TV reviews

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

The BarrometerA Barrometer rating of 2

Third-episode verdict: The Last Ship (TNT)

7 July 2014 Rob Buckley 3 Comments

In the US: Sundays, 9/8c, TNT

So let’s lay our cards on the table: TNT’s The Last Ship is not the best TV programme ever made. It’s a show in which a lone US naval warship is the world’s last best hope to prevent humanity’s extinction, following a global pandemic that’s already wiped out 50-80% of the world’s population – how could it be?

Add on dialogue that drips patriotism/jingoism at every turn, perfunctory/insulting characterisation and a cast that’s largely ‘adequate’ – even Adam Baldwin – and, last but not least, has Michael Bay as a producer, and again it’s obvious this isn’t going to be winning any writing awards, at least.

But I can still say, without any hesitation, that it is absolutely the best original TNT show of the past decade. Because even putting to one side the fact that for me, killer virus + naval action = awesome, The Last Ship is packed from start to finish with full-on naval and land warfare, great action scenes, genuine tension and adrenaline rushes from start to finish.

Indeed, unlike other shows which tend to pack their pilot episodes full of fun, run out of budget and fill the rest of their seasons with talking, the Michael Bay connection seems to be working well for The Last Ship, since if anything, the hardware demonstrations and fights seem to have increased in number not decreased since the first episode. What the show’s producers cleverly seems to have done is realised that:

  1. Ships and naval warfare are great
  2. But you need enemies to fight if any weapons are ever going to be used
  3. But unless you’re fighting aliens, you’re going to need a world-changing event for naval warfare to take place regularly between human beings and countries.

So far, beyond the obvious biological warfare of the virus itself, we’ve had helicopter battles, land battles, nuclear strikes, torpedoes, 5” shells, sniping, stealth warfare, terrorists, RPGs and a whole lot more, some of it CGI, obviously (I don’t think TNT have the budget for a nuclear war), but a surprising amount done with real ships on the sea and in exotic locales. Characters have died and been wounded, and there’s been real peril. Because it’s the end of the world and it’s every ship for itself.

It’s not been 100% authentic – launching a torpedo at almost point blank range and not getting any waves? I don’t think so – and there’s not a huge amount of veracity to the behaviour of those on any of the ships we’ve seen so far. The dialogue of the British characters has also clearly been written by Americans (we don’t need to say ‘the Queen of England’. If we’re talking about a Queen, it’s implicit that the Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland – i.e. our Queen – is the one we’re thinking of, unless we say otherwise).

But who cares? Halt and Catch Fire is great, brilliantly written drama but is it fun? No. The Last Ship is not brilliantly written, but hell is it ever fun, and it’s now the show I look forward to the most every week.

Barrometer rating: 2
Rob’s prediction: Should get at least another season, maybe more

What have you been watching? Including Reckless, The Last Ship and Crossbones

4 July 2014 Rob Buckley 7 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.

Despite the fact that a few shows have finished and I’ve decided to drop a few others from my regular viewing, I have a wee backlog of NBC’s new comedy-action show Taxi Brooklyn to get through. Fingers crossed, a review of the first two episodes of that later. I’ve already reviewed some new shows elsewhere, though:

I’ve also given another new show a try:

Reckless (US: CBS)
Absolute bobbins. As soon as you say the word ‘southern’ to an American from one of the northern states, apparently, through some form of word association, ‘sexy fun times’ is the first thing they think of, because what we have here is a desperate attempt to get in predominantly female viewers with a cop show set in the south that sees lots of cops and lawyers having sex and flirting with each other. Being CBS, though, it’s so tame and old hat that when people start sexting pictures of themselves, they still use email and no naughty bits are exposed, yet despite that, the female cop in question (Georgina Haig) gets fired. She decides to sue and hires lawyer Anna Wood to prosecute the police department; the PD hire her flirt partner Cam Gigandet (The OC, Never Back Down, Twilight), prompting muchos sparks. Except it turns out that another cop might have been raped by a bunch of other cops and things take a serious left turn.

There’s a good cast, including Adam Rodriguez (CSI: Miami), Shawn Hatosy (Southland) and Gregory Harrison (Logan’s Run). But the script is dreadful, perhaps even knowingly so at times – legal eagle Gigandet sails a motor boat to work in the morning, wearing his suit under his waders the whole time – and the gang rape of a woman by police officers after they’ve drugged her doesn’t exactly equal the sexy fun times the producers are after.

After the jump, a round-up of the regulars, with reviews of 24, Crossbones, Halt and Catch Fire, The Last Ship, Murder In The First, Old School, Penny Dreadful and Undateable.

Continue reading “What have you been watching? Including Reckless, The Last Ship and Crossbones”

US TV

Review: Tyrant 1×1-1×2 (FX)

3 July 2014 Rob Buckley 12 Comments


In the US: Tuesdays, 10pm, FX

Sometimes, before criticising fiction, it’s worth looking at reality and noting just how much weirder it can be. 

Take Bashar al-Assad. He’s the ruler of a little country called Syria that you might have heard of recently. He’s very much A Bad Man, having amongst other things deployed chemical weapons against his own population in a very bloody civil war that’s claimed the lives of over 100,000 people.

Guess what? He never wanted to be ruler of Syria. He wanted to be a doctor. In fact, he went to Western Eye Hospital, part of the St Mary’s group of teaching hospitals in London, so that he could become an opthamologist. 

In fact, it was his brother Bassel who was being groomed for power by their father, Hafez al-Assad. However, Bassel was killed in a car accident, which meant that Bashar was recalled back to Syria and his father decided to prepare him to become president instead.

Reality is strange: had that car accident not happened, one of the bloodiest dictators of modern history would be off treating eye disorders somewhere.

Thus, going into FX’s new show Tyrant, it’s worth remembering that despite all the seemingly preposterous conceits of the show, reality is almost certainly serving up something stranger somewhere in the world. Set in a thinly veiled version of Syria that’s separated by a mere star on its flag from the real thing, it sees an Arab-American paediatrician return back to his home country for his nephew’s wedding. While there, his father has a stroke and his brother has a car accident, which would be merely tragic were it not for the fact that his father is the ruler of the country and he in turn is now its new de facto ruler – at least until his brother gets better. Will he prove to be a better, kinder ruler, or will power turn him into the thing that he’s tried to so hard to avoid?

Written by Gideon Raff, the Israeli writer/director who created the original Homeland, Prisoners of War/Hatufilm, the show is a hard but rewarding watch, albeit one that knows it. But it’s not without its problems. 

Here’s a trailer. 

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Constantine
US TV

Preview: Constantine 1×1 (NBC)

2 July 2014 Rob Buckley 18 Comments


In the US: Fridays, 10/9c, NBC. Starts October 24

I was remarking only yesterday how DC comics and adaptations in other media now have something of a reputation for gloomy grittiness. When did this start, you might wonder, given how light and breezy the 1980s Superman and 1990s Batman movies were (yes, they were. Don’t argue)? Some might argue it was Denny O’Neil’s Batman strips. Others might point to the mid-80s decision by DC to try to appeal more to adults than children with its comics, which led to ‘Crisis on Infinite Earths’. 

But it probably began with a strand of DC comic-writing that began in the 80s and blossomed in the 90s with DC’s ‘Vertigo’ imprint, which was intended for ‘mature readers’. Many of Vertigo’s creations are still with us: Shade the Changing Man, Animal Man and Doom Patrol still crop up in DC Comics, although most people haven’t heard of them. They will almost certainly have heard of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman – indeed, it’s the creation that introduced the world to Gaiman and even now, movie producers are trying to come up with a way to adapt it that can feature Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

The other Vertigo character of note is John Constantine. Not truly a Vertigo original – Alan Moore created Constantine as an escort for another future Vertigo character, Swamp Thing, during that mid-80s ‘Crisis’ – it was nevertheless Vertigo and writer Jamie Delano who turned Constantine from a chain-smoking, trenchcoat-wearing, petty London street thug and Sting-lookalike with a certain knowledge of the occult into one of DC’s most popular, authentic and powerful characters in Hellblazer. Since then, Constantine has gone on to fight demons, devils and angels in his own comic, Constantine, as well as heading Justice League Dark. He’s even appeared in a movie of his own, played by no lesser and no less an inappropriate actor than Keanu Reeves:

Now NBC, which scored something of a critical, if not ratings success with ‘elegant horror’ show Hannibal, is trying to branch out into more conventional horror with its own version of John Constantine. Vastly more faithful visually and culturally than the movie, and drawing considerably on Delano’s Hellblazer run for its plot, NBC’s Constantine is nevertheless a horror show exemplified by the fact that its bad boy protagonist isn’t allowed to smoke on network TV in case it sends the wrong message.

Here’s a trailer.

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US TV

Review: The Leftovers 1×1 (HBO/Sky Atlantic)

2 July 2014 Rob Buckley 2 Comments


In the US: Sundays, 10pm, HBO
In the UK: Aquired by Sky Atlantic. Will air in September

TV is filled with death. For many shows, it’s their staple. What would 24 or Banshee be without their epic body counts? Would everyone love Game of Thrones as much were it not for its regular game of ‘Guess who’s going to pop their clogs this season’? Probably not.

In the real world, though, death generally isn’t quite as desirable, even if it is inevitable. The effects of someone’s death are almost always huge, traumatic and life-changing for those who know them. Religion can provide some comfort for the bereaved. It can even provide some answers as to why death happens at all. TV shows that remember this are few and far between.

So in many ways, The Leftovers is unusual and innovative. Adapted by Tom Perrotta, Lost‘s Damon Lindelof and Friday Night Lights’ Peter Berg from Perrotta’s book of the same name, it takes the Christian concept of the Rapture – in which the true believers in Jesus are taken up into the sky to be with God, leaving behind everyone to be judged before Jesus’s second coming – and gives it a slight twist. What if 2% of the world’s population just vanished, leaving everyone else behind, with no explanation for their departure? What would those remaining behind do? How would they feel? And without angels coming down to explain everything and given that some of that 2% include some very bad people indeed, not just the blessed – I mean, Gary Busey was one of those who disappeared. Gary Busey – could people even be sure it was God and not aliens or some bizarre space-time accident that caused the disappearance?

The answer to this existential dilemma, it appears, is be largely miserable, dull and nihilistic. Strangely, in fact, it seems like the animals have a better idea about what’s going on than the humans do.

Here’s a trailer. If you’re in the US, though, you can watch the whole of the first episode over on Yahoo.

Continue reading “Review: The Leftovers 1×1 (HBO/Sky Atlantic)”