TV reviews

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

Star Trek Shorts
US TV

What have you been watching? Including Star Trek: Short Treks

30 October 2019 Rob Buckley 5 Comments

It’s “What have you been watching?”, your chance to recommend to fellow TMINE readers anything you’ve been watching this week

Impulse Season 2
Impulse

This week’s reviews

Since I took the radical move of having a day off on Friday (and most of Thursday), it’s been a slightly reviews-light week this week. However, I did cover the whole of season two of Impulse (YouTube), which you should definitely watch. Never mind the width – feel the quality.

The Morning Show
The Morning Show

What’s coming this week

The aforementioned day off meant I actually had some time to watch a couple of movies this week, so Orange Thursday tomorrow will be taking in both Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019) and Terminator: Dark Fate (2019).

Friday is, of course, November 1, but it’s also the beginning of Fall 2019 – Part Three, since as well as Amazon giving us the second season of Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, Apple is finally launching its Apple TV+ streaming service with no fewer than four new series: The Morning Show, See, Dickinson and For All Mankind.

Which of those will be Boxset Monday and/or Tuesday, I can’t say, but I suspect it’ll be either Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan or For All Mankind. Or both.

And I still might get round to watching season one of Modern Love (Amazon), season two of The Hookup Plan (Netflix), season one of Beau Séjour (Belgium: Éen; UK: Walter Presents) or season two of The Kominsky Method (Netflix).

Another new show starting within the next week is His Dark Materials (UK: BBC One), but I’ll probably skip that. You never know though.

Mr InBetween
Mr InBetween

The regulars

Bar Stumptown, which took a day off last week, too, it’s the usual usual after the jump: Batwoman, Engrenages (Spiral), Evil, Magnum PI, Mr InBetween, Mr Robot, Titans, Total Control, Treadstone and Watchmen. I also watched a couple of Star Trek: Short Treks. And joining all of them is the returning Silicon Valley.

That’s a lot, isn’t it? Time for a cull…

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Impulse Season 2
Streaming TV

Review: Impulse (season two) (YouTube)

28 October 2019 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

In the UK: Season available to buy on YouTube. New episode free every Wednesday

Science-fiction is very rarely a ‘hard watch’. Sure, there can be science-fiction that taxes the brain or grosses you out, but it’s not often that it’s hard to watch because of its emotional resonances or difficult subject matter.

The fact that Impulse was also not only a YouTube TV series but also based on the same books as the terrible movie Jumper – and was simultaneously genuinely very, very good – therefore meant it was up there with unicorn tears.

Impulse

Don’t curb this Impulse

The first season followed annoying teenager Henriette (Maddie Hasson) who’s moved to a small town with her blue-collar mum (Missi Pyle), who’s gone from boyfriend to boyfriend, job to job, ever since Henry’s dad left her. Soon, mum’s got a new boyfriend (Matt Gordon) and Henry’s got a new quasi-sister (Sarah Desjardins) as a result.

One night at a party, Henry is sexually assaulted by the local jock (Tanner Stine). Unbeknownst to her, however, the fits she’s been having are the onset of something incredible – and the assault causes her nascent power of teleportation to emerge violently. In an instant, she’s back in her bedroom and Stine is crushed and paralysed by his truck.

The rest of the season then plays out across two strands. On the one hand, it’s a season of Friday Night Lights, with the effects on the victim, the rapist, their families and the communities of the crime explored in terrible detail. On the other, it’s a superhero origin’s story, as Henry begins to explore her powers with her sister and Aspie sidekick (Daniel Maslany) – and learns that superheroes tend to get supervillains to match (Callum Keith Rennie).

Given that thanks to a change in YouTube’s pricing policy, you can now stream the entire first season for free, you should do so right now if you haven’t already, since it was easily one of TMINE’s Top 14 shows of 2018. It’s right here, after the trailer:

Act on Impulse

And now we have season 2, which can already pay to watch in its entirety, but a new episode of which will be available to watch for free every Wednesday.

Is it a hard watch? Yes. Is it still good? Yes. It a big change?

Possibly. Because as Maslany says at one point in the season, “I thought I was a superhero’s sidekick, but I think I might have been a supervillain’s henchman instead.”

The hard question this time round: at what point does the victim of a sexual assault lose our sympathy?

Continue reading “Review: Impulse (season two) (YouTube)”
The Queen in Pennyworth
US TV

What have you been watching? Including Engrenages (Spiral) and Pennyworth

23 October 2019 Rob Buckley 4 Comments

It’s “What have you been watching?”, your chance to recommend to fellow TMINE readers anything you’ve been watching this week

HBO (US)’s Watchmen

This week’s reviews

My iPad is repaired (more or less). Productivity has returned.

This week, I’ve reviewed three new shows: the first episodes of Treadstone (US: USA; UK: Amazon) and Watchmen (US: HBO; UK: Sky Atlantic), as well as the entire first season of Living With Yourself (Netflix). They were all pretty good shows, too, which was a bonus.

The Kominsky Method
Netflix’s The Kominsky Method

What’s coming this week

I’ve not watched any movies this week at all again. Sorry. More sorry – there’s not much new TV coming our way, although there are going to be a few new returning shows, at least.

That means Boxset Monday/Tuesday is going to be one of the usual intended suspects, I suspect: season two of Impulse (YouTube), season one of Modern Love (Amazon), season two of The Hookup Plan (Netflix) or season one of Beau Séjour (Belgium: Éen; UK: Walter Presents). Joining that crew is season two of The Kominsky Method (Netflix), so we’ll see how it goes.

Epix (US)’s Pennyworth

The regulars

It’s the usual usual after the jump: Batwoman, Evil, Magnum PI, Mr InBetween, Mr Robot, Stumptown, Titans and Total Control. With Pennyworth available as of today on StarzPlay in the UK, I thought I’d finish off the final two episodes in one go. I’ve even had time to watch three episodes of Engrenages (Spiral).

Let’s talk about all of them after the jump. Before that, guess which one has been promoted to the regulars list.

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Living with Yourself
Streaming TV

Boxset Tuesday: Living with Yourself (season 1) (Netflix)

22 October 2019 Rob Buckley 3 Comments

Available on Netflix

Cloning and the ethics thereof pop up a lot in cinema and TV, particularly sci-fi – whether it’s the “clone wars” and the stormtroopers of Star Wars or the many incarnations of Tatiana Maslany in Orphan Black.

The ostensible motivations for the writers of introducing clones is to introduce an ethical or existential consideration. The Island asked if it was ethical to clone ourselves to create spare parts. Moon similarly asked if it’s ethical to create versions of ourselves to do jobs more cheaply than would be possible. In cinemas right now, we have The Gemini Man (no, not that one), which questions whether the government should be allowed to clone us to replace us with younger versions of ourselves, once we get a bit old and tired.

You don’t have to look too hard at even that little list before you realise that those reasons for the respective movies’ existence are pretty tissue-thin. Rather, beyond a cursory examination of the issues, all these uses of cloning have instead been about giving actors a chance to show off by playing several roles at once, sometimes with themselves.

So it’s odd then that the first TV show in quite some time to really consider what cloning might mean, psychologically, philosophically and existentially is a comedy written by Timothy Greenberg (The Detour) and starring Paul Rudd (Ant-Man, Anchorman, Friends) and Aisling Bea (I Feel Bad).

Living With Yourself
Living With Yourself

The Clonus Comedy

The show sees copywriter Rudd and interior designer Bea on the downslope of a marriage. The fun’s gone, they don’t talk to one another and their efforts at having a baby have come to naught. Rudd’s career is no better and he’s beginning to lose inspiration – allowing fellow co-worker Desmin Borges (You’re The Worst) to steal a march on him.

Then Borges confesses that he’s got ahead thanks to a day at the spa that utterly refreshed him. It’s exclusive and pricey – $50,000 – but he can get Rudd in if he wants. Rudd caves in and soon, he too is enjoying the benefits of the treatment.

However, it’s not long before he discovers what the treatment actually is: he’s been cloned. Or more accurately, the original Rudd has been cloned and then improved – and he’s the result.

But there’s been a glitch in the process and the original Rudd wakes to find himself buried in the woods in a plastic bag. Soon, the two of them are having to work out how to live with one another. And Bea.

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Watchmen
US TV

Review: Watchmen 1×1 (US: HBO; UK: Sky Atlantic)

21 October 2019 Rob Buckley 4 Comments

In the US: Sundays, 9pm, HBO
In the UK: Mondays, 9pm, Sky Atlantic

Back when The Umbrella Academy came out, I wrote this about Watchmen:

Alan Moore’s Watchmen is probably the best, most influential superhero comic of all time. An examination of the underlying assumptions and psychology of people who would put on masks to fight crime, it almost single-handedly (bar Denny O’Neil) made superheroes ‘real’ – or about as realistic as they ever could be, of course.

But it’s a very dense text and while you can remove certain elements of it relatively easily – bye, bye pirates! – try to unpick it too much and you lose Watchmen‘s intrinsic field: what makes Watchmen what it is. Small wonder then that Hollywood spent forever trying to adapt it before essentially making a frame by frame adaptation of the comic, just with a slightly different McGuffin.

That density of writing means that despite its influence being felt throughout comics and TV, there have been very few straight-on ‘homages’ (aka rip-offs). Nobody has done ‘Watchmen in space’, ‘Watchmen on Middle Earth’ or anything else.

One of the other reasons it’s so rarely adapted is it’s a “sacred text”. So perfect is it considered, no element of it can be removed or changed without true believers getting the hump. Even Zach Snyder’s movie version, which was virtually a frame for frame adaptation of the graphic novel, ended up getting into hot water for changing the ending.

To be fair, it was both a better ending than the graphic novel’s and a necessary adaptation, given the first season finale of Heroes had already used it. But it tampered with the good book, so it was excommunicated.

Dr Manhattan on Mars

Faithfully unfaithful to Watchmen

This leads to a problem.

You could do utterly faithful adaptations and get into trouble with the only people who care, but why bother – everyone might as well just read the book.

You could do something that’s an adaptation but doesn’t look like it at first, but why bother – everyone might as well read the book.

You could do really bad prequels that add nothing, but why bother – everyone might as well read the book.

You could do really bad sequels that add nothing, but why bother – everyone might as well read the book.

But HBO’s Watchmen seems to have hit on a solution.

Do something that is utterly different with almost nothing in common, yet something that is still clearly a sequel.

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