TV reviews

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

What have you been watching this week (w/e July 22)?

26 July 2011 Rob Buckley 3 Comments

Time for “What have you been watching this week?”, my chance to tell you what I’ve been watching this week and your chance to recommend things to everyone else (and me) in case we’ve missed them.

As you may have noticed, all attempt to maintain a fixed schedule for this boy are failing, but it’s here now.

My recommendations for maximum viewing pleasure this week: Burn Notice, Royal Pains, Penn and Teller: Fool Us, Sirens, Suits, The Daily Show, and Wilfred. Watch them (and keep an eye on The Stage‘s TV Today Square Eyes feature as well for British TV highlights) or you’ll be missing out on the good stuff.

In a new twist, here are few shows I’m watching, which you might like, but which I wouldn’t necessarily recommend: Come Dine With Me, Top Gear, and True Blood

Truth be told, I haven’t actually been watching much new TV this week, because lovely wife has discovered, after years of my telling her it is, that Battlestar Galactica is frakking awesome and now it’s all we watch. She even has a new wallpaper on her phone. But that’s okay – it meant I didn’t have to watch Torchwood this week, BSG is awesome and I get to see how the end was foreshadowed (and it bloody was, too, if anyone thought it was all a big surprise at the end). I’m just hoping we don’t have to watch Caprica at the end of it all.

Now to the irregulars and new things, as well as a few thoughts on some of those regulars:

  • Alphas: Episode 2 almost settled down into slightly familiar Eureka/Warehouse 13-style family viewing, but it still had a slight edge, even if it was just an excuse to do Final Destination.
  • True Blood: Alex Breckenridge was back briefly (yey), but largely, I have to say, if I were a teenage girl, this would be a great show, but it’s all a little too Mary Sue-ish for me.
  • Wilfred: This show is getting very, very weird and very, very dark. Even weirder and darker than last week. Is Wilfred God?

And in this week’s list of movies: nothing. I have watched no movies all week.

But what have you been watching?

“What have you been watching 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 this week. 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?

UK TV

Review: The Hour 1×1

26 July 2011 Rob Buckley 36 Comments

The Hour

In the UK: Tuesdays, 9pm, BBC2. Available on the iPlayer
In the US: Wednesdays, 10pm ET/PT, BBC America. Starts August 17

If you listened to me on Radio 5 a couple of Saturdays ago, you’d have heard me warbling on about US TV’s attempts to cash in on the Mad Men period vibe with two new shows: The Playboy Club and Pan Am. Now, before anyone over here starts to feel so superior about America’s supposed unoriginality – and it’s debatable just how much of a cash-in those two shows are – let’s have a look at BBC2’s The Hour, which doesn’t so much try to cash in on Mad Men as scream to the rafters, “Look! We’re doing a British Mad Men! Look!”

Set a little earlier than Mad Men in 1956, this slightly navel-gazing tale does what The Playboy Club is doing by marrying Mad Men with the crime drama. In this case, we have two heroic journalists (Ben Whishaw and Romola Garai) working at the BBC’s very dull newsreel service but wanting to produce the Corporation’s new properly journalistic, TV news service, all while juggling their emotional lives and the prejudices of the time – men-only bars and “no coloureds, no Irish” signs in hotels. But along the way, Whishaw discovers a conspiracy involving murders, suicide and Torchwood‘s very own Burn Gorman.

Cue the “Look how cool we are” trailer.

Continue reading “Review: The Hour 1×1”

The CarusometerA Carusometer rating of 3

Third-episode verdict: Necessary Roughness

19 July 2011 Rob Buckley Post a comment

In the US: Wednesdays, 10/9c, USA Network. Available on USANetwork.com

So we’re three episodes into USA Network’s "sports and entertainment therapy" dramedy, Necessary Roughness, and it’s still hard to work out why. While the first episode wasn’t badly made, the big question hanging over it was: "What is the point of this programme?" After three episodes, that question’s still here.

I guess if you’re into sports, having a show about sports and sports psychology might be interesting in and of its own right. However, given these are fake players, the sports psychology is a little bit vague and "Oh, you’re really worried about your father. Well, now you know that, you’re fixed", and the show is also delving into other problems of the rich and famous (or journalists), this probably still isn’t the show for you.

On its own terms as a drama, it’s also a bit lacking. Callie Thorne is charismatic enough, but she never seems fully to commit to the moment – she’s always looking for a way to play the funny, even when she’s supposed to be angry. Her relationship with Marc Blucas, sports trainer extraordinaire, is slightly different from what we’ve come to expect of "will they, won’t they?" TV relationships, but neither character has enough depth or charm for us to care.

Blucas is, as he was in Buffy and more or less everything he’s ever been in, largely only there to give Thorne’s character a love interest, and while there are countless shows with female characters only there as love interests for the male characters, those shows suffer from the same problems as Necessary Roughness but in reverse. Add on that the usual dollop of misogyny you’d normally expect from male sports stars (certainly on TV) and it’s not really a hospitable environment for either male or female viewers, particularly when you factor in Thorne’s whiny teenage children.

If there is one glimmer of hope in the entire show, it’s Scott Cohen’s Nico, the security detail for Thorne and Blucas’s employer. He’s a nice edge to a somewhat edgeless show, but isn’t in it enough.

Nevertheless, it’s not a show devoid of merits and it does have a few charms. Not enough for me to carry on watching, but a few. If you watched it, I wouldn’t blame you. I’d wonder why, but I wouldn’t blame you.

Carusometer rating: 3
Rob’s prediction: Might get renewed for a second season, but probably doesn’t deserve it.

US TV

What have you been watching this fortnight (w/e July 15)?

18 July 2011 Rob Buckley 21 Comments

Two Guys, A Girl and A Pizza Place

Time for “What have you been watching this week?”, my chance to tell you what I’ve been watching this week and your chance to recommend things to everyone else (and me) in case we’ve missed them.

As you may have noticed, I skipped a week or so (hence the name change this week) because I had too much on, so this is a little bit of a catch up.

My recommendations for maximum viewing pleasure this week: Burn Notice, Come Dine With Me, Royal Pains, Penn and Teller: Fool Us, Sirens, Suits, The Daily Show, Top Gear and Wilfred. Watch them (and keep an eye on The Stage‘s TV Today Square Eyes feature as well for British TV highlights) or you’ll be missing out on the good stuff.

In my viewing pile, ready to be watched: Curb Your Enthusiasm. I hear the new series is a bit limp so far. Any thoughts?

Now to the irregulars and new things, as well as a few thoughts on some of those regulars:

  • Burn Notice: Oh, oh. They better not be doing what I think they’re doing.
  • Cleopatra: A Channel 4 documentary about the eponymous female pharaoh. Mainly just talking heads, with the occasional bit of re-creation, this was old school documentary-making in which you actually learnt something from people who know their stuff, as opposed to anything on BBC1. Definitely worth watching if you have an interest.
  • The Daily Show: some cracking stuff with John Oliver about the NotW scandal.
  • Guilty Pleasures: Another documentary, this time about the role of luxury within ancient Greek societies, particularly Athens and Sparta. Actually very good, certainly in comparison to the recent BBC4 Ancient Greece season. However, one of those documentaries where at the end, after thinking, “Wow, yes, I’ve learned quite a lot from this and I’ve seen some great and beautiful things,” there’s this feeling that maybe a little thing might have been left out. Can you guess? It was… women. Barely a mention of women in the whole thing, which was very strange.
  • Necessary Roughness: Haven’t watched episode three yet. Episode two was roughly on a par with episode 1, perhaps a bit better since we didn’t have to resort to the general psychological handwaving and instant cures of the pilot episode and we moved out of sports psychology for the A-plot. Callie Thorne is still being too comedic for the role, though.
  • Penn and Teller: Fool Us: Probably should have mentioned this was on about five weeks ago. British magicians try to fool the famous Vegas magicians – if they do, they get to go to Vegas and perform for P&T’s audience. A mix of decent acts with completely rubbish acts whose trick you can guess the secret of almost immediately. But still very entertaining.
  • Sirens: I haven’t got round to episode three (or four) yet, but episode two was pretty good. Acting’s still poor, but the scripts are still decent.
  • Suits: Still maintaining the quality in episode 4, with everyone nicely not nice. Slight dodginess around the clinical trials (does no one do double blind over there?) but that was a slight flaw, easily overlooked.
  • Torchwood: Miracle Day: Yey. Torchwood‘s back. Or something. It’s clearly trying very hard to be good, but it’s still fundamentally a bad show. It’s quite strange watching the American picture composition style being imposed on Torchwood, since it now looks like a different, American show. Nevertheless, the acting’s bad (the guy who was in ER who plays Rex Matheson actually makes Eve Myles and John Barrowman look like Derek Jacobi), the dialogue’s painful, we have the usual Russell T Davies inability to write anything close to reality whenever dealing with laws, politics et al, and Torchwood as a group are bigged up as world-saviours, despite being incompetent morons. Barrowman and Myles are obviously the most uncomfortable, untrained people in the world when it comes to using weapons. And why oh why oh why, whenever we have a massive invasion of the Earth by aliens, does everyone forget about it by the next series? Snark and Fury is your best place for a proper review, incidentally.
  • True Blood: after a lot of Alex Breckenridge in episode two, there was nothing of her in episode three, which was depressing. But wow, what a strange show. I’m not really liking it, more sort of being baffled by its intricate campness crossed with sexual oddness and dodgy accents. Fun, and it was nice to see Stephen Moyer getting to use an English accent for a bit in episode two, but I’m not sure I’d recommend it as such.
  • Two Guys, A Girl and a Pizza Place: a very old (circa Friends) show starring a very young, unbuff Ryan Reynolds that you can currently watch on 5* in the UK. Actually very bad, though, or at least the episode I saw – very forced, very unoriginal, with Reynolds obviously trying to be Chandler from Friends.
  • The TV Book Club: never have I seen such an uncomfortable group of presenters (Adrian Edmondson, Rory McGrath, Meera Syal and probably someone else, too). They all looked like they’d been stuck up against a wall and forced to talk with each other. And their choice of books? Well, I wouldn’t belong to a book club that pretentious yet simultaneously incapable of venturing a useful opinion about a book. I’m just saying. Incidentally, did you know the whole programme isn’t just sponsored by Specsavers, it’s actually made by Specsavers? Again, just saying…
  • Wilfred: Episode four was just deeply disturbing. Deeply. Funny, but deeply disturbing. Guest star, incidentally, was Ed Helms from The Daily Show and The Hangover.

And in this week’s list of movies:

  • Bad Teacher: Surprisingly not awful and actually quite enjoyable. I was unconvinced by Cameron Diaz’s ‘Road to Damascus’ but the rest of our ‘Movie Club’ found it plausible.
  • The Adjustment Bureau: Again, another surprise – a science fiction film that sucked as a science fiction film but was actually a really nice romance. Matt Damon and Emily Blunt are both really good as well.
  • Pumping Iron: Interesting to watch these days, not just because it was the first movie to feature Arnold Schwarzenegger. But it’s a documentary about body builders and tonally, the directors clearly think they’re all a bunch of mentallers. These days, you watch it and think, “Fair play, guys. Good effort. Nice work. Got any tips?”, such is the change in society’s attitude towards men’s physiques. As a result of watching the movie, lovely wife has now decided that she much prefers watching professional body building to World’s Strongest Man, which used to be her favouritest thing ever. No pressure, obviously.

But what have you been watching?

“What have you been watching 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 this week. 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?