TV reviews

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

UK TV

Doctor Who – 3×1-3×13 – Full series review

1 July 2007 Rob Buckley 10 Comments

Full Season Carusometer

Well, here it is, the moment you’ve all been waiting for: it’s the unveiling of the first ever full-season Carusometer.

It’s a bit small, isn’t it? Sorry, my blog is only so wide and people’s screens are only so much wider. Click on it to get a bigger version that won’t mess with your eyes so much.

Anyway, as you can see, we started off all rightish with Smith and Jones, The Shakespeare Code and Gridlock. We then plummeted into some extraordinary depths with the Dalek two-parter, before beginning a slow crawl back up to the light via The Lazarus Experiment and 42 (which was really only as good as it was thanks to Graeme Harper’s direction).

The Human Nature/Family of Blood two-parter was the first undisputed piece of excellence by the series, with Blink almost at the same heights (it would probably get a half-mark if The Carusometer believed in shades of grey and anything other than absolutes. It doesn’t, so Blink gets a slight promotion) before a relatively even not-quite brilliant Master trilogy to finish off the series.

Compared with series one and series two then, series three is undoubtedly better, albeit slightly cheaper looking. Once again, we’ve had to sit through a relatively rubbish first third or so to get to the good stuff, but wasn’t it good by the end? David Tennant’s been allowed to find his feet properly and given a wide variety of material to work with; Sweet FA has generally had better material to work with than Pipes, even when the attention wasn’t on her, but probably hasn’t done quite as good a job with it. We’ve started to veer dangerously close to fanboy territory at times, but I don’t think we yet crossed that particularly dangerous event horizon, from which no amount of effort will be able to extract it. And a whole new generation have been scared witless by the Master and got to realise the Daleks really aren’t that frightening compared to some of the stuff that’s out there.

We’ve also learned a few lessons this series:

  1. don’t waste Graeme Harper on episodes like 42; save him up for stuff like Utopia. Imagine how much better those last three episodes would have been with Graeme Harper helming all of them. Still, he’s only human and doing three episodes last year nearly wiped him out, so use him more wisely next year Rusty
  2. don’t let Chris Chibnall write anything ever again. Even on his best days, nearly everyone else is better
  3. Rusty really can write. It’s just sometimes he chooses not to

Here’s to next year, hey?

But before I sign off, I’d just like to say that The Medium is Not Enough has declared the third series of Doctor Who to be a two or “Partial Caruso” on The Carusometer quality scale. A Partial Caruso corresponds to “a show in which David Caruso might volunteer to cameo as an evil alien genius. However, he will then ruin every take by being unable to understand any actor with an English accent and asking them to repeat the line. Fortunately, some quick thinking by script writers ensures that he is zapped by something sonic and converted into 17 CGI, airbrushed versions of himself that only have one line each, each dubbed by Sam Jones as revenge for Flash Gordon.”

For all my shiny reviews of this series’ episodes, you only have to visit the Doctor Who 2007 category. Isn’t that handy?

UK TV

Review: Doctor Who – 3×13 – The Last of the Time Lords

1 July 2007 Rob Buckley 17 Comments

The Last of the Time Lords

Well, blimey. Who knew Rusty did dark so well*? Not since I was a wee small boy and saw Caves of Androzani have I felt so disturbed after watching a Doctor Who story.

Indeed, it’s not since Caves that we’ve really seen the Doctor get such a thoroughly good kicking, and certainly not deliberately, as the result of a carefully laid and executed plan. That was dark. Really dark. And I liked it, bar the occasional bits of Rustiness.

Continue reading “Review: Doctor Who – 3×13 – The Last of the Time Lords”

UK TV

Review: Last Man Standing 1×1

28 June 2007 Rob Buckley 3 Comments

In the UK: Tuesdays, 9pm, BBC3. Repeated 11.30pm, 2.25am; Sunday 8pm, 12.30am

In the US: Nowhere yet, but who knows. Maybe Discovery or BBC America

Anyone fancy a game of monkey tennis?

That if, you’ll recall, was one of Alan Partridge’s last-ditch pitches to a BBC commissioner in an attempt to get his own TV show. It’s easy to imagine a similar conversation taking place in Soho House, not so long ago, between a desperate producer, a little the worse for wear from white wine and 17 rejections, and a BBC3 commissioner looking for new shows.

“Anthropology Agro!” suggests the tipsy prod. “We send six buff men around the world. They meet all sorts of tribes and cultures. They learn about their lifestyles and their customs. Then they pick fights with them.”

“Hmm,” muses the somewhat patronising BBC3 commissioner. “We are the BBC. We are supposed to be educational and informative. Except we’re BBC3. We’re watched by chavs and morons and Torchwood fans – who are both chavs and morons. The only way we’re going to get our target demographic of XYZ9s to be interested in another country and its culture is by sticking it in an XBox360 first-person shooter backdrop and making sure there are plenty of naked tribeswomen in it.”

Decided, she exclaims, “Brilliant! You’re hired” and Last Man Standing is born.

Except, it’s the BBC. It’s too liberal to be sending the prime of British youth around the world to beat up the natives. That’s too Raj, too Empire. We can’t do that anymore.

So they’ve stuck in a couple of provisos.

  1. Three of the six buff young athletes have to be American
  2. They all have to be bollocks at fighting

Continue reading “Review: Last Man Standing 1×1”

US TV

The Random Episode Carusometer: Standoff

27 June 2007 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

Random episode Carusometer for Standoff



Time to see if I misjudged a series: let’s re-evaluate Standoff. But what’s this? Shock, horror! It was a show that started before The Carusometer was even born! Its third-episode verdict was qualitative, without even the slightest hint of the overwhelming quantitative power The Carusometer has to offer.

Now, it can have the rating it deserves.

Anyway, we rejoin Standoff at episode 14, in which our dynamic FBI negotiating couple have to deal with a cult leader with too many wives who wants to get his own back on a church leader. We start with some clumsy interplay between the two about desirable holidays as he (Ron Livingston) says an RV holiday is the best, while she (Rosemarie DeWitt) says it’s not. Oh the relationship-depth explored…

We then have another interminable hostage negotiation. Now, the problems with a show about hostage negotiators are

  1. there aren’t that many different hostage negotiations that are realistic and common yet interesting
  2. hostage negotiations drag on for a bit and certainly don’t take just 40 minutes

So just about any episode you can come up with is bound to

  1. have an unrealistic, TV-friendly scenario
  2. be unrealistically plotted so it only lasts 40 minutes (minus couple time)

And episode 14 was no different from episodes one to three. Lots of negotiations handled in a way only an idiot would handle a hostage negotiation. You’d have to have been in an isolation tank from the day you were born, slowly being fed porridge through a tube, to think their tactics were good ways to bond with the hostages/kidnappers.

But guess what. The incredibly well conditioned cult members needed only two minutes of talking to the negotiators to be convinced they were in the wrong and must fight their cult leader. And they don’t get killed in the process. How incredibly, incredibly lucky and unlikely.

While there’s some reasonably non-stupid plotting, all the characters are essentially ridiculous. It’s not believable. It doesn’t compensate for this by making anyone interesting enough to make you overlook the flaws. It’s action by numbers. You could probably throw every single plot at Criminal Minds and it would morph into that show’s plots with just a couple of quick line changes.

So The Medium Is Not Enough has great pleasure in declaring Standoff a “Major Caruso” on The Carusometer quality scale. A Major Caruso corresponds to “a show that David Caruso might exec produce or star in. He will insist on vetting every female cast member before they are cast, to ensure ‘He has chemistry with them’. All the auditions will actually consist of is seeing if they can convincingly ‘Make goo-goo eyes’ at him and not be sick, while being shot at by AK47s before begging to have seven children by him and give up their high-flying, emotionally satisfying jobs since ‘he completes them’.”

US TV

Third-episode verdict: John from Cincinnati

26 June 2007 Rob Buckley 4 Comments
John From Cincinnati Carusometer2 Partial Imaginary Carusometer

Well, it’s time to pass a third-episode verdict on John from Cincinnati, I reckon. I could hold out until episode five, because everything’s a bit murky still, but I don’t think there’ll be much point: the verdict will be the same.

You see the trouble is, it’s completely mental. Seriously mental. Not since Twin Peaks has there been such a surreal mind-f*ck of a show. Even obviously kooky shows like Northern Exposure can’t hold a candle to the insanity that is John from Cincinnati.

We’ve had hotels haunted by terrifying ghosts that we can’t see. We have drug-dealers who listen to opera. We have people who speak like they’re in Lord of the Rings. We’ve had the kiss of an incontinent parakeet heal the wounded and bring the dead back to life. And, of course, in the first episode, we had levitating surfers.

Then there’s John, around whom all these strange events occur. It’s becoming increasingly clear that John is not from Cincinnati, but is in fact either John (the Baptist) or God Himself. John says the end is near and his pronouncements seem to change reality. He also doesn’t need to go to the toilet. In fact, he doesn’t know how.

You see? Mental.

All these odd events – and sterling dialogue that actors just like to eat up – keep us going through an otherwise not desperately exciting tale of washed out surfers and a dysfunctional family living in California. What the grand design is, I don’t know. I’m hoping there is one, so I’m sticking with it.

Fortunately, the Carusometer knows how to deal with such mental programmes, because it has a hidden z-axis.

The Medium Is Not Enough has great pleasure in declaring John From Cincinnati a 2i or Partial Imaginary Caruso on The Carusometer quality scale. A Partial Imaginary Caruso corresponds to “a show in which David Caruso might cameo as Wayland, the Saxon god of the smithy. Eight feet tall, he will walk through the ancient city of Marrakesh, reading out the instruction manual for a Krups coffee maker in the lost language of the Etruscans. Before him will walk and crawl and fly every manner of bird and beast that dwells upon the face of the Earth, singing the collected works of Emerson, Lake and Palmer. The show will be cancelled after a season”.