TV reviews

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

French TV

Review: Jo (Fox) 1×1

20 May 2013 Rob Buckley 5 Comments

Jo with Jean Reno

In the UK: Sundays, 9pm, Fox

Over the past few years, a new trend has started to emerge in television drama: the overseas cop show. Now, in a sense this is nothing new: The Persuaders! and other shows all filmed in exotic locales in the 70s and even earlier shows such as The Man From Interpol had been set overseas, even if they’d never actually gone there for filming.

But the new trend, seen in the likes of Wallander, Zen and Falcón, has English-speaking actors playing other nationalities in overseas locations. Wallander had Ken Branagh, Tom Hiddleston and sundry other Brits being quintessentially British while pretending to be Swedish, while Rufus Sewell got to drink lots of espressos in Italy in Zen, and Marton Csokas and Hayley Hatwell were as English-sounding as can be while solving crimes and romancing each other in Barcelona in Falcón.

France’s TF1, meanwhile, is looking to be a bit of an international player at the moment and, taking this trend on board, has gone one step further: rather than wait for some foreign broadcaster to start shooting a French cop show with English-speaking actors, it’s decided to do it itself and get a whole bunch of international actors over to Paris, get them all to fake American accents (except for the Americans, obviously) in a ‘quintessentially French’ cop show, and then sell the results to the rest of the world through the Fox International channel. It also managed to recruit famous French film star Jean Reno (The Professional/Leon) in his first lead TV role as the eponymous Jo of the series’ title – a cop in the famous Brigade Criminelle (what Spiral calls ‘the crime squad’) with more than a few issues. On top of that, they got in as show runner René Balcer, the creator of TF1’s late 90s cop show Mission Protection Rapprochée and Paris enquêtes criminelles, the French version of Law & Order: Criminal Intent.

Unfortunately, they also got French production company Atlantique Productions to make it. To be fair, Atlantique has been around for 30 years, making English-language productions such as Deadly Nightmares (aka The Hitchhiker), Death in Paradise and Counterstrike, not to mention Borgia for Canal+ and Transporter: The TV Series. What TF1 failed to notice was that largely, these programmes are all rubbish.

Here’s a trailer for Jo. We can talk more after the break – spoilers ahoy!

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US TV

Preview: The Goodwin Games 1×1 (Fox)

20 May 2013 Rob Buckley 3 Comments

TheGoodwinGames_1AVW79_2500_640x360_29996099731.jpg

In the US: Mondays, 8.30/7.30c, Fox. Starts tonight

And so it begins – the summer burn-off of all those shows the US networks thought they might need as mid-season replacements but didn’t. We’ve Save Me on NBC this week as well, but on Fox, we’ve starting with The Goodwin Games, a sitcom from the makers of How I Met Your Mother that has some of that show’s charm, but lacks its sparkle or any real hook.

The idea here is that Beau Bridges, patriarch of the Goodwin family and bad father, comes into a sizeable fortune – more than $20 million. He also knows he’s going to die, so before his death, he creates a series of games and videos through which he can get his three estranged children (Scott Foley, Becki Newton, TJ Miller) to come together again and parent them from beyond the grave, the lure of all that money being what keeps them playing his games.

And while it’s a moderately intriguing idea – I’d be happy to see The Game as a TV series or a US version of The One Game – the show has only a few innovations in an otherwise ordinary sitcom. And it also has TJ Miller. Sigh.

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What did you watch this week? Including Life of Crime, Elementary, Arrow, Vegas and Hannibal

17 May 2013 Rob Buckley 7 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, the usual recommendations:

  • Arrow (The CW/Sky 1)
  • Continuum (Showcase/SyFy)
  • The Daily Show (Comedy Central)
  • Doctor Who (BBC1/BBC America)
  • Elementary (CBS/Sky Living)
  • Hannibal (NBC/Sky Living)
  • Modern Family (ABC/Sky 1)
  • Vegas (CBS/Sky Atlantic)

These are all going to be on in either the UK or the US, perhaps even both, but I can’t be sure which.

Still in the viewing queue: new show The Goodwin Games, which I’ll be reviewing on Monday, and I’ll be playing catch up with New Zealand show Harry, too.

I did give Life of Crime a go, too, in which Hayley Atwell plays a cop in three different time periods at different stages of her career. Entirely fits the template of ITV crime dramas and you could predict virtually everything that happened in each time period, with the corresponding Attitudes written in neon lights all over every character.

Now, some thoughts on some of the regulars and some of the shows I’m still trying:

  • Arrow (The CW/Sky 1): No League of Shadows, surprisingly, but everything played out in the finale pretty much as you’d expect, beyond the final twist. Overall, a very decent season, although it started to lost its edge and become a tad more Smallville than Batman Begins by the end. One to look forward to next season, certainly.
  • Continuum (Showcase/SyFy): There I was complaining there wasn’t enough cool sci-fi in the show, when up it pops in spades. For my next trick, can we have some more intelligent schemes from the terrorists, please. 
  • Elementary (CBS/Sky Living): Everything played out pretty much as I expected in terms of revelations, but in many ways better than Sherlock‘s handling of similar Sherlock Holmes facets. I also liked the fact they made Irene Adler and Moriarty one and the same. It’ll be great if they bring her back and make her a maths professor, too. A good explanation for an in-story bad accent, too. PS, New York can try to pass itself off as London, but it will always fail.
  • Hannibal (NBC/Sky Living): I’m not convinced that Hannibal should be that good in a fight, particularly not up against Demore Barnes who was in The Unit. All the same, another fascinating episode, Gillian Anderson getting more to do this week. What surprises me is that the show, which I’m thinking more and more of as a cross between Touching Evil (US) and David Cronenberg’s oeuvre, is actually capable of instilling dread in me, which is a very novel emotion of a TV show to be able to create in its audience. Magnificent, but its fate is in the balance at the moment. Please renew it, NBC.
  • Vegas (CBS/Sky Atlantic): And so it’s gone, in a somewhat underwhelming finale that mostly just tied up loose threads, left a couple dangling and let everyone pat each other on the back and say goodbye, all while Carrie Anne Moss had nothing to do, which was par for the course. A shame, since it started off with so much fire.

“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?

US TV

Review: Doctor Who – 7×12 – Nightmare In Silver

15 May 2013 Rob Buckley 5 Comments

Doctor Who - Nightmare in Silver

In the UK: Saturday, 7pm, 11th May 2013, BBC1/BBC1 HD. Available on the iPlayer
In the US: Saturday, 8pm/7c, 11th May 2013, BBC America

Well, it’s Wednesday so there’s probably not much point doing a full review of Saturday’s Doctor Who episode – you’ve probably forgotten it all, already – but for the record and for completeness’ sake, so I thought I’d jot down a few thoughts. Spoilers after the jump…

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US TV

Review: Family Tree 1×1 (HBO/BBC2)

15 May 2013 Rob Buckley 2 Comments

Family Tree

In the US: Sundays, 10.30pm, HBO
In the UK: Will air on BBC2 this year

Christopher Guest is a god, of course. One of the originators of Spinal Tap, he is the premier maker of the improvised ‘mockumentary’, with films like Best in Class that are cuttingly funny social observations. He is America’s Mike Leigh.

Except, of course, Guest is half-British, the son of a UN diplomat, and shared his childhood between London and New York. Which is why we shouldn’t be surprised that BBC2’s latest co-production with HBO – following on from the likes of Rome and Parade’s End – is set predominantly in Britain. Family Tree follows Chris O’Dowd’s (The IT Crowd, Bridesmaids) attempts to trace various members of his family after his great aunt dies, leaving him a box of memorabilia. Along the way, he’s helped and hindered by his sister (Nina Conti, best known for her stand-up act, but also from Guest’s For Your Consideration), who still uses the therapy monkey she had when she was a child to say things that would otherwise be unsayable, and his dad (long-time Guest collaborator Michael McKean from Spinal Tap).

Again, largely improvised by the cast, it’s well observed and engrossing, flirting with British stereotypes while undermining them and having far more depth than a whole load of US shows I could name. But is it funny? Well…

Here’s a trailer:

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