Sometimes, pedigree just isn’t enough. Take Battle Creek. It’s written by David Shore (creator of House) and Vince Gilligan (creator of Breaking Bad); its first episode is directed by Bryan Singer (The Usual Suspects, X-Men, X-Men: Days of Future Past). It has ‘winner’ written all over it.
But it’s poor. It’s very poor. It’s a buddy-buddy cop dramedy set in the little town of Battle Creek, Michigan. What kind of buddy-buddy, you might wonder? Is one neat, one tidy? Does one play by the book and is the other a Maverick? One black, one white? Male, female? Gay, straight? Old, young? Blue collar, white collar?
No, surprisingly, Shore and Gilligan have gone for “rich, talented and handsome” versus “poor, incompetent and ugly”.
Dean Winters (best known as Liz Lemon’s bad ex-boyfriend in 30 Rock) stars as a Battle Creek police detective who has had to try to solve small town crimes on a small town budget. No wires, so baby monitors will have to do; tasers that don’t work; and so on – you get the picture. As a result, he has to cut a few corners here and there.
Of course, it’s easy to blame a low clear up rate, your suspect ethics and all your problems on your tools if you’re a bad workman… or your tools really do suck. But then Josh Duhamel (Las Vegas) arrives in town. A high-achieving FBI special agent, he has all the skills, resources and looks Winters doesn’t. Will Winters be able to cope, dwelling in the shadow of this golden boy? Or will he – like Duhamel’s previous work colleagues – try to get him shunted to some other god-foresaken outpost somewhere, as soon as it’s humanly possible?
That’s really all the show is built around and there’s not much to like about it. The two halves of the first episode show the problem quite well: the first half, while not especially well written, actually has the comic potential, with the fun pairing of Winters and co-worker Kal Penn (House) doing well milking their failed tech problems for all they’re worth. Then Duhamel turns up and the comedy becomes all about how Winters can’t do something, but Duhamel can because he has a forensics lab, etc. Time after time, whatever Winters wants to do, Duhamel simply does it. There’s no challenge.
There’s also no chemistry. Duhamel is the square cut Platonic ideal of an FBI agent, but little more, and the two have the easy going relationship and interactions most people have with alabaster. It’s not Duhamel’s fault so much as the fault of the set-up, which doesn’t lend itself to normal human interactions. And while there’s the potential for drama rather than comedy, the show doesn’t seem inclined to have Duhamel lording it over Winters rather than simply being oblivious to the effect he has on others.
On top of the fact the crime the couple investigate in the first episode isn’t that interesting, thrilling or complicated, and the supporting cast (bar Penn) aren’t worth watching either, you have a show that merely exists to fill up a Sunday evening schedule and add to CBS’s annual crime show quota.
In the US: Wednesdays, 10/9c, CBS In the UK: Acquired by Channel 5 for Spring broadcast
For a long-time, CBS’s CSI franchise had a world record. One of its glorious members, which included CSI: Crime Scene Investigations, CSI: Miami and CSi: New York, was not only the most watched TV show in the world, it was also the most stupid. It was just atomically stupid – if you could have distilled the stupid in CSI: Miami and then drunk it, you could have proved maths wrong because if you have a 1 and you add 1 to it, you get 11, not 2, don’t you, nerd? And then the world would have ended and we’d have reverted to an agrarian, barter-based economy that could only ever trade one item at a time.
But the era of CSI: Miami is no more, David Caruso is no longer on our screens and the world’s average IQ has increased by a point or two as a result. That doesn’t mean the Carusometer doesn’t miss it, of course, but all good things come to an end eventually.
Since the demise of CSI: Miami, CBS has made a concerted effort to come up with shows equally as stupid, the latest of which has been Scorpion, in which a bunch of technical geniuses get together to fight crime and solve problems by attaching ethernet cables to 747s as they fly overhead. Even if you have no knowledge of IT at all, you can probably tell that’s as dumb as hitting yourself in the face with a brick. All the same, Scorpion has never quite hit the heights of CSI: Miami’s awe-inspiring numbskullery.
Clearly hoping to fill the stupid vacuum and perhaps ultimately bring back the plough and chicken-swap meet, CBS has asked the CSI producers to come up with something that makes you feel like a drill is slowly working its way through your temple and into your frontal lobes while you watch it. And they’ve come up trumps again, with an astonishingly poor piece of television that once again has the power to reduce propositional calculus down to “Because duh!”
Originally piloted as an episode of the mothership, CSI: Crime Scene Investigations, CSI: Cyber eschews the tyranny of geography and the physical in favour of the unlimited potential of cyberspace, giving us a crack unit dedicated to fighting computer crime around the US. A decent idea with a lot of potential, one might think, with the opportunity to fight state hackers employed by Russia, China and North Korea, intent on stealing government secrets; organised gangs who write ransomware or extort major companies with phishing emails and DDoS attacks; or break-ins into SCADA systems by terrorists. The opportunities are vast, the scale of the problem potentially massive. This could be big.
So naturally, for this first episode, big boss “cyber psychologist” Patricia Arquette petitions her mumbling growling boss, Numb3rs’ Peter MacNichol, to put her five-strong FBI team in charge of an investigation into a baby kidnapping. Because the parents heard ‘foreign voices’ on the baby intercom.
Just have a think about that for a minute. Think about the sheer mind-numbing, xenophobic implausibility of it all. One day, you’re busily chasing people who know how to perform MySQL injections, exploit zero-day Adobe Acrobat security flaws and use Tor to navigate the ‘dark web’. The next, you basically decide to get yourself onto a case in which an actual person has been kidnapped, possibly by people with guns, because there’s a chance that both a piece of electronics and foreigners were involved.
Okey doke. Where are my Shades of Justice?
Of course, despite the fact that you’d need dozens, if not hundreds or even thousands, of highly trained, highly intelligent computer scientists working round the clock to service all the computer crimes already being committed in the US at the moment, the Oscar-winning Arquette – who’s apparently already undergoing the surgical procedure that turned Golden Globe-winning actor David Caruso into CSI: Miami‘s Carusobot – has opted for the lesser known “They’ll do” approach to assemble her team. As well as her half-robot self, she has “soldier boy” James Van Der Beek to stride around doing manly things like shooting. His qualification for this particular job is that he likes gaming. No really. This is official:
Elijah Mundo (James Van Der Beek) is Avery’s second in command and a senior field agent assigned to FBI’s Quantico Cyber Crime division. He is an expert in battlefield forensics, weaponry, vehicles and bombs. An avid gamer, on or off duty, he’s always on the field of battle.
Van Der Beek has, of course, been doing very well for himself in comedy shows for the past few years, something for which he has actual talent. Unfortunately, his over-sized Canadian Connecticut brain apparently won’t let him embrace the stupid so readily, because he prowls through every scene like he’s about to deliver the best one-liner you’ve ever heard – one so good it will coruscate the absolute ridiculousness of everything he encounters. Except he never gets to say it and he just sort of smirks instead. Take a look at that promo shot above: he can’t even take that seriously. Every cell in his body wants to send this show up.
After that, it all starts to get even sillier. You didn’t think that was possible, did you? We have a former black hat hacker (Shad Moss), whom the team had previously arrested, out on a sort of prison-release programme to help them – it’s CBS, he’s black so naturally, he’s the criminal; we have the white hat hacker (Charley Koontz) who caught the black hat hacker and is largely there to emphasise the point that anyone male who knows about computers must be overweight and not especially good with people (cf Scorpion); and we have a not-overweight female geek, who because she’s female tackles the girly end of cybercrime over in social media and ‘cyber trends’. I’d make an IT pun on ‘token’ at this point, but I’m pretty sure no one on the show’s writing staff would get even that level of techy in-joke.
Now there is a golden rule that it’s easier to take a good writer and teach them about a subject than to take a domain expert and teach them how to write, so to some extent expecting the writers of CSI: Cyber to know their TCP packet from their PGP envelope is unrealistic. Even if they did, that’s not the stuff of which drama is easily made.
All the same, there’s not really that much excuse for starting the whole process with bad writers. Because the writing on this is bad. So, so bad. Even once you get beyond the ridiculous foundations of the show, the dialogue is just painful to listen it, the plotting makes you want to scream and the characterisation comes down to everyone shouting out their own live-action doxing. The acting is uniformly bad, from the central cast through to guest actors who seem to be auditioning for musical theatre the whole time. Even the set design is woeful, with our team of top computer experts forced to work in a generic giant-monitor-filled room, in front of their incredibly tidy desks, with not an IEEE specs document or Oracle manual in site. Where are the dozens of quarantined PCs grinding away under the desks? Where are the extra hard drives being forensically mirrored? Somewhere else, being looked after by the people doing the real work? People who are allowed to sit down on chairs?
If there’s one thing to come out of this whole sorry mess, it’s a realisation that CSI: Miami got through some pretty dreadful writing and years thanks to an engaging cast, some great photography and the power of android acting. Without those, you end up with something as truly dreadful – and not even entertainingly dreadful like Scorpion – as CSI: Cyber.
Literature – and in particular science fiction – has a long tradition of imagining what life would be like if everyone in the world was dead except for one person. Indeed, the very first English-language novel, Robinson Crusoe, is largely about one man’s exploits alone on a desert island. And since then, there’s been the likes of Castaway, Life After People, 28 Days Later, I Am Legend, The Omega Man, Silent Running and even Red Dwarf.
A common theme ever since Crusoe has been that finally having no distractions and the chance to do whatever one wants by oneself is unbearable. And almost always the author gives in and provides the hero someone else with whom he can interact – because the story’s also pretty dull otherwise. Crusoe had his Man Friday, Silent Running had its little robots, Red Dwarf had its Rimmer and so on.
So in a sense, the similarly themed The Last Man on Earth is nothing new, despite being both a sitcom and having the unlikely home of Fox. The show sees Saturday Night Live’s Will Forte seemingly the only man alive in the whole of North America, if not the world, following the outbreak of a terrible virus (that apparently destroys human bodies right down to the skeletons, leaving no ugly dead bodies behind anywhere…). For over a year, he’s by himself doing whatever he wants, appropriating whatever he needs from wherever he visits, but apparently happy to settle down in a McMansion in his home town of Tucson, Arizona.
Gradually, he begins to realise there’s no point to life without other people and prays to God that He send someone, anyone, to end his loneliness – preferably female, though. God fails to answer, so Forte tries to kill himself. Except at the last moment, it turns out his prayers have been answered and there is one woman alive in the world still, and she’s found Forte.
Unfortunately, she’s Kristen Schaal. And just as Burgess Meredith discovered in Time Enough At Last, you should be careful what you wish for.
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.
Last one of these for a fortnight, as I’m on holiday next Monday. But somehow, following last week’s purge and with a bit of efficiency, I’m bang up to speed with practically everything and I’ve watched some new shows:
The Odd Couple (US: CBS)
Somehow, some strange sort of comedy lifeboat has been erected at NBC and floated off a big bunch of its more talented comedy actors to this CBS show based on the classic Neil Simon play/movie/TV series of the late 60s/early 70s about two divorced men, one a slob, one a tad OCD, who end up living together. Here, Matthew Perry (late of Go On) takes on the Jack Klugman role, once again playing a DJ; Thomas Lennon (Sean Saves The World) takes the Tony Randall role; Yvette Nicole Brown (Community) is Perry’s PA; Wendell Pierce (The Michael J Fox Show) is one of Lennon and Perry’s mutual friends.
But despite the source material, the cast and the likes of Joe Keenan behind the scenes, it’s not that good. There are times when it comes close to funny and there’s more intelligence than you might have expected of a CBS comedy, with Perry’s romance with Leslie Bibb in the first episode not going quite how you’d expect; Lennon is as good as always, as is Perry, even if Perry is a more natural fit to Lennon’s role. It’s also better at characterisation than you’d expect and never hits the miserable bitterness of We Are Men, But it’s never laugh out loud funny. Or even funny. Needed to be a lot better, basically, given its pedigree.
X Company (Canada: CBC)
Second World War spy action drama, based on Canada’s real-life spy training base Camp X. In this first episode, a bunch of non-descript young people overact a lot as they’re sent undercover into a French village, while a bunch of better characterised people are systematically killed off. This being a Canadian show, lots of the Nazis are quite nice, as are the Canadians, while the Brits, whether working for or against Camp X, are bastards. For reasons unknown, everyone German (some of them actually played by Germans) speaks German, while despite Canada’s bilingualism, everyone else speaks English.
The first 15 minutes is quite horrendous and I almost stopped watching after that, but after that initial attempt to woo the viewer with action, everything settles down and becomes a lot more interesting. It’s still not great, but one of the better efforts from Canada of late. Incidentally, as I predicted not so long ago, 2015 is indeed turning out to be the Year of Synthesia
Living With Models (UK: Comedy Central)
Ordinary schlub looking for a flat finds one… occupied by models. Close your eyes. Imagine the series. Whatever you just imagined is better than the series itself.
Hostages (UK: BBC4; Israeli: Channel 10 – aired in 2013)
This Israeli show that sees a surgeon’s family taken hostage to force her to kill one of her patients – the Prime Minister – has already been adapted by the US as Hostages. However, despite having seen that show, I quite enjoyed this version, as it’s considerably better – more low key in the exact same way as Prisoners of War was. Although many of the beats are the same, the structure’s different, more time is taken and it does actually feel like a thriller at times. There’s plenty of genre clichés, such as the “illegal gun dealer who demands more money from the man he’s just sold the guns to” and “the bad ass cop who faces down a hostage-taker single-handled”, but largely, it’s not bad, and it does everything better than the US remake does – a step down from Engrenages, naturally, but a step up from Salamander. Good to see BBC4 branching out into Sky Arts’ usual territory, too.
After the jump, the regulars: 12 Monkeys, 19-2, The Americans, Arrow, Banshee, The Blacklist, The Doctor Blake Mysteries, The Flash, Fortitude, Gallipoli, Man Seeking Woman, Marvel’s Agent Carter,State of Affairs and Suits. Oh, Vikings and Bosch are back, too.
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 theReviews 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.
Time, I think, for another purge. “Why, Rob?” you may ask. “Lots of shows such as Constantine, Ground Floor,Spiral (Engrenages) and State of Affairs are finishing anyway, so why purge any more?”
Because it’s a good habit to get into, that’s why. Rather than simply watch whatever floats past out eyes, shouldn’t we examining everything, seeing if it’s still worth it, and abandoning anything that really isn’t serving a purpose it might once have? Hence, a purge.
Plus I’m away for a few days next week and there are some new shows starting soon, so I need to claw back a little time.
So dropping off the viewing list this week are the following:
Allegiance (US: NBC)
After the first episode’s cliffhanger ending, we have the most obvious cop-out imaginable that makes super-genius son look a complete idiot. And unless Hope Davis was mumbling for most of last week (possible) or I just wasn’t paying attention and didn’t notice it (possible), this week she seems to have acquired the world’s worst Russian accent. No more of this fresh hell for me, thank you.
Better Call Saul (US: AMC; UK: Netflix)
I wasn’t a fan of Breaking Bad, I’m not finding the first few episodes great so far. Maybe I’ll pick it up again later (thanks, Netflix). But right now, it’s not for me.
Fresh Off The Boat (US: ABC)
I was hoping Nahnatchka Khan’s magic was going to be enough to get the show improving over time. But despite a winning performance by Constance Wu, episode three proved to be laugh-free.
Gotham (US: Fox; UK: Channel 5)
If it hadn’t been a Batman prequel, I would have dropped it by now. But one good episode isn’t sufficient to maintain my interest and although we actually had the Penguin and the Riddler meet this week, it was yet again a brief flash of interest in an otherwise turgid episode.
Hiding (Australia: ABC)
Each hour-long episode probably has about enough plot and laughs for half an hour. Even then, when the show sets up a glorious opportunity to do something good – our ex-crim turned faux doctoral student in criminal psychology given a chance to lecture on what makes crims tick – it bottles it and tries to save up what morsels of goodness it does have for another episode.
Man Seeking Woman is hanging on a thread, too. But I won’t be giving up just yet.
I also tried two new mini-series this week.
Gallipoli (Australia: Nine)
The Gallipoli campaign of the First World War (its centenary is in April) is a strange affair. Rarely mentioned in the UK except perhaps as an example of yet another thing with which Winston Churchill was involved before the Second World War that he inevitably cocked-up, elsewhere in the world it’s of vital importance. An attempt by the Allies to take Constantinople that stalled in Gallipoli, it was the moment for Australia and New Zealand that they decided that being part of the British Empire wasn’t that great, while for the Turks, it was the spur that eventually led to their later independence under the leadership of Gallipoli hero Mustafa Kemal.
Based on the book of the same name, this nine-part Australian mini-series is effectively Australia’s Band of Brothers, attempting to take a balanced approach to the campaign, with Brits, ANZACs and Turks treated equitably by the producers, as the horrors and inevitabilities of war, coupled with human nature, force everyone into untenable positions that eventually results in untold slaughter.
The first two episodes are light on characterisation, largely sticking to re-enacting the war and focusing on one teenage soldier (Kodi Smit-McPhee) as he learns to kill and survive, although there are scenes involving famous figures, including British war reporter Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, here played by Gaius Baltar himself James Callis, and Mustafa Kemal (Yalin Ozucelik), although he’s not yet been identified by name.
It’s a very creditable, often moving piece of work, even having been filmed in Turkey, although the CGI (and some of the accents) are a bit flakey. Worth watching if you have an interest in history, particularly history that’s important to people in the rest of the world, and don’t mind a heavy emphasis on warfare.
The Slap (US: NBC)
A remake of the Australian mini-series of the same name, which in turn was based on the book of the same. A Greek-American family and friends all get together to celebrate the 40th birthday of Peter Sarsgaard. Except midway through the party, cousin Zachary Quinto hits a misbehaving child and all Hell breaks loose.
While this is obviously an attempt by NBC to put on a prestige series about a Very Important Topic, with a Very Important Cast (Uma Thurman, Thandie Newton, Brian Cox), it’s creatively flawed at pretty much every level. Some of that is the fault of the source material – assuming, of course, the original thought a 40-year-old man considering an affair with a teenager was in any way a good idea. But a lot of it’s down to casting. Melissa George, who reprises her role from the original, has minimal to do, but attempts by Sarsgaard, Cox and Quinto to demonstrate their Greekness result in some of the worst Greek yet put on screen, with Cox and Quinto often forced to use the time honoured “mumble, talk in someone’s ear or cover my face with my hand when I’m ‘speaking’ this language. Oh wait, let’s speak English for no good reason!” technique of ensuring that no one can hear them speaking Greek, lest we all find out how bad they are. Unfortunately, we do.
On top of this, we get Sarsgaard grouching about the fact a woman – a Latina, at that! Heavens! – got the job he wanted and the whole thing feels like some sad, middle-aged white man somewhere got a bit upset that he wasn’t allowed to do sh*tty things with impunity any more, and decided to write a bit of wallowing self-pity about what the world’s come to.
Episode two might be better, though.
After the jump, then, I’ll be looking at last week’s episodes of 12 Monkeys, 19-2, The Americans, Arrow, Banshee, The Blacklist, Constantine, The Doctor Blake Mysteries, The Flash, Forever, Fortitude, Ground Floor, Man Seeking Woman, Marvel’s Agent Carter, Spiral (Engrenages),State of Affairs and Suits.
I also watched a movie.
Valentine’s Day (2010) (iTunes)
Slightly tepid Gary Marshall (Pretty Woman) ensemble movie that attempts to Crash/Love Actually St Valentine’s Day, with various couples getting together and breaking up on Valentine’s Day as their various stories all intersect each other. Jamie Foxx, Julia Roberts, Bradley Cooper, Ashton Kutcher, Jennifer Garner, Jessica Biel, Queen Latifah, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Alba, Shirley Maclaine, Eric Dane and others are among the star-crossed lovers unfortunately trapped in LA, with not a single one of the stories plausible or even especially romantic, with only one or two surprises in the whole thing. The final two couple revelations are almost worth the prize of admission, though.
But last week was Greek week in London. Yes, students at two universities, KCL and UCL, stage a Greek drama or tragedy at this time every year – just for larks, KCL’s is in Ancient Greek with super-titling!
The Clouds (KCL: Greenwood Theatre)
Aristophanes’s comedies are always tricky boys to dramatise, not least because a lot of the humour only works in Ancient Greek, but because attempts to make them funny also tend to fall flat. So it’s to director Oliver Harrington’s credit that he managed to make The Clouds, in which a rustic farmer with debts decides to learn sophistry from Socrates so that he can talk his way out his problems, actually very funny. While some of the cast (and the supertitler…) struggled with the Greek a little, Harrington managed to mix the old and new, acting with singing, crude and sophisticated together in one show and for it all to work. I did get slapped by a phallus midway through, though.
Bacchae (UCL: Bloomsbury Theatre)
UCL have it a little easier, working in English, but The Bacchae was no less memorable, with Emily Louizou’s more timeless production managing to bring out the religious aspects of Euripides’ original play, to give us a truly frightening and charismatic Dionysus (Pavlos Christodoulou), who can bend reality to his will and make mortals do the unthinkable.
