TV reviews

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

US TV

Season finale: Burn Notice (season two)

22 September 2008 Rob Buckley 2 Comments

 

Burn Notice is something of an odd show for the USA Network. While most of the USA output is fluffy stuff like Monk or Psych, Burn Notice is quite edgy and dark – a spy show where villains frequently get shot by the good guys, who are all busily trying to avoid getting shot by the people who are supposed to be good guys, too.

After a slightly intermittent first season in which most of that initial edginess was squandered on USA Network quirkiness, the second season has been far superior. After the introduction of BSG‘s/Canada’s Next Top Model‘s Tricia Hilfer as Carla, one of those responsible (possibly) for the ‘burn notice’ that ostracised our hero from the rest of the spy community, we gamboled merrily along from explosion and murder to explosion and murder – via way of the equally vicious spy Michael Shanks from Stargate SG-1 – in the hope that by the end of the season, we’d know what was going on and what Carla was up to.

Did we?

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US TV

Review: Smallville 8×1

22 September 2008 Rob Buckley Post a comment

Smallville

In the US: Thursdays, 8/7c, The CW

You just can’t keep a good Superman down, can you? We are now officially entering year eight of Smallville, aka Superman: The Early Years. But as you might expect, it’s starting to show its age a little.

Tom Welling, despite playing a character who’s only just sort of cleared college age, is now in his 30s, and the rest of the cast aren’t as young and vigourous as they once were either – or they’ve scarpered for the hills as soon as they were free of their contracts at the end of the last season. The creative force behind the show, Miles Millar and Alfred Gough, have also left, leaving their deputies in charge.

So with a skeleton crew on board and no captains at the helm any more, is season eight going to flounder and crash onto the rocks?

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UK TV

Review: No Heroics 1×1

19 September 2008 Rob Buckley 15 Comments

No Heroics

In the UK: Thursdays, 10.30pm, ITV2

There’s something that baffles me about the British. Whenever Hollywood produces a comedy where Hugh Grant turns up, being all self-effacing and a bit of a klutz and lacking in confidence compared to those powerful, strident American types who are all into self-improvement and “being all you can be”*, we get on our high horses and whinge about ‘clueless bloody Americans’.

Then we go and produce half a dozen ‘comedies’ where we live down to the same stereotype. Do we have no pride? Must we really think the worst of ourselves? Must we really hate people who are, ooh, I don’t know, good at things?

Case in point: ITV2’s No Heroics. It’s British! It’s about superheroes! Yey! So they spend all their time down the pub grumbling about how crap they are and being complete dorks.

Oh, FFS.

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The CarusometerA Carusometer rating of 3

Third-episode verdict: Raising the Bar

18 September 2008 Rob Buckley 2 Comments

Time to have a proper look at Steve Bochco’s new series about young lawyers, Raising the Bar. Not much to add since the first episode, since everything’s more or less the same: young lawyers cocking up and getting more impassioned about their cases than their older colleagues do; same lawyers finding it’s hard to be friends with their old school friends when they’re on opposite sides and getting all impassioned.

The second episode was marginally better than the other two episodes, with a hint of drama creeping in. But there’s nothing dreadfully good and exciting it, bar Malcolm in the Middle‘s Jane Kaczmarek as a cranky judge.

So The Medium is Not Enough has great pleasure in declaring Raising the Bar a three or ‘Minor Caruso’ on The Carusometer quality scale.