TV reviews

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

UK TV

Mini-review: Mayo and Kermode in Movie Heaven

23 December 2013 Rob Buckley Post a comment

Movie HeavenSimon Mayo and Mark Kermode, Britain’s foremost film critics, have largely been confined to radio – until now. Mysteriously, though, rather than a TV show, they’ve got themselves an iTunes something. I don’t know really what to call it, but they call it Movie Heaven, anyway.

The premise is simple: get a guest on and get them to programme a day’s worth of movies, one of the morning for the kids, one for the afternoon for the family, one for the evening for adults and one for late night that’s got a slight edge to it. First up is Andy Serkis, who played Gollum in The Lord of the Rings, and there’s a pretty good selection of films, including Oliver!, in his schedule.

The show’s pretty good, largely because it’s Kermode and Mayo, and Serkis is an entertaining guest. However, it falls apart in its direction. The show is filmed on a cinema set, which works fine when it’s just Kermode and Mayo, but as soon as Serkis comes along, Kermode and Mayo are on one side of the aisle, Serkis on the other, with Kermode stuck awkwardly behind Mayo. You can imagine the whole thing working quite nicely around a table, but because of the choice of set, it feels a bit amateurish. Then again, it only costs 99p a download, so I don’t imagine they could afford much else.

Either way, if you like Kermode and Mayo or you like films, give it a try and try to ignore the production values.

What have you been watching? Including Kirstie, Getting On, The Tomorrow People, The Tunnel and Homeland

16 December 2013 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.

As it’s nearly Christmas, US TV has been both slowing down and speeding up: shows are going on their holiday hiatus or even ending their seasons, leaving us with cliffhangers and plot resolutions aplenty. Nevertheless, there have been a couple of new shows, although I’ve still got BBC4’s Don’t Ever Wipe Tears Without Gloves in the viewing queue.

The first is HBO’s remake of BBC4’s Getting On, which tried to give a semi-comedic, semi-realistic examination of life as a nurse, but didn’t quite have the acting chops or writing to make it work:

TV Land’s Kirstie, aimed presumably at people who were already old in the 80s, reunited Kirstie Alley and Rhea Perlman from Cheers and added Michael D Richards from Seinfeld to the mix as an actress, her PA and her driver respectively, who have to deal with her life issues, which include a son she’d put up for adoption when younger and who now re-enters her life as a grown adult. It’s all multi-camera, shot with a studio audience and I would rather stab myself in the eye and the ear, repeatedly (in either order, I don’t mind) than have to watch another episode. Great cast, terrible, terrible scripts.

Now let’s look at the usuals.

Shows I’m watching but not recommending
Almost Human (Fox)
A sudden recollection by the writers that women exist turned out to be the worst thing possible, since despite this being 40 years from now, apparently any woman in a position of power will have had to have sacrificed a personal life to do so and really just want to be told how pretty they are and to land a guy. FFS. This week’s sci-fi idea: clones.

Agents of Shield (ABC/Channel 4)
Lots of storylines dovetail and J August Richards returns, bringing back the charisma he apparently stole from the younger regular cast. But it all hinges on a woman with only one dress and the Agents of SHIELD not having any proper procedures in place for some of the most obvious situations possible. Daft as brush and not as exciting as that.

The Tomorrow People (The CW/E4)
A guest appearance by Nicholas Young of the original Tomorrow People that probably had all the young cast snivelling in despair (“yes, you lot, cameos in remakes of this show is all you can expect by way of an acting career in 40 years time”) helped to liven up the show, which while still not anything truly remarkable is now finding its feet. Perhaps too much pointless sci-fi though I hate to think what they’ll find when they go looking for (spoiler)dad’s body. Just noticed that the ‘Founder’ is Crassus from Spartacus, who up until that show was a jobbing UK soap opera actor. Shows how far you can go with an English accent as a baddie in the US, doesn’t it?

Recommended shows
Arrow (The CW/Sky 1)
Deaths galore, an epic baddie reveal, a new superhero is in town (well, left town to be exact), Ra’s Al Ghul is around and Arrow gets his mask at last, all in a subtle nod to A Christmas Carol. Top stuff.

The Blacklist (NBC/Sky Living)
A clever change in format for the show, with most of the show’s tropes now dead, burned or destroyed. Even the big question – is James Spader Megan Boone’s father – seems to have been answered. Looking forward to seeing what they come back with in January, since it’ll be a relatively different show, I suspect. Nice to see Alan Alda getting a chance to be evil for a change, too.

Elementary (CBS/Sky Living)
As well as giving producer Liz Friedman a chance to channel her years on House, the past couple of episodes have either fleshed out Bell’s role or written him out (I’m not sure which, yet. It might even be both), either of which would be a good move. Not sure about the ‘sponsor’ thing and the sheer lack of any decent deduction by Holmes is getting silly.

Homeland (Showtime/Channel 4)
A combination of the sublime and the ridiculous last week, but it was still immensely thrilling, flashing back to the ‘will he, won’t he’ of the first season. This week, however, we had the season finale, and it left me wondering what the point of the past two seasons were, other than to course-correct from what happened in the first season. Overall, though, a much better third season than second season. Where the show will go from here, though, I don’t know, since it’s going to be pretty much starting from fresh with its fourth season.

The Tunnel/Tunnel (Sky Atlantic/Canal+)
Excellent stuff that fixed most of the problems of the original Swedish/Danish scripts and gave it all a brilliant cinematic look on top. It’s a strange show for me in that it’s not a must-see since I’ve seen it before, but even though I’ve seen it before, when I watch it, it’s still intensely thrilling. People without Sky will be able to buy it on DVD and Blu-Ray in January, you’ll be thrilled to know.

“What have you been watching?” is your chance to recommend to friends and fellow blog readers the TV and films that they might be missing or should avoid – and for me to do mini-reviews of everything I’ve watched. Since we live in the fabulous world of Internet catch-up services like the iPlayer and Hulu, why not tell your fellow readers what you’ve seen so they can see the good stuff they might have missed?

Classic TV

Nostalgia corner: Chandler and Co (1996)

12 December 2013 Rob Buckley Post a comment

Peter Capaldi with a crossbow in Chandler and Co

There are a couple of names that are big in BBC circles right now: Peter Capaldi and Paula Milne. Capaldi is of course set to become the 12th Doctor Who (or should that be 14th? We’ll soon know) this Christmas, while Milne has been responsible for series such as Angels, The Hour and The Politician’s Husband, as well as TV movies such as Legacy.

So it seems an appropriate time to have a look back at 1996’s Chandler and Co, written by Milne and co-starring Capaldi. The show’s two lead characters, however – the eponymous Chandler and co – were Dee Chandler (Catherine Russell, who’s probably best known as Serena Campbell in Holby City and as Helen Lynley in The Inspector Lynley Mysteries) and her sister-in-law Elly Chandler (Barbara Flynn from The Beiderbecke Affair and A Very Peculiar Practice). After Dee divorces Elly’s philandering brother Max, she convinces Elly to help her set up a private detective agency.

Unfortunately, of course, having no background in law enforcement or anything investigative, neither has a clue what she’s doing. Enter Larry Blakeston (Peter Capaldi), the PI who investigated Max for Dee and a supplier of fine technological devices to inquiring detectives. Blakeston agrees to help out – with some degree of eye rolling at the duo’s amateurism.

With the show keen to depict a more realistic milieu for the private detectives, far away from the drug lords and master criminals of other TV shows, in favour of the more bread and butter cheating spouses and runaway children, you’d have thought it would have been a relatively genteel piece. But instead it was largely about the emotional and physical damage loved ones can do to each other (particularly men). Indeed, even Capaldi, an ostensible hero of the piece, doesn’t get let off lightly, pressurising Dee into sleeping with him in order to maintain his good favour and by extension the viability of her business.

Fitting into a period when female crime investigators were on the rise again in the UK (Prime Suspect, Anna Lee), the show lasted two series, during the second of which Flynn was replaced by Susan Fleetwood (who sadly died shortly after the series aired). It’s not been repeated since, but you can watch the first series on YouTube below:

The BarrometerA Barrometer rating of 3

Fourth-episode verdict: Almost Human (Fox)

3 December 2013 Rob Buckley 5 Comments

In the US: Mondays, 8/7c, Fox
In the UK: Not yet acquired
Find it in the schedules where you live

With so many shows now starting with double-episodes, it seems to make more sense – if I can bear it – to wait for four episodes before passing verdict on them. Almost Human is a case in point. A big brave bold JJ Abrams TV show from Fox, it’s a futuristic buddy-buddy cop story between a growly white cop (Karl Urban) and a sensitive black android cop (Michael Ealy). They solve crimes together. They rib each other.

Every episode is more or less the same: there’s a shiny, quite interesting science-fiction idea about law enforcement or crime in the future. Our two heroes go around and solve the crime in precisely the same way two modern day cops would, just a bit quicker thanks to technology and special effects. The android gets shot or beaten up a bit, but he can take it because he’s an android. And then there’s much laughter at the end.

Along the way, despite 100 years having passed since women’s liberation, the entire existence of women except as sexbots, strippers, wives and mothers is pretty much forgotten – you might spot one in ten characters as being female. There’s a lot of male bonding and jokes. Mackenzie Crook from The Office gets to be nerdy. All the promise of story arcs and characterisation that was in the first episode gets more or less forgotten.

It’s incredibly, incredibly adequate.

I do appreciate that the show is trying to be a procedural, a CSI with robots, and that expecting individual episodes to be anything more than exactly the same as each other is a bad idea. There’s a decent enough chemistry between the two leads and they do their jobs as required. And it does come up with some intriguing ideas (this week, we got a liquid you can swallow that will make you a GPS beacon and a drug made from bacteria found on the ocean floor).

But unless you’re a teenage boy or will watch pretty much anything science-fiction related, this probably ain’t the show for you. It’s just too bland, too boys club and too empty in the human relationships department to really make you want to watch.

Barrometer rating: 3
Rob’s prediction: Will probably last a season, maybe get a second. But that’s it, unless there’s a big reboot

The Weekly Play

The Wednesday Play: Dead of Night – The Exorcism (1972)

28 November 2013 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

Many plays, particularly those in the theatre, are written to impart a message from the author. TV plays typically have been no different and especially during the 1970s in the UK, social realism and commentary on injustices in society were grist to the playwright’s mill.

Largely, however, this wasn’t the case for genre series, which were much more interested in ideas about science, technology and the future in the case of science-fiction shows – or just scaring people in the case of horror shows. But the first play in BBC2’s 1972 supernatural anthology series Dead of Night, The Exorcism, married both the supernatural and social conscience to deliver a play about the divide between rich and poor that still was able to scare the crap out of the viewer.

Set in a recently purchased cottage in the countryside, The Exorcism sees various middle-class friends (Clive Swift, Edward Petherbridge, Anna Cropper and Sylvia Kay) get together for a dinner party and to revel in how much money they have. Unfortunately, their behaviour excites some particularly unfriendly proletariat ghosts and the party ends up going in a particularly bad direction for them all.

If you can get over the somewhat agitprop nature of Don Taylor’s play, this is a real blood curdler that’ll make you think while it scares you witless. Best watched at night, with the lights turned down, it’s this week’s Wednesday Play on Thursday. Enjoy – and if you like it, you can buy it and the two surviving episodes (Return Flight and A Woman Sobbing) on DVD.

PS Trivia lovers might like to know that the eighth episode of the series was going to be The Stone Tape, but that was eventually aired as a separate play.