TV reviews

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

The BarrometerA Barrometer rating of 3

Third-episode verdict: The Whispers (US: ABC)

16 June 2015 Rob Buckley 8 Comments

In the US: Mondays, 10/9c, ABC
In the UK: Not yet acquired

Supernatural and sci-fi summer shows generally follow a standard pattern: a good beginning followed by a quick descent into the tedious and unextraordinary. Look at Under The Dome and Extant.

For a while, it looked like The Whispers was going to follow the same path. Thankfully, it’s picked up again and is still quite a promising weekly viewing.

Based on a short story by Ray Bradbury, the series gives us invisible, largely intangible aliens trying to invade the Earth by persuading young children that they’re playing a game with a new playmate. These games have almost all turned out to be fatal to the children’s important parents and have all been part of a linked masterplan to destroy us all. Or at least America.

At the same time, an FBI child specialist (Lily Rabe) and her ex-lover Defense Department operative (Barry Sloane) are sometimes independently, sometimes jointly putting the pieces together, while simultaneously investigating the disappearance and mysterious reappearance of Rabe’s husband (Milo Ventigmiglia). Which turns out to be linked. Who’d have thunk it?

Despite the presence of a not inconsiderable number of terrible child actors as well as the desperately uncharismatic Rabe, the first episode gave us a surprisingly large number of chills, particularly in the second half, which amped up the alien weirdness.

Just like the parents, however, episode two fell victim to the children, so even with Ventimiglia carving tattoos into his own skin, the show felt like it was pulling up a deckchair and a mint julep, ready for a summer of relaxation while the kids played on the lawn, as it basically retrod everything we’d learnt in the first episode for the benefit of the characters. So far, so Extant.

Fortunately, episode three started advancing the plot again and pushed the kids a bit more into the background, while simultaneously giving us the bold idea of a white, American suicide bomber still in infants school. Did you ever think US TV would give us that? Well, I didn’t. And rather than simply having Milo Ventimiglia run around a lot, there was some actual action as well.

The show’s biggest problems are Rabe, the preponderance of insipid child actors and the slightly tedious soapiness that requires Rabe to be married to the chief suspect. But above all that are its absolutely pedestrian direction. While to a certain extent the show’s intent is to scare through the mundane and the everyday, rather than be a new Children of the Corn, the sheer banality of the direction is almost breathtaking, with seemingly no effort made to try to scare or to insert any imagination into shots. Not every show can be Hannibal, but they should at least try to be better than a training video for fitting a new fumigator hood to your stove.

The Whispers is no classic, but as far as scary TV goes, it’s so far doing a far better job than many of its predecessors. Although it could be doing even better, it’s a reasonably decent way to while away the time of a Monday, one I might well stick with for the foreseeable future.

Barrometer rating: 3
Rob’s prediction: Could well get a second season, even though it probably won’t and shouldn’t need one

US TV

Review: Dark Matter 1×1 (Canada: Space; US: Syfy; UK: Syfy)

15 June 2015 Rob Buckley 34 Comments

Dark Matter

In Canada: Fridays, 10e/7p, Space
In the US: Fridays, 10/9c, Syfy
In the UK: Mondays, 8pm, Syfy. Starts tonight  

They say there are no original ideas any more and that everything has already been done before – it’s just a question of how you take elements of what’s gone before to create a new mixture.

If this statement is true, it’s doubly true of science-fiction, where for any given show, it’s almost certainly possible to name a very similar if not identical predecessor. A case in point is the new Canadian-US co-production Dark Matter.

Adapted from their own comic by the brains behind the TV version of Stargate, Joseph Mallozzi and Paul Mullie, the show is roughly 90% Blakes 7 for starters – a group of six misfits, four men, two women, wind up on board an advanced spaceship. There they meet the seventh member of the crew, the ship’s artificial intelligence, and come together to fight oppression from a huge federation.

The remaining 10% of the show is pure Andromeda, with the ship’s artificial intelligence having a robotic avatar and the crew having turned good relatively recently, originally being a bunch of criminals until they had their memories taken away. And then there’s the slightly enigmatic woman with funny coloured hair who’s on board the ship but wasn’t one of the criminals and who has strange powers.

So far, so derivative. There’s even a little sprinkling of Firefly on top. The question is – does Dark Matter stick all these components together to create something decent?

The short answer is: not really, but at least it’s fun.

Continue reading “Review: Dark Matter 1×1 (Canada: Space; US: Syfy; UK: Syfy)”

What have you been watching? Including Big Hero 6, The Audience and Hannibal

12 June 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.

Life is good. Summer is here. I’ve watched loads of tele. Elsewhere, I’ve reviewed and previewed:

I’ve also passed verdict on the first four episodes of UnREAL (US: Lifetime) and the first three of Between (Netflix). That means that after the jump, I’ll be looking at the latest episodes of: Game of Thrones, Halt and Catch Fire, Hannibal, Sense8, Silicon Valley, Stitchers, Westside and The Whispers.

But before that, not only have I watched a movie, I’ve been to the theatre again:

Movies

Big Hero 6 (2014)
The first Disney animated movie to be based on a Marvel comic, Big Hero 6 sees a group of nerds come together to become science and technology superheroes when they’re faced with a man with an army of tiny robots. Led by a teenager called Hiro, they’re also helped by an inflatable healthcare robot called Baymax who can’t quite get to grips with this fighting thing superheroes do…

It’s actually quite a sweet little film, albeit with slightly traumatic moments that might disturb little children, with ironically Hiro learning from the caring Baymax how to be a better person and hero. Despite being a bit ‘boys and toys’, there are also a few good female nerd roles and some bits that will make you laugh out loud. The East meets West location of San Fransokyo is brilliantly realised, too.

Theatre

I’ve already reviewed The Oresteia (Almeida) elsewhere.

The Audience (Apollo Theatre)
Once a week, in a tradition that goes back to the time of Queen Victoria, the reigning monarch of the UK meets with the current Prime Minister to be updated on current events and to discuss matters of relevance to the both of them. In the hands of playwright Peter Morgan (The Queen), what could be purely a matter of historical interest instead becomes a song of praise to both the institution of the monarchy and the Queen herself.

The play flits between historical periods, giving us Prime Ministers from Churchill through to David Cameron, with the Queen acting as a fixed point in time who can compare Anthony Eden’s misadventures in Suez with Tony Blair’s in Iraq, Cameron’s small majority with Wilson’s, and act as a confessional for all of them. But it also looks at how the Queen herself changes over time, starting from a young, independent woman wanting to be involved in matters of state through to the mature monarch who accepts the needs of the constitution for her to back the government in everything, whatever she might feel personally. She also gets to have her own sounding board. Who, you might ask? Well, who could possibly provide the Queen with an audience except herself?

Rather than put the boot in as The Queen perhaps did, the play, which has been updated since its original run with Helen Mirren to include both Blair and Cameron at the expense of Callaghan, humanises both the Queen and all the Prime Ministers: Churchill is the traditionalist who mentors the new queen but also wants to postpone her coronation for political purposes and forces her not to change her name when she marries; Eden was right about Mussolini and Hitler and is convinced Nassar is the same; Wilson is the upstart socialist from Huddersfield with the eidetic memory who becomes paranoid as Alzheimer’s starts to rob him of his faculties; and Brown is the economics expert who believes his destiny was to lead the country – but who knows that he’s not got the right skills for the job. Even Major is redeemed: the man everyone remembers as little more than the tail end of Margaret Thatcher’s regime is here the man who brokered deals between warlords in the Balkans but who’s constantly undermined by his supposed allies.

And then there’s Margaret Thatcher…

Kristin Scott Thomas is excellent as the Queen, having to endure numerous quick changes of costume and jumps between time period, yet still surely making even the most ardent republicans feel something for the most powerful woman in the world, the firm proponent of the Commonwealth who was happy as a mechanic in the war and who would probably vote Labour if she could. In this she’s helped considerably by Izzy Meikle-Small as her younger self, who’ll make you wonder if the Queen is really just a grown up Arya Stark.

Hats off also to David Calder (Star Cops) as Churchill, Gordon Kennedy (Absolutely) as Gordon Brown, Michal Gould as John Major, Nicholas Woodeson (Rome) as Harold Wilson, and Highlander’s David Robb as Anthony Eden.

I’ll happily confess that both my wife and I wept buckets during the play and would happily go and see it again.

Continue reading “What have you been watching? Including Big Hero 6, The Audience and Hannibal”

US TV

Preview: Proof 1×1 (US: TNT)

12 June 2015 Rob Buckley 4 Comments

Jennifer Beals in TNT's Proof

In the US: Tuesdays, 10/9c, TNT. Starts June 16

The procedural is killing mainstream US TV. It really is. On the face of it, there’s nothing wrong with a procedural, whether it’s cops, doctors, firefighters or soldiers. As a format, the procedural is versatile since if you’re going to produce 13-24 episodes of something that doesn’t necessarily have a linking narrative, you’re going to want to have a reason for things to happen – and if your characters’ job is to go and find things, that really does help.

Trouble is when everything has to be crowbarred into that format, even when there’s really no good reason for it. You can just about forgive something like Stitchers – who else would bother trying to insert themselves into dead people’s fading consciousnesses every week apart from a shadowy government agency? Once would be enough for most people and you’d probably pick people who hadn’t died traumatically, which would be dramatically dull, of course.

But now we have the ludicrous Proof on TNT, a network that I thought was trying to get away from the fact that 90% of its content is procedural but here are showing that like some teenager after a break-up, they can’t quite get over their first love.

Jennifer Beals (Flashdance, The Chicago Code) is a powerful, high flying surgeon who is a sceptical woman of science. However, following the death of her teenage son, her family isn’t quite so happy, with Beals and husband David Sutcliffe (Cracked) getting divorced and her teenager daughter being none too happy with her either.

Then one day, tech billionaire Matthew Modine (Full Metal Jacket, Weeds) bribes hospital administrator Joe Morton (Terminator 2, Grace and Frankie) into ordering Beals to meet him. Modine is dying and hasn’t long to live, but being the prepared type, he wants to know exactly what’s going to happen to him afterwards. So he offers to give Beals his entire fortune on the event of his death – provided she can bring him proof of what happens, be that ascent to Heaven, everlasting blackness or partying in Valhalla until Ragnarok. And rather than investigate plausible cases in a long-drawn out research project, she’s going to look at a different phenomenon every week.

Yes, that’s right, we have the first ever ‘investigate the afterlife’ procedural. That’s… plausible.

Continue reading “Preview: Proof 1×1 (US: TNT)”

US TV

Preview: Another Period 1×1 (US: Comedy Central)

11 June 2015 Rob Buckley 4 Comments

Another Period

In the US: Tuesdays, Comedy Central. Starts June 23

Talking of reality TV show mockery, here comes another pastiche, albeit in a somewhat different form. Imagine it’s the turn of the 20th century and the cast of Downton Abbey have been relocated to Rhode Island. Now imagine that they’re being followed by a reality TV crew and that actually, all they want to do is everything that the Kardashians get up to, except in the milieu of the time.

So we have the show’s creators and writers Natasha Leggero and Riki Lindhome playing a pair of idiotic sisters who want to be in the list of the “400 most powerful white people”, invited to all the best dinner parties and doing sexy time with that John Ritter, if only it didn’t require 20 servants to undress them all.

As jokes written down in those paragraphs, they’re quite fun ideas and knowing that both Mad Men’s Christina Hendricks and Community’s Paget Brewster are in the show might even make you want to watch Another Period. Now try sitting through 25 minutes of those jokes being milked for all they’re worth while someone does a bit of shakycam in their direction. It’s not quite so funny then unless – and this is the important part as it’s vital to understanding Comedy Central’s comedy output – you’re either hammered or stoned.

Only you know if you’re hammered or stoned, but if you’re planning on being wide awake and alert and this is on your tele, you’ll be making a mistake. You’ll titter a bit, but without a bit of a chemical incentive, big guffaws will be as elusive as Raffles.