TV reviews

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

Classic TV

Old Gems: Chance in a Million (1984-1986)

5 January 2012 Rob Buckley 2 Comments

The British sitcom writing team of Andrew Norriss and Richard Fegen had something of a mini-career in the 1980s of subverting the sitcom genre. British sitcoms had been somewhat dominated by farce, with unlikely coincidences, social embarrassment and unwritten rules of social behaviour the cliches that filled the genre.

Although best known for The Brittas Empire, which took all these concerns to their logical (and sometimes illogical) conclusions while simultaneously subverting them, Norriss and Fegen began undermining sitcoms first in 1984 on the then-new TV network Channel 4 with Chance in a Million. The show’s premise was simple: you know all those coincidences and bizarre events that happen in sitcoms and drive the plots? Now imagine a man cursed with such bad luck that that’s what his life is actually like. What would he be like? How would he cope? What sort of experiences would he have? Would he have a girlfriend? And how would she deal with it?

Starring Simon Callow and Brenda Blethyn, then just beginning their TV careers, Chance in a Million paradoxically saw more romantic mix-ups, rugby teams stuck down sewers, wedding rings catapulted into fires, cases of mistaken identity, bank errors and drug traffickers than any sitcom before and since, and is fondly remembered by almost everyone who saw it. Here’s a trailer:

Continue reading “Old Gems: Chance in a Million (1984-1986)”

US TV

Review: Work It (ABC) 1×1

4 January 2012 Rob Buckley 4 Comments

In the US: Tuesdays, 8.30/7.30c, ABC

So this is it? The first new show of the New Year and this is what ABC throws at us? That’s kind of like saying "Merry Christmas!" to someone and having bubonic plague pustules rubbed in your face as a reward. In fact, ABC should probably have to pay people to watch this, in part to afford the shots they’ll need, such is its mesmerising, terrifying, pus-ridden awfulness.

Now, as mentioned last year, one of the big trends of the Fall 2011 season was "sitcoms that deal with the (alleged) difficulty of being a man in the 21st century". We started on a relative high note with How To Be A Gentleman, before slowly moving down through the various circles of Hell that were Last Man Standing and Man Up!. Now, though, like Dante, we have made it through to the ninth circle and we are staring into the three treacherous faces of Satan.

We have reached Work It.

Work It sees a bunch of unemployed men theorise that women ‘have it all’ in the modern job market, so to get jobs, they dress up as women. And watching it is like being deprived of God’s love for 30 minutes, although it will feel like eternity.

Cue the trailer.

Continue reading “Review: Work It (ABC) 1×1”

US TV

What did you watch this week (w/e December 23)?

23 December 2011 Rob Buckley 4 Comments

The Bleak Old Shop of Stuff

Time 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.

Last one of these before Christmas and the New Year, so get your recommendations in now, since there are people out there with time on their hands and awkward conversations to avoid and some decent TV might be a lifesaver.

  • American Horror Story: End of the season and it’s all change. Overall, a very silly show that was never really scary, just gory when it chose to be. Right, who’s going to give Alex Breckenridge a job?
  • The Bleak Old Shop of Stuff: Essentially, Radio 4’s Bleak Expectations transposed to the small screen as a single-camera comedy and with a very famous cast (Mitchell and Webb, Stephen Fry, Katherine Parkinson). The trouble is it doesn’t work as well. The same verbal jokes are there but they flutter by quickly without an audience to laugh at them and give time for gaps in the dialogue. There’s CGI for some of the more outlandish fantasies (none of them as outlandish as radio can conjure up though) and the whole thing feels like 300 thanks to the copious amounts of green screen, but none of that was actually funny, and was again largely about verbal puns. And at an hour, the run-time of the story was far too long. All the same, it raised at least the regulation amount of laughs, which is more than you can say about Life’s Too Short and Rev these days.
  • Dexter: An episode marginally better in quality than the previous ones, but largely because of the ending, which should have been how the previous season ending. Overall, a very disappointing season that together with last season’s finale burnt up most of the goodwill and excitement surrounding the show. Fingers crossed next year will be better and at least there’s something interesting for the show to address.
  • Homeland: By turns, exactly what I expected, yet also surprising. Given the plot mechanics needed for a second season, it was obvious what was going to happen, but I was hoping for (spoiler) Brody to trigger the bomb. But beyond that, there were enough twists that I didn’t see coming and enough overall intelligent writing to satisfy me. However, the finale, together with a few of the preceding episodes, also showed the programme’s roots in 24, with many of the same tropes, just approached differently and slightly more realistically.
  • Life’s Too Short: Finally caught some of this. Pretty much exactly like every other Ricky Gervais-scripted show, particularly Extras, but without the laughs.
  • Misfits: Better than series two, with some real standout episodes, but another season that didn’t really go anywhere with the characters, even though they developed slightly. Season four really needs to start heading in a different direction and start fleshing everything out more.
  • Rev: The Christmas episode and just miserable.
  • Shameless: Yes, I’ve seen the first episode of the second season, and beyond a slightly worrying trend towards making Fiona more of a ‘winner’, this is still excellent stuff and Emmy Rossum is great. They’ve also recast Jane Levy’s part, since she’s off starring in Suburgatory now.

And in movies:

  • Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows: Not as good as the first Robert Downey Jr movie. Stephen Fry is oddly unsuited to the role of Mycroft, it turns out and the replacement of Rachel McAdams with Noomi Rapace from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo robs the movie of a vital element as well. But Kelly Reilly’s back, Jared Harris makes a fabulous Moriarty, the script is actually quite good, Jude Law is better than in the first movie and the ‘fight scene’ between Moriarty and Holmes is memorable, as is the coda at the end. Silly, but enjoyable and smarter than many a blockbuster, even if this is less detective story than action adventure movie.

"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?

Classic TV

Christmas Lost Gems: Stigma (1977)

22 December 2011 Rob Buckley 3 Comments

Stigma

It’s that time of year again and as used to be tradition with the BBC, back in the 70s when it was still great, it’s time for a TV Ghost Story for Christmas. Now, I’ve already covered a couple of these before, notably the magnificent The Signalman and the bafflingly weird The Ice House, and I gave y’all a potted history of them with The Ice House, so I try not to repeat myself too much.

If you recall, the Ghost Stories were divided into two camps: the earlier MR James and Dickens adaptations, which focused on the external and the period horror; and the later modern stories, such as The Ice House, that didn’t really have ghosts at all. Stigma, the penultimate Ghost Story, falls firmly into the latter camp, a modern chiller that fits more in the realm of David Cronenberg’s ‘body horror’ school of scares than the true ghost story.

The first of the series’ original stories rather than adaptations, Clive Exton’s (Armchair Theatre, Studio 64, The Eleventh Hour, Killers, Survivors) Stigma is actually quite simple: a woman, Katherine (Kate Binchy), heads off to her country cottage with her teenage daughter. Some workmen who have been working in their garden have unearthed a large menhir stone and they use an excavator to lift the stone up slightly. That’s when everything starts to go pear-shaped and Katherine starts bleeding, despite not having a wound anywhere on her body. If I give you the clue that ‘stigma’ comes from a Greek word, the plural of which is ‘stigmata’, you can probably work out what’s going on, and what the double-meaning of the story is.

It’s a creepy little tale in all, with terrible things like possession, poltergeists and massive bleeding happening to terribly nice people for no good reason, other than they lifted up the wrong stone – making it as arbitrary as any of James’s tales. Also, as with all the James ghost stories, there’s no real explanation for what transpires: there is a literal explanation of what’s happened (it’s eventually found under the stone), but there’s no revelation as to why ‘the thing under the stone’ has chosen to do what it did or how.

Unlike the relatively genteel previous stories, Exton’s story is full of blood and nudity. At times, it plays like an episode of Casualty, focusing on all kinds of kitchen and household implements, making you wonder exactly what’s going to happen. And it somehow manages to elicit scares from an onion, too. But its disconcerting invasion of the old and terrifying into the modern world, without any way of escaping, should manage to put the frighteners on most hardy people.

It’s not available on DVD and has never been repeated. Silly BBC. But it is available on YouTube, you lucky people, so if you’ve half an hour to spare, gather ye around to have the willies put up you.

US TV

What did you watch this week (w/e December 16)?

16 December 2011 Rob Buckley 3 Comments

Dustin Hoffman and Michael Mann

Time 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.

The A-Team: Misfits, Modern Family, Happy Endings, and Homeland.

The B-Team: Dexter and Rev.

Yes, we’re back on Fridays, mainly because everyone seems to be sticking the good stuff on TV on Sundays and I don’t watch things live, but also because Mondays can be a bit tricky for me whereas Fridays are a lot easier.

Anyway, a few thoughts on what I’ve been watching:

  • Luck: So this should be TV gold. Michael Mann and David Milch behind the camera; Dustin Hoffman, Dennis Farina, Nick Nolte et al in front; and it’s all set in the high stakes world of horse racing and gambling. Yet was it incredibly dull? Yes. Could barely sit through it. It probably didn’t help that everyone mumbled their lines so I couldn’t make out what most of the cast were saying. This was just the pilot: the series itself starts in January on HBO, but I won’t be tuning in. Ratings were pretty poor, too, so don’t expect it to last more than a season.
  • American Horror Story: Yes, still watching. It’s largely been crud and I’ve forward wound through lots of it. This week’s episode, written by Tim Minear, however, was about half-tolerable (the second half, to be precise).
  • I Hate My Teenage Daughter: Episode two was actually more palatable than episode 1 but also more boring. Standard sitcom set-up, you can understand why some people might like it, but ultimately so bereft of redeeming qualities, such as laughs, the whole thing is so bad, I had to give up after about five minutes.
  • Dexter: The show’s stupidest season limps towards its conclusion. Even more implausible than last year’s season finale in terms of plotting and character, on top of that, we have (spoiler alert) Debs fancying Dexter. Ew! I think I’m going to tap out after the end of the season, unless someone tells me there’s a great big pick up in quality next season. Bye, Dexter, it was nice knowing you.
  • Homeland: Thank Apollo and the Muses themselves for Homeland, TV drama’s almost sole redeeming show at the moment. Excellent work by Claire Danes and Mandy Patinkin this week. It should be fascinating to see where they go with it on Sunday and the next season.
  • Misfits: A fun episode that’s best not thought about too hard.
  • Rev: Sometimes I wonder why I’ve developed this Pavlovian conditioned reflex towards British TV of late. I just can’t face watching it, even if it could be really good (Dark Mirror, Downton Abbey, etc). I’m starting to think it’s shows like Rev that are part of the problem. I really liked the first series of Rev. It was refreshing and fun. The first episodes were the best and there were some hints of cringe comedy towards the end, but it was a really good show. Come the second series and it’s become cringe comedy, miserable and like having a tooth pulled. You get lured in and then you get crushed. That’s the real reason we only have six episodes per series in the UK: we’re almost fundamentally incapable, it seems, of writing more than about six good episodes of something. Grr.

And in movies:

  • Universal Soldier: Regeneration: Now, I know what you’re thinking. What on earth possessed me, particularly since the first movie wasn’t really the greatest, to watch its third (or is it the fourth) sequel? Well, it was there. But guess what: despite being toplined by Andrei ‘The Pitbull’ Arlovski, Universal Soldier: Regeneration is actually better than all the other Universal Soldier movies put together, as well as the likes of Terminator 3. It’s smarter, more thoughtful, has better action scenes and is shot in the style of The Bourne Supremacy. Very weird. The second half loses it a little, with all the set-up essentially dropped in favour of fights, and Dolph Lundgren’s appearance is basically a cameo but actually a reasonable low-budget action movie.

And in books

  • The Good, the Bad and the Multiplex: I finally finished reading it. It’s okay. Not great. Just okay. Lacks a lot of the humour of a proper Kermode rant, so it’s just him throwing out facts and saying things are rubbish.
  • Bad Science: Ben Goldacre’s take-down of media reporting, nutritionists, et al. Overly technical in style at times, it’s not so much “bad science” as “bad medicine” but it should be compulsory reading for anyone who’s ever read a food story in the paper and believed it. I’m up to the chapter on Gillian McKeith – that should be 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?