TV reviews

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

What have you been watching? Including Extant, Tyrant, The Last Ship, Suits, 24 and Halt and Catch Fire

18 July 2014 Rob Buckley Post a comment

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.

Oh, why do they do this? The rest of the week is a gaping hole of misery, reality shows, American Ninja and God knows what else, yet come Sunday, Wednesday and Thursday, suddenly it’s all systems go and the US networks chuck everything they’ve got at the schedules.

I’ve tried my best and this week, I’ve managed to review the following new shows:

But still in the first-run viewing queue are USA’s Satisfaction, El Rey’s Matador, and The Divide. The latter’s from WE tv, which doesn’t even make scripted drama, and it aired two hour-long episodes in one go. What chance does that give me? It’s like they’re doing it deliberately to annoy me, now.

Fingers crossed, though, I’ll be able to play catch-up over the weekend and review them all on Monday and Tuesday next week.

Anyway, after the jump, a round-up of the regulars that I did watch, with reviews of 24, Extant, Halt and Catch Fire, The Last Ship, Suits and Tyrant.

Continue reading “What have you been watching? Including Extant, Tyrant, The Last Ship, Suits, 24 and Halt and Catch Fire”

US TV

Mini-review: You’re The Worst 1×1 (FX)

18 July 2014 Rob Buckley 35 Comments

You're The Worst

In the US: Thursdays, 10.30pm ET, FX

Firstly, I’d like to say that if I were American, I’d be sick of Brits by now. I like to joke about it, but we are in virtually every US TV show, either with our own accents or faking US accents. If I were an American actor, I’d probably have given up trying by now. I mean if it’s not the Brits, it’s the Aussies, so what chance would I stand?

Case in point: You’re The Worst – it’s set in LA but has Chris Geere as its male romantic lead. Chris Geere. You know, the guy from Waterloo Road and Trollied.

No? Exactly. Was there literally no one American who was better or more attractive? It astonishes me.

To be fair, he does play the dishevelled, impoverished, cynical English author very well, which is what You’re The Worst calls on him to be, but there’s no especial need for him to be English other than just because.

Nevertheless, if Marriage was a salutary example of how not to do a basic cable romantic-comedy, You’re The Worst is the counter-example, with jokes, interesting characters and situations, romance, and moments of complete unexpectedness all pushing the boundaries of what basic cable allows.

As the name suggests, the show is about two very toxic, self-destructive human beings who realise there’s a good possibility that their toxic, self-destructivenesses are highly compatible. Geere decides that a wedding is the best place to tell his ex-girlfriend, the bride, what a terrible person she is and what a mistake she’s making so gets thrown out; outside, he bumps into one of the guests, Aya Cash (Traffic Light, We Are Men, The Newsroom and the failed US adaptation of Friday Night Dinner), who’s stealing one of the wedding gifts. They hook up and after briefly returning to their individual lives, decide that actually, maybe they’re better off with each other than without.

Created and exec produced by Weeds’ Stephen Falk, the show has about 1000% times more edge than Rush, with some pretty graphic sex scenes and language, and moments of amorality Rush would sit there feeling all pleased with itself for doing but that it tosses out there with pure abandon. Both Cash and Geere have charm and charisma, both individually and together. Their characters do actually feel like real, if exaggerated people. The supporting cast don’t feel like they’re just there as plot aids or have been produced through some macro in Final Draft. The romance, twisted as it is, is romantic – you do want these people to find happiness together. And unlike Marriage, it’s funny, doesn’t offer the same trite bromides and doesn’t have complete idiots for characters.

All in all, I really liked it.

Here – watch this very NSFW trailer to see if you might, too.

US TV

Mini-review: Marriage 1×1 (FX)

18 July 2014 Rob Buckley 11 Comments

Married

In the US: Thursdays, 10pm ET, FX

Some comedies make you laugh. Some comedies are romantic. Some comedies make you think. Some comedies give you characters you can love.

So spare a thought for Marriage, one of two half-hour comedies dark and gritty FX is debuting this week on Thursday nights, because it does none of the above.

It is an absolute laugh-free zone, with characters you can’t even slightly care about, zero romance and whose deepest thought is that in marriages, you sometimes have to do things because your partner likes them.

It stars Nat Faxon (Happy Hour, Ben and Kate) and Judy Greer (Archer, Arrested Development, Mad Love) as a long-term married couple whose marriage has lost its spark, John Hodgman (The Daily Show) as Faxon’s best friend and Paul Reiser as the husband of one of Faxon’s friends.

Good cast, no? Well, maybe not Faxon, whose baby-man Ben annoyed the crap out of me, rather than endeared himself to me in Ben and Kate. But overall, people who have comedic chops.

Yet the entire script is just one neverending repetition of pretty much every relationship comedy you’ll have ever seen, played out by a cast of characters with the depth of a paddling pool.

Faxon stereotypically wants to have more sex than Greer, who’s too tired. Innovative!

So Faxon’s friends advise him to do things she likes and then she’ll want more. Novel!

Except he does it badly. Who saw that coming?

So she suggests jokingly he get a mistress. And he takes it seriously. Well you could knock me down with a feather!

Maybe all that would raise a laugh in a multi-camera studio comedy (barely), but in a single-camera comedy that also likes doing cringe comedy and where, despite being on cable, the height of sophistication is jokes about masturbation? Not a chance.

I don’t foresee a future for this Marriage, particularly since it follows the much, much better You’re The Worst. More on that in a moment.

But here’s a trailer so you can see what I’m on about. It contains the one funny joke in the show.

US TV

Review: Rush 1×1 (USA)

18 July 2014 Rob Buckley 16 Comments

USA Network's Rush

In the US: Thursdays, 9/8c, USA Network

A while ago, I remarked that of all the people from Coupling whom you might have expected to see as a US action hero, Englishman Richard Coyle was probably at the bottom of the list, since he played poor old put-upon, terminally unconfident Welshman Jeff.

Well, it seems the season for such surprises because over on basic cable, USA has decided that absolutely the best person to head up its new dark, gritty – well, darker, grittier – medical show Rush is Welshman Tom Ellis. From Miranda. Yes, Miranda.

Here, let Blog Goddess and Welshwoman Joanna Page talk you through Tom Ellis’s Miranda highlights.

As Ellis himself remarks, “If Rush was a show in the UK, I don’t think that they would think of me to play that part.”

All power to him, though, because despite being forced to play American, Tom Ellis is actually very good in Rush. Tom Ellis is not Rush’s problem.

And Rush does have problems. Many of them. The most obvious of these is it’s basically Royal Pains crossed with the anaemic US version of Rake. Just like Dr Hank, Ellis’s eponymous Rush is a concierge doctor to the rich and famous, rushing to their side whenever they’re in medical trouble and using his ingenuity and network of connections to solve the trickiest of medical concerns.

But just like Rake’s Cleaver Greene, Rush is in it for himself and is a drug-taking, near moral vacuum who likes to screw around, smoke at his godson’s party, sabotages his relationships, exploits his female assistant and will take the worst scum of humanity as his clients, as long as they pay cash up front or hold a gun to his head.

Except this is basic cable so Rush has a heart. And it’s the USA Network, where characters are welcome and dark and gritty aren’t. Which means if you’re expecting a rush from Rush, you’re going to be sorely disappointed.

Here’s a trailer:

Continue reading “Review: Rush 1×1 (USA)”

US TV

Review: The Strain 1×1 (FX/Watch)

15 July 2014 Rob Buckley 23 Comments

FX's The Strain

In the US: Sundays, 10pm, FX
In the UK: Acquired by Watch to air this autumn

Vampires are one of the enduring horror icons of the past two centuries. Based originally in folktales, they first truly rose to prominence thanks to Bram Stoker’s Dracula. However, initially playing on the dual horrors of death and sex, they’ve gone on to be metaphors for pretty much everything from women’s sexual liberation to drug addiction.

Along the way, though, they’ve lost a lot of their potency, in part because of the general decline in Christianity but also because of the even greater decline in belief in scary beast monsters that skulk in the dark. More sophisticated demands from audience in terms of characterisation and the acknowledgement that stereotyping is generally a Bad Thing have meant that the question of whether a race of creatures, even non-human ones, can be all bad has also added to people’s reluctance to take vampires en masse as scary evil bastards.

Indeed, it would be relatively easy to list at least some of the media that have ‘defanged’ vampires and made them almost objects of ridicule: The Twilight Saga, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Angel, Blade, True Blood, Being Human (US), Being Human (UK), Dracula, From Dusk Till Dawn, 666 Park Avenue, The Gates, The Vampire Diaries, Moonlight, Penny Dreadful… As you can see, the list does indeed go on and on and on and on – poor old vampires. Makes you almost feel sorry for them.

So you have to at least admire shows that try to make vampires scary again. The much revered and generally wonderful Channel 4 mini-series Ultraviolet is perhaps the best example of how to do this properly, treating them completely seriously, adding science to the mix, giving us all that nuance about whether vampires are truly evil or not, and then basically saying, “Yes, they are and they want to kill us all and stick us in battery farms after creating a nuclear winter to block out the sun.”

Guillermo del Toro’s calling card to the world, Cronos, was also another sterling attempt to make vampires scary, giving us a vampirism passed on by a piece of beetle jewellery, although the film suffered more than a little from del Toro’s love of grand guignol.

Now, del Toro is having another go at making vampires scary with The Strain, an adaptation of his own books in conjunction with Lost/Bates Motel’s exec producer Carlton Cuse. This essentially takes that original story of Dracula and asks the question: “What would happen if Dracula hadn’t turned up in the 19th century at a boat in Whitby but instead arrived on a 747 in 21st century New York? He’s super fast, super strong and kills in horrible nasty ways, before bringing others back to life as vampires, too. How would the authorities react? What would science make of him?”

So far, so good.

Unfortunately, taking a leaf from his own book, del Toro’s also asked, “What if Dracula’s vampirism was actually caused by an infestation of worms? And there were actually a lot of evil vampires, all intent on taking over the world in a secret gothic conspiracy where they all dress in black?”

Equally unfortunately, the result is something not so much scary as a bit unpleasant yet laughably bad.

Here’s a trailer.

Continue reading “Review: The Strain 1×1 (FX/Watch)”