TV reviews

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

The BarrometerA Barrometer rating of 3

Third-episode verdict: Crossbones (NBC)

24 June 2014 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

In the US: Fridays, 10/9c, NBC

Were Crossbones, Neil Cross’s (Luther) moderately ahistorical adaptation of the story of famous pirate Blackbeard, happily ensconced in the Saturday teatime slot, it would probably be the best Saturday teatime adventure fare for a long, long time. While the show plays more than a little bit fast and loose with history, has a somewhat Pirates of the Caribbean attitude towards a bunch of thieves, rapists, kidnappers and murderers, and forsakes plausibility and great acting in favour of ghostly visions and John Malkovich with spikes in his head and the strangest accent you ever did hear coming from his mouth, the show is at least fun (unlike Black Sails), remembers in the second half of every episode to have some swashbuckling, looks good and is a bit smarter than you might have been expecting.

Except this is a 10/9c show. It’s aimed at adults. And for that, it’s a little too silly. Yet it doesn’t truly realise it. Except for Malkovich of course.

Since its first episode, the show has moved on from being Heart of Darkness with pirates and has in fact pretty much forgotten why it ever sent Richard Coyle to try to kill the dread pirate Malkovich. Instead, it’s seen Coyle become an uneasy ally with Malkovich, who is part hero, part psychopath, part politician, all rolled up in a man who seems surprised that he’s being paid so much money to play at pirates in Puerto Rico.

Episode two saw Spanish submarines and, strangely enough, Malkovich’s attempts to impose an Athenian-style democracy on a nation of pirates, as well as the continuing romance between Coyle and Claire Foy’s feisty aristocrat-cum-quartermistress. Episode three gave us a slightly more pedestrian affair, with Coyle and Malkovich having to rescue Foy from the clutches of Coyle’s employer (Julian Sands being as Julian Sands as it’s possible to be). Supposedly, this was enabled through a cunning plan of Coyle’s but since it required Sands to act like he’d been dropped on his head as a baby, there’s apparently quite a low bar to pirate cunning.

It’s all jolly good fun – at least, in the second half of each episode when the show stops trying to be an actual drama, filled with not especially great attempts at character development and chessboard-like plotting, and decides to give us lots of swordfights and ships firing cannons at each other. It’s at its best when Cross bring Coyle and Malkovich together to share some decidedly above-average and knowing dialogue, at its worst whenever it tries to add depth to any of the hammier supporting characters or deal with anyone female. Historical purists will have a field day, but anyone who enjoys a Saturday tea time romp with period ships, doesn’t mind Britain’s legitimate attempts to stamp out criminality being portrayed as pure evil and wants to see how much latitude Cross and co give Malkovich will have a great 50% of the time.

Barrometer rating: 3
Rob’s prediction: Will probably make it to the end of the season and might even make it to two

What have you been watching? Including Murder In the First, Continuum, Suits, Old School and Undateable

20 June 2014 Rob Buckley 6 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.

A slightly slower week this week, with only one new show unveiled – SyFy’s Dominion. Hopefully, I’ll be reviewing that later today, but so far it looks like possibly the worst TV show ever made. Although obviously The Starlost still provides strong competition there.

After the jump,  a round-up of the regulars, with reviews of 24, Continuum, Enlisted, Game of Thrones, Murder In The First, Old School, Penny Dreadful, Suits and Undateable.

Continue reading “What have you been watching? Including Murder In the First, Continuum, Suits, Old School and Undateable”

The BarrometerA Barrometer rating of 2

Third-episode verdict: Halt and Catch Fire (AMC)

17 June 2014 Rob Buckley 3 Comments

In the US: Sundays, 10/9c, AMC

Oh, what a shame. After two episodes that might have led the viewer to believe they were looking at AMC’s new Mad Men, Halt and Catch Fire has fallen at the third hurdle.

Set in Texas’s so-called Silicon Prairie in 1983, the show looks at the PC revolution from the vantage point of four people, aiming to go into the PC clone business: a mesmerising salesman (Lee Pace), a punk girl programmer (Mackenzie Davis), a tired hardware engineer (Scott McNairy) and his more talented wife (Kerry Bishé). However, much like Pace’s character, the show promised a lot up front and is now failing to deliver on its promises.

The first episode gave us the set-up, with the near-sociopathic Pace turning up at the fictional Cardiff Electronics with a stunning game plan for how he’ll force the company to take on IBM by entering the PC cloning business, recruiting the brightest and best – McNairy and Davis – to do his bidding. And despite the show relying on an audience that can at least understand what’s involved in reverse-engineering a PC BIOS chip – and maybe even actually be able to do it – it was an excellent and engrossing piece of work. Pace was stunning as the visionary Steve Jobs of the piece and the script was thoughtful and clever.

Episode two continued this, never quite doing what you thought it was going to do. After a slow first half, the episode really took off with a glimpse of the terrifying business tactics IBM used in the 1980s. Pleasingly, the female characters got some rounding out, particularly Davis who got to show off at IT – and proper IT, not the dumbed down TV IT you get on something like NCIS. Pace continued to astonish, too, giving us a barely contained force of nature hiding behind the bland face and intonation of a born salesman, but who steals and has few ideas of his own.

Unfortunately, episode three gave us the first script written by anyone except show creators Christopher Cantwell and Christopher C Rogers, and it appears they might be the key to the show’s success or otherwise, because the stack of cards came tumbling down. Not completely and to a certain extent, the show was realistic enough to show that genius thoughts don’t necessarily arrive the first time, but may need time, effort and surprising sources for inspiration to be produced, but certainly most of the show’s main attractions got dropped – or at least there weren’t the dialogue and character moments needed to distract from the potentially flawed architecture.

It didn’t exactly help that the episode separated off the characters so they barely got to interact with one another or that Bishé’s character was the only one who got a chance to excel. Meanwhile, Pace’s masterplan was revealed merely to be “Let’s stick it to my old employers”, rather than anything with any real insight into revolutionising the PC industry. McNairy just moped for an episode and was squeamish over an obvious metaphordead bird. And Davis, channelling Tom Cruise in Risky Business, danced around an office all night, looking for inspiration, before heading off with the least convincing punks since Ralph Fiennes in Prime Suspect.

Then, of course, we got that scene, in which Pace (spoiler alert) seduces the husband of a potential investor of whom he disapproves, purely to put her off the deal. It’s a surprising character moment, presumably meant to indicate just what he’s prepared to do, but it comes out of nowhere and massively spins the show away from the plausibility it’s been trying to provide for the previous two episodes.

The show still isn’t without its charms and obviously could still recover. Any show that starts an episode with Gary Numan’s ‘Our Friends Electric’ is clearly full of potential awesome and we could yet see a reason why we should be routing for these characters, other than because they’re the ones the show is about. We have not one but two technically gifted female lead characters – that’s 50% of the main cast – both of whom are fully drawn out people. And when the show actually deals with the technical side of things, surprisingly, it’s extremely compelling, even if it’s just discussing how to make a motherboard smaller or reduce its heat output.

Without wishing to sound like Chris Morris in The IT Crowd, what’s needed is for the disparate characters to act like a team – presumably that’s the end game but the producers are taking their time getting there, and although this is an AMC show, speed is somewhat of the essence, given the nature of the subject matter and the show’s own plot requirements. We also need to be able to root for the team and as most of the characters are already aware, there’s literally nothing exciting about their clone – this isn’t Apple, this is Compaq. No one was excited by a Compaq PC, not even Compaq. They’re bored, so we’re bored.

So here’s hoping that from episode four, with presumably (spoiler alert) Bishé’s joining of the team, we’ll be heading for more interesting territory, because a bunch of people griping while producing a dull office product is just not a fun affair, no matter how much empty sex, weird scars and sick wildlife there is along the way. On the other hand, we might just get an episode in which someone forgets to back up their data. Let’s hope the producers pick the right option.

Barrometer rating: 2
Rob’s prediction: Hopefully the show can recover but anything more than one season is looking unlikely at the moment

What have you been watching? Including Power, Crossbones, Halt and Catch Fire, Continuum, Suits and more

13 June 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 working from home for most of this week and ironically therefore having more time to write things but less time to watch them, I’ve managed to keep up with the vigorous summer schedules (blimey, I remember when summer was dead and there was nothing to watch. Now look at it). Not many new shows starting this week, though, although I have reviewed the first episode of Steve Bochco’s new TNT show Murder In The First. And I also gave Power a go.

Power (US: Starz; UK: iTunes et al)
To say I was putting this one off as long as possible would be an understatement. Stop me when you want to get off: night club owner is also a drugs kingpin in a series exec produced by 50 Cent. It just sounds like it’s going to be horrible. And it was. I managed to get through 10 minutes before just deciding that the torture, relentless 50 Cent soundtrack, abuse/debasing of women et al was really not going to make it an enjoyable experience. It wasn’t without its virtues: it stars Omari Hardwicke (Dark Blue) and Naturi Naughton (The Playboy Club), who are both good, even though Naughton basically only has to act selfish and stupid. The direction is fine and it’s well shot. It’s surprisingly bi-lingual.

However, the next 50 minutes of the episode might be the best crime show since The Wire, but I’d rather watch open-heart surgery, because there’d be more humanity in that.

After the jump, yet more, with a round-up of the regulars, with reviews of 24, Continuum, Crossbones, Enlisted, Halt and Catch Fire, and Penny Dreadful

Continue reading “What have you been watching? Including Power, Crossbones, Halt and Catch Fire, Continuum, Suits and more”

US TV

Review: Murder In The First 1×1 (TNT)

13 June 2014 Rob Buckley 5 Comments

Murder In The First

In the US: Mondays, 10pm (ET/PT), TNT

TNT’s an odd network, a sort of in-between house on basic cable between regular old vanilla, commercial, network TV and the no-holds-barred, challenging world of premium cable. With no real identity of its own, it churns out shows that would largely sit very happily on any broadcast network were it not for the occasional swear word: Falling Skies, King & Maxwell, Perception, Memphis Beat, Dark Blue, Leverage, Saving Grace, Trust Me, Rizzoli & Isles, Franklin and Bash, The Closer, Major Crimes – the list goes on and assuming you hadn’t forgotten that pretty much all of those shows ever existed, you’d have been hard-pushed to remember they were on TNT and perhaps even cable. The network’s one truly good show was Southland… which it picked up from NBC then slashed its budget.

At most, you might think of TNT as ‘The Crime Channel’, because of the 13 shows listed above, 11 involve cops, lawyers and/or robbers, and the rest of the time, it’s broadcasting reruns of Law & Order. But you don’t. It’s just TNT. It’s just… there.

I don’t think it’s escaped TNT’s notice that it’s not very noticeable, either. It’s got an ambitious summer schedule of dramas lined up that includes spy thriller Legends, for example. But it’s starting us off gently with another crime drama, except to make it a bit more memorable, it’s gone once again to Steve Bochco, who previously gave the network Raising the Bar (make that 12 out of 14 shows).

Young people might not have heard of Steve Bochco (and let’s face it, they’re probably not going to be watching TNT, since it leans towards a much older demographic, anyway), but together with Mary Tyler Moore’s MTM Enterprises, he was pretty much responsible for launching the second wave of great American television that began in the 80s. He started it off with the innovative Hill Street Blues before giving us LA Law, Doogie Howser MD, Hooperman, NYPD Blue and (oh horror) Cop Rock, which I guess was innovative, too, given it was as the name suggests, a musical drama about cops:

Possibly Bochco’s greatest creative achievement, even if it wasn’t a ratings success, was the almost-theatrical Murder One. As with Hill Street Blues, Murder One was unusual for its time in having story arcs – a season-long high-profile criminal case in Murder One’s case. It was filled with a fantastic cast that included Patricia Clarkson, Mary McCormack and the magnificent Stanley Tucci and Daniel Benzali, who presided like a Renaissance Pope over his cadre of lawyers:

So perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that for his latest show, Murder In The First, Bochco has pitched at that older demographic who liked his previous shows. Giving Murder One a slight Law & Order twist, Murder In The First follows a criminal investigation by San Francisco police into two murders linked to a celebrity all the way through to the trial and (presumably) conviction of the killer. It also adds in a dash of Hill Street Blues, with its focus on the domestic lives and working relationships of the cops.

Starring Taye Diggs (Day Break), Kathleen Robertson (Boss), Richard Schiff (The West Wing), Steven Weber (Studio 60), Nicole Ari Parker (The Deep End) and Draco Malfoy himself – Tom Felton from the Harry Potter movies – it’s not exactly what you’d call ground-breaking, but is probably going to be a passable piece of summer viewing. Well, better than everything else on TNT, anyway.

Here’s a trailer:

Continue reading “Review: Murder In The First 1×1 (TNT)”