Back to its regular Friday slot, it’s “What have you been watching this week?”, your chance to recommend to friends and fellow blog readers the TV that they might be missing or should avoid – and for me to do mini-reviews of everything I’ve watched this week.
We’re still in the quiet period on Fox, but the other channels have been continuing with their usual output. So, after the jump, The Apprentice, Being Erica, Boardwalk Empire, Chuck, Dexter, In Treatment, Life Unexpected, Modern Family and Stargate Universe.
In the UK: Mondays, 10pm, BBC2. Available on the iPlayer
One of the funniest parts of the the Tristam Shandy adaptation, A Cock and Bull Story, that Michael Winterbottom directed in 2006 was the strange partnership between the stars Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon. Or should I say ‘Steve Coogan’ and ‘Rob Brydon’, because in the movie the two actors played rivalrous versions of themselves, complete with fake partners, backgrounds, etc, that are close but don’t really match up to the real things:
Strangely, four years on, BBC2 has decided to get Winterbottom, Coogan and Brydon together again for a six-part comedy series that sees ‘Brydon’ and ‘Coogan’ visiting restaurants around the country to review them for The Observer food magazine, while recreating the same chemistry they had during A Cock and Bull Story. It’s a near-the-knuckle, moderately funny, occasionally hilarious piece that’s as much drama as comedy.
Boo. Happy Halloween. Bet you weren’t expecting this, it being a Sunday and all, but I was away on Friday and today’s catch-up day. So here’s “What have you been watching this week?” your chance to recommend to friends and fellow blog readers the TV that they might be missing or should avoid – and for me to do mini-reviews of everything I’ve watched this week.
This week, as well as being Fox’s traditional quiet period (so no House or Running Wilde), it’s also been Halloween week, with more or less every show giving us a special episode for the holidays. So, after the jump, random spookiness in The Apprentice, Being Erica, Boardwalk Empire, Chuck, Community, Cougar Town, Dexter, Hellcats, Life Unexpected, Modern Family, No Ordinary Family, Smallville,Stargate Universe and 30 Rock.
But I also gave Canada’s Men With Brooms a try and we also have the return of HBO’s In Treatment. Here’s a trailer for the third season, followed by a summary of the first two seasons, so you can get a better grasp of what the show’s like if you haven’t seen it, it being on HBO/Sky Arts n’all.
Ooh, ooh. I think we’re turning a corner. Looks like the world is just about getting fed up with vampires and possibly even werewolves as well (you can return your Team Edward and Team Jacob armbands), and zombies are coming back into fashion. Oh frabduous day.
Because shortly following the UK’s Dead Set, we now have an American zombie TV show, one a tad higher quality than The Vampire Diaries. Bizarrely, though, it’s on AMC.
AMC’s last project was Rubicon and it’s best known for Mad Men and Breaking Bad, so maybe you wouldn’t naturally assume it was the best place for an adaption of a comic book about zombies. Nevertheless, it turns out with Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption) in charge, AMC’s actually a very good place for a quite moving and gory story about a guy (Andrew Lincoln of Teachers) who wakes up to find almost the entire world over-run with zombies.
HG Wells’ The First Men in the Moon is one of Wells’ lesser known sci-fi books. While The War of the Worlds, The Time Machine, The Invisible Man and even The Island of Dr Moreau get remade all the time, The First Men In the Moon had a rather lovely 1964 film adaptation starring Lionel Jeffries and co-written by Nigel Kneale, but that’s been it.
Now, there are few UK TV writers today who are bigger sci-fi fanboys than Mark Gatiss. If he’s not writingDoctor Who, starring inDoctor Who, appearing in documentaries about Doctor Who, presenting documentaries about horror movies, appearing in documentaries about Nigel Kneale, writing Lucifer Box stories that pastiche 19th century fiction, updating Sherlock Holmes, et al, he’s thinking about it. I know he is. I can sense it.
So leave it to Gatiss to not only realise there’s this gap in the HG Wells adaptation record but to fix it by writing a 90 minute TV movie based on the book – and, naturally enough, starring in it.
Now, BBC4 isn’t exactly big budget, so you might be expecting something put together with some local theatre stars, a couple of pieces of string and a bit of papier mache. But The First Men in the Moon follows on from previous low budget, high gloss sci-fi productions, such as The Quatermass Experiment (which also starred Gatiss), A for Andromeda and Parallel Quest, by being very good looking, having a great cast (Rory Kinnear) and some quite extensive CGI, all while staying reasonably faithful to the source material – both the book, and because this is Gatiss, the movie.
It’s just a pity everything was done with such a knowing wink in its eye. Here’s a trailer:
