TV reviews

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

US TV

Review: Complications 1×1-1×4 (US: USA Network)

22 June 2015 Rob Buckley 3 Comments

Complications

In the US: Thursdays, 9/8c, USA Network

A lot of things can be learned from Matt Nix. Well, three at least. Nix, of course, is the creator of USA Network’s Burn Notice, for years the network’s most popular show. What lessons can we learn from him?

  1. Collaboration is important
  2. Not everything needs to be a procedural
  3. Dark and gritty may not always be a good thing

When Nix first pitched the idea of Burn Notice to USA, it was a dark misery-fest set in New York. Then USA said that maybe he should lighten the whole thing up a bit and set it in Miami. The result was a show that lasted for 111 episodes and a movie. However, I and many others gave up on the show after the fifth season because it had stopped innovating and had become a formulaic procedural.

Now we have Nix’s Complications, in which ER doctor Jason O’Mara shoots a gang member to save both his own life and that of his patient, the child of a gang member. Events then start spiralling out of control as he has to keep protecting and caring for the child or else the gang will kill him, his family, etc.

The show reads as what Nix might have made Burn Notice had he been left to his own devices. It’s dark and gritty, there’s almost no fun or engaging characters, and there’s mysteriously a procedural element to the show as well, with O’Mara having to deal with a ‘dark and gritty’ case of the week in each episode – domestic violence, foot amputation, etc, etc.

And it’s barely watchable. I sat through all 3-4 episodes (the first is a double-episode so your counting system might vary) wondering when it was going to get good. I sat through O’Mara doing all kinds of stupid things, able assisted in this by a somewhat criminal nurse Jessica Szohr. I sat through any number of scenes of poor old Beth Riesgraf (Leverage) having to play Generic Wife 3 – you know, the one who spends all her time nagging the husband, who can never tell her his deep dark secret, even if it means he might destroy his marriage?

But it never got good. Almost the show’s only redeeming feature is gang ‘fixer’ Chris Chalk (best known from The Newsroom but about to be a regular on Gotham as Lucius Fox), who quite rightly gets all the show’s good lines.

The show thinks it’s saying something. And if you watched the first episode, you might think it was going to say something, too, something interesting even – perhaps about what happens if a doctor ‘breaks bad’ or what it means for a doctor to ‘first, do no harm’, with O’Mara working through with psychiatrist Constance Zimmer (UnREAL) all the possible other permutations of medical morality and what happens when you introduce it to the real world. I’m sure over the course of the season, Complications is going to come back to all this at some point at least, but it doesn’t within the next two episodes to any appreciable degree.

Instead, all it does is show you semi-plausibly how to commit some really stupid instances of medical malpractice and get away with it. Even then, it does so in an utterly implausible framework and without any joy, excitement or attempts to engage the audience.

As I remarked earlier this year, USA has had such faith in the show that it’s effectively kept it in a box for a year. Now it’s dumping all the episodes as quickly as possible. I’d say that’s actually a pretty astute move on their part, since for a summer show, Complications is about as enjoyable as septicaemia contracted from some broken glass you stepped on on the beach.

Killjoys
Canadian TV

Review: Killjoys 1×1 (Canada: Space; US: Syfy)

22 June 2015 Rob Buckley 7 Comments

In the US: Fridays, 9/8c, Syfy
In the UK: Not yet acquired

Talking of generic Canadian-US co-production space opera science-fiction, here’s some more! The Killjoys of Space/SyFy’s Killjoys are a group of bounty hunters who have to track down criminals in a system of four planets ruled by a powerful corporation unimaginatively called The Company, the forced title for the show coming from the fact that’s what bounty hunters are nicknamed in this system.

What’s the organisation that employs these bounty hunters? Brace yourself, Brits. Why, it’s the RAC. Yes, the RAC. “The RAC is coming to get you!” Doesn’t that send shivers down your spine?

The three bounty hunters follow the golden ITC rule of casting first laid down in The Champions back in the 60s, in giving us two guys and a girl as leads. The girl – Britain’s own Hannah John-Kamen (Banana, Cucumber, Happy Valley, The Hour) – is the mysterious highly trained one, probably raised since birth to go around killing people; she’s also possibly a member of the rich elite that rules ’the Quad’ as it’s known. Working for her is regular goofball Aaron Ashmore and following this first episode, his brother Luke Macfarlane, who’s wanted by the Company because he knows something bad from when he was a soldier. Together, they all have to track down criminals while cracking jokes and trying to avoid sides in an impending civil war.

You’ve got a decent enough synopsis there, so you should be able to extrapolate from that. Possible love triangle? Yep. John-Kamen having secrets that will be revealed in time? Almost certainly. Lots of semi-decently choreographed but ultimately average fight scenes? Sure thing. A smattering of sci-fi jargon and ideas that very slightly distinguish the show from all other very similar shows you’ll have seen before? Absolutely.

But it’s Canadian sci-fi at its most generic. It even features some of the same guest cast as Dark Matter. Perhaps the only really good thing about the show is the main cast. John-Kamen’s good and you wonder what happened to poor old Aaron Ashmore’s career that he’s ended up here after Smallville, Warehouse 13, et al. Not a great actor, Luke Macfarlane is nevertheless clearly there to bring the funny, having starred in Canada’s only good sitcom of the past decade, Satisfaction.

As a result, this first episode at least was hard going, with aching gaps where there should have been action, decent dialogue, jokes that are funny or in fact anything to stop me yawning like the only thing that would keep me alive was constantly stretching my face muscles for a whole hour every day.

Still, you have to admire a show with the chutzpah to call itself Killjoys, at least. That’s not inviting some obvious jokes. Not. At. All.

What have you been watching? Including Humans, Tyrant, Jodorowsky’s Dune and Jurassic World

19 June 2015 Rob Buckley 21 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.

It’s time for a move again. With new shows launching on Thursdays and a couple of Sunday shows finishing, I’ll be switching “What have you been watching?” back to Mondays, starting next week, to give myself time to watch everything. (This was a bad idea. I’m sticking to Fridays for now)

In terms of new stuff, still sitting in the viewing pile somewhere are The Astronaut Wives Club, Complications and Killjoys, which I should be getting round to reviewing on Monday or Wednesday, but I did manage to watch Dark Matter this week, as well as…

Humans (UK: Channel 4; US: AMC)
We’ve discussed this a bit already in the comments section elsewhere, but this UK-US co-produced remake of SVT’s Äkta Människor is a surprisingly good bit of sci-fi, imagining a parallel world where robot humans are being created to replace people in sectors ranging from mining to social care to prostitution. Tom Goodman-Hill (Mr Selfridge, Cabin Pressure) decides to buy a ‘synth’ to help out around the house, much to the annoyance of his often-absent wife (Katherine Parkinson, apparently unable to escape the IT crowd), particularly when her children decide they like the new arrival (Gemma Chan from Bedlam) better than their mum. The problem is that Chan and a few other synths may be a little bit more alive than they’re supposed to be…

The show does a decent job of imagining this parallel world, from all the applications that the robots are put to through to the little details about how they’d operate in practice. It also wisely chooses to focus not just on questions of artificial intelligence but how we react to synths – we might like labour-saving devices that do the cooking for us or even read bedtime stories to our children, provided they don’t look like prettier, younger women whom our children can bond with and prefer. Similarly, in the case of engineer and synth inventor (?) William Hurt (Challenger), we might well want to keep an old android around, even once it’s malfunctioning, if we’re starting to dement and the android has the only memories of our dead wife.

The show’s a little too “made in the UK” for my liking, with its prosaic, unimaginative direction making it look like it has a budget of £3.50. Nevertheless, it’s a smart, sometimes creepy, sometimes touching show that I’ll be making an effort to tune in for next episode.

I’ve already passed third-episode verdicts on The Whispers, Westside and Stitchers, so after the jump, I’ll be looking at the latest episodes of Halt and Catch Fire, Hannibal and Strike Back: Legacy, as well as the season finales of Game of Thrones and Silicon Valley, and the first new episode of the returning Tyrant.

But first, movies!

Jodorowsky’s Dune (2013) (iTunes)
I’ve already given a lot of the background to this elsewhere, so I won’t go into it in great detail, but suffice it to say a very different adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune was developed in the 1970s by surrealist director Alejandro Jodorowsky (The Holy Mountain) and this movie is a documentary that runs through the history behind it.

It’s a fascinating movie, but watching it, one can’t help but feel that firstly, Jodorowsky’s Dune would have been an absolutely stunning but utterly silly movie with often little more than a passing resemblance to the book. Secondly, it’s surprising how much influence a non-existent movie can have, since without it (or if it had ever been made), there’d have been no Alien and a number of movies would have lost some of their most important imagery. Thirdly, it makes you realise just how crazy mental you need to be to produce at least certain kinds of art.

Kingsman: The Secret Service (2014) (iTunes)
X-Men: First Class/Kick Ass’s Matthew Vaughn and Jane Goldman adapt Mark Millar’s comic The Secret Service to give us a fond homage to Roger Moore-era James Bond, with Colin Firth, Jack Davenport and Michael Caine a bunch of posh secret agents who have to let chav new blood (Taron Egerton) into their top secret organisation when they have to deal with a tech billionaire (Samuel L Jackson) who wants to save the world from nasty polluting human beings.

At times, Kingsman feels like a retread of Vaughn and Goldman’s previous movies, mixing in the school training and spies of First Class with the superbly choreographed fights and ultraviolence of Kick Ass. What largely differentiates the movie is its Englishness, the movie satirising Moore’s Bond and (American) movies’ concepts of what an English gentleman should be while simultaneously taking ownership of it to give something a young, male working class audience to aspire to.

The movie’s final scenes involving a Swedish princess are a little disheartening after the largely good work that preceded it, even if it is another Moore satire, but generally a good viewing and by the end of it, you will accept Colin Firth can be an action hero. Mark Strong is also in there as a Q-like Scotsman, but no Welsh or Northern Irish members of the nation were apparently invited to join the Kingsmen.

Jurassic World (2015)
Bigger but not better retread of Jurassic Park set 20 years after the original that imagines a world now jaded about the return of once-extinct dinosaurs so regarding trips to the expanded ‘Jurassic World’ theme park island as little more than trips to the zoo. Consequently, the company behind it decides to bring the crowds back to create a brand new dinosaur by cross-breeding the more dangerous parts of a whole bunch of other dinosaurs – belatedly bringing in former US navy sailor turned Velociraptor trainer Chris Pratt to check out their security. Want to have a guess if it’s good enough or not?

Despite looking excellent, giving plenty of head nods to the original and some oftentimes smart writing, Jurassic World is nevertheless a little dead inside. Characters are either underdeveloped or plain annoying, so we don’t really care enough about them to feel frightened when bad things start to happen. Indeed, you’ll probably care more about the poor herbivorous dinosaurs getting a pasting at the hands of Indominus Rex than about whether Pratt survives to make it to a second date with the perpetually high-heel clad workaholic theme park executive Bryce Dallas Howard, who turns out not to be too shabby with a gun.

All the same, despite not hanging together well as a movie, there are some good individual moments that’ll stick with you afterwards.

Continue reading “What have you been watching? Including Humans, Tyrant, Jodorowsky’s Dune and Jurassic World”

The BarrometerA Barrometer rating of 3

Third-episode verdict: Stitchers (US: ABC Family)

18 June 2015 Rob Buckley 2 Comments

In the US: Tuesdays, 9/8c, ABC Family

Three episodes into Stitchers, ABC Family’s VR5 20th anniversary tribute show in which an emotionally cut-off young female techie learns to connect with others through a virtual reality technology, and we’re getting the measure of quite a silly, stupid but enjoyable show.

The first episode introduced us to the ‘stitchers’ programme, a covert government programme run by nerds that enables the ‘differently brained’ Monica Potter-alike Emma Ishta enter the memories of dead people and solve their murders by putting on a catsuit and lounging in a giant fishtank. Yes, you’re right – that is silly. But the show knows it and plays with it.

Since then, the show has gone through the traditional second episode retooling, with the producers retconning away so that they could add new members to the team, come up with a reason for Ishta to keep on ‘stitching’, make her boss (Salli Richardson-Whitfield) a bit more duplicitous and so on. It was all a bit forced and ridiculous, but we’re talking about a show where people communicate with the dead while quoting Batman and Galaxy Quest at each other, so it’s all pretty much par for the course.

Episode three was perhaps the most thoughtful episode so far, but as with Scorpion, which only really works once it’s exceeded a certain level of extreme lunacy, that meant it was the show’s weakest so far. It didn’t help that it was clearly a script commissioned before the retooling, which meant that the new additions to the team just sat around twiddling their thumbs like they were still stuck in the first episode. Or that Ishta’s strengths are in quirky, antisocial glibness rather than deep and meaningful. Or having the painful ‘girls v boys’ music argument. Or that the best nerd quote the show had to offer was ‘Thunderbirds are go’.

All the same, this is not a show that’s trying to be The Wire. It’s trying to be a bit of silly, escapist, summer fun, where epic nerds run around swapping TV quotes, discussing Settlers of Catan while solving crimes, and having silly little romantic relationships, with just enough of a series arc to distract you from the tedium of the pseudo-procedural A-plots of each episode.

And at that, Stitchers works just fine.

Barrometer rating: 3
Rob’s prediction: A bit touch and go whether it’ll last more than a season, but will probably turn out to be this year’s guilty summer viewing pleasure for many

The BarrometerA Barrometer rating of 2

Third-episode verdict: Westside (New Zealand: TV3)

16 June 2015 Rob Buckley 6 Comments

In New Zealand: Sundays, 8.30pm, TV3

Without having watched Outrageous Fortune, it’s getting increasingly harder to work out Westside, TV3’s 1970s-set prequel to the most popular drama in New Zealand history that isn’t called Shortland Street. Telling the story of OF’s safecracking grandpa Ted West when he was still young, vibrant and married to his still-alive wife Rita, does it feel like Outrageous Fortune 30 years earlier?

Dunno.

Is it true to the characters of the original show?

Dunno.

Does it tie into and sort out all kinds of plot threads from the original show?

Dunno.

Are its Shakespearean episode titles as good as the originals’?

Does it really matter?

To be honest, though, it might be a two-edged sword, knowing Outrageous Fortune well while watching this. There are sub-plots and plot threads from the first couple of episodes that I thought might be interesting for Westside to explore in later episodes. Except having looked them up, it turns out they were all answered in the original show. And having now looked them up, I know there’s going to be a sad ending, too.

So in retrospect, I was probably better off not knowing about Outrageous Fortune, instead getting to enjoy a fun Bonnie and Clyde meets Life on Mars down under comedy crime caper, with a swaggering, smart and likeable young buck of a semi-ethical criminal, his scheming, adulterous but apparently equally good-hearted wife, his dopey gang and their equally dopey relationships with other criminal gangs of various ethnic origins.

My first recommendation for anyone who never watched the original show is therefore to not look up anything about the original show, at least until this season is over. Let it stand on its own two feet, because it does this very well.

After a very decent start to the show, the second episode was a slight come down, losing some of the fun, while bravely making most of our heroes casual racists in a 1970s-stylee. Rita’s scheming was nevertheless good to watch and we got our first Almighty Johnsons cameo (Eve Gordon) – here’s hoping for more to come.

Episode three saw a return to the fun of the first episode, as well as a continuation of the darker themes, with 1970s attitudes to domestic violence coming under the spotlight, as well as New Zealanders’ then attitudes to other islanders. Thankfully, this was all a lot more tasteful than Australia’s Jonah From Tonga.

It’s hard to dislike and very easy to like Westside. It could do with tightening up here and there, and there are a couple of duff actors in the supporting cast, but the leads are great, the setting is marvellous and the plots strong. It may be a prequel but it feels like it has the potential to run and run (and I’m sure that’s the intention, too). Just don’t spoil it for yourself by reading what happens 30 years later.

Barrometer rating: 2
Rob’s prediction: Could run for multiple seasons