TV reviews

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

US TV

Review: Crossbones 1×1 (NBC)

5 June 2014 Rob Buckley 16 Comments

Crossbones

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

At its height, the British Empire was the most powerful force humanity had ever known. Fully 1/5 of the world’s population lived and died under the British flag. Yet its true power was not on land but on the sea where they ruled with the most brutal and efficient military force that has ever been: the British Navy.

But the oceans that this navy sought to control were vast, unknowable and full of terrible danger. And for all the Crown’s might, its ships were often lost to starvation, to storm and tempest, and to pirates.

So it was in 1712, the Crown offered a prince’s fortune to whomever could create a device that would allow its navy to navigate this great emptiness with a precision never before known. With this device, the Empire would increase its dominion over the world. But without it, the ships of the Crown would continue to be easy prey, not only from the gods and monsters of legend, but from a monster far more brutal and far more real.

– The opening narration to Crossbones

Back in the 00s, when I was watching BBC2’s Coupling, the last person I expected to become a US action hero was Richard Coyle. To be fair to Coyle, I didn’t expect any of the cast of Coupling to become US action heroes, but Coyle was right up there at the top of the list of cast members who wouldn’t become US action heroes. Because he was Jeff.

Of course, Ryan Reynolds was “the second guy in Two Guys, A Girl and a Pizza Place” before he became the action hero we now know, so perhaps that’s a warning for you of the danger of typecasting comedy actors.

Indeed, since Coupling, Coyle’s been a Persian prince in Prince of Persia…

…a suave Russian ex-special forces soldier-cum-spy in Covert Affairs…

…and now a British government agent and assassin in NBC’s Crossbones. Good for him – he’s made it to the big time: the broadcast networks.

I think it’s fair to say, though, that all you need to know about Crossbones can be encapsulated thus: John Malkovich is Blackbeard the pirate; he does not have a black beard. All the same, it does also need the following addendum: Crossbones is much, much better than Black Sails.

Here’s a trailer.

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US TV

Mini-review: Halt and Catch Fire 1×1 (AMC)

4 June 2014 Rob Buckley 4 Comments

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

Of all the events in history you might have expected to have seen dramatised on TV, the quest in the early 1980s to develop 100% IBM PC-compatible computers by reverse engineering IBM’s proprietary BIOS chip probably wasn’t one of them. Leave it to AMC, then, to expand the envelope, because here we have Halt and Catch Fire – named after an obscure assembly language instruction – which seeks to do just that.

Starring Lee Pace of Pushing Daisies as Joe MacMillan (the Steve Jobs of the piece), Scott McNairy as Gordon Clark (the Steve Wozniak), it sees former IBM salesman MacMillan go rogue and turn up at a fictitious Texan computer company a year later. There he meets Clark and persuades him to help him build a PC-compatible. Along the way, he’s also recruited a bright young engineer, Cameron Howe (Mackenzie Davis) who’ll help them both to make MacMillan’s dreams a reality.

And actually, it’s very good. While Silicon Valley and the BBC’s similar Micro Men decided to take the comic route to deal with computers, this is as serious and as hardcore as AMC’s Mad Men. Although it’s not based on a real company or people, it draws elements from real events to look at the somewhat overlooked Texas companies that helped to create the PC revolution and recreates the early 80s as convincingly as The Americans, albeit that portion of the 80s that led to Tron, right down to the synthesiser incidental music and theme tune. Lee Pace is compelling as the visionary and ruthless MacMillan, who’s prepared to destroy an entire company to get what he wants. The technical details are impressive and assume a level of knowledge in the audience, whether it’s a discussion of firmware, the use of hexadecimal notation or comments familiar to anyone in IT (“No one ever got fired for buying IBM”).

And although it’s an AMC show, this first episode actually clips along at a reasonable pace. Admittedly, the first 15 minutes or so are a bit shaky, thanks to an Armadillo accident (no, really) and Clark’s sheer lack of charisma next to MacMillan’s overwhelming personality. And Davis’ character is somewhat undermined in that after a cracking introduction that shows how bright she is, that’s initially only to show why MacMillan wants to sleep with her and his near-sociopathy.

But by the end of the episode, it becomes a compelling watch. Definitely one to stick with.

TV reviews

Review: Undateable 1×1-1×2 (NBC)

3 June 2014 Rob Buckley 14 Comments

Undateable

In the US: Thursdays, 9/8c, NBC

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. At least, for NBC’s Undateable it was.

As the title suggests, this is a comedy about a bunch of hopeless male nerds who are basically undateable: they don’t look good, they don’t know how to talk or act around women, yet all they want in life is to win over some woman’s heart. Into their midst comes an alpha male, a modern Fonzie, who is the master of the one-night stand and small talk with the ladies. And he’s going to show them how to win it big with the girls.

Ordinarily, that would sound pretty horrible and given it stars Chris D’Elia (Whitney) as the neo-Fonz and is a multi-camera comedy filmed in front of studio audience in the worst traditions of CBS comedies – the success of which NBC is desperate to emulate – that potential for horrible only manages to near cesspit level depths.

But right now, thanks to the tragedy of Elliot Rodger, lonely nerds who have problems with women aren’t exactly a popular subject in the US – particularly ones that seek help from pick-up artists in shows that tell nerds that yes, your princess is in the same castle. Couple that with Elia’s decision to take to task in the worst possible way women around the world for the hashtag #YesAllWomen, which emerged following Rodger’s murders, and you’d presume, perhaps even hope, that Undateable would die a fiery death on arrival, just like any other NBC comedy you could care to mention, lest we all get the plague and die from its suppurating sores.

Yet, strangely, Undateable got the highest-rated summer debut for a network comedy in five years. On NBC.

WTF? What’s going on?

Well, Undateable isn’t quite what you might think it is. For one thing, it’s from Bill Lawrence, creator of Scrubs, Cougar Town and Ground Floor, so it was never going to be as stupid or as offensive as anything that the Chuck Lorre channel was going to throw our way. It’s also based on a book by two women – 311 Things Guys Do That Guarantee They Won’t Be Dating or Having Sex – and written by romcom specialist Adam Sztykiel (Made of Honour).

But more importantly, it’s not a programme that portrays women as objects or that shows that constant one-night stands are a good thing. Indeed, Neo-Fonzie isn’t the hero – just as the nerds are going to learn from him how to flirt and be confident, so he’s going to learn from them that actually, maybe his life is a bit empty and lonely and he needs to treat women better.

In a sense then, TV has never needed Undateable – a show that teaches nerdy men how to be nice to women, not to expect them as a prize and shows them that women are people with their own problems, too – more than it does right now.

I just wish – as I do with pretty much every NBC comedy – that it was a bit funnier.

Here’s a trailer or two:

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What have you been watching? Including X-Men: Days of Future Past, Game of Thrones and Old School

2 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.

You take a day off and blimey, even in summer, it’s suddenly all systems go at the networks. As a result, still in the viewing queue are the first episodes of NBC’s Undateable and Crossbones as well as AMC’s Halt and Catch Fire. Fingers crossed, I’ll have reviews of them up tomorrow and Thursday – and not such a backlog for my next round-up, which should be on Friday.

I did watch a movie, though:

X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014)
Probably the most famous of all the X-Men comic storylines – if any X-men comic can truly be said to have famous storylines – with the cast of the first three movies facing an apocalyptic future thanks to some killer robots called Sentinels. So they get Kitty PrydeWolverine to travel back in time to 1973 where he has to meet the cast of X-Men: First Class and guide them on a different path that doesn’t involve them all dying.

With an amalgam of X-Men writers and directors to match the on-screen melange, this feels like X-Men: First Class crossed with X-Men: the more fun, action-packed storyline and period setting of the former but with the coldness and coolness of the latter. Largely a Mystique/Professor X piece, with a lot of added Wolverine, it still manages to feature cameos from pretty much everyone who was in X-Men and X-Men: First Class, as well a few new ones, even if it’s only for a few moments, and with its time travel element, don’t be surprised by the fact it effectively wipes out X-Men 3 from the canon so that they can have more fun in the next movie, X-Men: Apocalypse, based on the second most-famous X-Men/X-Men: Evolution storyline.

None of it makes a lick of sense, mind, and no more fits into continuity than X-Men: Origins: Wolverine. All the same, the second best of the X-Men movies, thanks to Jennifer Lawrence, James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender (with a consistent accent for a chance) and Hugh Jackman. In fact, I’m going to see it again later this week.

After the jump, a round-up of the regulars, with reviews of 24, Continuum, Game of Thrones and Old School.

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The BarrometerA Barrometer rating of 3

Third-episode verdict: Penny Dreadful (Showtime/Sky Atlantic)

28 May 2014 Rob Buckley 5 Comments

In the US: Sundays, 10pm ET/PT, Showtime
In the UK: Thursdays, 9pm, Sky Atlantic

Well, what a variable show we have in Penny Dreadful. The brainchild of John Logan and Sam Mendes, it sees an all-star cast (Timothy Dalton, Josh Hartnett, Eva Green, Billie Piper, Rory Kinnear, Helen McRory and Simon Russell Beale) in a Victorian setting that brings together all the great works of Victorian horror fiction into one big melange: Dracula, Frankenstein, Dorian Gray and possibly some others I haven’t spotted yet.

Except as much as Logan would like it to be a melange, it’s more a patchwork of different body parts sewn together, much like Frankenstein’s monster himself. Episode 1 tried to introduce as many characters as possible without revealing who they all were until the last minute – a strategy that might have worked if we hadn’t read the character list, read any of the books or knew what the show was about. Instead, apart from a show full of mysteries that weren’t mysteries, we had little beyond Logan frightfully pleased with himself for coming up with such a unique and novel concept that was absolutely in no way like The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen or anything similar that had gone before – oh no – and delighting in his use of language, while the cast decided to play it straight or camp it up in roughly equal measure.

Episode 2 then took a plummet in quality and was almost so bad I had to turn it off. But not quite. Principally an episode designed to introduce three missing actors – Billie Piper, Reeve Carney and Rory Kinnear – it took away the one interesting aspect of the pilot: the melange of the different Victorian stories. Instead, we had a vampire thread, a Frankenstein thread and a Dorian Gray thread. Eva Green’s performance was astonishing in the eponymous séance, despite being given a cringeworthy script to deal with, but it was Kinnear’s arrival that just about saved the episode. Unfortunately, Carney was desperately uncharismatic and his character gave no real impetus to the plot, Piper’s Belfast accent was nearly as nails on blackboard as the entire cast of Orphan Black’s, and the show felt so satisfied with itself for mining Victoria horror for its inspiration, it almost totally forget to do anything with it.

Episode 3 on the other hand was significantly better, despite being equally delineated, mainly thanks to roughly 50% of it being dedicated to Kinnear’s character (spoiler: Frankenstein’s first monster). While one could quibble (rather a lot) with the idea of someone teaching themselves English purely through reading books of classic literature (at least in the original book, Kinnear’s character got to hear people speak first), Logan’s love of language finally paid off now he had the superb Kinnear to deliver it appropriately. And in fact, all the scenes Logan gives to Kinnear are actually surprisingly touching.

Unfortunately, despite the liberties Logan’s taken with the original work, he’s decided to stick with one particular cliche (spoiler: the monster wants a bride) that together with the Dracula and Gray themes, effectively makes Penny Dreadful a series about monstrous men hunting after women for various sexual reasons, either as text or sub-text. And when Logan’s not showing off how much he like Shakespeare and Wordsworth, he’s just getting his characters to swear a lot in an effort to be shocking, which is neither big nor clever.

Although a slight hint at werewolfism/shamanism for Josh Hartnett’s character in the third episode actually makes him interesting, he’s saddled with cheery consumptive Billy Piper for most of his scenes; Piper’s saddled with having sex with everyone else and coughing up blood a lot; Green mostly just has to look either spooked or spooky, although that is at least preferable to those séance scenes; Dalton just growls a lot and runs around a lot; and Carney is about as convincing as the charismatic debauched Gray as Leonard from Big Bang Theory would be. We’ve not even seen Dracula.

So in essence, watch this show for Rory Kinnear, because he’s great. Everything else is just so much lit-appreciation onanism.

Rating: 3
Rob’s prediction: Might get a second season, but I wouldn’t bet money on it