TV reviews

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

What have you been watching? Including The Producers, Divergent, Dig, Gallipoli, Fortitude and Vikings

16 March 2015 Rob Buckley 10 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.

Well, I’ve not quite caught up with my backlog. Nearly, but not quite. To be fair, the deluge of new shows has continued and this week I’ve already dealt with the first episode of American Crime and Powers, not to mention the first three of Secrets and Lies. But I’ve had to put on the backburner for a couple of days at least the first two episodes of A&E’s The Returned, a remake of Canal+’s Les Revenants, as well as E!’s first foray last night into insulting the British scripted programming, The Royals. I’ve also had to hold off starting on both the third season of House of Cards and Netflix’s new Tina Fey sitcom The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. But I will get round to all of them, I promise.

After the jump then, the regulars and the new regulars including 12 Monkeys, 19-2, The Americans, American Crime, Banshee, The Blacklist, Dig, The Doctor Blake Mysteries, Fortitude, Gallipoli, Man Seeking Woman, Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD and Vikings. One of them has been promoted to ‘recommended’ status and one of them narrowly avoided demotion – which ones do you think they were?

But I’ve also watched a couple of movies and been to the theatre!

The Producers (touring production, Bromley Churchill Theatre)
Musical adaptation of the Mel Brooks movie classic, in which theatrical producer Zero Mostel discovered from accountant Gene Wilder that he could make a fortune from a flop, and the duo conspired to put on the worst play imaginable: Springtime For Hitler. This touring production sees Cory English take on the Zero Mostel role, Jason Manford take on Wilder’s, with Phill Jupitus, Louise Spence and David Bedella rounding off the rest of the cast. Despite Manford, Jupitus and Spence being the big names, it’s English who’s the film’s focus and who gets the lion’s share of the work, the others getting surprisingly little to do. But the cast itself, right down to the dancers, are all uniformly excellent, even if Manford spends a little too much time in the first half trying to copy Wilder’s vocal patterns rather than giving his own interpretation. Not quite as funny as the original film, and with too many songs for its own good, it’s nevertheless a top notch night out.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 (2014) (iTunes)
Catness is out with the resistance in the third part of the series, which dials back in the action in favour of lots of propaganda videos, as each side tries to out PR the other in the ongoing civil war. It’s all a bit bleak and miserable actually, with very little respite from the darkness, making it the hardest watch of the series so far.

Divergent (2004) (iTunes)
More young adult, post-apocalyptic misery. To maintain peace and prosperity, society gets divided into factions following a terrible war and just as with Harry Potter’s sorting hat, everyone gets sorted into factions that suit their personalities. Except Shailene Woodley’s Tris is ‘Divergent’ and could belong to any number of factions, so picks ‘Dauntless’. Unfortunately, the ‘Erudites’ don’t like that, because they have a naughty scheme up their sleeves that the Divergents could ruin.

Very much a watered down Hunger Games, with flimsy logic and a thinly veiled metaphor for High School life (are you a nerd, a jock, on the debate team, a wallflower or are you really just such an individual?) meshed poorly with a very sub-Equilibrium post-apocalyptic background and fight scenes and a Twilight-style ‘special’ heroine whom everyone is after because she’s so special, yet simultaneously special. All the same, it’s actually enjoyable enough stuff, with some darkish moments, a plucky heroine, Theo James (Golden Boy, Bedlam) almost summoning up a personality for a change and Ashley Judd getting to use her Missing training for all of five minutes.

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Streaming TV

Review: Powers 1×1 (Playstation network)

13 March 2015 Rob Buckley 7 Comments

Powers

On the Internet: Playstation network

To quote Master and Commander, what a fascinating modern world we live in. Once upon a time, you needed something called a ‘television set’ to watch television programmes. Imagine that, hey? I mean ask the average teenager what a television set is now and they won’t know, am I right? It’s only if you tell them it’s the screen for their console games that they’ll know what you’re talking about.

The main cause of the step away from broadcasting TV has been the Internet: now practically anyone with enough money can not only make TV but also air it over the Internet to anyone who’ll watch it. No need for a pesky network of transmitters, cables or satellite dishes. The challenge has been to demonstrate that Internet TV is as good as broadcast TV and therefore worth watching.

Companies such as Netflix and Amazon have been doing just that, giving us the likes of House of Cards, Transparent, The Man In The High Castle, Orange Is the Only Black and more. Now comes Sony with TV for its Playstation console network. And it seems intent on proving that actually, Internet TV is pretty sucky and nowhere near as good as that stuff you used to watch on your ‘television set’.

Powers is the Playstation Network’s first foray into scripted original programming. Adapted from Brian Michael Bendis’s graphic novel of the same name, it imagines a world in which superheroes (aka ‘powers’) are real and commonplace, how that world would deal with it and how those superheroes would genuinely act. ‘Arch nemesis’? You’ve been reading too many comics – there’s no black and white in the real world. That guy’s just a dick…

Sharlto Copley (District 9, The A-Team, Maleficent et al) plays a detective in the police’s ‘powers’ division tasked with policing homicides committed by superheroes. A former ‘power’ himself, he lost his abilities in a fight with the Sylar-esque Wolfe (Eddie Izzard) and hasn’t quite adjusted to his loss, something his new partner, Deena Pilgrim (Susan Heyward), quickly comes to realise. Now he’s faced with dealing with someone who’s killing ‘powers’ – and it’s probably the teleporting ‘power’ Johnny Royalle (Noah Taylor), who everyone thought was dead.

Now clearly Sony wanted to produce something that it imagined would draw in games players. So pause for a second and imagine a crude stereotype of games players. Imagine what TV they’d like to watch.

And you’ve pretty much got Powers.

Okay, it’s probably not as bad as whatever you’ve imagined. Yes, there is underage sex between a teenage powers wannabe (played by the thankfully 28 years old Olesya Rulin) and a much older man. Yes, there’s plenty of gore and ickiness. But actually, there are no hot naked babes, only the ever-wonderful, well clothed Michelle Forbes as Retro Girl. And actually the story involves remarkably little action and violence, intent as it is on trying to depict real people in a strange world.

But this is a superhero fest with ample eye-rolling moments, startling bad dialogue and in-show trading cards of all the ‘powers’. There’s also amazingly bad acting, just like in most games. Although Forbes is reassuringly competent, she’s only in the first episode for a few moments, leaving the bulk of the action to Copley, Izzard, Heyward and co, who are clearly under the impression they’re getting paid a lot of money to appear in something that only about five people will watch so are either hamming it up something chronic or phoning in their performances. It doesn’t help that Copley and Izzard are both woefully miscast, clearly hired as names rather than because they were the most suited actors for the roles.

Worse still, someone has obviously been counting beans at Sony and figured that this actually qualifies as just another game and gave all 10 episodes of the show the budget of one. Because everything just looks rubbish. Imagine CGI from the early 90s and that’s what pretty much every special effect looks like – you won’t believe that a man can fly… or shoot lightning bolts or anything else. In fact, ITV2 did a very similar but comedic show a few years ago called No Heroics and it had better effects than this does.

Actually, the whole thing was better. Think on that. A seven-year old, not very good ITV2 show is better in every respect than a TV programme intended as Sony’s Internet TV calling card.

As well as the poor, often tedious pacing of Powers, the largely bland look of the show is a big surprise, given that the director is David Slade, who set the visual tone of the delectable Hannibal. But beyond a few piquant visual flourishes, Powers‘s direction is about as bland as it comes.

There’s a decent enough story lurking under all of this. Unfortunately, it’s Sony who are trying to ‘realise’ it and the result is something pretty poor. Frankly, gamers – even everyone – deserve better than this. And broadcast TV looks like it’s got a good few years left in it as a result.

US TV

Review: American Crime 1×1 (US: ABC)

12 March 2015 Rob Buckley 25 Comments

American Crime

In the US: Thursdays, 10/9c, ABC

Every so often, the American entertainment media decides it needs to make something Very, Very Important about race in America. Race and crime and drugs. Hopefully, in some sort of ensemble and/or anthology format. Something that’ll make up for not talking about them in an adult manner for the previous five to 10 years.

American Crime is such a Very, Very Important show and it really, really does know it. It is also quite important, too.

Following on from the likes of Crash and The Wire but without much by way of humanity, accessibility or humour, American Crime is a slow-moving, lovingly made, beautifully shot piece, filled with overlapping stories and fine actors, that you almost certainly know you should be watching but might well struggle to find the energy to do so, once you remember that the previous episode sucked all the joy of life from you.

Created by, written by and directed by John Ridley Jr (12 Years A Slave) and starring the likes of Timothy Hutton, Felicity Huffman and Penelope Ann Miller, it sees Hutton and Huffman’s war veteran son killed during an apparent burglary and his wife raped. Soon, a young Latino man is arrested, as is a black meth addict, and the racial battle lines are drawn, as the case proceeds. Except then the twists set in, muddying the waters.

Miserable already and the show only gets worse over the course of the first episode, as we see parents learn tragic things about their sons they’d rather not, people’s alcoholic pasts used as weapons against them, and lives destroyed. The script is thoughtful, giving us respectful, undramatic professionals, ranging from police to doctors to journalists, as well as drug addicts who are more than just their next fix, while refusing to make anything black and white – or simply Black and White. The acting’s first rate, in particular from Hutton, who it was possible to forget while watching Leverage was the youngest ever winner of an Oscar for supporting actor but who makes sure you know it here.

The trouble is that it’s a real struggle getting to the end of even this first episode. Hutton’s anguish is powerful, the bleakness of his and Huffman’s marriage horrifying, and while the drug addiction scenes never exactly hits the absolute misery of Requiem For a Dream, for example, they’re about as close as network TV is going to get.

It’s also pretty slow-moving, with just the occasional implausibility to take you out of all the verisimilitude – why exactly are those drug dealers watching ABC’s Sunday night chickfest Revenge? Why do the other dealers have a copy of Country and Landscape to read? Yes, there’s three-dimensionality to characters, but there’s also downright unlikeliness.

The show does have some thoughtful things to say about race along the way. Huffman’s character, for instance, hears ‘Latino’ and automatically assumes that the suspect in her son’s murder is an illegal immigrant, even though he was born in the US and his father is a proud legal immigrant.

If you can force yourself to eat a regular dose of greens every week that not only will drain you and leave you feeling saddened and perhaps even frightened by the world but wants you to feel that way, too, American Crime is about as good a crime drama as you’re going to get. If not, you’ll be missing out, but I won’t blame you… because I might be joining you.

TV reviews

Review: Secrets and Lies (US) 1×1-1×3 (US: ABC)

10 March 2015 Rob Buckley 8 Comments

Secrets and Lies (US)

In the US: Sundays, 9pm ET/8pm CT, ABC

You know, if you’re going to remake an already not great show, you should probably try to fix some of the original’s problems. Australia’s Secrets and Lies was supposed to be Ten’s Really Big Thing for 2014. Backed up by social media et al in the exact same way that Gracepoint was, it saw painter and decorator Martin Henderson find the body of his neighbour’s dead child while out running. Unfortunately for him, the police get it into their heads that he’s the murderer and it’s left up to him to work out who the real culprit was, all the time being followed by the police and the media while simultaneously reviled as a child killer by everyone he comes across. Along the way, all kinds of secrets and lies are revealed that threaten his family, marriage, livelihood, etc.

And he takes his top off a lot.

It’s a decent idea that unfortunately didn’t pan out in practice so well, as it relied on Henderson being an absolute idiot and the police being insanely vindictive and incompetent, to the extent that they were practically twirling their moustaches and laughing menacingly the whole time. The result was that the ratings were pretty low and little was heard of the show after just a few weeks. Watercooler moment? Only if you’d forgotten there was a watercooler and then every so often were reminded you had a watercooler once and idly wondered where it had got to – for a moment.

ABC – the US one, not the Australian one – bought up the format rights to the show before it had even been made and now we’re finally seeing the remake emerge onto our screens, with Henderson replaced by posh boy Ryan Phillippe (Cruel Intentions) and the moustache-twirling police detective replaced by Juliette Lewis (Natural Born Killers). The trouble is, beyond the recasting, it’s pretty much the same show, except with Phillippe taking his top off less. More or less every moment is the same, just relocated to a Washington/Canada environ with a US cast (bar one couple who are British for no readily explored reason).

And that means all the stupid things are the same, too. While there are changes in emphasis and Henderson’s neighbour is now Phillippe’s house guest, confidant and sanity-advisor, we’re still getting him picking up the murder weapon that’s been hidden in his house and then trying to hide it in an only slightly less obvious location. Lewis may not have a literal moustache to twirl but she spends all her time looking like she’s sucking on a lemon while thinking of new ways to make Phillippe’s life miserable, going out of her way to ignore all kinds of heinous acts, including domestic violence, if it would cut into her lemon-sucking time in front of Phillippe.

To be fair, Phillippe – who’s changed a lot since Cruel Intentions – does well as a now moderately hard working painter/decorator (although Henderson’s gay clients appear to have been lost somewhere over the Pacific in the relocation) and the supporting cast do feel like proper characters and potential suspects rather than a simple Rent-A-Mob. You also get a better feel for Phillippe’s motivations for some of the daft things he does, which now only seem very inexplicable rather than outright ludicrous.

But fundamentally, the backbone of the story is still the same old idiocy that made me turn off the original at pretty much the exact same point I’m almost certain to turn off this time – now. Spare your brain, don’t watch Secrets and Lies.

What have you been watching? Including Dig, Maximum Choppage, The Americans, Fortitude, 12 Monkeys and Vikings

9 March 2015 Rob Buckley 22 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’sLocate TV – they’ll even email you a weekly schedule.

A couple of days away and once again the new shows descend! It’s like they know. I’ve done my best to watch them all, and you might have noticed my reviews of The Last Man on Earth, CSI: Cyber and Battle Creek over the past week. I’m putting off my review of ABC’s remake of Secret and Lies until tomorrow when I’ve had a chance to watch the third episode (yes, they showed the first two on the same night) and American Crime only arrived on the scene on Thursday so I’ll be giving that a go either tomorrow or Wednesday. Netflix’s also dumped the whole of the new Tina Fey sitcom The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt onto our queues on Friday, which I’ll at least try to make a start on this week, too.

Which just leaves the following, which I have actually managed to watch but which don’t really merit full reviews of their own.

Dig (US: USA Network)
Tim Kring (Heroes) and Gideon Raff (Homeland, Tyrant) collaborate on what is essentially Touch 2, with FBI agent Jason Isaacs coming to Jerusalem to hunt down a murderer, only to be drawn into Jewish mysticism and Dan Brown-style prophecies and conspiracies involving a red-haired archaeology student and the guy who played Hardman in Suits (the fabulous David Costabile) having a big collection of cloned kids and a black-hair-free cow in Norway. It’s novel to have both the Israeli location shooting and the solely Jewish rather than Christian mythology as the foundation of the plot, but already it’s so intricate and beardy weirdy that I’m not really tempted to watch any more of the silliness. But there are enough bonkers elements, including Richard E Grant, to make me watch at least one more episode, I think.

Maximum Choppage (Australia: ABC2)
Asian guy returns to Melbourne after three years away in Beijing at a martial arts school, whereupon his family and friends demand that he protect them from local gangs. Unfortunately, it turns out he’s actually been at Marshall Arts School, learning how to paint and edit videos, which means he and his female kung fu-tastic best friend have to pull off a series of elaborate con tricks on everyone to keep the neighbourhood in check by convincing the baddies that he really is a true warrior. Written by and starring Lawrence Leung, it works best when it’s sending up the plots of 70s and 80s kung fu movies and transposing them onto modern Melbourne, worst when it has a bad guy called ‘Kai Lee’ who likes to sing ‘The Locomotion’. Not bad and occasionally quite titter-worthy, but not as good as the average episode of Hong Kong Phooey.

After the jump, the regulars: 12 Monkeys, 19-2, The Americans, Arrow, Banshee, The Blacklist, The Doctor Blake Mysteries, Forever, Fortitude, Gallipoli, Man Seeking Woman, Marvel’s Agent Carter, Suits and Vikings.

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