In the US: Sundays, 10.30pm/9.30c, HBO In the UK: Mondays, 10.10pm, Sky Atlantic
It’s fair to say the final two minutes of the third episode of The Brink made me change my mind about it a little. It’s slightly smarter than it first seemed, perhaps being more about political gamemanship than about a genuinely crazy Pakistani general taking over his country, causing the world to worry it’s on the brink of war. The US’s – and perhaps the world’s – only hopes are the asian-addicted US Secretary of State (Tim Robbins) and a hapless, idiotic US civil servant in Pakistan (Jack Black).
But it’s still not great. No siree.
The show has been consistent since day one in giving us a world run by hopelessly childish, corrupt and often stupid men who might nevertheless be quite good at their jobs – well, some of them.
It’s also been consistently unfunny, although it’s constantly firing a broad spectrum of attempted jokes that would probably sit well in any Judd Apatow movie comedy. Some of these make it through to their targets, whether it’s a simple swear off between two important officials or a sight gag involving a man with a very large penis.
But largely they follow a simple, uninspiring formula that juxtaposes the seriousness of the position or person with their conversation or vice versa – eg Pakistani president in a conspirators’ meeting talking about his brother’s cheap choice in wine, Secretary of State arguing with an Indian politician while in a urinal.
There is some intelligence behind it all, as I intimated earlier, and there’s certainly some wit to it at times. But the humour’s so broad that it neutralises most of that intelligence.
The Brink’s certainly not the worst programme you could watch and it’s not the least funny comedy on TV by a long shot. But it could and should have been a whole lot better.
Barrometer rating: 4 TMINE prediction: Should be dead by the end of the season
In Canada: Fridays, some time or other, Space In the US: Fridays, 9/8c, Syfy In the UK: Not yet acquired
I said on Friday that I was quitting Killjoys but I had some spare time on Saturday so I thought I’d give it one last chance. I really should have followed my own advice, since although episode three was marginally better than its predecessors, that still didn’t lift the show into the heady realms of ‘average’, let alone ‘good’.
The show is about as generic as it comes, seeing three ‘killjoys’ (bounty hunters) who work for the RAC (ha ha ha!) having to chase after criminals in outer space, usually with some shooting or fighting involved. The first episode introduced us to the three killjoys – well, technically two killjoys at that point (Hannah John-Kaman and Aaron Ashmore) who are joined by Ashmore’s soldier-boy brother with PTSD Luke Macfarlane. Episode two then gave us a bonding exercise between the three that ended with Mafarlane being recruited to the killjoys in lieu of a proper job, with episode three being his first ‘mission’.
All the time, they bicker and squabble with each other, either suggestively or like siblings, depending on the pairings.
And that’s about it. John-Kaman has ‘raised from birth to be an assassin’ secrets she’s keeping from the others; Macfarlane has ‘I was in a secret war’ secrets he’s keeping from the others; Ashmore just wishes people would take him seriously.
To its credit, Killjoys tries very hard to world-build and create an SF society on the four worlds in its solar system. Trouble is it’s still very, very boring and its action sequences are hopelessly generic. Although they all have a certain je ne sais quoi, the leads take it in turn to pass round the acting talent between episodes, yet it’s never quite enough to fill any of them up to the brim.
By the end of it, you probably won’t care what anyone’s secrets are and you might as well just watch Guardians of the Galaxy instead.
Barrometer rating: 5 TMINE prediction: Cancelled by the end of the season at the latest
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.
Summer schedules are here, so another week, another batch of new programmes to review. Elsewhere, I’ve reviewed most of the new shows, I think:
I haven’t watched this week’s episode of Strike Back, which I usually watch with my wife, but she had better things to do this week. So that means that after the jump, I’ll be looking at the latest episodes of the usual regulars – Halt and Catch Fire, Hannibal, The Last Ship, Suits, Stitchers, True Detective, Tyrant, Westside and The Whispers – as well as newbies Ballers, The Brink, Killjoys, Mr Robot and UnREAL. At least one of them’s for the chop.
But I’ve watched one other new TV show, as well as a movie…
Scream (US: MTV)
I was umming and ahhing about whether to review Scream, given that
It’s MTV so aimed at ‘those young people’
I never really liked the Scream movies
I have a big workload next week so might not have the time
I’m slightly boycotting anything associated with Kevin Williamson, as a result of the evil that is The Following and Stalker.
But as I had nothing else to watch this lunchbreak, I decided to watch it anyway. And frankly, I was bored. Scream as a movie was moderately interesting, critiquing and subverting the horror genre with characters making explicit analysis of the tropes of horror movies, so that these could then be undermined.
The TV Scream wishes it was even half that clever, though. Not truly a sequel, given it doesn’t really follow on from the original movies or feature those characters, as far as I can see, it does however feature a ghost-masked killer who’s always on the end of a phone (or social media interaction), talking to his victim. It also starts off by doing the exact same thing as the original Scream – killing the most famous cast member in her own home while she’s on the phone to the killer.
All the same, that’s where the similarities really stop, since the rest is tedious. The show spends most of its first hour boring us witless with a bunch of cookie-cutter teens and their cookie-cutter relationships, which are so tediously unoriginal, the show tries to be clever by pointing out how tediously unoriginal they are at the end. It also tries to ‘Scream’ TV shows, name-checking the likes of American Horror Story, Hannibal, The Walking Dead et al, without adding even an iota of insight or analysis to them.
Even halfway through, I was desperate for my lunchbreak to end and the sweet relief of work to begin. Surely that’s not the way it’s supposed to be?
Mr Holmes (2015) (in cinemas)
Sir Ian McKellen plays a 90-year-old Sherlock Holmes, retired and looking after his bees, while slowly losing his faculties. At the same time, he thinks back 30 years to an old case that Watson fictionalised and whose solution he can’t quite remember.
Those going in expecting a ‘Sherlock Holmes story’ will be disappointed as there’s only two minor mysteries for Holmes to solve in the entire piece and they’re not the hardest to crack. But while it’s still definitely a story featuring Sherlock Holmes – in various forms, including the Strand magazine Holmes and Nicholas Rowe’s Holmes, Rowe having starred in Young Sherlock Holmes – Holmes here is a proxy for intellectuality without emotionality/spirituality and how it’s ultimately no comfort if you’re human and mortal.
I wouldn’t say I loved it, but it’s something that definitely leaves you thinking about it for some time afterwards, and McKellen is superb at both ages.
Also features a slightly odd excursion to Japan with Hiroyuki Sanada (Helix, The Last Samurai, Ring, Lost).
Imagine what would happen if all the animals in the world suddenly decided that humans were screwing things up and they were going to run the planet instead.
Well, we’d be screwed, that’s what. Even putting aside what would happen if it was just the ants – they’d win all by themselves – even with overpopulation, there’s only seven billion or so of us and there’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 insects, just for starters, and they’re all largely bastards to begin with.
Okay, so let’s dial it down a notch and imagine it’s just zoo animals – and only a few of them at that – as well as maybe some cats. Not quite so worrying, is it? I mean, we’ve always suspected the cats were out to get us, haven’t we?
Yet so far, that’s all the thrills and spills we’ve had from Zoo, CBS’s latest attempt to capture the summer lightning in a bottle that was Under The Dome.
Based on James Patterson’s (Women’s Murder Club) novel of the same name, Zoo is initially set in two locales: Botswana and Los Angeles. In Botswana, US ex-pat James Wolk (Lonestar) is jaded with life and off running safaris for tourists, when he starts to notice some lions acting strangely. They’re ganging up with each other to kill people and are even using battle strategies to do it.
Uh huh.
Meanwhile, newspaper reporter and conspiracy theorist blogger Kristen Connolly (House of Cards, Houdini, The Whispers) is getting all het up about some lions that escaped the local zoo, killing their keepers and some innocent bystanders. She blames the food, but person-hating animal pathologist Billy Burke (Revolution) reckons it’s all just a freak incident – until he goes looking for all the missing pet cats, that is…
Uh huh.
If that sounds ludicrously bad, then you’re right and you haven’t even been exposed to the toxic dialogue and characters yet. Frankly, with TV like this, the world probably would be better off with the animals in charge.
In the US: Wednesdays, 10.30/9.30c, TV Land In the UK: Not yet acquired
There’s a long tradition of comedy shows about men and women of the cloth. Think All Gas and Gaiters, Oh, Brother!, Oh, Father!, Troubles and Strife, Rev, Father Ted, The Vicar of Dibley. Ironic, isn’t it, though – all those shows are from this side of the Atlantic, rather than the very much more religious US. You could probably have a long think and come up with some US comedy shows about reverends, but you’d be hard pushed.
Maybe it’s too serious a subject for the US to tackle – at least, head on. But when they can come at it at an angle, maybe not.
TV Land – the comedy network for people who like things the way they used to be when they were young – is currently trying to bring a relatively younger audience, and given it was probably the last US network to have a go at a religious sitcom with The Soul Man, it seems fitting that they’re giving it another go with Impastor. The Soul Man was, of course, about an R&B singer who becomes a preacher. Whether it was ’too black’ for TV Land’s audience, only TV Land can say, but Impastor is certainly a whole lot whiter. But that doesn’t mean TV Land is forsaking diversity. Oh no.
Michael Rosenbaum (Smallville, Breaking In) is gambling addict and small-time criminal Buddy. When all seems lost and even his girlfriend Aimee Garcia (Dexter) has deserted him, he decides to take his own life by jumping off a bridge. Fortunately, at the last moment, a vicar on the way to his new job intercedes. Unfortunately for the vicar, he plummets to his own doom instead and Buddy seizes the opportunity to take his place… and perhaps his possessions, money, etc. Except Buddy turns out to have an accidental talent for ‘pastoring’.
If only he didn’t have to pretend to be gay, too.
Here’s a trailer and if you’re quick, below it is the entire episode:
