TV reviews

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

Nordic TV

Review: Those Who Kill (Den Som Dræber) (ITV3) 1×1

28 February 2012 Rob Buckley 18 Comments

Those Who Kill

In the UK: Thursdays, 10pm, ITV3. Available on the ITV Player
In Denmark: Aired last March. Cancelled after the first series

Foreign TV is a funny old thing. What you get to see of another country’s TV is usually the cream of the crop, some nice purchasing person at your local TV network having viewed it all and decided what’s good and what isn’t. So it’s easy to think as a result, based just on what you see on TV of it, that another country’s television output must be great.

French TV looks good thanks to Engrenages. Canadian TV looks good thanks to Being Erica and The Border. Danish TV looks awesome thanks to The Killing and Borgen. UK TV looks good because of Downton Abbey and Doctor Who. US TV just looks good all round. Israeli TV looks amazing thanks to all the adaptations like In Treatment and Homeland.

Italian TV, thanks to Inspector Montalbano, just looks silly. Some things I guess you just can’t polish.

But if you have to wade through it and start delving into the lower reaches of TF1, CTV, Sky Living, TBS, et al, you soon start to realise that not all foreign TV is good. Equally, you start to realise that other countries watch other countries’ TV and try to emulate that.

Now, here in the UK, we’ve had something of a Scandinavian TV love-in thanks to BBC4 and the rise of the ‘Nordic noir’ genre of books and movies. The Killing, Wallander and Borgen have convinced people that Scandinavian TV is universally brilliant. So ITV3, the home of old crime shows, has been trying to get in on that action and has bought in Danish TV network TV2’s Den Som Dræber aka Those Who Kill.

On paper, this should be cracking. It’s written by bestselling crime-author Elsebeth Egholm and Stefan Jaworsk, the writer of several award-winning and critically acclaimed features and TV series. The show stars, among others, Lars Mikkelsen from The Killing, and comes from the producers of several of the Wallander movies, and when it aired in Denmark last year, was watched by a record-breaking 50% of the adult population.

Yet, unfortunately, Those Who Kill is laughable old toss. Here’s a trailer:

Continue reading “Review: Those Who Kill (Den Som Dræber) (ITV3) 1×1”

US TV

What did you watch this week (w/e February 24)?

27 February 2012 Rob Buckley 5 Comments

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

First, the usual recommendations: Archer, Being Human (US), Cougar Town, The Daily Show, House,  Happy Endings, Modern Family, Portlandia, Ringer, Royal Pains, Shameless (US), Southland, Spartacus, Suburgatory and 30 Rock. Do watch them (if you can and they happen to be on TV this week). The Almighty Johnsons is still in my view pile and there are a couple of other things that I’m going to be reviewing in the next day or so, including Those Who Kill (aka Den Som Dræber) and Justice League: Doom

  • Caerdydd: Slowly catching up on this about a year (or two) since we recorded it. Not as good as the previous series, but still great fun.
  • Modern Family: Very sweet
  • Ringer: Nice guest cameo by Misha Collins from Supernatural, and thankfully the whole thing was as ludicruous as always.
  • Royal Pains: Ah, the never-ending slow progress of the plot. And for a finale episode, incredibly badly written – bad dialogue, obviously plotting and no real draw for the next series and that might work in a lazy summer show, but in winter, you need to be a whole lot sharper.
  • 30 Rock: Great cameos by Jim Carrey and Andie MacDowell. But very strange.
  • Southland: I could see the cliffhanger coming a mile off, but still great work. Whoever does the trailers for TNT needs to be shot, since they give away the resolution to the cliffhanger.
  • Spartacus: Back on track now, with a very well paced and plotted episode, although the crunch moment (ho, ho) was an obvious twist. Good to see the return of Gannicus, too. Pondering Spartacus, it amazes me that it’s so popular. Although there’s the obvious, nudity, swearing and massive violence, complete with bloody entrails, we’re talking about a historical story, set in a foreign country, with no Americans (obviously) in the cast, people talking in pseudo-Shakespearian language, gay men front and centre, full frontal male nudity and the whole thing largely filmed and staged like theatre. It breaks all the rules, but yet people love it. Isn’t cable great?

And in movies:

  • Real Steel: Rocky with robots and Hugh Jackman. Surprisingly fun and not awful, although Evangeline Lilly is very much lost in a somewhat tedious "deadbeat father and son work out their differences by building and training a boxing robot" story that has no room for women unless they’re dead or wearing Gucci cocktail dress with cut-outs. But some great robot boxing, including a final homage to Ali’s rope-a-dope trick against Foreman. Wonder if they’ll turn ‘Zeus’ into a lean, mean fat-reducing machine.

"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

Preview: Awake (NBC) 1×1

20 February 2012 Rob Buckley 10 Comments

Awake

In the US: Thursdays, 10/9c, NBC. Starts March 1
In the UK: Not yet acquired

Hello to Jason Isaacs! Welcome back to the blog.

Yes, Jason Isaacs has himself a new US TV show, this time on network TV instead of cable. In it, rather than a member of the Rhode Island Irish mafia, he’s a cop.

No, don’t turn off. The cop bit is the least interesting part.

He’s a cop, but he’s a cop who has a car accident in which his wife dies, leaving him to look after his teenage son.

Except when he goes to sleep, he wakes up in seemingly a parallel world in which his son died and his wife survived. And when he goes to sleep at the end of the day, he returns to the first reality.

I say reality because he doesn’t know which one’s real and which one’s a dream. They both seem equally real. Both his therapists want to help him, but will he give up on his wife or his son, assuming he can? Because for some reasons, the cases he investigates in the two realities are linked.

Here’s the first seven minutes of it for you to enjoy:

Continue reading “Preview: Awake (NBC) 1×1”

What did you watch this week (w/e February 17)?

20 February 2012 Rob Buckley 6 Comments

Time (well, let’s pretend it is) for “What did you watch this week?”, my chance to tell you what I watched this week that I haven’t already reviewed and your chance to recommend things to everyone else (and me) in case we’ve missed them.

First, the usual recommendations: Archer, Being Human (US), The Daily Show, House, Modern Family, Happy Endings, Portlandia, Ringer, Royal Pains, Shameless (US), Southland, Spartacus, Suburgatory and 30 Rock. Do watch them (if you can and they happen to be on TV this week).

  • Archer: Back on form this season
  • Modern Family: A very good episode this week. Worried that lovely wife and I are now this close to being Claire and Phil.
  • Modern Family: Access All Areas: A Sky exclusive documentary. Interesting only to hear what everyone sounds like normally. Otherwise, cringe-making awfulness.
  • Royal Pains: Ooh. Surprising ending. Normally the show’s so fluffy. And it’s good to have Boris back after all this time away. Not sure about that ‘Swiss French’ accent and unless Boris was making a racist joke, Campbell Scott’s pronunciation of Frankstein needs some work.
  • 30 Rock: Funny again! Yay! And good Batman episode too.
  • Southland: I think we can conclusively assume now that everyone in the last three seasons who wasn’t a patrolman or Regina King has been fired so the producers can afford Lucy Liu. Also a very sensitively handled ‘coming out’ episode for Cooper.
  • Spartacus: Far less attention-grabbing than before and it’s hard not to imagine every scene improved by Andy Whitfield.

And in movies:

  • Inception: Still awesome
  • Heat: Still awesome
  • The Dark Knight: Better than I remember.

“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 CarusometerA Carusometer rating of 3

Third-episode verdict: The Almighty Johnsons (SyFy)

20 February 2012 Rob Buckley 15 Comments

In the UK: Thursdays, 10pm, SyFy
In New Zealand: Already aired. Season two coming soon

I have to say this is a borderline one for me. It’s a nice, amiable show in which a bunch of semi-dickish brothers turn out to be Nordic gods. The youngest is Odin and he has to go on a quest to find Frig, his wife, so that they can all become full gods; if he doesn’t, they’ll all die and so will big chunks of the population of New Zealand. Opposing him/them are a bunch of goddesses who want to run the world and don’t want a bunch of almighty Johnsons to be running it instead of them.

Cue the metaphorical and literal battle of the sexes.

And it’s all right. The first episode was fine. The second episode was a bit better, had a little more depth and fleshed out the other brothers and the supporting characters. The third rounded off the plot and let us get to know the goddesses a little better, too.

But it’s not much better than all right. It’s kind of fun. It doesn’t have a great attitude towards women, although the men fare little better. There’s a lot of pseudo-myth floating around but not really being capitalised upon. There’s the occasional fight scene, which isn’t bad.

So it’s okay. I’m tempted to drop it, but it’s amiable and different enough from other shows that I’m going to stick with it, despite its 3 on the Carusometer. Your mileage may vary.

Carusometer rating: 3
Rob’s prediction: Well, it’s already on season two in New Zealand, so it’s clearly got a future.