TV reviews

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

What did you watch this week? Including The Booth At The End, Orange is the New Black, The Almighty Johnsons, Satisfaction and Suits

26 July 2013 Rob Buckley 8 Comments

It’s “What did you watch this week?, my chance to tell you what I movies and TV I’ve watched this week that I haven’t already reviewed and your chance to recommend things to everyone else (and me) in case I’ve missed them.

First up, 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.

Still in the viewing queue: Kerry Packer…. But otherwise I’m up to speed again, just in time to disappear for a fortnight on holiday. Oops.

New shows I tried this week
Orange is the New Black (Netflix) 
Netflix’s comedy-drama from the creator, based on a true story about a woman sent to a correctional institute. I only watched half an episode, but it was pretty good albeit with a little too much female nudity, so I reckon I’ll be jumping back in at some point.

The Booth At The End (Netflix/Hulu)
At Mark’s suggestion, I decided to give this one a bit of a whirl. And actually, it’s quite good, if a little frustrating. Essentially, each episode sees an unnamed man (Xander Berkeley) sitting in a both at the end of a diner. People come to him who want things, sometimes trivial, sometimes seemingly impossible. And the Man looks in his book and tells them what they need to do to make that thing happen: it can as simple as making a phone call; or it could be to murder a child or set off a bomb, although he’s at pains to state that he doesn’t actually make these things happen and they may happen anyway. In In Treatment style, a lot of the plots of the characters mingle and part of the fun is guessing how they’ll all mesh together, and it’s also pleasantly theatrical, since nothing is ever shown, just described by the Man’s various supplicants, so it relies a lot on your imagination.

The frustration is two-fold. The first is that there are very few answers and if you hang out to the end of the first season of five, 22-minute episodes, you still won’t really get any gratification on that score. The second is that Netflix in the UK only has the first season, the second season being available exclusively to Hulu in the US – although since this aired on FX in the UK at one point, too, it might come round again.

But I asked a man with a book how to overcome that problem, and I’m currently in the middle of the first new episode, which has new characters and a new diner, so far. I’ll report back once I’ve watched the rest.

Shows I’m watching but not necessarily recommending
Ray Donovan (Showtime/Sky Atlantic)
Actually, I’m not watching this, since I gave up midway through the latest episode. Just not something in which I’m interested.

Ray Donovan TV Schedule

Under The Dome (CBS/Channel 5)
Still no explanations for anything, and it’s now starting to look like a 1980s Stephen King adaptation. Too many plot convulsions required to get the particular moments we saw by the end. But it’s oddly compelling, despite being massively ordinary.

Under the Dome TV Schedule

Recommended shows
The Almighty Johnsons (TV3/SyFy UK/Space)
Hooray! What looks like the final episode for tying up all the loose second season plot threads, this was also half about setting up new plot threads. Looks like we’re getting more storylines that are goddess-oriented, too. Yay!

The Almighty Johnsons TV Schedule

Continuum (Showcase/SyFy)
A slightly unconvincing alliance at the end. But a good episode.

Continuum TV Schedule

The Newsroom (HBO/Sky Atlantic)
I spoke too soon. While this episode was definitely less chaotic than the first episode, we had a return to the same weaknesses as season one, particularly the sexism, with pretty much every scene failing the Bechdel Test. Still, at least Aaron Sorkin is trying to engage with and understand the Internet now, even if he hasn’t quite got the hang of it.

The Newsroom TV Schedule

Perception (TNT/Watch)
Perception catches up with Second Life how many years after it was trendy? Oh dear. And certainly on a TNT budget, it’s not going to be able to recreate The Cell, despite its best efforts. The procedural was also completely loopy and implausible. But it did have some fun moments about the problems for our hero in distinguishing between reality and fantasy.

Perception TV Schedule

Satisfaction (CTV)
Not quite as good as normal, but there’s still not many sitcoms that feature polyamory as a plot point. 

Satisfaction TV Schedule

Suits (USA/Dave)
A slightly unconvincing ending – and indeed main story. But it would take a hard-hearted viewer not to be moved by Louis’s fate at the end of this.

Suits TV Schedule

“What did you watch this week?” 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?

What did you watch this week? Including The Newsroom, Suits, The World’s End and Continuum

22 July 2013 Rob Buckley 8 Comments

Slightly later than usual, it’s “What did you watch this week?, my chance to tell you what I movies and TV I’ve watched thislast week that I haven’t already reviewed and your chance to recommend things to everyone else (and me) in case I’ve missed them.

First up, 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.

Summer has arrived though and started to fill up my viewing queue with new shows. I’m continuing to watch Under the Dome, but it’s getting close to being edged out of the viewing pile, what with it been the standard Stephen King fare. But it has its moments, so I’m sticking with it. The Bridge (US) is proving slightly inferior to the original, despite following largely on the same path, except the Aspie detective in this one is clearly more of a hindrance than an asset at this stage, and a lot less an unapologetic force of nature than Saga Norin was.

However, I’m on holiday in a week’s time, so with all the new stuff I’ve had to drop Being Mary Jane from the viewing queue and my plans to keep watching Crossing Lines have been dropped because there are now much better shows to fill my time with. I’ve also abandoned Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake, on the general grounds that it’s Jane Campion and the trailer makes it looks dreadful.

Kerry Packer… is still in the queue though, since I might just about get around to watching it at some point, and Orange is the New Black, Netflix’s new comedy-drama from Weeds‘ creator set in a women’s prison, will be available forever so I’m not rushing into it. I’ve also got last night’s Newsroom and Ray Donovan to work my through as well, although the latter might not last long if the queue fills up any more.

I did have a little time to try out some new shows though:

Room 9
The Africa Channel’s Torchwood-esque (it’s even got a Captain Harkness in it) import from South Africa. That turned out to be cock, though, with poor acting and over the top humour  – not so much X-Files as Miracles, with lots of ghosts and the like to investigate, and the production standards of 1980s Canadian syndicated TV to make it all seem realistic.

Count Arthur Strong
BBC2’s adaptation of the Radio 4 comedy about an old music hall comedian turned out to be paralysingly unfunny, despite Rory Kinnear doing his best.

But here’s what I thought of this week’s recommended shows:

The Almighty Johnsons (TV3/SyFy UK/Space)
Another ‘re-orienter’, with various new directions set up for characters, although good to see a certain regular character returning. Stronger on laughs than previous eps, weaker on plot drive. Also seemed to be a lot less for the female characters to do. They need to start plotting a course for a stronger story arc soon, too.

Continuum (Showcase/SyFy)
The budget that the producers had been saving up at the start of the season is now being spent well, with two episodes of strong sci-fi fun in a row, some surprise returning characters and the series arcs now tying together nicely. It still has a little something missing – the tight plotting of the first season – but it’s about an episode or two away from having that and more again.

The Newsroom (HBO/Sky Atlantic)
The return of Aaron Sorkin’s somewhat chaotic attempt to do the fun and import of The West Wing, except in a newsroom. Far less preachy than last year, more interested in talking about how journalists get stories than about how they should be covering them, it’s certainly a step in the right direction. There’s also far less outright sexism: everyone’s about the relationships still, but the women are now allowed to be interested in work, too, and not be hopelessly incompetent at it. Having said that, Olivia Munn’s character is now being called ‘Money Skirt’. Still not quite the quality it should be, but not hitting anywhere near as many of the bum notes as it was hitting last season.

Perception (TNT/Watch)
A great big kick in the gonads for any shippers out there and contained some of the worst ‘Tourette’s’ acting ever committed to video. However, a decent enough procedural.

Satisfaction (CTV)
A good, funny episode, dealing with the problem facing any young couple that settles down: the loss of cool.

Suits (USA/Dave)
The return of the best lawyer show on TV. Dramatically, it’s still doing very interesting things, and the Machiavellian manipulations are still excellent. But, as well as the slightly suspect English stereotypes, the show is playing up the comedy angle more and more, which is in danger of destabilising the show. Definitely still recommended, though.

And in movies:

The World’s End
The third of the Simon Pegg/Edgar Wright trilogy that started with Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. Pegg is a high school rebel who never grew up and wants to get the old gang back together for a 12-pub crawl in Newford Haven, despite their being in their late 30s now and all deeply in hate with him. Except problematically, most of the inhabitants of Newford Haven have been replaced by alien robots.

It has quite a lot going for it and will make you laugh a lot, since it is essentially the closest you’re going to get to a Spaced movie. The ending really isn’t what you’re expecting and there’s an element to the storytelling that doesn’t appear in the trailer that will make you think you imagined it the first time you saw and will then turn out to be awesomely cool when you realise it’s going to be repeated throughout the movie.

But it does have one colossal problem: the massive lack of decent female roles in the movie. Where Jessica Stephenson/Hynes should be, instead, we have nothing but men as far as the eye can see – Rosamund Pike, the main female character in the movie, gets minimal lines or things to do and like most of the (largely dialogue-less) women who feature in the story, she’s there as an object of male desire rather than as a character in her own right. To a certain extent, it’s justifiable in the sense that it’s about boys who’ve never really grown up, but it’s still a big problem with the movie.

Flawed but fun.

“What did you watch this week?” 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?

The Weekly Play

The Wednesday Play: The Naked Civil Servant (1975)

17 July 2013 Rob Buckley Post a comment

Given that the Queen has just today signed an act of parliament making gay marriages legal in England and Wales, it seems appropriate to make today’s Wednesday Play The Naked Civil Servant, a boundary-breaking ITV play based on the autobiography of openly gay man Quentin Crisp. Directed by Jack Gold, written by Philip Mackie and produced by Blog Goddess Verity Lambert, the play starred John Hurt as the flamboyant Crisp, covering his life from youth to middle age as he comes to terms with his homosexuality during the 1930s and 1940s, a time when homosexuality was illegal and even women were looked down upon for dyeing their hair.

Spawning a recent sequel (An Englishman in New York) and regarded by industry professionals as one of the most important British TV plays ever made, it’s a must watch. If you like it, buy it on DVD!

US TV

Review: The Bridge (US) 1×1 (FX)

11 July 2013 Rob Buckley 18 Comments

fx-the-bridge3.jpg

In the US/Canada: Wednesdays, 10pm ET/7pm PT, FX
In the UK: Not yet acquired

As I remarked at the time I reviewed its first episode last year, the superb Swedish/Danish co-production Bron/Broen/The Bridge very much had its eye on the international market when it was made. Taking elements of everything from Wallander, The Killing and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, the show sees a dead body – subsequently revealed to be two halves of two bodies stuck together – left on the exact border of Sweden and Denmark. Two detectives, each playing up to the stereotypes held about their respective countries – icy Swedish female detective with Asperger’s Saga Noren (Sofia Helin) and schlubby, overly-personable Danish detective Martin Rohde (Kim Bodnia) – then have to investigate the crime together, which turns out to have increasingly political ramifications, as the serial killer responsible exposes inequalities in both countries.

Since then, it’s been acquired by many countries, including the UK and the US. But what I didn’t appreciate when I wrote that review was that in this age of international co-productions, The Bridge provides a surefire format for adaptation by other countries. Indeed, the UK and France are making The Tunnel together (I’m not sure how that’s going to work, given the respective national stereotypes) and now FX in the US had made The Bridge, taking the same story as the original and transposing it to the US-Mexican border.

The remake sees Diane Kruger playing Sonya Cross, an Aspie member of the El Paso police department in the US, while Demián Bichir is Marco Ruiz, a detective for the Mexican state of Chihuahua. As with the original, two halves of two women – this time a US judge and a Mexican teenager – are found on the bridge between their two countries and the two detectives have to work together to find out who’s behind the murders and what they want. Along the way, they encounter an unethical journalist (Matthew Lillard), a wealthy widow (Annabeth Gish), Cross’s helpful, Asperger’s-friendly boss (Ted Levine) and the corrupt Mexican police. All kinds of political issues are raised, too, ranging from immigration through drugs and prostitution.

Now, to a certain extent, we’ve been here before. For starters, people who’ve seen the original will obviously want to know if there’s any point watching the remake. Indeed, we’ve already seen the US adapt a Scandinavian show, The Killing, as initially a shot-for-shot remake, so there was no point in watching the somewhat lesser remake if you’d seen the original. But equally, as the show began to diverge from its source material, it ended up giving us an inferior ending that annoyed even viewers who’d never seen the original.

On the strength of this first episode, though, I’d say that largely, whether you’ve seen the original or you haven’t, it’s worth watching, since it takes many of the strengths of the original and adds its own to the mix. Here’s a couple of trailers – one in English, one in Spanish, appropriately enough.

Continue reading “Review: The Bridge (US) 1×1 (FX)”

The BarrometerA Barrometer rating of 2

Third-episode verdict: Satisfaction (CTV)

10 July 2013 Rob Buckley 2 Comments

In Canada: Mondays, 8pm, CTV

Time for a third-episode verdict on CTV’s latest sitcom, Satisfaction, in which three twentysomethings – a couple (Luke Macfarlane and Leah Renee) and his old college room-mate (Ryan Belleville) – who all live together in one flat end up going through all kinds of wacky twentysomething dilemmas.

And surprisingly, three episodes in, as we found with the first episode, it’s still quite funny. Yes, it’s attachment to the situation in ‘sitcom’ is still negligible, preferring to just give us loosely connected funny incidents. Yes, it has a roster of stereotypical ‘freaks’ to support the main, normal cast. And yes, it’s not going to win any awards for the subtlety of acting.

But despite all that, it’s actually pretty good, garnering a pretty good laugh quotient each episode with absurdity and the occasional piece of well observed satire, including last week’s fake TV programme, The Horse Doctor, and this week’s “guy who gave up his job saving the world so he could become a hipster who designs fonts because it’s more meaningful”. It has some good lines, the characters are reasonably fleshed out and likable (although could do with some development), and it can even be quite clever

Give it a go.

Barrometer rating: 3
Rob’s prediction: Should get another season, assuming CTV doesn’t cut back its original programming budget again