TV reviews

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

The BarrometerA Barrometer rating of 1

Third-episode verdict: Hannibal (NBC/Sky Living)

19 April 2013 Rob Buckley 10 Comments

In the US: Thursdays, 10/9c, NBC
In the UK: Acquired by Sky Living
In Canada: Thursdays, 10pm, CityTV

Time to cast an eye over the first three episodes of Hannibal, to see if it’s got worse since the first, exceptionally good episode and my tentative recommendation was in error. It wasn’t – Hannibal is still awesome.

Episode two was a very slightly inferior affair that picked up the pieces following the second episode and introduced Freddie Lounds to the Hannibal TV universe. No longer a man working for The Tattler, this Lounds is a tabloid web site journalist running Telltalecrime.com – which still has classified ads and the right letters for a certain important aspect of Manhunter/Red Dragon. She’s a delightfully evil and ingenious hack and a worthy addition to the Lecter universe. The slight downside of the second episode was a serial killer of the week plot that was slightly silly but thoughtful and riffed slightly on the Red Dragon method of selecting victims – and was also an equal-opportunist who didn’t select anyone for sexual reasons.

As well as giving Crawford a chance to show his policing skills, the episode gave us some very chilling moments with Hannibal that showed the key to his frightening capabilities are still his intellect and the inability to hide things from him. And it was great to see some more recycled lines from Red Dragon, in particular the fabulous explanation for why killing must feel good (it feels good to God).

Episode three was a slower paced affair that focused on the victims of the first episode and their families, as well as Hobbs’ daughter. It also picked up on the implication of the first episode – that Hannibal had committed one of the crimes – and showed the danger of having invited him to help with investigations. It’s also given him a ‘helper monkey’, which should prove interesting in subsequent episodes.

Always beautiful to watch, always tense and frightening, perhaps a little gorier than it needs to be, the show is still a masterpiece of intelligent TV horror with a great cast, that laughs at the substantially inferior likes of Criminal Minds, Bates Motel and American Horror Story. Watch it.

Barrometer rating: 1
Rob’s prediction: Should get picked up for a second season, provided the tough time slot selected doesn’t prove to be its nemesis

US TV

Review: Da Vinci’s Demons 1×1 (Starz/FOX)

18 April 2013 Rob Buckley 7 Comments

Da Vinci's Demons

In the US: Fridays, 9pm, Starz
In the UK: Fridays, 10pm, Fox. Starts 19th April

You might have thought the horror that was Torchwood: Miracle Day had ended. There’s no more Torchwood, thanks to the series being so poorly received, even the majority of die-hard Torchwood fans couldn’t bear any more episodes. Yet like that giant hole in the middle of the Earth, sucking the joy from life in that show’s finale, so its legacy carries on.

That legacy is an alliance between BBC Worldwide and Starz aimed at creating yet more dramas as good as Torchwood: Miracle Day – yes, that good – and Da Vinci’s Demons is its first bastard offspring. On paper, it might have seemed a good idea, with David Goyer, the co-writer of Batman Begins, crafting a historical fantasy series about the early life of Leonardo Da Vinci. The well known Renaissance polymath, he’s popped up in enough shows over the years that he probably deserved a show of his own.

But in practice, it’s not. Starz has tried to do historical shows before. It’s had huge, deserved success with Spartacus; Magic City may just be nasty but it’s a loving recreation of the 1950s Miami at the very least. Unfortunately, rather than aping either of those two shows, it’s decided to go the Camelot route and produced a genre-busting show that marries Camelot‘s sex, nudity, poor action and complete bypass of virtually all history; the BBC’s child-friendly but atrocious Merlin, Robin Hood and Bonekickers; the setting and political intrigue of The Borgias; the ridiculous conspiracy theories of The Da Vinci Code; and elements of movies ranging from Batman Begins to Hudson Hawk. Yes, the probably gay Florentine polymath Leonardo Da Vinci is actually a leather-jacket wearing shagger of women, prone to the occasional sword-fight with the local guards, who somehow gets mixed up with the magical secret society that is the Sons of Mithras, all while flying people around in his inventions.

And it’s all filmed in Wales with an almost entirely British cast. Be proud. We made this.

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The Wednesday Play: Red Shift (1978)

17 April 2013 Rob Buckley Post a comment

Since I know a lot of you lovely readers are sci-fi lovers, today, I thought I’d give you the gift of one of the few sci-fi/fantasy plays that the BBC made in its standard drama strand, Play For Today. Based on Alan Garner’s novel of the same name, Red Shift is an odd little thing set in three time periods: Roman times, the Civil War and ‘modern times’. Linked by an artefact that appears in all three periods, a stone axe, the play looks at the plight of three different men, all faced with different challenges of the time, usually involving women. In the Roman period, some Roman deserters are in hiding, except the enemy may be within (or it might be the Celt woman they have prisoner, who might actually be a local goddess); in the Civil War, the goodies (including James Hazeldine) are holed up in a church, trying to escape from some Royalists; while in the present time, a somewhat pretentious student is vexed by his girlfriend and his parents.

To a certain extent, the story defies description, losing some aspects of the novel in translation to TV. The stories are linked more or less only by location, although the themes of adolescent angst, religion and control/lack of control of women are still there in the play. As a result, it’s more fascinating to watch mainly for the third story to see what ‘modern values’ were in 1978, with the pretentious student living with his parents in a caravan, and they being unwilling for him to have sex with his girlfriend. It’s also fun to see how little traffic there was in motorways in those days.

I won’t pretend it’s the greatest play ever and the specialised science-fiction strands at the BBC produced far superior work. But it’s a worth a watch out of historical curiosity and to see something that doesn’t give easy answers.

The BarrometerA Barrometer rating of 5

Third-episode verdict: Orphan Black (Space/BBC America)

16 April 2013 Rob Buckley 4 Comments

In Canada: Saturdays, 9e/6p, Space
In the US: Saturdays, 9/8c, BBC America

What ho! Time to revisit the verisimilitude vacuum that is Orphan Black, which I believe is supposed to be the US and Canada’s revenge for Brits and Aussies getting all the leads in proper TV shows, but which merely ends up showing why that’s the case. Here we have a couple of Canadians, whose attempts at English accents have got worse over the space of just three episodes to now resemble those in Mary Poppins, pretending to be brother and sister ‘street kids’, the sister assuming the life of a woman physically identical to her in order to get some cash, escape her drug-dealer boyfriend and, eventually, escape from someone who’s trying to kill her. Along the way, she discovers that there are more women who look just like her and before you can say “Really? It took you three episodes to get to that point when it was in the trailer and it was obvious in the first episode?”, she discovers she’s a clone. Whose clone, why she was cloned, how she was cloned and why all her fellow clones are being killed off, we’ve still yet to find out.

Well, you guys still watching will, because I’m giving up at this point. It’s not just the terrible accents, I should point out here, which are now like fingernails on blackboards. It’s not just the attempts at English slang (“I’ll kick the shite out of you.” Are you northern now, love?). And if I were 18 and had never seen a sci-fi conspiracy theory thriller before, either on TV or at the movies, I might be of a different mind.

But watching ‘street’ kids who would probably have been stabbed to death years ago in real life, outsmarting even cops they now work alongside, while a never-ending, unconvincing parade of new clones is shoved across the screen is just not my thing. Again, if I was 18, I’d probably think this was brilliant. Maybe not, but I might. But having already seen much better, more exciting, less stupid, funnier and better shows, some even involving clones and conspiracy theories (Timeslip and A For Andromeda. Hell, even The Island was better, the first half about 1,000 times better. Clone, however, was worse, I’ll give you that), this feels like a great big witless waste of time.

I don’t care about the characters; I’m not interested in them either: central clone Sarah is dumb, her other clones are just annoying, and the evil one is ridiculous; her brother, Felix, was comic relief for all one episode, before becoming the guy who gets the plot told to or runs around getting into trouble. None of the supporting characters work and are all too stupid to live. And the central clone conspiracy is being dragged out for so long that I can’t tell if it’s interesting or not. There aren’t even hints, beyond the existence of the clones. It might turn out to be the most interesting conspiracy theory ever, but at the moment, we’re only just being told there are clones and heaven knows how long it will take to spin out whatever gossamer-thin premise the writers have planned. In terms of tension and intellectual stimulation, “How did they do that shot with those clones?” is as far as it goes. And when you’re more interested in the details of the SFX than the plot, you know the show is ungripping to say the least.

So I’m dropping it. If you’re 18 or so, do feel free to carry on watching, though.

Barrometer rating: 5
Rob’s prediction: I’d like to say it’ll be cancelled before the season is out, by suspect it’ll go on and on, particularly if there’s a cliffhanger at the end of the season  

UK TV

Review: Doctor Who – 7×9 – Cold War

15 April 2013 Rob Buckley 16 Comments

Doctor Who - Cold War

In the UK: Saturday, 6.15pm, 13th April 2013, BBC1/BBC1 HD. Available on the iPlayer
In the US: Saturday, 8pm/7c, 13th April 2013, BBC America

Mark Gatiss is a fanboy. This will probably come as a surprise to you only if you’ve never heard of Mark Gatiss before. Otherwise, this should be known to you.

A member of the League of Gentlemen (a troop of horror-story loving fanboys), Gatiss first appeared in the realm of Doctor Who writing some of Virgin’s range of New Adventures books that emerged following the cancellation of the original series. Then, after writing and starring in some of the Liz Shaw spin-off P.R.O.B.E. stories, and some of the Big Finish Doctor Who and Sapphire and Steel audio ranges (he’s an S&S fanboy, too), he came to write some Doctor Who TV episodes: The Unquiet Dead, The Idiot’s Lantern, Victory of the Daleks and Night Terrors. He’s also written fiction that pastiches 19th century fiction, hosted and contributed to documentaries on some of his favourite fanboy subjects (Nigel Kneale, Hammer horror), adapted and starred in HG Wells’ The First Men In the Moon and being a Sherlock Holmes fanboy, too, it should come as no surprise by now for you to hear that he’s one of the show runners and writers for Sherlock.

A fanboy, then. Clear?

The biggest problem facing fanboys in general and Mark Gatiss in particular is originality. It’s all right when you have something to adapt and something to riff on, but actually coming up with good new ideas is actually terribly hard for the fanboy. It’s no surprise therefore that whenever Gatiss writes anything, it’s usually slight variations on an existing, familiar story, with knowing references to other things thrown in and some sort of Important Obvious Metaphor thrown in for good luck.

By now, it shouldn’t surprise you when I tell you it was Gatiss who suggested to bestest Sherlock pal and Doctor Who show runner Steven Moffat that they should do a story feature the Ice Warriors, just about the only popular old Who monster that the new series hadn’t featured. Nor should it surprise you that our Stevie was a bit dismissive of the idea, thinking they were a bit rubbish looking.

But Gatiss has brought them back, with an Important Obvious Metaphor about the Cold War (hence, the title) thrown in for good luck. It’s a little bit The Ice Warriors, a little bit Dalek… okay, a lot Dalek, with a big chunk of Alien and just a soupçon of Hunt For Red October on a low budget thrown in. And while it never hit the ‘totally excellent’ mark, by sticking with what he’s best at, Gatiss turned in what’s probably his best Doctor Who yet.

Here’s a trailer.

Continue reading “Review: Doctor Who – 7×9 – Cold War”