TV reviews

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

US TV

Review: Sex&Drugs&Rock&Roll 1×1 (US: FX)

17 July 2015 Rob Buckley 2 Comments

Sex&Drugs&Rock&Roll

In the US: Thursdays, 10pm, FX

What is the American Dream? To succeed? To be rich? To be famous? To have an enduring legacy? To do well by your family or community?

Arguably, it varies and has varied over the years and one of the main themes of FX’s lukewarm but amusingly titled Denis Leary comedy, Sex&Drugs&Rock&Roll, is that not only has it changed, it can change for individuals, too.

Leary plays Johnny Rock, the lead singer of a 1990s rock band. The band never made the big time, having split up the day their first album was released, and 25 years later, Rock is penniless and still living with one of his backing singers, while his co-writer and band guitarist John Corbett (Northern Exposure, Sex and the City) is still estranged from him but playing for Lady Ga Ga.

Then into Rock’s life comes one of the band’s few fans, Gigi (Elizabeth Gillies). She’s an aspiring singer and wants to reunite the band to back her – and for Corbett and Leary to bury their differences and write her some new songs, with Leary relegated to a songwriter credit. Not only has she got plenty of money to entice them with, she’s also a pretty good performer.

The big catch? Gillies is Leary’s estranged daughter – and Corbett has a thing for young women…

Much of the humour, if it can be described as such, in Sex&Drugs&Rock&Roll is about how the nature of ambition and fame have changed and change with age. When the band was young, they wanted to be famous for producing good music and to get all the sex and drugs they could. Now they’d just like to have some money to buy things with and to be remembered at all. Except now, to be famous, you have to be like Kim Kardashian or Lady GaGa and that, rather than the Beatles, is something people aspire to be.

There’s also the impending competition between Gillies and Leary, with the feisty, focused, sexting- and social media-aware Gillies liable to become more famous than Leary ever was and certainly now is.

The rest of the humour is standard Leary japes: swearing, pratfalls, taboo subjects (eg trying to French kiss someone who turns out to be your own daughter), group teasing, the occasional diatribe about the state of the world and so on.

And not much of it lands on the funny bone. Some does and you can see most of it in the trailer below, but it all feels as tired as Leary’s band, like it’s going through the motions. There’s a slight element of misogyny to the show, too, although to some extent that’s because of its setting and the show does a decent enough job of undermining it. All the same, you’ll probably feel a bad taste in your mouth as you watch the episode.

There’s also the horrifying inclusion of actual singing. True, Gillies is a singer in real-life, making her Broadway debut when she was just 15 and enduring 50+ episodes of Nickleodeon’s performing arts sitcom Victorious. But if she’d sung for just 10 seconds longer, Sex&Drugs&Rock&Roll would have been cast into the same bin I consigned Nashville and Empire. Tough on music, tough on the causes of music, me.

I do have a fondness for Leary from his stand-up days, but as with Rescue Me and the rest of his TV work, Sex&Drugs&Rock&Roll just felt like a sitcom written by someone who knows his star is waning and is desperate to keep doing encores until he can’t do them any more.

Australian and New Zealand TV

Review: Glitch 1×1 (Australia: ABC)

15 July 2015 Rob Buckley 20 Comments

Glitch

In Australia: Thursdays, 8.34pm (no, really), ABC
in the UK: Not yet acquired

The dead are coming back to life and this time they’re Australian! Well, most of them are, anyway.

Indeed, ABC’s new Glitch is exploring a path that the likes of Les Revenants, The Returned, Resurrection, Babylon Fields, et al have already trod well, with a small isolated town shaken up by the return of people once thought dead – thought dead because they actually were dead. And indeed, tonally, it’s very similar, being slow, thoughtful, consumed with the emotional impact of such a miraculous event and its real-world consequences.

So is there anything that makes Glitch different? Well, it’s Australian. That’s a bit different, isn’t it? And they all had to claw their way out of their own coffins, rather than just appear out of nowhere (although that’s Babylon Fields, too, now I think about it).

It’s also got a variety of dead people, including an Irishman and an Italian, although how big a variety is a bit tricky to say at this point, given most of them can’t even remember their surnames, let alone details about their lives. But certainly, as well as the recently deceased, there are zombies who died during the Second World War and even one who passed away during Victorian times. Are they coming back at random or because of what they can say about Australian history (this is ABC, after all)?

There’s also some comedy, surprisingly enough, with the Victorian Irishman (Ned Dennehy) being something of an ‘hilarious’, slightly racist alcoholic and getting into all kinds of scrapes with his new, teenage aboriginal partner in crime (Aaron McGrath from The Code, The Doctor Blake Mysteries, The Gods of Wheat Street).

And lastly, there appears to be a rule that if the dead try to leave town, their eyes start to bleed and they revert back to dust. Or maybe it’s if they return to where they were killed. The rule’s not yet clear.

But otherwise, if you’ve watched any of the shows listed above, you’ll know what to expect: a prestige production with some lovely filming in some lovely locations, with people really getting to act and do tragedy because their dead wife’s back and they just loved her so much.

The cast is strong, including Patrick Brammall (Power Games: The Packer-Murdoch War, Upper Middle Bogan, The Moodys) and Emma Booth (Underbelly). The central premise doesn’t quite feel like a retread of previous shows. There’s a slight tension from Brammall’s attempts to keep everything secret from the rest of the town, including his suspicious sergeant (Andrew McFarlane), as well as another character who doesn’t show until right at the end of the first episode.

And there are the central mysteries of who the remaining characters are and why everyone’s coming back from the dead – which the show’s characters do at least seem moderately interested in, which is more than you could say of Resurrection‘s.

Yet despite the short run (all six episodes are now available on iView), I’m not sure how tempted I am to watch the rest of it. There’s something of an allure to it and with Thursdays looking a little light at the moment, I might be tempted to tune in. But the whole thing lacks a certain je ne sais quoi. Perhaps because what it’s offering just isn’t new any more.

What have you been watching? Including Terminator: Genisys, Man of Tai Chi, The Last Ship, UnREAL and Westside

10 July 2015 Rob Buckley 12 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 not exactly behind on my TV viewing, so much as watching certain shows at Mrs TMINE’s pace and she’s been very busy of late. That means I still haven’t seen the latest two episodes of Strike Back or this week’s Humans. And as ABC Australia only aired the first episode of its new supernatural chiller Glitch last night, I’ve not yet had the time to watch it, which means I’ll review it on Monday or Tuesday next week.

All the same, this week, I’ve passed third-episode verdicts on:

And after the jump, I’ll be looking at the latest episodes of the usual regulars: Dark Matter, Halt and Catch Fire, Hannibal, The Last Ship, Suits, Stitchers, True Detective, UnREAL, Westside and The Whispers.

I’ve also watched a couple of movies.

Terminator: Genisys (2015) (in cinemas)
Probably the first proper sequel to the first two Terminator movies, this does for the franchise what JJ Abrams’ Star Trek did for Paramount’s space epic, effectively recasting and rebooting the whole series while still maintaining continuity.

Here, the idea is that the timelines are being altered again, with more Terminators being sent further back in time to both protect and kill Sarah Connor (Emilia Clarke from Game of Thrones) that by the time 1984 rolls round and Kyle Reese goes back to save her, she’s not in need of saving, having been raised by an ageing Terminator (Arnie) to be a warrior. The question is: can Reese, Connor and daddy Terminator now stop Skynet from taking over the planet and nearly exterminating humanity? And what will Skynet do to stop them?

The first half hour or so is actually very good, with not only some good ‘future shock’ scenes, but near frame-by-frame recreations of key scenes from The Terminator that even give us a young Arnie v old Arnie fight. We also get Lee Byung-hun (Red 2, GI Joe) as a T-1000 and Jason Clarke (Brotherhood, The Chicago Code) as John Connor.

The trouble is that the rest of the movie suffers from ‘CGI weightlessness’ – while the CGI is impressive, it also gives us physically impossible physical effects that rob the action of impact and any sense of tension. It’s basically just computers plastering the screen with pixels, for all the emotion that’s conveyed.

All the same, much better than it has any right to be, quite funny in place and although it often feels like fanboy homage to the original, it never feels slavish and often innovates and takes the story in unexpected directions. Blink and you’ll miss Matt Smith, by the way.

Man of Tai Chi (2013) (Now TV)
It’s a Matrix reunion for Keanu Reeves’ directorial debut, with this Chinese-set, half-Mandarin, half-English martial-arter that stars Reeves’ Matrix martial arts instructor and bestest friend Tiger Chen as a T’ai Chi student who wants to show the world the power of T’ai Chi in conventional tournaments. However, Reeves’ evil billionaire wants him to star in underground fight movies and tries to corrupt Chen.

With fight choreography by The Matrix’s Yuen Woo-ping, naturally everything’s dead exciting but littered with wire work, and although my six months of T’ai Chi at university doesn’t exactly make me an expert, I didn’t notice an awful lot of T’ai Chi on display (“What sort of T’ai Chi is that?” “My own style.” You betcha), beyond a couple of scenes with Chen’s sifu. The plotting is pretty much exactly what you’d expect, with only a couple of twists, and unfortunately, despite his presence towards the end, The Raid/Star Wars 7’s Iko Uwais doesn’t get much screen time.

All the same, enjoyable enough, some good locations and with enough variation from the standard formulae that you’ll never be bored.

Continue reading “What have you been watching? Including Terminator: Genisys, Man of Tai Chi, The Last Ship, UnREAL and Westside”

The BarrometerA Barrometer rating of

Third-episode verdict: Mr Robot (US: USA Network)

9 July 2015 Rob Buckley 16 Comments

In the US: Wednesdays, 10/9c, USA Network. Starts June 24
In the UK: Not yet acquired

10 PRINT “Hello friend”;
20 PRINT “Reviewing Mr_Robot is quite difficult”;
30 IF (Mr_Robot=“DELUSION” OR Mr_Robot=“SOCIAL ENGINEERING") THEN GOTO 60;
40 PRINT “Mr Robot is a terrible show that thinks it’s saying something very clever and very edgy but actually is very stupid, confusing the audience with ambiguity and a sheen of intelligence and background research into suspending their critical facilities.”;
50 STOP
60 PRINT “Mr Robot is a superb, captivating show that examines modern life, our relationships with each other and how they’re influenced by technology, technology’s power over us, corporations power over us and the nature of reality, while cleverly using the standard tropes of hacker stories to distract us.”;
70 END

Tricky, hey? Mr Robot could be many things. When I’m most hopeful, I believe it to be a sort of hacking Fight Club in which a socially impaired hacker (Rami Malek) talks to the viewer, makes observations about normal life and drinking Starbucks, before taking down capitalism with the help of his Tyler Durdenesque hallucinated pal, Mr Robot (Christian Slater) – all while using his powers with computers to take out low-life internet paedophiles like a Batman who trained with code ninjas rather than actual ninjas.

Just as good is the possibility that maybe Malek is being made to think this by people who know exactly how to mess with the mind of someone paranoid with a diagnosed history of hallucinations. They may all be real, but they’re not who they’re pretending to be. How could they be? They’re so implausible.

When I’m at my least hopeful, I suspect Mr Robot is dicking with us. Sure, there’s the superb direction, the greatest attention to technical detail bar none of any TV show (surely the first usage of IPv6 addressing in a browser URL bar on TV?), the adult themes and characters, the 80s soundtrack, and the furniture of quality TV such as foreign languages, drug taking and diverse sexuality.

All the same, this could be a show that actually believes that the world is run by a secret cabal, the 1% of 1%s, and hackers like fsociety really do exist, dress and act exactly like the way it depicts, and are anarchist-socialist-libertarian heroes who are protecting us. Or worse still, come the end of the season, they’ll send us a goatse or a Rickroll link of a finale that’ll all be about the LOLs and how they messed with us so bad.

Certainly, this tightrope walk with reality is what the show would like us to have to do, that much is clear. And making us doubt everything we see and hear is half Mr Robot’s game, I suspect – to somehow make the viewer conscious of the weird blurring of reality and the virtual which we’ve all normalised, where lives can be destroyed at the touch of a button and people across the world can be inside your home with you, watching what you’re up to, simply because you tried to listen to a CD.

Whether it’s actually ‘true’ or not is as unimportant as whether the show’s Evil Corp is actually called Evil Corp – even though we know it’s not called that, everywhere we look, that’s what it seems to be called. It even has an evil logo. Is it Mastercard? Is it Visa? Perhaps it’s both and yet neither.

Similarly, do people avoid looking or even talking with Christian Slater because he’s not real or because he dresses like a twat? Perhaps it’s both and yet neither.

So the Barrometer has had to go all quantum mechanical on us for the first time in its history, although I doubt its shiny, highly polished, barely used brain really understands more than whether it simply likes a TV show or not. It’s got two review waves – blue for “it’s all in his mind or a set up”, red for “we’re showing you the true nature of society”. I suspect that only when the series has finished, if then, will the wave function collapse into one of these waves.

Until then, I’m going to absolutely captivated – and doing my very best to get someone in the UK to pick it up. If I can do it with The Last Ship and Halt and Catch Fire, surely I can do it with Mr Robot?

Barrometer rating: 0 or 3
TMINE prediction: Already renewed for a second season and the ratings are doing well

The BarrometerA Barrometer rating of 4

Third-episode verdict: Ballers (US: HBO; UK: Sky Atlantic)

7 July 2015 Rob Buckley 3 Comments

In the US: Sundays, 10pm, HBO
In the UK: Acquired by Sky Atlantic. No air date set

Three strikes and you’re out. Wrong American game, I know, but that would generally be the rule at this point for a show that scored as poorly as Ballers on the Barrometer, the all-singing, all-dancing, all-smiling guide to quality television.

Yet for some reason I’m almost inclined to keep watching. The show is effectively Entourage, relocated to Miami and set in the world of sports and sports agencies, rather than acting. Okay, it’s got a heroic, good natured agent you want to root for (Dwayne Johnson), rather than a complete git (Jeremy Piven). And yes, the cast is almost entirely black, not the generally paler shades of Entourage.

But black, East Coast Entourage is what it is, right down to the epic misogyny, wanton excess, man-children behaving badly and cameos by famous players – none of whom, of course, I recognised.

Unfortunately, despite the presence of Rob Cordry (The Daily Show, Childrens Hospital), the big differences are:

  1. It’s about as funny as a routine echocardiogram picking up a suspicious murmur
  2. Other than Dwayne, there’s no one at all you can root for.

The first episode was just hideous in every way possible. As was the third episode. The second was marginally better, I grant you, with some moments where you could almost bring yourself to like some other characters and there were signs of jokes.

But overall? Hideous, reprehensible, nasty and almost certainly true to life, unfortunately.

And to some extent, perhaps that’s why there’s part of me that wants to keep watching. The Rock, of course, is great, which helps, too. But I think it’s the fact that it’s like having your worst nightmares confirmed, like on some depressing Channel 4 ‘documentary’ that invites you to judge its participants, that makes me want to keep watching.

So if you like sports and watching people with oodles of cash and car-crash lives, but can’t bear yourself to watch The Real Housewives of anywhere, maybe this is the show for you. If not, do avoid at all costs. It might just suck you in.

Barrometer rating: 4
TMINE prediction: Cancelled by the end of the season, but could last another if HBO thinks it can build an audience