TV reviews

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

Welsh TV

Review: A Mind to Kill – series one

6 March 2009 Rob Buckley 11 Comments

A Mind To Kill

You wouldn’t know it from the BFI’s celebration of 25 years of Channel 4 and S4C, but S4C does in fact produce television programmes, some of them quite good. Have a look at Caerdydd. Go on. It’s good.

But it would be a mistake to think this is a recent development. A case in point is A Mind to Kill, Wales’ answer to Taggart. Starring Welsh man-god Philip Madoc as widower Detective Inspector Noel Bain, A Mind to Kill was a dark and gritty 1991 TV movie about neo-Nazis set and filmed in South Wales.

Shot in both English and Welsh – as (Noson) yr Heliwr (which, I think means either The Night Hunter or Hunter in the Night. Anyone?) – the film, the charismatic Bain and the series format proved popular enough that a series of sequel films was made, running for five series from 1994 to 2004 – even making the transition to the rest of the UK by airing on Five. Yet almost nobody remembers it.

Praise be, then, the first series is being released on DVD by Network on March 16th.

Continue reading “Review: A Mind to Kill – series one”

US TV

Season finale: Burn Notice (season 2.5)

6 March 2009 Rob Buckley 2 Comments

Burn Notice season 2.5 finale

There’s been a marked “treading water” quality about Burn Notice. On the one hand, Burn Notice is very, very good when it’s dealing with spy stuff; but when it’s all that tedious “person in distress” stuff, it’s really very boring – having all the mystery of whether the nuclear-bomb grade spy skills of Michael Westen (Jeffrey Donovan) really can take out the small tea hut that is the usual criminal-of-the-week.

The spy stuff for the last few seasons has come from the series’ big question: why was Michael fired from his spy job? I don’t know. He doesn’t know. He’s been looking for ages and to stretch that plot out, they’ve been filling up episodes with tedious “person in distress” episodes that make me want to yawn. We’ve even had guest rapper episodes. Not good.

Fortunately, though, we’ve found out the answer to that question. Yes, we’ve found out. Sort of. And it looks like the hatches are being battened down for a third (or is that fourth?) season of mostly spy hijinks. Thank God for that.

Oh, some spoilers ahead, so watch out.

Continue reading “Season finale: Burn Notice (season 2.5)”

The CarusometerA Carusometer rating of 4

Third-episode verdict: Eastbound and Down

4 March 2009 Rob Buckley 4 Comments

Third-episode verdict time for Eastbound and Down, Will Ferrell and Adam McKay’s sports-related comedy about a failed major league baseball player who returns to his home town to become a teacher. The only problem? He’s a complete a-hole.

After a not desperately promising start, things looked like they were going to get better with the second episode, a reasonably funny piece with a cameo by Will Ferrell himself as a BMW dealer almost as a-holey as our ‘hero’.

But episode three wasn’t even pilot episode funny, with few jokes and a worrying tendency to suggest that the hero was going to learn some valuable lessons in life. Oh no.

Ultimately, while there are a few yucks to be had both from its political incorrectness and from its laughing at the jock hero who thinks he’s the business – but really, really isn’t – the joke’s just not able to sustain the show: you get acclimatised to Danny McBride’s insensitivity and stupidity and the show stops being funny and you just don’t notice his offensiveness any more. The characters aren’t really sufficient to fill in the gaps left behind, either.

So despite its promising pedigree, I’d say don’t bother.

Carusometer rating: 4
Prediction: It’s HBO, so it’ll last the season, but won’t get renewed.

Classic TV

Lost Gems: Ultraviolet

3 March 2009 Rob Buckley 43 Comments

Let’s face it, vampires are silly. Yes, they are. They so are. Unless you’re stuck in some perpetual Twilight of gothdom/Emodom, the whole “vampiredom is cool/mysterious/sexy/dark/a great way to live” should have been replaced in your psyche by vampiredom is “sad/ridiculous/obvious metaphor for oral sex and venereal diseases” years ago.

To be fair, in part, that’s because of the daftness of general TV depictions of vampires, which should have put you off them altogether. The vampires on Buffy very quickly became laughable and Angel very rapidly became self-parody. The Marc Warren Dracula adaptation was awful, and no matter how good the 1970s BBC adaptation with Louis Jourdan was, his flapping his way up a wall like an overladen man on a spacehopper was enough to cause hysterics – and not the frightened kind – in any viewer.

But it needn’t be so. As Being Human in the UK and to a lesser extent True Blood in the US recently showed, you can do vampires convincingly in this day and age if you do them right.

Ten years ago, Channel 4 did the first – and possibly the best – of the modern vampire stories. Starring Jack Davenport, Susannah Harker and Idris Elba of The Wire, Ultraviolet managed to bring science, intelligence, moral ambiguity, decent characters and all the hallmarks of modern storytelling to the vampire story – all without saying the word ‘vampire’ once.

Although it’s been repeated and issued on DVD, it’s hard to get now (although you can watch every episode on YouTube) as it’s been deleted, so it’s officially a Lost Gem. Here’s a shiny fan-produced trailer for you, albeit one with a very bad choice in soundtrack:

Continue reading “Lost Gems: Ultraviolet”