Greek and emotionally drawn out, too. Acting’s pretty good, with Evgenia Dimitropoulou playing a double-role of both the modern day Alexis and her own aunt Anna – as Alexis, she does a good job of playing a British-Greek girl who doesn’t speak Greek that well (hers is about as good as mine, in fact), although she seems to understand an awful lot, even some quite obscure words such as λεπρός (leper), when she winds up in Crete.

The series has never aired in the UK, surprisingly, although I’m sure BBC Four will get round to it some day. However, you can watch all of it on YouTube, albeit without subtitles, if you hunt around.

There were a few celebs among the audience at the Q&A, including Patrick Barlow and Robert Young, but one in particular pretty much stalked me all over Blackfriars and at the Q&A the entire evening. He made his bilingual acting debut in the first episode of the series, which I’ve embedded below – see if you can spot him. I’ll give you a clue – he first appears at the 3m59s point.

Continue reading “What have you been watching? Including Blunt Talk, The Island/Το Νησί, Y Gwyll/Hinterland, Impastor, Continuum and You’re The Worst”

US TV

Review: The Bastard Executioner 1×1-1×2 (US: FX)

17 September 2015 Rob Buckley 7 Comments

In the US: Tuesdays, 10pm, FX

The ‘Renaissance Fair’ is a curious US phenomenon, the origin of which is unclear. A popular holiday-weekend form of entertainment all over the country, the Renaissance fair has nothing to do with the Italian Renaissance, offering instead a melange of earlier British medieval history that arrives in the present day via Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court and the Errol Flynn Robin Hood, taking in jesters going ‘hey nonny nonny’, knights in shining armour, dragons and random fairground attractions along the way.

But fair enough. It’s the US. The average European would find it hard to name most US presidents of the 19th century, let alone know the difference between the Roanoake and Jamestown colonies. Let’s not quibble too much over it and we can always take the kids to the Excalibur Hotel in Las Vegas and enjoy a permanent Renaissance Fair if we want.

The problem is when you get something like The Bastard Executioner, Kurt “Sons of Anarchy” Sutter’s latest show on FX. Allegedly set in the early 14th century in Wales during the reign of Edward II (US readers: that’s the wimpy gay one in Braveheart), it sees one man lead a rebellion of the Welsh peasants against the evil English baron who’s oppressing the masses.

And while The Bastard Executioner would very much like to be a rousing, gritty historical drama, it is instead pretty much a Renaissance Fair on TV.

Continue reading “Review: The Bastard Executioner 1×1-1×2 (US: FX)”

800 words
Australian and New Zealand TV

Review: 800 Words 1×1 (Australia: Seven)

16 September 2015 Rob Buckley 6 Comments

In Australia: Tuesdays, 8.40pm, Seven
In the UK: Mondays, 2.15pm, BBC One. Starts April 9 2018

Stories about city slickers who up sticks and head off to the country, where they find a better, quieter life, aren’t exactly new: think Doc Martin (and its many adaptations), Hot Fuzz, Hart of Dixie, Doc Hollywood and, erm, City Slickers. But generally, when they do head off to the country, it’s not another country.

However, 800 Words gives us just that, presenting us with a recently widowed journalist (Erik Thomson) who decides to relocate his family from Sydney, Australia, to the New Zealand coastal town he used to holiday in as a child. Whether that’s because Australian TV network Seven wanted something a little bit more exotic or its because New Zealand production company South Pacific Pictures (Outrageous Fortune, Shortland Street, Westside, The Almighty Johnsons) had got tired of trying to get funding from NZ On Screen and figured it could get more cash from Oz, I couldn’t say.

There he has to deal with all manner of disasters, including shipwrecks, dangerous sculptures, building works, nudists and his two bereaved and often sullen teenage children. But wouldn’t you know it? Thanks to the friendly but sometimes strange townspeople, it turns out that his life in his new home isn’t as bad as all that. Or at least it wouldn’t be if he didn’t insist on writing up 800 words of his thoughts about it every week for a major Australian newspaper that’s accessible over the Internet.

The show is created by James Griffin, who as well as being responsible for creating and writing most of those South Pacific Pictures shows, wrote 800 words a week for 12 years for New Zealand’s Canvas magazine, so knows what he’s talking about. Although I couldn’t get by on UK magazine pay rates for 800 words a week, let me tell you, and I’m sure hoping that Griffin dispensed more words of wisdom than Thomson does here: “Logically, the best place to start the story of a new beginning is at the beginning.” That’s 2% of your word count gone already there, mate, and I’m pretty sure any sub worth their salt is going to edit that out anyway.

Griffin’s presence also assures 800 Words a certain quality of writing, both dramatic and comedic, albeit a bit male-oriented. Here he gives former Plainclothes mate Thomson both plenty of screentime and an implausibly large bevy of mostly much younger women to chase after him. To be fair, Thomson is the show’s main draw, having starred in Seven’s long-running family comedy drama Packed To The Rafters for years and won several awards.

But it also means that bevy of women aren’t desperately well characterised yet (“My mum’s great with women’s feelings, terrible with men’s” being the most any of them gets yet) and sometimes don’t get to wear any clothes and Thomson’s teenage daughter (Melina Vidler) largely only gets to pout, hunt for phone signal and storm out of every scene.

Apart from the general joking, there’s a fair bit of comedy from Woody (The Doctor Blake Mysteries’ Rick Donald, who seems to have returned to Oz after a brief foray into the US), an implausibly thick but genial ex-pat Australian builder. As you might imagine, there are also some bittersweet moments as Thomson has to deal with the death of his wife and his children’s general misery.

But this is largely a show admittedly designed to feel a lot like Packed To The Rafters, equally admittedly without Rebecca Gibney, who’s off elsewhere on Seven with Winter. Rocking the boat, being too innovative, giving too unflattering a view of NZ are probably not on the menu. It’s intended to feel comfortable and familiar.

If you like your drama to feel like a warm hug, or you’re a fan of The Almighty Johnsons and (understandably) want to see more of Michelle Langstone and John Leigh, 800 Words could be for you.

What have you been watching? Including Narcos, Hand of God, You’re The Worst, The Last Ship and Impastor

11 September 2015 Rob Buckley 8 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.

Once again, we’re in that slightly fallow period between seasons, where almost nothing new has started yet and everything old has already finished or has only one episode left. That’s why most of this week’s reviews have been previews:

Fortunately, though, there’s not been nothing at all on and after the jump, I’ll look at the few regulars that are still on or that have just returned: Hand of God, Impastor, The Last Ship and You’re The Worst.

But the big holes in the viewing schedule that are still to be filled meant that I’ve actually been able to watch a whole new series in one go:

Narcos (Netflix)
I didn’t quite manage to watch it in one weekend, but since tassiekev recommended it last week, I made a start on it on Friday and had got through all 10 episodes by Tuesday.

Slipping under most people’s radars like so many Cessnas heading into Miami from Colombia during the 1980s, Narcos is a dramatisation of the story of Pablo Escabar’s reign as a drugs lord, starting from the late 1970s when he sees the potential in exporting new drug cocaine into the US before making its way through the events of the 80s and early 90s that rocked Colombia and eventually other parts of the world.

Initially, the show feels like GoodFellas, with DEA agent Boyd Holbrook providing a helpful voiceover that’s at times comedic. But while it does occasionally jump around in time, the show quickly becomes almost documentary-like, with little of the standard tropes of drama: there’s no strong narrative drive, no “good guys win, bad guys lose” and no themes illustrated by suitably balanced sceens.

Instead, Narcos retells the events in all the real-world’s messiness, showing just how much of a war was going on in Colombia in the 80s, a war almost reminiscent of the IRA’s similar campaigns in England at the time. Perhaps the show’s only real directorial flourish is the use of the original photographs and footage from events, rather than mock-ups featuring the actors, whenever they appear in the story. And Holbrook’s narration quickly becomes hardened and surprisingly anti-Reagan for a show that’s made in a time when half of America seemingly reveres the former president in the same way they revere Jesus.

Like a lot of other Netflix shows (eg House of Cards, Marco Polo, Daredevil), Narcos revolves around one absolutely stonking central performance – in this case, Wagner Moura, who plays Escobar. It’s a mesmerising affair that manages to convey Escobar’s friendliness, ambitions and his capability for extreme violence that makes him seem like a modern day Kublai Khan, despite being perpetually clad in tatty shirt and trainers.

What’s even more extraordinary about Moura’s performance is this is effectively Netflix’s first Spanish language show, with about 80% of the dialogue in Spanish, and Moura is Brazilian and didn’t speak any Spanish until six months before production started. The show’s come in for some criticism from Colombians, because despite being lavishly shot in Colombia and the rest of the cast being almost universally Spanish speakers, they’re either not Colombian or not doing the right accents. Nevertheless, it’s to Netflix’s credit that it’s making something so heavily subtitled because the story demands it.

With Pedro Pascal (Game of Thrones)’s more nuanced DEA agent providing a strong counterpoint to both Holbrook and Moura, this is Netflix’s best new show in quite some time and heartily recommended. Season two’s already been commissioned, in case you were worried.

Continue reading “What have you been watching? Including Narcos, Hand of God, You’re The Worst, The Last Ship and Impastor”