TV reviews

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

US TV

Preview: Clipped 1×1 (US: TBS)

11 June 2015 Rob Buckley Post a comment

TBS's Clipped

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

Time was you know that someone’s career either on the downslide or had never existed if their sitcom was on TV Land. But it seems that supposed comedy network TBS, which was actually starting to look quite promising with the likes of Ground Floor and Wedding Band, has decided to try to poach this ‘honour’. We’ve already had to endure Your Family Or Mine this year and now we have Clipped, which makes that travesty look like The Chapelle Show.

The basic premise of Clipped is both simple and forced: a bunch of Bostonians who all went to the same High School but largely didn’t hang out together all end up over the river in Charlestown, Massachusetts, working in the same hairdressers, Buzzy’s.

Buzzy’s, despite being outfitted like a barber shop and having a male boss and three male stylists, but only a female receptionist and two female stylists, is actually a unisex salon. Can you see that queue of women forming to go in? Of course, you can. Because there they are, despite all probability, on your TV screen getting haircuts that make them look like “my 70-year-old dad who has to smoke through a hole in his neck”. Appealing, non?

But the women come for one thing – one man, even. For reasons not thoroughly explained in this pilot episode, one of the skinniest of the male barber-hairdressers is a babe-magnet and professional-level baseball player and he’s just had a call from his agent; coincidentally, the insurance premiums have just gone up at Buzzy’s and the short, not at all Danny DeVito-esque boss of the shop leaves it up to the staff to work out among themselves whom to fire. Should he leave? And how will the female stylist who secretly loves him take it?

Clipped was originally called Buzzy’s Barbershop and then Buzzy’s and it’s clear from this that deciding on the title for the show is where all the creative effort went, because it’s like something you might find in a cat’s litter tray the day you come home to discover Tiddles has been licking away at Friday’s leftover curry. This is strange because it was created by Will and Grace’s David Kohan and Max Mutchnick. I say Will and Grace’s but it’s better to think of them as Partners’ David Kohan and Max Mutchnick, because that’ll give you a stronger flavour of the show’s contemporary and realistic nature, cutting edge humour and superb casting choices. Not at all on the downslope of their careers. Not at all.

Despite having that slightly noxious, cat excrement quality to it, Clipped has somehow managed to attract both Ashley Tisdale and George Wendt to its cast. Tisdale looked to be doing just fine post-High School Musical when she landed up in Hellcats, but clearly something’s gone terribly wrong since. And Wendt, who was of course Norm in Cheers, clearly has some bills to pay or a new yacht to buy, because here he’s playing a gay hairdresser who’s been in a relationship with Die Hard’s Reginald Veljohnson so long that the other hairdressers’ nickname for him is ‘Brokehip Mountain’ – gay hairdressers being a novelty in Charlestown, apparently.

The show fails at just about every level. I don’t think I laughed once in the entire pilot. Not once. It’s insulting to gay people, short people and the working class. The acting’s poor. No one is well cast, particularly the baseball-playing Mike Castle. There are even fewer Boston/Charlestown accents on display than in The McCarthys. It doesn’t even convince as a vision of life in a barber’s – sorry, unisex hair salon. How can you fail to get even that right?

About the only thing that was any good was the romantic sub-plot, but that’s just going to be two young ‘uns trying hard not to show their feelings, despite both knowing them, for about a season and a half to two seasons or longer, and who has time for that these days?

All in all, you’d be much better off in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

The BarrometerA Barrometer rating of 3

Fourth-episode verdict: UnREAL (US: Lifetime)

11 June 2015 Rob Buckley 10 Comments

In the US: Mondays, 10/9c, Lifetime
In the UK: It’ll be on Lifetime or Living, you know it

As the show’s weak ratings in the US bare out, it’s hard to know what to make of UnREAL, a ‘comedy’ drama set behind the scenes of fake reality dating show ‘Everlasting’ that looks at all the manipulations and exploitation that go on in the name of entertainment and making money. For Lifetime, it’s not only a touchy subject, given how much of its content is reality TV, but it’s atypically dark, with a lack of any real heroes or heroines and themes of everything from racism and feminist analyst of stereotypes through to anorexia, drug-taking, alcoholism and rape.

As I mentioned in my review of the first episode, the show’s stronger when dealing with analyses of how reality TV works, weaker when dealing with relationships behind the camera, which mirror the ones in front. However, over time, the series does seem to have slowly lost interest in the reality TV contestants themselves, being more interested in the people behind the cameras.

This is perhaps an unwise move for UnREAL with Shiri Appleby’s reluctant enabler distinctly implausible, although there is a slightly ambiguous but successful attempt in the third episode involving her psychiatrist mother to flesh her character’s motivations out and suggest she has a personality disorder.

Indeed, most of the main characters have been fleshed out, although are still somewhat implausible. Surprisingly, English reality show star Adam isn’t the least plausible, but references to PG Tips to one side, the show’s attempts to do Englishness crunch like it’s trying to go from first to third gear without using the clutch. For example, having his Abercrombie-and-Fitch clad English friend ask “Who watches American TV?” doesn’t really suggest producers that know the UK TV market very well.

The fourth episode improves the show somewhat as it takes us into some very edgy, unusual territory, away from some of the more soapier plots although not abandoning them. If the show hadn’t lost virtually all Lifetime’s normal audience, I imagine the last of them had left by the end.

Overall, UnREAL is something of a slow but ultimately enjoyable burn, which presumably is why Lifetime’s just shoved the first four episodes onto its web site – that and the hope that the ratings might pick up through good word of mouth as a result. Despite the show’s subject matter, it’s a lot smarter than you’d think, although practically everyone in the cast has been miscast. But you’ll have to enjoy a both frothy and darker side to life – and reality TV – to really love UnREAL

Barrometer rating: 2.5
Rob’s prediction: Dead after one season

Streaming TV

Review: Sense8 1×1-1×2 (Netflix)

9 June 2015 Rob Buckley 10 Comments

Sense8

There’s a reason that HBO makes all the best US shows. Lots of reasons in fact. At a basic level, it’s got oodles of cash so it can afford to splurge on high production standards. It’s also a premium cable show, which means that it can show pretty much anything: sex, violence, swearing, drug-taking – whatever it wants, more or less.

But most importantly, it gives TV producers creative control. No network executives monitoring scripts, sending notes, telling the writers to make character x more likeable, character y less gay and situation z less East Coast. Here’s your big pile of money, give us 10 episodes, off you go and don’t come back until you’re good and ready.

Simples.

So naturally Netflix, attempting to burst into the worldwide TV scene and wanting to overturn the idea of Internet TV being cheap and nasty, essentially emulated HBO’s model with its own productions. The slight twist is that it combined the HBO production model with the DVD release model: almost without exception, it’s released all episodes of its shows at the same time, usually on a Friday, so we can binge-watch them over the weekend.

Sometimes this has worked very well, giving us true TV classics such as House of Cards and Daredevil that you almost can’t stop watching as soon as they’re released.

But the model does have flaws, both in terms of production and release. With Grace and Frankie and Bloodline, for example, somebody somewhere needed to tell the shows’ creators that they were spending an awful lot of money on something that wasn’t very good. They really needed a network executive saying character x need to be more likeable, character y more gay and situation z less Florida Everglades. They also needed someone to point out it’s no use structuring a show to be watched in one go, if the individual episodes are so uninspiring, no one can be bothered to watch the next one.

Sense8 is perhaps the epitome of all the flaws of the Netflix model and is so far, quite easily the worst show that Netflix has put out. Two episodes in, it’s getting better, but that’s from a very, very low starting point.

On paper, the show should be good. For starters, it’s created by the Wachowskis, who created and directed The Matrix, and J Michael Straczynski, who’s best known for creating Babylon 5 but was BAFTA-nominated for his script for Clint Eastwood’s Changeling. The Wachowskis are also directing it.

The show itself is essentially Heroes, with strangers around the world waking up to discover they have strange new abilities and that they’re all linked somehow. There’s even a Mohinder-alike (played by Lost/The Buddha of Suburbia’s Naveen Andrews) to go around the world to each of them and explain what’s happening to them.

The main difference between this and Heroes is that rather than be able to fly, have super strength, etc, the sensate ‘sense eight’ can share each other’s senses – they can see, hear, feel, taste, etc, everything that the others experience. They can even tap into each other’s knowledge. Or at least they could if they could understand what they are…

…and each other. Because this is a show that celebrates diversity and empathy. Right from its “look at the wonders of the world and humanity” title sequence through to the end credits of each episode, Sense8 wants you to experience the joys of living from every possible person’s point of view. So the eight include a gay Spanish actor, a Chinese female martial artist/businesswoman, a trans, lesbian San Francisco hacker, a Chicago cop, a young female drug addict DJ who’s down and out in London, an Indian bride-to-be, an African bus driver and more.

All of which is admirable and oodles of cash have been spent to give us worldwide filming. It lacks a little bit of local knowledge, giving us a London filled with Mancs and a penniless girl who manages to live in a bedsit within walking of St Paul’s, but it’s all very lavishly filmed, with the Wachowskis’ typical flair for the visual.

The trouble is that for at least the first episode and a half, not only is all this taken to be sufficient in and of itself, but clearly no one’s told the Wachowskis that maybe they need to be a little bit more disciplined.

There is an attempt to give us a plot, with Andrews, who is himself sensate, trying to protect the Sense8 from someone called Whispers who’s also sensate but killing off the sensate. Or something.

If that previous paragraph sounds ludicrous, that’s because it is and so is the show.

All the same, despite that plot starting itself and the show off with Daryl Hannah committing suicide, nothing happens as a result of it that’s in any way exciting until the end of the second episode, when we get Andrews doing all kinds of cool things. But that’s two hours in.

Until then, we get not so much a bunch of characters as a bunch of Very Important Characters who represent Very Important Things and only do and talk about Very Important Things. Must go to Pride parade with black lesbian girlfriend. Must make video explaining to the world importance of Pride parade. Must have disapproving parent who doesn’t accept my life choices. Must show importance of women’s rights in India. Must show difficulty of coming out when in the public spotlight. And so on.

In between all these Very Important Things, there is the constant repetition for each of the Sense8 of numerous scenes of them experiencing what the others are experiencing and then shaking it off as an hallucination – “What can it all mean? Am I going mad?” No, but possibly the audience is, having already seen this five times before and confidently expecting it at least another two times.

And in between this epic point underlining are interminable scenes showing off the various cultures and locations. For example, Indian bride-to-be’s fiancé puts on a faux Bollywood dance number for her at their party. It’s a lovely idea, but it only really needed 10 seconds of time to make the point. But the Wachowskis instead choose to give us the entire dance number.

The result of all of this, coupled with some of the worst dialogue since someone put The Starlost through Google Translate and back again, is that the first episode is among the worst things I’ve ever seen on TV. It makes Artemis 81 look vibrant, exciting and unpretentious.

There is just enough of an uptick at the end of episode two that I might try episode three. But I can’t imagine there’s a single human being who made it through to the end of episode one who was cheerfully looking forward to the next episode, unless they were hoping to see more of Doctor Who’s Freema Agyeman doing naughty things with her girlfriend while faking an American accent for no good reason.

I guess if there’s a lesson here, it’s that if you’re going to give creative freedom to creators, either be very careful to whom you give that freedom or be prepared for some epic failures as well as successes. Sense8 is a very ambitious, beautiful plea for empathy and tolerance and to learn to love and accept people for all their diversity. It’s also an example of how even the best creatives can need a dispassionate eye to look over their work and reign them in.

The BarrometerA Barrometer rating of 5

Third-episode verdict: Between (Netflix)

9 June 2015 Rob Buckley 5 Comments

Even if you are an REM hater, ‘The End of the World As We Know It’ has never been more boring than in Between. A co-production between Netflix and Canada’s CityTV, it sees virtually everyone in the absurdly titled town of Pretty Lake aged over 21 keel over and die of a mysterious, unknown ailment. With thousands dead in just a few days, the government quarantines Pretty Lake, sticking an electric fence round it, leaving behind a town full of kids running riot while surrounded by the slowly putrifying corpse of every adult relative and mentor they’ve ever known.

The latter point should be a dramatic focus of the show, you’d have thought, with traumatised teenagers and infants blubbing and suffering from shock at their terrifying orphaning. But although episode two managed to give us kids dragging the dead bodies of their parents et al into a communal pit filled with thousands of bodies, followed by a group cremation, generally they’ve not been that upset. A bit miffed and puzzled as to what’s happening; a bit keen to send lots of texts, mope around with their boyfriends and girlfriends, and settle old scores with a bit of glowering. But they were actually all a lot more saddened by their loss of mobile phone coverage in episode three.

As I mentioned in my review of the first episode, the show almost goes out of its way not to be too interesting or Lord of the Flies. None of the characters have anything going for them, having the self-centred entitlement of the typical teenager combined with the collective charisma of Ryvitas and a complete inability to care about the horrific deaths of their own parents right in front of their own eyes – not a Bruce Wayne among this lot, it seems. The show pushes the envelope of plausibility to open up possibly exciting plot scenarios, by giving the small town of Pretty Lake not only its own prison full of murderers but a zoo from which a tiger has escaped. But it’s a sign of the pausity of the show’s storytelling capabilities that this has so far failed to produce even the slightest thrill. There’s an escaped tiger everyone… an escaped tiger. No? Don’t really care. Okay.

Between‘s biggest lure is its mysterious ailment, neither bacterium nor virus, affecting only those over 21 and striking without symptoms or leaving a trace. Yet the show leaves that lying around in the background, barely touching upon it, in the exact same way Revolution chose to ignore its electricity-destroying nanites until it was too late for anyone to give a toss about them.

So after three episodes of enduring mind-numbing tedium, combined with a laughable ability to paint even a slightly plausible picture of either small town or post-apocalyptic life, I’m thinking it’s time to give up on this. But, you know, whatevs.

Barrometer rating: 5
TMINE prediction: If Netflix renews this for a second season, I’ll eat my hat

What have you been watching? Including The Elephant Man, Hannibal, Strike Back & Halt and Catch Fire

5 June 2015 Rob Buckley 14 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.

Elsewhere on this ‘ere blog, I’ve already reviewed all the new TV shows I could find this week and which you should either try to find yourselves or desperately avoid, these being:

So if you’re looking for new shows here, I ain’t got nothing for you, mister, I’m afraid, since I haven’t had a chance to watch Netflix’s new Sense8, the entire series of which was released today. Thanks Netflix.

However, we’ve got a few returning regulars this week, too, which means that after the jump, I’ll be reviewing the first new episodes of the latest seasons of Hannibal, Halt and Catch Fire and Strike Back: Legacy. I’ll also be looking at the latest episodes of Between and Game of Thrones, and casting an eye over perhaps the last ever episode of Community.

But first, a theatre review! I have in fact between to the theatre twice this week, but I’m saving up my review of the Almeida’s marathon modernisation of The Oresteia – a trilogy in four parts, it turns out – until next week when I can give it due consideration.

The Elephant Man (Theatre Royal Haymarket)
Little known actor Bradley Cooper and the rest of the Tony Award-nominated Williamstown/Broadway cast (Patricia Clarkson, Alessandro Nivola, Anthony Heald et al) come over to the Theatre Royal for this 12-week run of Bernard Pomerance’s 1979 play about the deformed Joseph Merrick aka ‘the Elephant Man’ because he was exhibited in a circus. Most people will be familiar with the 1980 David Lynch movie starring John Hurt, and this follows similar beats, focusing on Merrick’s life between his discovery by a Dr Treves (Nivola) at the circus run by Heald through his life in Treves’ care at the London Hospital and his friendship with Clarkson’s famous actress (who in real life actually did perform at the Haymarket) until his eventual death in the hospital.

It’s a moving piece, albeit one that can’t quite focus on a theme, jumping between questions of God and Darwinism through to women’s bodies in Victoria society. Merrick here is similar to Lynch’s version, being the beautiful souled man trapped in a body so horrifying everyone but a trained actress can’t help but avoid screaming and running away from. However, this is less ‘disabled as object pity’ than the movie, giving us a Merrick who’d quite like to see a naked woman, please.

Cooper takes on the challenging role of Merrick but eschews all make-up in favour of an entirely physical and quite breathtaking performance, assuming each deformity as it’s described in an early scene. Cooper’s obviously and deservedly the focus of the play, but Nivola’s performance is what anchors it and Scott Ellis’s direction is innovative. I was impressed, my wife loved it and the whole thing got a standing ovation, so see it while you can.

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