TV reviews

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

The BarrometerA Barrometer rating of 4

Third-episode verdict: Believe (NBC/Watch)

25 March 2014 Rob Buckley 6 Comments

In the US: Sundays, 9/8c, NBC
In the UK: Thursdays, 9pm, Watch. Starts March 27th

Three episodes into the latest JJ Abrams drama to emerge from NBC and suddenly we realise that of all the shows Abrams could have emulated, he chose to go with Touch. You could just about spot it if you looked hard enough, even though the first episode was largely by-the-book Abrams formula number one, with secret organisations squabbling over a MacGuffin – in this case a kid with nebulous special powers – that our hero has to defend. True, it was a bit quirkier than normal, with a baddie worried about getting home in time for her mother’s birthday, but there was nothing hugely innovative about it.

Episode two was something of a reboot, with the writers deciding quirky was bad and essentially rewriting the motivations for the goodies and the baddies. Apart from the addition of Trieste Kelly Dunn from Banshee to the cast, perhaps the biggest surprise was how quickly the writers were willing to dish the dirt on all the mysteries the show had served up in the pilot, leaving us with just few to puzzle over, most of them involving butterflies and how our hero figures in the set-up.

Episode three continued in the same vein, answering more questions and giving us flashbacks to how it all started. But now we have the same kind of ‘everyone is interconnected’ silliness of Touch, with our hero and little girl sidekick meeting someone new each episode and fixing their problems with a bit of special power fun. And they’re being told to do it by the butterflies.

It’s still not without charms. Each episode has an obligatory heartwarming moment in which something lovely happens thanks to our less than dynamic duo. They also try to solve problems without a gun, which is novel these days.

But the central mysteries were as unexciting and derivative as I was expecting and the characters vary from insipid to irritating, without much variance. I can’t quite recommend it but if you fancy something like The Littlest Hobo but without as many dogs or a show like Touch where the kid actually gets to talk, this might be the show for you.

Rob’s rating: 4
Rob’s prediction: Cancelled by the end of the season

US TV

Review: The 100 1×1 (The CW/E4)

24 March 2014 Rob Buckley 2 Comments

 


In the US: Wednesdays, 9/8c, The CW
In the UK: Acquired by E4. To air 2014

Sometimes, the contrariness of US TV amuses me. Watch pretty much any US TV show these days and you’ll spot someone who isn’t American pretending to be American. Whether it’s simply the ubiquitous Canadians who permeate every show that’s shot for budgetary reasons in Canada (pretty much anything on The CW, for example), or the numerous Brits, Australians, New Zealanders and Scandinavians looking for jobs and pay in the US they’re never going to get back home, look close enough and they’ll be there, usually sporting a non-descript Mid-Western accent, in pretty much any show you care to mention. 

Yet, when a show actually calls for some degree of international representation, not only will virtually all the characters be American, even the foreigners the producers bring in will be obligated to pretend to be from someone in Iowa.

Case in point is The 100, set in some distant, post-nuclear future, in which only a handful of humans from around the world have survived. They all live in The Ark, an amalgamation of all the world’s space stations, so naturally you’d expect just a few of them to not be American. Yet they aren’t. Even the obviously and famously Scottish Henry Ian Cusick from Lost is forced to feign US accent.

Bizarre.

Nevertheless, The 100 is a moderately interesting piece for The CW, which is rapidly turning into the ‘more sci-fi than the SyFy’ channel. Yes, we have all the standard tropes designed to appeal to young people of both genders – pretty, clean-cut, fit young things in various states of undress, emoting at each other and worrying about their teenage relationships. But these 100 pretty young things are all juvenile offenders, forced to return as guinea pigs to the irradiated world that is the Earth by the Draconian regime that runs The Ark. Will they all die of radiation sickness, get eaten by rabid rats or club each other to death?

Maybe, actually, which is surprising. In fact, some of them might even get killed before the end of the first episode…

Here’s a trailer.

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What have you been watching? Including Remedy, Spun Out, W1A and Ender’s Game

21 March 2014 Rob Buckley 10 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.

New shows I’ve already reviewed this week:

I’ll be getting round to The CW’s The 100 either today or early next week, but I did try a few other new shows, too: two Canadian, one British.

Remedy (Canada: Global)
Dillon Casey is a doctor who comes from a family of medics, all of whom work at the same hospital for some reason. After cocking up something chronic, he’s forced to come back as a porter and we get to see hospital life from the viewpoint of everyone who works there who isn’t a medic. Which might be interesting and different (at least, if you’ve never watched Casualty), except it’s so self-consciously quirky and ‘family’, it’s practically unwatchable, so I gave up. Only really notable for Enrico Colantoni (Flashpoint).

Spun Out (Canada: CTV)
For reasons best known only to Canada, they’ve decided to produce a totally unrequested response to CBS’s The Crazy Ones that’s even worse. Starring Dave Foley of Kids in the Hall fame, it’s a multi-camera sitcom about a PR agency run by Foley, together with his daughter, and all the highjinks they get up to once newbie Billy from BSG turns up. All the same, it’s possibly one of the least funny things TV has ever produced.

W1A (UK: BBC2)
A follow up to BBC4’s cult comedy 2012, this reunites Hugh Bonneville and Jessica Hynes as the former Olympic organisers now recruited by the BBC to handle sensitive issues. I’ve not worked an awful lot for the BBC but it is recognisably accurate but exaggerated as a piece of satire. How funny it is for people who don’t work in television, I’m not sure, although parallels with any large organisation no doubt abound. Most of the humour, though, comes from wordplay, mostly provided by narrator David Tennant, and in the cameos by famous people, such as one by Alan Yentob and Salman Rushdie that’ll send your eyebrows through the roof. 

Bonneville is, of course, the hapless sensible everyman, dealing with a quagmire of neverending meetings with ‘timewasting morons’, trying to use common sense of all things to deal with problems. However, the show has a slightly dodgy edge, with Bonneville fighting against the excesses of liberal political correctness so the show also treads a slightly tricky path around things like the Countryfile age discrimination suit. Generally, a promising start, so I’ll be tuning in next week.

I also watched a movie:

Ender’s Game
Evil insect aliens attack the Earth and 50 years later, we’re still preparing in case they come back by training kids in war planning, in the hope their brains will be flexible and fast enough that they’ll make great generals. Essentially, Harry Potter in space school, right down to its own version of Quidditch, but with a pleasingly darker, smarter, nastier edge, our hero essentially someone who can outstrategise his bullies rather than who spends the whole time feeling put upon. The final battle is a big intense surprise; Ben Kingsley’s awful New Zealand accent is not a surprise. 

After the jump, the regulars, with reviews of Believe, Enlisted, Resurrection, 19-2, The Americans, Arrow, Banshee, The Blacklist, Community, Continuum, The Doctor Blake Mysteries, Hannibal, Line of Duty and Suits

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Streaming TV

Mini-review: From Dusk Till Dawn 1×1 (El Rey/Netflix)

20 March 2014 Rob Buckley 3 Comments


In the US: Tuesdays, 9pm, El Rey
In the UK: Available on Netflix. New episode released each week

Robert Rodriguez is best known as being a pal of Quentin Tarantino. His first big success was a Tarantino-scripted flick, From Dusk Till Dawn, which saw Tarantino and George Clooney play two brothers who rob a bank then head off to a strip joint that just happens to be run by sexy Latina vampire Salma Hayek. As a piece of grindhouse, it was fine and clearly benefited from Tarantino’s ear for dialogue. But it wasn’t exactly a classic.

Rodriguez went on to greater success with the Spy Kids movies, but he’s produced more grindhouse over the years. Bizarrely, he’s just launched his own TV network, El Rey, which is an English-language channel targeted at Latinos. The flagship drama he’s using to launch the network? A TV-length adaptation of From Dusk Till Dawn, starring almost no one you’ve heard of and written by Rodriguez rather than Tarantino.

Hmm.

Okay, not strictly true. Don Johnson appears in the first episode and although this isn’t a spoiler if you’ve seen the movie, gets killed before the end of it (although, you know, vampires). And Robert Patrick (Terminator 2, The Unit, The X-Files, The Last Resort) takes over Harvey Keitel’s role as a vicar vampire-hunter in later episodes. 

However, largely, this is just a slower, duller, much, much cheaper version of the movie, played out over an entire series. It’s not terrible and there are attempts to emulate Tarantino’s style; the two leads (DJ Cotrona from Windfall and Zane Holtz from nothing much at all) do just fine as more generic versions of Clooney and Tarantino, the cool one and the psycho-crazy one respectively; the action is okay, if not especially thrilling; it’s not got a great attitude towards women, but it’s no that much worse than many other shows I could name on that score; and there are promises to flesh out the vampires’ Mayan backstory. 

But, you know, they killed Don Johnson. Why bother watching after that?

Here’s a trailer:

US TV

Review: Crisis 1×1 (NBC)

18 March 2014 Rob Buckley 15 Comments

Crisis NBC

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

Normally, you can rely on two things in life: CBS to do action well, and NBC to do action badly. There is a CBS Action channel; there is no NBC Action channel.

So works the universe. Or so I thought.

Colour me surprised, therefore, by NBC’s latest action show, Crisis, which not only is good in its own right but is also better than CBS’s very similar Hostages. It even has a better Dermot in it (Dermot Mulroney rather than Dylan McDermott).

As with Hostages before it, it sees a family abducted in order to force a very important person to do some things they wouldn’t normally do. Here, though, Crisis ups the ante somewhat by having a whole coach load of VIPs’ children abducted and those VIPs then getting forced to do things they wouldn’t normally do. Trying to stop the baddies is FBI agent Rachael Taylor (666 Park Avenue, Charlie’s Angels), newbie secret service agent Lance Gross (Tyler Perry’s House of Payne) and Taylor’s sister, CEO and parent Gillian Anderson (The X-Files, The Fall, Hannibal).

And although it’s prone to silliness in much the same way as another NBC action hit, The Blacklist, on the whole it’s smart enough and interesting enough that I’m looking forward to the next episode.

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