TV reviews

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

The best audio commentaries ever!

20 April 2006 Rob Buckley 10 Comments

List shows. They’re great aren’t they? We love ’em to bits, every single one, don’t we?

No. We don’t. We hate list shows. We hate everything about list shows, except the fact they can fill an entire Sunday evening when you’re too stuffed to find something else to watch.

DVD commentaries. They’re invaluable companion pieces to movies and TV shows, aren’t they?

No. Audio commentaries are just directors and luvvies droning on about camera angles, mise en scene and how it’s really hard gig, acting. Only trainspotting dweebs like me listen to audio commentaries.

Despite these obvious problems, I thought I’d put together a list of audio commentaries anyway. Sue me.

Now there are plenty of rubbish audio commentaries. I’ll never forget Bridget Jones’s Diary‘s, for example, which consisted entirely of the director saying things like, “Ooh. This was a scene with Rene and Colin. We shot it at night. They were very good.”

But what makes a good audio commentary? Here’s a few examples:

1 Fight Club

Not really that different from most audio commentaries, bar one single fact: Brad Pitt is clearly off his head on something. I’d hazard a guess it’s grass, given his previous statements on the subject, but it might be tequilas. Whatever it was, Brad clearly found everything very, very funny indeed as a result. And as a result, it’s very, very funny to listen to.

2 Big Train

A much-neglected sketch show from Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews, starring Simon Pegg, Mark Heap, Kevin Eldon and other comedy geniuses. The audio commentaries for the first two episodes are just Mathews and Linehan struggling to recall what they were thinking about when they wrote particular scenes. But then, joy! The entire cast bundles in through the door during episode three and the hilarity begins. They take the piss out of the writers, themselves, audio commentaries, the series. You name it, they rip the piss out of it. Much funnier than the actual episodes they watch, in fact. “It’s called Eaaaaaarth”. Nice one, Kevin.

3 Dodgeball

Practically existential this one. If you don’t listen to the audio commentary, the DVD is just a DVD. Listen to the audio commentary and suddenly it takes on a completely new aspect. Consider: almost every DVD these days has things like deleted scenes, usually with the director explaining why they were deleted. Watch the deleted scenes on Dodgeball and you’d be forgiven for thinking that the terrible studios had forced the writer/director to excise the true ending in favour of the commercially popular ending. Then you listen to the DVD commentary and you realise it’s all lies: the director cannot be trusted. He’s messing with your head.

At first, the commentary starts with the director and Vince Vaughn discussing the movie. But wait! Where’s Ben Stiller? Oh, he’s late, apparently. Vaughn and the director then discuss – for 20 minutes – what a complete jerk-off Stiller is, how full of himself he is and so on. Then Stiller comes in and starts to play along, demanding someone watch his car for him in case it gets stolen. And so on. Basically, the whole DVD commentary has almost nothing to do with the actual movie, but is just a kind of extended audio version of Extras/Curb Your Enthusiasm/The Larry Sanders Show. And then you realise: even the other bits of the DVD are lies as well. Could they really have shot the ten minutes of extra footage necessary for the new ending in just a day? Would they really have ended the movie the way they originally claimed? Will you ever have faith in a DVD commentary again after this one? It’s all deeply disturbing.

4 The Bourne Identity

Not fantastic, although you do find out about Liman’s dad and his involvement in the Oliver North trial. But Liman does point out the extraordinary lengths they went to for one shot that everyone misses (the bit where Bourne disappears right before your eyes once he gets into Marseilles), and you find out that he ended up having to direct most of the movie in French, which is pretty impressive.

5 eXistenZ

A disturbing insight into David Cronenberg’s mind for nearly two hours. If you’ve seen the movie, you’ll remember the “gristle gun” – the gun put together from bones and teeth. What kind of warped mind comes up with this stuff? And how? “Well, I just considered the problems of metal detectors and how to smuggle weapons and it occurred to me that since people can go through metal detectors, it was a logical way to overcome the problem” says Cronenberg. Yeah. Anyone could have thought of that. And it just carries on in that vein. You will never be able to analyse a Cronenberg film again, because you’ll realise your brain works on a completely different wavelength to his. Whatever you think he means, he doesn’t. He really doesn’t.

6 Brass Eye

Chris Morris genius, but the man himself doesn’t provide a commentary. Instead, he gets a bunch of homeless guys in to comment on the drugs episode. It’s original at least.

7 Battlestar Galactica

Originally these were podcasts and what’s fun about them is a combination of the lack of production values and exec producer Ronald D Moore’s honesty. For one thing, they’re almost all recorded in his front room, the same week as the episode aired on television in the US. Frequently, the phone starts ringing, someone’s mowing the lawn, dogs start barking, the LAPD fly their helicopters over his house, for which Moore can only apologise profusely. Then he starts a little double act up with his wife, whenever she comes into the room to talk about the kids and the housework. Then the irritation! People have been talking on bulletin boards about the poor sound quality of the podcasts. Well, you’re damn lucky to get the podcasts! Quit whining. And then he’ll actually start explaining why he thought a particular episode was rubbish. It’s all his fault, but the direction was lame, the script was lame, it wasn’t original enough… If only all DVD commentaries were done like that.

So you see, there are a few neglected works on genius lurking in the spare audio tracks of your DVD collections. Turf them out, listen to them and see if you can find some crackers as well.

UK TV

Review: Doctor Who – 2×1 – New Earth

17 April 2006 Rob Buckley 5 Comments

David Tennant will a silly haircut

What was the most rubbish bit about Doctor Who on Saturday then?

  1. The 20 minutes of padding in the middle of the script
  2. The bit where they forced David Tennant to do an Austin Powers impression?
  3. The fact someone had turned the volume on the incidental music all the way up to 11?

Hopefully next week’s will be better.

Prison Break getting more and more impressive. And Lost, get your skates on

12 April 2006 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

Okay, Prison Break is still immensely stupid at heart, but I’ve actually been surprised by how well the show is progressing in the US. Last week, we had the flashback episode that showed most of the inmates on the outside and how they all wound up in jail. This week we had the “it’s all falling apart” episode. What I liked about it was the economy of writing. In a show like Prison Break that has a weekly cliffhanger and an ongoing plot, there’s a tendency on the part of the viewer to assume that any obstacle that gets thrown up is purely for the sake of the cliffhanger.

This week’s episode threw back two events that had almost been forgotten from last year. I won’t spoil it for UK viewers by saying what they were, but by episode end, you’ll be thinking to yourself “Ooh, that’s clever” and you’ll have new respect for Michael and his planning skills. And, incidentally, for the other inmates, who aren’t so bad at planning either, it turns out.

Plus it had Michelle Forbes in it. Anything with Michelle Forbes in it has to be good by definition.

By the way, for those of you not watching Prison Break and wondering if there’s going to be six more seasons of people trying to break out of jail and constantly being foiled, it’s already been revealed that season two is going to consist of the escapees on the run after their first season break out – although not everyone manages to escape. So it’s not going to be Lost – The Prison Days.

On that subject, could the writers get a move on with Lost please? It’s starting to irritate? Still, I was expecting that. After all, it comes from the writers of Alias, the show that was all tease, no real plot development and no real payoff. From what I hear, Alias‘s final episode isn’t even going to mention Rambaldi. No Rambaldi pay-off after five years? Bastardos! On that track record, I’m confidently predicting they’re all still going to be stuck on that island with no explanations at the end of the seventh season.

US TV

Review: Pepper Dennis 1×1

9 April 2006 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

Let’s play a game. It’s a new game I’ve just invented. I promise it’s better than my last one. It’s called Through the D Hole. The D stands for demographics. It was originally going to be Audience, but A doesn’t rhyme with ‘Key’. Plus the game would have had a whole host of other connotations I didn’t really intend. So demographics it is.

This is how it works. It’s pretty much like Through the Keyhole in that through a series of clues about a TV series, you have to guess the target demographic of the series. The fewer clues, the cleverer you are and the more derivative the show. Simple, huh?

To show you how it works, we’re going to run through an example. The show we’re going to use as an example is Pepper Dennis.

Pepper Dennis

So that’s your first clue. Let’s study the punctuation carefully. It’s not Pepper, Dennis?, which would probably be some arch comedy of manners in the vein of Keeping Up Appearances. It’s not Pepper Dennis!, which would probably be a game show in which people throw various powders at the eponymous Dennis. It’s Pepper Dennis. Since shows need to have reasonably descriptive names or else no one will watch them after spotting them in TV Guide, we can assume Pepper Dennis is the name of a person rather than a boat or law firm.

So what kind of person is called ‘Pepper Dennis’? No real human being, so that’s a problem. Since US TV shows named after the lead characters have this Dickensian idea that names are a clue to personality, we know that ‘Pepper’ has to be sparky. Furthermore, we can assume it’s a woman, not a man, because it sounds too wimpy for a made up male name on TV (it would have to be something like ‘Semtex Dennis’ if were to be a man). Wow. We’re doing well already.

So we have a sparky female lead in a show named after her. That gives us two possible demographics: women and teenage/young men. But shows with female leads that use two or more names of the character are always targeted at women (think Ally McBeal, Sue Thomas: FBEye) rather than men (think Buffy, Tru Calling, etc), except when it’s a sitcom (Roseanne, Reba, Blossom, etc). So Pepper Dennis is targeted at women. Pepper isn’t quite a grown-up name so we’re talking young women.

Ta da. I’ll name that demographic in one, David.

See how easy that was? Given just the name of this one show, we were able to work out its exact demographic. And since it only took one clue, we already know, well in advance, just how derivative it is, thus saving us all from having to watch it. It’s a useful game, as well as fun.

Let’s compare with the facts though, just to make sure we didn’t skimp on the workings out and to make sure this game works.

Pepper Dennis stars Rebecca Romijn as Pepper Dennis, one of those journalists who exist purely to prey upon the weak in TV dramas. It’s true in real life of course. I’d have taken over the world by now, if it weren’t for those meddling kids.

Piper is always after a story and being beautiful, aggressive and otherwise perfect, always gets it. She has high standards in men, too, and only someone at least as good as her will ever woo her.

But wait. A new anchor arrives at her station. Before she’s met him at work though, she ends up sleeping with him! Hilarity results, as you can imagine, particularly when it turns out he’s as good as her. Has Pepper found true love? Will the return of her loser sister to her life make her a better person?

Of course she has. Of course she will. Are you nuts? The show has as much originality as the “sisters bonding over a tub of ice cream while they share their woes about men” scene at the end. I could write down for you – now if you wanted – the exact formula used to pick every single nuance of character in each role. I’m surprised they even credit a writer on the show, given that every element of it was determined by focus group and watching old episodes of Gilmore Girls and Dawson’s Creek.

Pepper will continue to seek out stories, episode by episode, find out that the way forward in her career – and love – is to embrace not suppress the woman inside herself. Only then, when she has accepted her vulnerabilities make her strong, will she get everything she wants. No need to watch it, now.

So there we go. Game proven. Over to you audience. Your next challenges: Thief, currently airing on FX; and if you haven’t already read my review of it, Teachers, airing on NBC. Enjoy your trip through the D hole…

US TV

Review: Teachers (US: NBC)

4 April 2006 Rob Buckley Post a comment

Only one episode to go on so far, but Teachers is shaping up as distinctly average. A re-make of the Channel 4 show, it’s been turned into a bog-standard NBC sitcom: frankly, if it weren’t in widescreen, I’d have assumed I was watching something from the mid-80s. Plot for those who don’t know it: teachers at a school aren’t really the altruistic providers of knowledge to kids that propaganda would have you believe. Except (NBC twist here), they secretly are and are just playing at being rubbish in case that stops them being cool. Oh dear.

There aren’t really any saving graces: the characters are all stereotypes of the genre – there’s the nerdy one, the cool one who really isn’t the total slacker he pretends to be, the ‘babe’ who the cool one fancies and who’d go for him if he wasn’t such a slacker and oh God I’m falling asleep just listing them. The dialogue is actually surprisingly clever in places, but is delivered badly and is mostly drowned out by an awful laughter track; Sarah Alexander is Sarah Alexander but with a slightly exaggerated Englishness (“What’s your favourite thing in the world?” “A perfectly brewed pot of tea”. Give me strength, guys. You couldn’t do better than that for an English character when the whole show was lifted from a British comedy series?); and the rest of the cast is pretty uninspiring.

Predictions: liable to be cancelled very soon. Probably won’t be picked up by the UK except on late-night satellite (maybe Paramount Comedy).