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 Lego Movie, The Bridge (US), The Leftovers and Halt and Catch Fire

11 July 2014 Rob Buckley 4 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.

The fourth of July weekend hasn’t stopped American unveiling a slew of new shows this week, so elsewhere, I’ve reviewed:

I also managed to squeeze a movie in this week, too:

The Lego Movie (2014)
Not a 100% slam dunk and the live action bit towards the end felt a bit uncomfortable, but a very funny movie overall, in which an average Lego construction worker (Chris Pratt) must save the Lego world from the oppressive regime of President Business (Will Ferrell). Featuring slews of in-jokes and classic Lego sets (yes, I did have the blue space Lego in the 70s), the best bits are nevertheless the cameos from licensed characters such as Superman and Green Lantern, and especially Batman and certain characters from Star Wars. Definitely worth a watch.

After the jump, a round-up of the regulars, with reviews of 24, Halt and Catch Fire, The Leftovers and Suits, as well as the returning The Bridge (US).

Continue reading “What have you been watching? Including The Lego Movie, The Bridge (US), The Leftovers and Halt and Catch Fire”

US TV

Review: Welcome To Sweden 1×1 (TV4/NBC)

11 July 2014 Rob Buckley 3 Comments

Welcome To Sweden

In Sweden: Aired starting in March on TV4 in Sweden
In the US: Thursdays, 9/8c, NBC

International co-productions are the future. Television is just getting so pricey and risky to make and the margins are getting so thin for most shows that pretty much anything you care to think of of any import is going to have foreign money in it somewhere.

There are right ways and wrong ways to do a co-production, though. Taxi Brooklyn is the wrong way. The wrong way. If you try to make a TV show like Taxi Brooklyn or in the same way as Taxi Brooklyn, you are doing it the wrong way.

You might ask if there is a right way, though. Certainly, taking the foreign money and making the show you always intended to is a right way. But another right way is for both parties to be properly involved, equally skilled and have equal input.

Welcome To Sweden isn’t quite the right way, but it’s close. It sees an American celebrity accountant move from New York to Sweden to be with his girlfriend, where he has to learn about and adapt to Swedish ways. Cue the stereotypes?

Not quite. The show was created by Greg Poehler and Swedish writer/actress Josephine Bornebusch, who also star in it and produce it. It’s based on Poehler’s experiences of being an American living in Sweden for the past seven years. It has both Swedish and American writers, and is half in Swedish, half in English. It’s filmed in Sweden and first aired on Sweden’s TV4. It features a host of cameos from famous Americans, usually but not always playing themselves, including Patrick Duffy, Gene Simmons, Amy Poehler and Aubrey Plaza from Parks and Recreation, and Will Ferrell (who’s married to a Swede and can speak Swedish). It also includes cameos from famous Swedes, including Malin Åkerman, Lena Olin, author Björn Ranelid and Abba’s Björn Ulvaeus.

So there’s a lot more nuance to the show and it’s even quite funny, which is a bonus. It’s international co-production done right. Almost.

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US TV

Review: Extant 1×1 (CBS/Amazon Prime)

11 July 2014 Rob Buckley 7 Comments

Extant

In the US: Wednesdays, 9/8c, CBS
In the UK: Available on Amazon Prime

Of all the many, may influences that are obvious in Extant, CBS’s new ‘limited series’ in which Halle Berry plays an astronaut who may have been impregnated by an alien pretending to be her dead former lover, Doctor Who and Sherlock are probably the hardest to spot. Solaris, yes. Gravity, yes. Moon, yes. Rosemary’s Baby, yes. AI, yes.

But Doctor Who and Sherlock? Nope. Can’t see ‘em.

Yet writer/showrunner Mickey Fisher actually had “What Would Steven Moffat Do?” stuck to his computer while writing the scripts, which is odd, because if you were going to characterise Steven Moffat’s writing, it would largely be multiple layered, complex plots, with different arcs that interact and come together at the end, filled with characters with nifty lines in dialogue.

And that’s not Extant. Clever? Ish. Complex? Not really. Good dialogue? Not even slightly. It’s more an exercise in futurology than anything that Steven Moffat would put together. But that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily bad.

Here’s a trailer.

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The BarrometerA Barrometer rating of 2

Third-episode verdict: Tyrant (FX)

10 July 2014 Rob Buckley Post a comment

In the US: Tuesdays, 10pm, FX

Three episodes into FX’s Tyrant and things are marginally improving, while paradoxically staying much the same. Featuring a fictional Middle Eastern, yet seemingly English-speaking country that largely resembles Syria with just a hint of Saudi Arabia, it sees self-exiled Barry Al Fayeed (Adam Rayner) returning to the country of his birth, along with his family, for his nephew’s wedding. But when first his father, the president, dies and then his brother is involved in a car accident, Barry finds himself increasingly involved in the running of the country that he’d abandoned.

After a first couple of episodes that was very much the show finding its feet and voice, following the departure of creator Gideon Raff, episode three has given us a marginally more enjoyable programme with just a hint more optimism than before. Rayner appears to have woken up now and rather than the slow descent into evil initially projected from the first episode, with Rayner seduced into non-American, non-democratic ways by the appeal of absolute power, now he’s doing his best to clean up the country and bring it into the 21st century, step by step, as best he can, despite his brother being a psychotic, rapist, finger-amputating nutbag who’ll hang opposition leaders.

However, the change in producers has given the show and its characters a slight schizophrenia. It now no longer really knows what to do with either Rayner’s wife or his daughter. His wife in particular has now oscillated from being amazed in the first couple of episodes that Rayner would want to turn his back on the lavish lifestyle being the son of mass-murdering dictator affords and pleased that he’s staying to being amazed that he’s contemplating being in such a barbaric country. Rayner’s gay son has done a similar volte face, despite having found himself a boyfriend with whom he can discuss Skype. His daughter just seems unhappy no matter what.

The show’s sole interesting characteristic is its focus on the negotiations of power in a different style of rule. Whereas The West Wing gave us creative uses of the bartering and exchange of votes, the introduction of policies and so on, Tyrant gives us eternal dilemmas, such as which of the usual suspects to round-up and hang if you’re to seem strong yet not too oppressive, and how to convince a guilty man to recant his bribed confession to prevent civil war, even if it means he’s off to the gallows, too.

Although most of my criticisms from the first two episodes still hold true, the show is well made and is now decently acted. If it can maintain its course change, focus on the politics and give us an optimistic future, rather than simply paint a bleak picture of the Middle East and how absolute power corrupts absolutely, it’ll be worth watching. However, given the show’s title and the fact it’s on dark and broody FX, I’m not convinced it will. I’ll let you know how it goes, though.

Barrometer rating: 2
Rob’s prediction: Unlikely to last more than a season.

US TV

Review: Taxi Brooklyn 1×1-1×2 (NBC/TF1)

7 July 2014 Rob Buckley Post a comment

Taxi Brooklyn

In France: Aired in May on TF1
In the US: Wednesdays, 10/9c, NBC

Take a look at that title. Go on. Take a look: Taxi Brooklyn. What does that even mean? It’s two words just stuck together, isn’t it?

Indeed, never has an international co-production so obviously signalled both its complete inability to understand an international market, or that it’s really hoping that people will want to watch it if it just sticks random things together. The latter, so far, has been French TV channel’s TF1’s implicit aim with first Jo and then Crossing Lines and now, pretty much explicitly, with Taxi Brooklyn.

So here are the random things stuck together:

  • Luc Besson’s Taxi series, France’s most successful movie franchise ever, the first of which got remade with Queen Latifah and Jimmy Fallon in 2004.
  • Olivier Megaton, director of Taken 2 and Transporter 3
  • French actor Jacky Ido, who you may remember from Inglorious Basterds or even from the first series of Spiral/Engrenages where he played ‘Personne’.
  • Brooklyn
  • A necessity to do everything in English

These aren’t just the pieces of some long-lost jigsaw puzzle sitting at the back of your cupboard – these are the pieces from someone else’s jigsaw that have mysteriously got mixed in with three others you have no recollection of ever even asking for.

Putting it all together was clearly an impossible challenge and the writers therefore obviously decided not to even bother trying to make it look like a show that’s supposed to hang together coherently. The plot – if it can be described as such – is thus utterly ridiculous.

Caitlin “Cat” Sullivan (Chyler Leigh) is a tough cop, so no one wants to partner with her. She’s also a terrible driver, so she gets her driving privileges revoked. How’s she going to solve crimes and do her job on public transport? What a dilemma!

But when she arrests a French taxi driver speed demon, Leo Romba (Ido), who’s been forced at gunpoint to act as a getaway driver in a bank robbery, serendipity has clearly struck. Ido agrees to help her solve the crime – and to drive her around – if she’ll clear his name. And since he was arrested and put in jail back in France so had to enter the US illegally, Sullivan agrees to help him with the US immigration authorities if he’ll continue to drive her around on future cases.

Forced, much? Absolutely. Excitement? Laughs? Not at all.

Because despite Megaton’s presence on the pilot, as well as supporting cast that includes Jennifer Esposito (Samantha Who?, Blue Bloods), Ally Walker (Universal Soldier, Profiler) and José Zúñiga (Law & Order, CSI), the show is unredeemed by excitement comedy, good characters or logic. Zut alors!

Here’s a trailer.

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