There’s something weirdly fascinating about the USA Network’s Dig. The creation of Tim Kring (Heroes) and Gideon Raff (Homeland), it sees FBI agent (hello to) Jason Isaacs travelling to Jerusalem to catch a criminal, only to somehow get embroiled in an Old Testament conspiracy theory that involves unblemished heffers, cloned kids whose feet must not touch the ground and a long-lost priest’s breastplate that allowed him to communicate with God. Bringing in all sorts of Jewish mythology in the same way that the similar Touchdid, it’s nevertheless absolute bobbins in the Dan Brown vein that’s only mildly less stupid.
Since the first episode, we’ve had all sorts happen but very little get explained, beyond the introduction of yet more conspiracists including Richard E Grant and the pairing of Isaacs buddy-buddy stylee with a sceptical Israeli cop (Ori Pfeffer). There have been plenty of chases, plenty of deaths, plenty of ‘revelations’ and plenty of biblical references, but nothing yet makes much sense.
The show has a few redeeming features: the Jersusalem filming and having half the show in Hebrew is lovely; the occasional local touch, such as having Pfeffer pick up his kid while taking a suspect to the police station, makes it feel like one of Raff’s shows before he switched to US TV; a strong supporting cast, including Grant, Anne Heche and David Costabile, lift the show above the likes of Allegiance; and having a show that’s firmly about Jewish rather than Christian traditions is novel.
But that’s not enough, when faced with Dig‘s obvious stupidity and dullness. It’s just tedious to watch.
Nevertheless, there’s something oddly compelling about its strangeness. Normally, with such a high Barrometer rating, I’d have dropped it like so much CSI: Cyber. But for some reason, whether it’s just the absolute strangeness of the show, Isaacs or the location filming, I want to tune in for more.
I absolutely under no circumstances would recommend Dig (or anything Tim Kring is involved with) to anyone, but I might well stick with it, right until the bitter end. At which point, I’m sure I’ll rue my wasted time. But I think I’ll still have seem something different from the usual US TV thriller. And perhaps that’s Dig last remaining redeeming feature.
Barrometer rating: 4 Rob’s prediction: It’s only supposed to last a season and that’s all it’s going to get
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.
Well, it’s been another epic week in TV land (not to be confused with “I can’t believe you can still see the” TV Land – the network for older, nostalgic, probably slightly visually challenged folk), with loads of new shows, as well as some returning ones. I haven’t managed to find the time to tune into Netflix’s new thriller series, Bloodlines, which was released on Friday, but this week, I’ve managed to take a gander at:
Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (Netflix)
Tina Fey’s new sitcom (unfortunately not starring Fey) in which one of four female cult members holed up underground are rescued by the authorities, and while three of them are happy to return home, one of them is spunky enough to try to make a new life for herself. Her name? Kimmy Schmidt. First, Schmidt (Ellie Kemper) manages to find herself a ‘home’ (aka small cubbyhole, it being New York) to live in with failed actor Titus Andromedon (Tituss Burgess) and makes a sort of a friend in the form of Lillian Kaushtupper (Carol Kane). Then she gets a job looking after the son of the delightfully named and incredibly rich trophy wife Jaqueline Voorhees (Jane Krakowski). Will she buckle under all these pressures or will she prove unbreakable?
As with 30 Rock before it, this is a show that grows from a not especially auspicious pilot episode redeemed by one character (Jack in 30 Rock, Mrs Voorhees here) to become funnier over time. But it’s still not hilarious by the second episode and if you’ve ever seen The Nanny Diaries, you’ll find yourself noticing not only how very similar they are in a lot of ways but also that there’s:
A complete lack of Scarlett Johansson in this, who was much funnier
A complete lack of Chris Evans or anyone even in a similar role. He was funny in that, too
Nowhere near as much intelligence in the script-writing, despite the source.
All the same, there are some laugh out loud moments involving IP licensing and the revelation of who Voorhees’ parents are, so I’m going to bear with and watch the rest of it – when I have a mo.
I also tried to watch…
The Royals (US/UK: E!)
Liz Hurley becomes queen and has to supervise the rest of her equally inappropriate, bonk-tastic family. Or something. I did manage to get through the young Harry-alike playing darts and managing to get a bullseye every time while not really looking, to impress an American girl into bed. But I gave up after 10 minutes, in part because it’s really hard to watch that much soft porn shagging on your iPad when you’re commuting on a train, without people thinking you’re a perv, and I didn’t manage to get back to it. Oh well. I don’t think I’ll be missing much. Joan Collins is in it, too, apparently. But then she was in Benidorm.
After the jump, the regulars: 12 Monkeys, 19-2, The Americans, Arrow, The Blacklist, The Doctor Blake Mysteries, The Flash, Fortitude, Man Seeking Woman, Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD and Vikings. One of these is being demoted this week. I wonder which one?
On top of that, we also have the return of Community. Woo hoo? You’ll find out the answer to that one after the break, too.
Wondering where Dig and American Crime are? The short answer is: waiting for third-episode verdicts tomorrow and maybe Wednesday. The long answer? I’ve got to watch them first…
Are you the kind of person who loves Veronica Mars? Are you the kind of person who loves brain-eating zombies? Do you think you might be the kind of person who would like it if Veronica Mars had been a brain-eating zombie?
Then listen up, because I have a show for you.
iZombie is loosely adapted by Veronica Mars-creator Rob Thomas from his comic of the same name and sees driven medical resident Rose McIver (Power Rangers, Xena, Masters of Sex, Once Upon A Time) take a rare moment to enjoy her life and go to a party. Unfortunately, at said party, David Anders (Alias, Heroes) is passing out his new experimental recreational drug, which has the rather bad side effect of turning everyone into zombies. Guess who gets caught in the flesh-eating crossfire?
Realising she has the power to infect others and that she needs to eat brains regularly if she’s going to avoid a massive IQ drop, McIver abandons her engagement to Robert Buckley* (One Tree Hill,666 Park Avenue, Lipstick Jungle) and goes to work as a medical examiner. There, by pretending to be a psychic, her ability to acquire memories from the brains she eats starts to come in handy for homicide detective Malcolm Goodwin (Breakout Kings) in solving murders. The only person she can trust not to kill her messily for being the undead monster she is? Fellow medical examiner Rahul Kohli, who might even be able to come up with a cure for her ‘condition’.
As with Veronica Mars before it, iZombie is a whip-smart show about a whip-smart woman who delivers a whip-smart voiceover while she solves crimes, all while juggling repressed passions and emotions, and trying to deal with adult issues. It’s a lot of fun, very knowing and oozes obvious subtexts from every pore, with McIver’s zombie-induced lethargy and lack of joie de vivre standing in as a viewer-determined proxy for anything from depression through to the rejection of societal and familial expectations.
Which should be exactly the kind of thing I would love. Yet for some reason, iZombie left me a whole lot colder than it should have done. Maybe it’s the glibness of it all or the lack of any real darkness; maybe it’s McIver’s annoying family; maybe it’s the fact the show has latched onto the police procedural format as the best way of telling stories; maybe it’s the fact that McIver gets shot and has no apparent capacity to heal – or blood flow – yet doesn’t seem too worried about having a bullet hole in her.
Whatever it is, while the show does have plenty of merits, from the central cast through to the zombie premise itself, it’s not quite gelling for me yet. But then I found the same was true of Veronica Mars, which I appreciate is practically a diagnostic criterion of some form of mental unbalance. So give it a try at least, since it’s entirely possible this might be the best TV show ever. I don’t think it is, but maybe someone’s eating my brain already.
“You’re not a very good lesbian, are you?” Kelly Brook asks Elisha Cuthbert at one point during the first episode of One Big Happy. It is the first of many points in the show’s half hour run that surprisingly, Kelly Brook is Very Right. Unfortunately, the sitcom itself is Very Wrong.
Exec produced by Ellen DeGeneres but written by Liz Feldman (Ellen: The Ellen DeGeneres Show, Ellen’s Really Big Show), the show flips the sexes of the usual “straight female with gay best friend” premise of most sitcoms and dramedies by giving us the straight Nick Zano (Happy Endings, 2 Broke Girls, 90210) and the gay Elisha Cuthbert (24, Happy Endings), who have been best friends since high school. Promising each other that if they didn’t have kids by the time they were both 30*, they’d have them together, Plan B seems bang on course, bar the babies, until Zano meets Brook in a bar and they fall head over heels in love. However, she’s about to be deported and despite Brook and Cuthbert hating each other at first sight, after a whirlwind romance, Zano and Brook get married in Las Vegas. Except wouldn’t you know it, Cuthbert is pregnant, which means they’re all going to have to find a way of living together.
The show is a mixture of 50% stereotypes, 50% character comedy. Despite usually being deployed in self-depreciation, the stereotypes are tedious and deployed shotgun-like, almost as though the writer isn’t even sure herself why she’s putting them in there.
Brook, for example, has to deploy the obligatory reference to British teeth, but as she has model-perfect teeth, has to talk about that back tooth of hers that isn’t quite straight.
Similarly, Cuthbert’s black brother-in-law offers her a glass of Chardonnay when she’s upset: “Oh my God, I’m talking like a white woman,” he says. What? Just what?
All I can do is marvel at how far programs for generating comedy scripts have come. They’re almost as funny as quite stupid human beings now.
To be fair, though, in contrast, the character comedy is actually reasonably funny in places. However, despite Cuthbert showing she had surprising comedic chops on Happy Endings, she’s woefully miscast in this as the straight-laced lesbian who wants to paint her house battleship grey, and the model-handsome former MTV presenter Zano doesn’t exactly convince as the nerd who’s writing a science fiction novel about robots. The first five or 10 minutes of the episode, when it’s just Zano and Cuthbert failing utterly to convince as lifelong best friends, also fails utterly to raise even the slightest laugh.
Then along comes Brook as the carefree, live wire Brit Prudence, who spends large portions of the first episode parading naked and pixellated in front of the obviously uninterested Cuthbert. And things get better – not the just the Brook being naked part, obviously, since she’s very good at it.
Now on the face of it, this shouldn’t work on two levels – again not the Brook being naked part.
The first level is that the stereotype-laden Feldman can’t expand her horizons even further than one US state to really understand what ‘carefree live wire’ might mean for an Englishwoman so writes her as Californian. Ancient prophecy has it that were a normal English working class woman to ever unironically suggest to anyone that they would benefit from a colonic irrigation, our blessed isle would instantly sink beneath the waves and descend to Avalon, where faerie folk would proceed to collectively tut at us for our desecration of our heritage and all that we hold sacred and pure. Yet Brook is required to do this very thing. One can only presume that King Arthur is pleading our case to them right now and we don’t have long to reach the lifeboats.
The second is that Brook is a terrible actress. She’s been trying to crack the US market for over a decade now, with appearances in everything from the first season of Smallville and the benighted The (Mis)Adventures of Fiona Plum through to Adult Swim’s NTSF:SD:SUV. The result has been she’s almost never been called back for further appearances, because it’s been clear to everyone that even by American TV standards, hers is a vanishingly small acting talent.
However, most of those jobs have required her to play prim and proper Englishwomen. Here, Brook is able to transcend her thespian vacuum simply by being loud and effusive, instead of buttoned-down. The result is that she’s actually quite engaging and even makes you laugh. It seems the old adage that if an English person speaks to foreigners loudly and slowly they’ll understand you really is true.
The problem for the show is that essentially despite saving it from being an absolute disaster, Brook is the only thing holding it up and she also makes everyone around her look dull and uninteresting. You just don’t care about the fussy Cuthbert, the tongue-tied Zano or any of the thinly drawn supporting characters.
The show’s other big problem is that it’s nothing but High Concept. What happens next? They’re all going to live together under one roof, the lifelong friends with a baby, one of whom is gay, and the woman they’ve both known for less than a week? One of them’s uptight, one of them believes in colonic irrigation, one of them is… male – and the two women don’t really like one another.
It’s not much is it, beyond going to the doctors, shopping for baby clothes, etc? Is Brook just going to prance about naked while Cuthbert says the word vagina every so often, when the writers realise they’ve got nothing else to work with?
Obviously, we’ll have to wait to see where things go next to be sure, although since we already have NBC’s The New Normal to act as a less congenial template, we can make a few educated guesses – and they’re not that enticing. But I can’t imagine One Big Happy really soaring or striking out into exciting new unpioneered comedic territories. But then this is NBC, which is also giving us a second season of Undateable. It’ll probably be the network’s most popular programme within a month.
Still, not only is it half bearable, it features Kelly Brook occasionally being funny, and it’s only six episodes long, so I doubt there’s going to be many padding episodes. So in all the diversity of the diverse new sitcoms we’re getting, this might be one that you’ll tune in to. Assuming you’ve got some ironing to do or something.
* So about seven and three years ago, respectively
In the US: Mondays, 10/9c, A&E In the UK: Available on Netflix. New episode every Tuesday
There are remakes. Then there are unnecessary remakes. And then there’s The Returned.
First, there was a French movie called Les Revenants. That saw a whole bunch of people coming back from the dead and returning to their very much surprised loved ones in a small French town, who have all moved on.
Then there was a Canal+ TV series called Les Revenants based on the movie, which aired on Channel 4 in the UK and on Sundance in the US; the second season of that is going to air in France later this year. That saw a whole bunch of people coming back from the dead and returning to their very much surprised loved ones in a small French town, who have all moved on.
Then there was a book called The Returned. That saw a whole bunch of people coming back from the dead and returning to their very much surprised loved ones in a small US town, who have all moved on.
Then there was an ABC TV series in the US called Resurrection based on the movie, which aired on Alibi in the UK; the second season of that is currently airing. That saw a whole bunch of people coming back from the dead and returning to their very much surprised loved ones in a small US town, who have all moved on.
And now we have a US remake of the Les Revenants TV series called The Returned. This sees a whole bunch of people coming back from the dead and returning to their very much surprised loved ones in a small US town, who have all moved on. Worse, still it’s practically identical to Les Revenants in almost every way – to the extent that alleged screenwriter and showrunner Carlton Cuse (Lost, The Bates Motel) and every other writer involved should probably relinquish their credits and give them over to the translators who translated the scripts into English for them.
You have to ask why this is happening. Sure, Sundance is a bit niche, but with Resurrection airing on ABC, it’s not like the concept’s not already getting a pretty good airing as it is. Yet here it is, not as good and not as creepy as Les Revenants, but filling our screens all the same on A&E, the network whose tag line is “Be original”. Oh sweet, sweet irony.
Still, let’s evaluate The Returned on its own terms, rather than merely wondering why it exists. After all, despite the fact we’re into episode two and at least three dead people have already turned up, no one in The Returned is wondering why they exist, so clearly a lack of questioning is all the rage.
As a show, it’s all right, but it’s supernaturally generic. We have a decent cast, some of whom look virtually identical to their French counterparts, including Kevin Alejandro (Southland), Michelle Forbes (BSG, Homicide, ST:TNG), Mark Pellegrino (Lost, The Tomorrow People) and Jeremy Sisto (Kidnapped, Suburgatory), with support from just about any reliable Canadian actor you care to mention (including Aaron Douglas from BSG, and Roger Cross from Arrow, 24, and Continuum). The various mysteries and secrets of the characters – assuming you haven’t already learnt them watching Les Revenants – are intriguing, and their various dilemmas are relatable. Well, apart from Pellegrino’s, cos he’s a git in this. If you watch the trailer at the end of the first episode, you’ll know that zombie-esque action is on the horizon, which is at least moderately more interesting than anything Resurrection was prepared to throw our way.
All the same, the characters are all colossally annoying in their inability to even call a doctor to ask WTF is going on. No one mentions what’s happened to anyone else, meaning that no one yet knows that they’re not alone in having a returned loved on. No one’s even mentioned zombies, except one of the zombies themselves, so that doesn’t count. Michelle Forbes hasn’t even had a line yet.
But briefly just to make comparisons with the original again, there’s none of Les Revenants’ unusual qualities. No odd silences, no quiet pieces of direction, no genuinely creepy kid, no lovely Mogwai soundtrack. The Returned is like virtually everything else on A&E: decent, solid, slowly paced and with nothing about it whatsoever that could be described as revolutionary. It’s comfortable viewing for an uncomfortable subject.
And perhaps that’s the argument for this otherwise unnecessary remake: it’s more watchable for being less unusual, meaning that more people are likely to watch it all the way through to the end.
So should you watch it? Well, look at the picture above of Victor in The Returned. Now look at the picture below featuring Victor from Les Revenants.
Would you rather watch a show featuring top Victor or bottom Victor? Once you know the answer to that, you’ll know which version is for you. And here are corresponding trailers to help you, too.
