Just in time for the news that it’s just been acquired to air on Fiver in the UK comes the season finale of 10 Things I Hate About You. As mentioned in previous reviews, this isn’t really much like the movie, with just a few plot elements and characters the same, but it’s not bad in and of itself. Nothing too remarkable, but still reasonably funny with some interesting quirks and characters.
However, things have perked up in the last three episodes, making it a much more appealing show altogether.
Of all the shows arriving on our screens over summer, the surprise big hit has been Royal Pains. A charming comedy-drama about a New York ER doctor who ends up working as a ‘concierge doctor’ to the rich of the nearby Hamptons, it’s as languid as a Long Island iced tea, with no big pyrotechnics, no screaming melodramas, only MacGyver-esque medical procedures and reasonable people having relatively normal relationships – against the general insanity experienced by the rich.
While it hasn’t avoided the occasional escape from reality and House-ian "bizarre diseases of the week" to diagnose, it has remained whimsical fun with a compelling cast throughout. With a second season now assured and with so many sub-plots coming to a head, a cliffhanger ending was inevitable. What was surprising is that the creator of Charmed and the show’s exec producer Constance M Burge managed to avoid Wiccans for a whole season – until now.
In the US: Sundays, 9pm ET/PT, Showtime. Starts September 27th
Dexter is of course America’s favourite serial killer. Trained by his adoptive police officer father to channel his homicidal instincts for ‘good’, Dexter only kills bad people.
However, as pleasing as that might have seemed, the third season of Dexter didn’t appeal to as many fans, as politician Jimmy Smits’ plan to befriend Dexter, learn his secrets and then go off killing his own enemies failed to interest viewers as much as the previous seasons’ stories did. To some (not me), it all felt a bit flabby, a bit drawn out, a bit tired.
With Dexter marrying and having a baby at the end of season three, many worried that the show might be jumping the shark or at the very least that season four was going to have a stupider or less captivating plot.
Worry ye not. Episode 1 of season four looks to be a cracker, with John Lithgow turning up as the new, mental serial killer in town. If only he didn’t spend so much of it naked. We just don’t have to see that kind of thing on tele, do we?
Dark Blue, the TNT show doing its level best to be dark and gritty but hobbled by being a Jerry Bruckheimer production, has now made it to its third episode so time to pass verdict.
On the whole, it’s pretty much the same as it was before. Perhaps a little more coherent compared to the first episode and obviously not trying as hard, but more or less the same.
In fact, the set-up has become marginally less interesting, now the question of whether Logan Marshall-Green (unrecognisable compared with his Traveler character) has switched sides has been answered. Each episode seems to revolve around the cops having to prove they’re crims – usually something that involves knowing some useless fact about some other crim – things going badly wrong, and some crap plan being devised at the last minute to make it all turn out right, usually with Dylan McDermott swirling around in his raincoat.
Episode two did try to alter the formula, in which our goodies do nothing too bad and only pretend to, by having them trying to sell drugs to get $100,000 for an arms deal after one of the twatty undercover operatives decided to go home for his wife’s birthday (as you do). But again, nothing too bad happened, no one did anything too awful, and frankly, they all should have been rumbled within the first few seconds of the episode.
Episode three was a marked improvement, however, with our heroes finally doing things perhaps they shouldn’t have done, misusing witnesses and getting good people killed as a result. This is probably the ‘dark’ in the title that they’ve been searching for for a while. If it carries on in this vein, it might be tolerable.
There are two big problems with the show: Dylan McDermott, with his fluffy hair, who undermines any attempt by the rest of the cast to look street or to be able to masquerade as undercover cops; and the lack of real edge. It’s just so Bruckheimer that you know this is as close to reality as Spooks or 24. The undercover cops all hang out together, they take about ten seconds to set up their fake identities each week, and the baddies never shoot first and ask questions later. Frankly, you long for the days of Miami Vice and Don Johnson, just to show them vaguely what having an undercover identity might be like. Which should show you how far off Dark Blue is.
It’s just about worth watching for Logan Marshall-Green, who shows the others how it should be done, but other than that, there’s not much to redeem the show and make it something you’d want to stick with.
Carusometer rating: 3 Rob’s prediction: Will probably last about a season at most
Way back when I started this blog, one of the things I promised to do was review the DVD of The Omega Factor, a 1970s show of extreme weirdness. I never did review it (well, not properly), but this is a good second best, I reckon.
Made by BBC Scotland and starring James Hazeldine and Louise Jameson (Leela off Doctor Who), The Omega Factor was The X-Files of its day. Hazeldine plays Tom Crane, a journalist who comes up to Edinburgh to investigate the paranormal for an article he’s writing. While there, he comes into contact with a genuine psychic, Drexel, who is reputed to be one of the two surviving ‘men of power’. Tom accuses him of fraud, so Drexel gives him a minor demonstration of power. But it’s not enough to put Tom off his investigations, so Drexel causes Tom to crash his car, killing his wife in the process.
Tom eventually returns to Edinburgh to continue his investigations, where he’s recruited by Department 7, a top-secret government unit conducting experiments into the paranormal. They theorise – correctly – that Tom himself has psychic powers, which is why Drexel was worried about him. Indeed, Tom is soon able to solve a murder using ‘psychic visions’, visions that mysteriously incorporate the Greek letter Omega.
Subsequent episodes see Tom helping Department 7 with their experiments into his own powers as well as investigations into haunted houses, telekinesis and more. Department 7 soon reveals itself to use suspect methods, even covertly experimenting on Tom’s brother. But over time, it becomes apparent that a secret group called Omega has infiltrated Department 7, has been working with Drexel and has a plan to take over governments using mind-control. I won’t spoil it for you by revealing any more of the plot though.
The show was very popular at the time, popular enough that it was left with a cliffhanger ending, but thanks to Mary Whitehouse declaring it ‘thoroughly evil’, it never got that second series.
I didn’t watch it at the time – way too young – but caught up with it in the early 90s through VHS copies. These weren’t very good and I never saw the final three episodes. But through the murky haze, I perceived this to be possibly the scariest TV programme ever made.
Unfortunately, once I had a crystal clear DVD version and the final three episodes, I discovered it wasn’t – I’d been filling in the gaps with my own imagination – which was a shame, but it’s definitely in the top ten. There are some incredibly interesting pieces of direction and scripting: in particular there’s one scene where someone is ‘possessed’ and the mental struggle between Tom and the possessor is done entirely theatrically, rather than using effects.
Anyway, here are the dead spooky titles and a few dead spooky seconds of the first episode to give you an idea of just how weird and spooky it was. I heartily recommend you get it on DVD, if you can, but someone nice has uploaded the whole series to YouTube and even set up a playlist if you don’t want to go that far.
