TV reviews

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

Allan Hawco in CBC's Caught
Canadian TV

Review: Caught 1×1 (Canada: CBC)

6 March 2018 Rob Buckley Post a comment

In Canada: Mondays, 9/9.30NT, CBC

Sometimes, you watch a TV show and you wonder to yourself, “What exactly is the point of this?” Not in the sense of it being rubbish, but simply because you want to know what its underlying message is. Usually there is one – it’s what helps plenty of writers to put pen to paper after all – but sometimes, there is no message.

Indeed, after watching the first episode of Caught, CBC’s new crime mini-series based on the acclaimed novel by Lisa Moore, I can’t help but wonder if its only point is to give most of the great and the good of Canadian acting the chance to wear bad wigs, since there doesn’t appear to be a message of any kind – at least, not yet.

Set in 1978, the show stars Allan Hawco (Republic of Doyle, Frontier, The Book of Negroes, ZOS: Zone of Separation) as a former weed-dealer who’s been in prison for four years. However, one night, he manages to make his escape with the help of Roger Cross (Continuum, Arrow, Motive, The Returned, Dark Matter). After laying low for all of a night, he decides to head off to join his former partner Eric Johnson (Smallville, Flash Gordon, Rookie Blue), who’s now branched off into harder stuff and is running a sizeable drugs empire in far warmer climes than Canada. Hot in pursuit is somewhat ill, disgraced detective Paul Gross (Due South, Eastwick, Men with Brooms) and somewhat overlooked, female detective Enuka Okuma (Rookie Blue), who hope he’ll lead them to Johnson. Meanwhile, Johnson has his own troubles, including the fact new business partner Greg Bryk (Frontier, Mary Kills People) has a new girlfriend, Tori Anderson (No Tomorrow, Blindspot).

Paul Gross in Caught
Paul Gross in Caught

And?

All of which is very, very familiar. It’s the standard realm of crime dramas about the drugs trade. Cops, double crosses, plans within plans, everyone seeming to be one thing when they’re actually something else. I wouldn’t be surprised if everyone turned out to be an undercover cop by the final episode. Indeed, one of the points made about Moore’s novel was that the plot was very familiar, even if it did flit between twists – it was only her writing that made the novel anything but generic.

Certainly, by the end of the first episode, I found that I’d been more interested in the constantly bad wigs that each and every person has to wear than the plot, even when it’s revealed (spoiler alert) (spoiler alert) Hawco is really working with Gross to catch Johnson. Gross probably has the most staggering look, although it might be because he’s actually gone white (!), but Okuma’s and Hawco’s wigs are pretty astounding. Only Cross looks the same as always, but I’ll put that down to all the time-travelling he’s been doing of late.

As well as wigs, there are some nice cars, but without the internal monologue Moore uses to drive Hawco’s character in the book, there’s precious little here to lift the show out of the mundane. Were it not for the period details and the fact it’s set in Canada (and the Dominican Republic for a bit of glamour), it could be an episode of more or less any crime show.

Eric Johnson in Caught
Eric Johnson in Caught

Conclusion

The cast are fine. Gross is perhaps playing up his grizzled old detective too much, while Hawco’s almost the opposite – a seemingly nice guy, even though he’s been taking beatings in prisons for four years. Okuma does exactly what you’d expect of her role, as does Johnson, who’s pleasingly oily, if not quite as sociopathic as he needs to be. That just leaves Anderson to surprise, playing the diametric opposite of her No Tomorrow mouse.

But in terms of plotting, there’s nothing much here so far for the discerning viewer. Other than bad 70s hair.

Jeff Daniels in Hulu (US)'s The Looming Tower
US TV

Third-episode verdict: The Looming Tower (US: Hulu; UK: Amazon)

5 March 2018 Rob Buckley 6 Comments

In the US: Wednesdays, Hulu
In the UK: Thursdays, Amazon

How soon is too soon? 9/11 was a staggering 17 years ago, more or less, yet it still looms over daily politics. So is it too soon for the events leading up to it – and its fallout – to be dramatised on TV, even by documentary makers working from a book by a Pulitzer Prize-winner?

Possibly. To be honest, The Looming Tower feels a little brave just for trying to do what it’s doing – namely to point fingers at real people and organisations to suggest what went wrong with the US’s intelligence apparatus that allowed Osama bin Laden to fatally attack New York and Washington DC in 2001. But it does it so well and intelligently that you feel it’s earned the right.

Looming tower

It starts its narrative in 1998, introducing us to the two real adversaries of the piece: Jeff Daniels, the head of the FBI’s I-49 Squad counter-terrorism unit, and Peter Sarsgaard, the CIA’s corresponding head of ‘Alec Station’. Both want to catch Osama bin Laden, but disagree on methods. Daniels wants to approach it as a criminal matter, building a case against him so he can be arrested and tried in court, working his way up through the minor levels of al Qaeda until he gets to the boss. Sarsgaard on the other hand doesn’t care about the little people and is worried that using intel to catch them will let the big guy get away. He’d rather rendition, waterboard, bribe and carpet bomb his way around the Middle East until he can cut the head off the snake, even if it means thousands of civilians will be killed in the process – at least they won’t be American civilians.

Sarsgaard’s approach means that he’s not going to give Daniels any of the intel he receives, as Daniels will only end doing something stupid like using it to arrest people. What could go wrong? The Looming Tower shows us exactly what.

In most fictional shows, Sarsgaard would be the daring goodie, Daniels the by-the-book dullard who’s missing the bigger picture and needs to be sidetracked. But although it’s ultimately the CIA that gets its way, defining US tactics for years post 9-11 before it switches to Daniels’ approach, The Looking Tower instead sides with Daniels.

Saarsgaard is a brittle theoretician with zero people skills and just as little field experience. Nevertheless, he believes he’s the smartest man in the room – everyone calls him ‘the professor’ – and can’t see any flaws in his ‘perfect’ (aka insane) plans, other than the stupidity of other people.

Meanwhile, Daniels is all about feet on the ground and getting to know the enemy, using the normal skills of law enforcement. His methodical use of human intelligence is going to work best in the long-term and avoid potentially bolstering al-Qaeda’s recruitment campaigns; it’s also going to stop atrocities from happening in the short-term.

Central to this is Tahar Rahim (A Prophet, The Last Panthers), one of the FBI’s eight (read them and weep) Arabic speakers and a lapsed Lebanese-American Muslim who joined the FBI for a bet. But Bill Camp, an ageing former soldier trained in counter-intelligence techniques, also proves to be important as he uses his training to extract information peacefully from those who have been arrested.

Tahar Rahim in The Looming Tower
Tahar Rahim in The Looming Tower

Nairobi

Although the action sometimes shifts to the 2004 congressional 9/11 enquiry, the first three episodes are still largely set three years before 2001, when bin Laden’s plans for the US are still nascent. The story therefore focuses on his warning to the world in his interview with ABC on US TV, followed by his assaults in Africa, including the bombing of the US embassy in Nairobi, and the subsequent FBI investigation.

Here, the show takes a leaf from Narcos‘ book by interspersing the show’s impressive recreation of events with TV footage of the time, making everything far more real than it would otherwise have been. It also does everything intelligently and no one is stupid – arrogant, maybe, but not stupid. The FBI, the Kenyan police and al Qaeda are all respectful professionals, as well as fully rounded human beings.

There’s a real air of verisimilitude to proceedings, in terms of both the FBI’s work as well as al Qaeda’s planning. If a trite cliché of the spy or police procedural genre comes anywhere near the plot, it quickly gets chewed up and spat out. There’s also some great dialogue and even moments of comedy, mainly involving national intelligence co-ordinator Michael Stuhlbarg’s rebuffs to Saarsgaard (“I know you think there’s a button under my desk that can authorise bombings at your word, but I have to tell you, no such button has been supplied to me”).

Okay, that’s not 100% true of the activities in England, with South Africa not wholly convincing as a double for both London and Manchester. But I’ve seen worse and Tony Curran’s Special Branch officer clearly comes from Northern Ireland not the Republic – the show doesn’t overlook the IRA’s activities in previous decades, either.

Peter Sarsgaard in The Looming Tower
Peter Sarsgaard in The Looming Tower

Conclusion

There is perhaps a little too much focus on Daniels’ bigamist (or should that be trigamist) private life, as well as Rahim’s dating activities. Alec Baldwin has yet to convince as CIA director George Tenet and the story’s thrust is perhaps a little too one-sided, with the CIA clearly identified by the show as the problem, with little contrasting evidence from the agency’s point of view. And while The Looming Tower is better paced and better written than its ultimate epilogue Zero Dark Thirty, it’s obviously nowhere near as well directed, even if its paced documentary style serves the narrative.

But if you like your Homeland-style spy thrillers with real-world authenticity, great acting from Sarsgaard and Rahim, and genuine stakes, The Looming Tower will be a great addition to your viewing queue.

Barrometer Rating: 1

The Barrometer for the Looming Tower

Good Girls
US TV

Review: Good Girls 1×1 (US: NBC)

5 March 2018 Rob Buckley Post a comment

In the US: Mondays, 10/9c, NBC

Every so often, NBC tries to do working class. Like a trust-funder volunteering in a soup kitchen, it’s never very comfortable doing it, but it holds its nose and tries its best all the same.

Kudos to the network for at least trying to go blue collar with the likes of Superstore, but it’s going to be a while before NBC is ready to take off its latex gloves and hang out with the customers if Good Girls is anything to go by. It sees Christina Hendricks (Mad Men) and Mae Whitman (Parenthood) playing working class, Detroit sisters, Retta their equally working class Detroit friend.

All are down on their luck. Hendricks is married to car dealer Matthew Lillard (Homeland) and discovers not only is Lillard having an affair, he’s made some bad deals and bankrupted the family. Retta’s married to a security guard but their kid is sick and needs some very expensive medical treatments. Whitman is a single mother who works at a grocery store and whose ex- is now rich and looking to get custody of their son with his new wife.

Naturally, Whitman has the brainwave of robbing her workplace to solve all their problems. However, rather than simply mulling it over as a fun but crazy idea, they actually go ahead and do it. Even more surprisingly, the store’s safe turns out to have half a million dollars in it, making them rich over night.

Why does it have so much money in it? Well, that’s a slightly less fun story…

Desperate housewives

Good Girls has a confused ‘vaccinated time travel‘ feel. It’s happy venturing into the realm of soccer mums and checkout girls for all of about 10 minutes, during which it tries to show the misery of poverty with no way out. Retta’s visits to her doctor should be compulsory viewing for anyone who thinks the NHS can’t get any worse, while Whitman’s sexually harassed, abused worker is never going to benefit from a #MeToo hashtag. Hendricks isn’t exactly starting from zero, but the fear is she’s going to end up on less than zero before too long.

Guided tour through poverty over, soon it’s off to the land of Porsches, iPhones and doctors who give you refreshing flavoured waters – all accompanied by an almost audible sigh of relief as it musters up the courage to try again next week.

Yet Good Girls also feels there’s a certain nobility in being penniless, with Whitman’s son more comfortable with her when she has no money than when she does. The show quickly punishes its heroines for wanting to have more than they’ve got, even if it is because they’ve committed a crime. Spoiler alert: (spoiler alert) Whitman’s boss works out it was her and tries to blackmail her for sexual favours; Retta’s husband succeeds in getting into police academy, putting them both in a difficult position; and all three women are soon at the mercy of the (naturally dangerous because they’re ‘ethnic’) gang who were storing the money in the safe. Women: know your place.

That confused feeling extends to its indecision over whether it’s a comedy or a drama. One moment Retta’s being ignored by a hurried doctor and told she needs to find $10,000 a month to have a chance of keeping her kid alive, the next Hendricks is having an embarrassing comedic waxing. The hold-up is all for laughs, as the ‘good girls’ get to pretend at being bad-asses, but by the end of the episode (spoiler alert) there’s a near-rape and a brutal murder.

It’s Desperate Housewives meets Sons of Anarchy meets Desperate Housewives again. Except not very good.

Whitman unsurprisingly does well, given she gets the bulk of the meaty lines and drama. Retta is mainly there for the comedy and pathos, but doesn’t have the material to work with. Hendricks is largely off in her own revenge comedy with Lillard that feels oddly disconnected from the others’ more visceral plights.

Average girls

Good Girls is neither awful nor great. It’s a show that wants to take a walk on the wild side but gets a bit frightened when it does and quickly decides everyone should stay in their place. Whether it’ll allow all three women to ultimately Break Bad or not, I can’t say, but I don’t think I’ll hang around to find out.

David Morrisey as Aulus
US TV

What have you been watching? Including Britannia and Black Lightning

28 February 2018 Rob Buckley 8 Comments

It’s “What have you been watching?”, your chance to recommend anything you’ve been watching this week

The Winter Olympics is over! Isn’t it? I think it is. I have to admit I’ve not been paying it any attention.

But it seems to be over, judging by the fact we’re starting to get some new shows again in the US. I’ve already reviewed CBS’s Living Biblically this week and at some point in the next few days, I’ll also be casting a critical eye of Good Girls and The Looming Tower. I’m skipping that Biggie and Tupac thing (Ed: Unsolved), on the general grounds it’s a mini-series, a biopic and an anthology, which is a fatal triple combination.

I might give Heathers a go, if I can be arsed, but I’ve not seen the original and other reviews haven’t been kind. I might give Canada’s Crawford and Little Dog a whirl, too, assuming I can find both a way to watch them and the time.

But that’s all for the next week to reveal. Until then, after the jump, I’ll be looking at the current regulars: Black Lightning, Corporate, Counterpart, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, High Maintenance and The Magicians. And since I had a little time to spare, I finally caught up with the final four episodes of Britannia.

Continue reading “What have you been watching? Including Britannia and Black Lightning”

Living Biblically
US TV

Review: Living Biblically 1×1 (US: CBS)

27 February 2018 Rob Buckley 4 Comments

In the US: Mondays, 9:30/8:30c, CBS

The Bible is full of guidance on how to live your life. However, it was written a long time ago, so while certain bits of advice are timeless (eg “Love thy neighbour”), some of the more specific parts, particularly from the more detailed sections at the beginning, don’t really work as well in modern society and may even not have made much sense in the first place.

For example, there’s plenty about what to eat and drink that would have prevented outbreaks of food poisoning in a hot Middle Eastern country that didn’t have refrigerators, for example, but bacon’s a pretty safe food stuff in most countries now. Meanwhile, rules about how women should be treated when they’re menstruating really don’t cut the mustard any more (Leviticus 15: “Whenever a woman has her menstrual period, she will be ceremonially unclean for seven days. Anyone who touches her during that time will be unclean until evening… On the eighth day she must bring two turtledoves or two young pigeons and present them to the priest at the entrance of the Tabernacle”) .

Anyone who decides to stick to the word of the Bible (and all the words at that) is going to have their work cut out for them and probably get some strange looks, too. Indeed, such a source of comedy (and education to some extent) is this idea, it’s already been a best-selling book called The Year of Living Biblically, which has now been turned into a US sitcom, Living Biblically.

Strange rules

This sees tepid Catholic Jay R Ferguson playing a newspaper film critic whose best friend has died really. Then atheist/agnostic wife (Lindsey Kraft) reveals that she’s pregnant and Ferguson starts to search for more meaning to his life.

So he turns to his Catholicism and the Bible for inspiration in his time of need, deciding to live as closely as possible to the Good Book’s teaching, in order to be the best father possible – something that his new priest (Cougar Town‘s Ian Gomez) and his Rabbi friend David Krumholtz (Numb3rs) both find to lie somewhere between commendable and borderline insane.

Episode one of the show sets up all the characters, including Ferguson’s very un-newspaper-like workplace, while putting Ferguson through the mildest of challenges – to not wear fabrics of more than one material (Leviticus 19:19: “Keep my decrees. Do not mate different kinds of animals. Do not plant your field with two kinds of seed. Do not wear clothing woven of two kinds of material”).

Slightly more interestingly, the show also challenges him to stone an adulterer (Deuteronomy 22:22: “If a man is found sleeping with another man’s wife, both the man who slept with her and the woman must die”), which is a least a little brave, since he does actually go through with it.

However, it does indicate that maybe the focus is going to be completely on the Old Testament (otherwise, John 8:11: “Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery. Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?”…When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her”), since that offers the most opportunities for laughs, although not for depth or any real guidance.

Living Biblically

Simple sitcom

However, that’s really the show’s only source of laughs, since everything concocted to provide a framework for this quasi-biblical scholarship is pretty limp. It’s actually relatively amiable stuff for a single-camera CBS sitcom and ultimately this is still a show about someone trying to be nice to other people. But of laughs, there were but a few – certainly nowhere near enough to feed 5,000, let alone 15 million viewers.

Indeed, amiable is the best that can be said about the show. The cast are okay, but not hugely charismatic. The moral dilemmas are minimal and trite. Jokes are formulaic.

Still, if you want a little biblical education that’s largely set in a bar, you could do worse.