It’s “What have you been watching?”, your chance to recommend anything you’ve been watching this week
The Winter Olympics continues to have its chilling effect on TV programming, with an almost glacial release of new shows and plenty of old shows frozen in their tracks. Elsewhere, I’ve reviewed Stargate Origins (Stargate Command) and Here and Now (US: HBO). But that’s been the lot, more or less, in the past week. That does mean, though, that I’ve been able to christen a new movie feature on TMINE this week, Movie Monday, to take in film reviews, which means WHYBW can now focus on tele.
Black Lightning‘s on holiday this week, so that just leaves us with the remaining usual regulars: Corporate, Counterpart,DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, High Maintenance and TheMagicians, as well as the season finale of Baron Noir.Two of them are getting a promotion – can you guess which ones?
In the US: Sundays, HBO
In the UK: Tuesdays, 9pm, Sky Atlantic. Starts tonight
Is patience a virtue? It’s supposed to be, isn’t it? When it comes to TV, patience certainly can be a necessity, at least, as both the now-retired Carusometer and its successor, the Barrometer, can attest. Indeed, these days, plenty of shows start badly and it’s not before you get to anywhere between episodes three and seven that they get their acts together and reveal their true merits.
Patience is now particularly expected of us when it comes to ‘prestige TV’, which is often almost defined as being slower moving than regular TV. Remember The Leftovers? Great by the second or third season, apparently, but the first season was depressingly dreadful.
Maybe you are virtuous enough to be so patient as to stick with any given show until it gets good. But in the age of Peak TV, you need something more than patience – you need time. There’s so much good television, particularly serial shows, and prestige shows, you have to have oodles of hours spare in your day to actually watch them.
Here and Now
So how patient should we be with HBO’s latest prestige project, Here and Now? Already, you can sense its worthiness, with a name that’s as portentous as This is Us‘s – it might as well have called itself Very Important Drama About Modern Life. It’s also from Alan Ball, who wrote American Beauty and created Six Feet Under and True Blood. Very prestigious indeed.
Then there’s the cast and the plot. It stars Tim Robbins and Holly Hunter (wow!) as two former 60s radicals now all grown-up and living in Portland, Oregon – a place with so many liberal niceties and ticks, it can be satirised on multiple levels for multiple seasons with Portlandia. But it gets even more liberal than that: Robbins is a philosophy professor, Hunter a former therapist who nows heads something called ‘the Empathy Initiative’ focusing on conflict resolution by teaching empathy.
Even if that weren’t enough, they’ve adopted kids of different races from all around the world, all of whom are now adults. There’s Jerrika Hinton (Liberia), who’s the creator and owner of a retail fashion website; Raymond Lee (Vietnam), who’s now a successful life coach; and
Daniel Zovatto (Colombia), a student studying video game design.
At this point, even if you’re quite literally a card-carrying liberal like me, your patience will probably be extremely tested. You might not even have the patience to start watching the show. I wouldn’t blame you.
Even if you can muster that patience, the first episode is extremely… prestige. You get to watch Robbins screwing around with young prostitutes because he can’t cope with being 60, having a loving family and seeing Donald Trump as president. Hinton’s a dick to her staff for having the temerity to put a hat on a male model who’s being photographed. Hunter gets to patronise her Spanish-speaking staff with extended r-rolls and constantly rail against Western values and medicine. Lee’s offering motivational advice about not crying, while not actually having any relationships, while Zovatto’s having sex with blokes he meets in bars. Hunter and Robbins’ birth daughter (Sosie Bacon) is having arguments with teenage alt-righters in school about the patriarchy. Everyone’s wondering what pills they should be taking to cope with their undiagnosed ADHD or whatever.
And for about 45 minutes, it’s the most tedious, naval-gazing, First World Problems nonsense you could ever hope not to have to watch, interspersed with trips to the dry cleaners. You’ll want to throw a brick through the TV then drive down to Hooters with your shotgun in the back of your pick-up truck.
What, you might think, is the point of all of this? When exactly is the shoe going to drop and the series reveal why a lot of money and talented people have been spending their time on it?
The Stargate series is one of the most successful science-fiction franchises in history. While it doesn’t yet have the longevity of Doctor Who, it could get there, even though it’s struggled a bit at times.
It began with a relatively simple, blockbuster movie that sees the US military hiring an archaeologist (James Spader) to help them understand an ancient alien artefact found in the Egyptian desert in the 1920s. The giant metal ring turns out to be a gateway to another world, on the other side of which are the descendants of Egyptian slaves still in thrall to an alien pretending to be their god, Ra. Although the military, led by Kurt Russell, initially plans just to nuke the planet, they end up freeing the slaves and killing the bad guy. Hoorah!
Since this wasn’t yet the age of the three-movie franchise, from that idea was born a follow-up TV series Stargate SG-1 that continued the story and expanded it. Before you knew it (well, after 10 seasons), there were different races of different aliens impersonating different gods on countless worlds, dozens of Stargate teams, and further spin-off series including Stargate: Atlantis and Stargate: Universe, all of which added up to a metric fuck-tonne of continuity and mythology.
All good things have to end some time, though, so the franchise has been somewhat dormant for a few years. But since August, it’s been building an online presence over at ‘Stargate Command’, which now has its own, exclusive, 10-part, shortform series, Stargate Origins.
Saving the world again
Stargate Origins does a tricky job of navigating that decade+ of mythology to give us a show that almost miraculously fits in with Stargate continuity, and acts as both a sequel to the movie and a prequel to the various TV series, all while being faithful to its predecessors yet doing something a bit different.
The show is set in 1938, 10 years after archaeologist Paul Langford (now played by Star Trek: Enterprise‘s Connor Trinneer) discovered the Stargate in Egypt with his then young daughter Catherine. He’s still in Egypt. He still doesn’t know what the Stargate does. In fact, he thinks it’s a new kind of Rosetta Stone.
Meanwhile, Catherine (Ellie Gall) is now a grown woman on the verge of marriage to a British soldier (Philip Alexander). She’s losing interest in the Stargate and is thinking of heading off to archaeological projects new.
Then the head of Hitler’s Occult Unit (Aylam Orian) turns up. He’s found a bit of parchment in Thailand that reveals the Stargate’s true nature, as well as a set of seven signs on the gate that will open up the doorway to another planet. Hopefully he’ll be able to find something he can steal for Hitler and Germany while he’s there – and he’s taking Trinneer along to help him.
Can Gall, Alexander and local soldier Shvan Aladdin open the gate, rescue Trinneer and save the world from both aliens and Nazis?
Raiders of the Lost Gate
And that’s the first three episodes – they’re only 10 minutes each, so we’ve effectively had just the first act of a three- to four-act, 1h40 movie. Overall, while they’re a bit cheaper looking than the TV series and movie, they’re actually not half bad.
Stargate Origins is also fun and smart. While carefully not really contradicting anything the future shows say about both Stargates and Catherine Langford, it manages to avoid the heavy weight of continuity previous shows have had to deal with, while marrying the strengths of Stargate and Raiders of the Lost Ark.
The Raiders comparison I don’t really have to explain – you can spot the parallels even from the plot summary above – but it’s not an angle the show has ever taken before, despite the time travel options it made available to itself in episodes such as 1969. That gives it a both a different tone to the other shows as well as a period charm.
Also as per Raiders, the Nazis are a smart and worthy bunch of adversaries, not merely mono-dimensional moustache twirlers. They know a lot more than Trinneer does and Orian spends a lot of time guessing correctly what’s going on while Trinneer makes obvious gaffs. There’s also comedy: Orian has a camera crew with him to record everything for posterity and despite the short runtime of each episode, Stargate Origins is wise enough to have silly little scenes, such as when director Sarah Navratil tries to work out which side is Orian’s best side.
It also keeps in some of the features of the movie that didn’t quite make it to the TV series, such as the Go’auld and their followers still only speak a derivation of Ancient Egyptian, not English. Yet at the same time, all the more established features of the TV shows are there, such as the ‘dial home devices’ that are supposed to run the Stargate and continuity is respected.
New team, new pricing
This is a web series for a small platform so expecting great acting is probably a mistake. All the same, both Gall and Trinneer make for a decent pair of leads whom you want to root for. Everyone else is a little bit hammier than is optimal and Alexander doesn’t exactly make you have huge hopes for Britain’s chances in Africa in the Second World War – you can tell why Catherine ends up with Ernest. But we’re not talking ‘YouTube Star’ bad and everyone is more than watchable.
Is this all worth the price? Well, what is the price? It’s a little unclear. You get the first three episodes for free, just by registering for a Stargate Command account. After that? Dunno.
It may be that the remaining episodes will be available for a fee. At the moment, for US$20, you currently get access to not just Stargate Origins but every Stargate TV series, so it might be bundled with that. $20 sounds a bit pricey for the final to two or three acts of a single movie, but if you want all the other TV series, too, that’s not bad.
However, $20 only gets you access to May 15, after which “the All-Access content will no longer be available through your All-Access Pass, but you will still be a member of the Stargate Command community, which will continue.”
What happens after that? Dunno. This interview doesn’t make it much clearer either.
So it’s all a good start, but you might want to hold off getting sucked into Stargate Origins until the final pricing model is revealed, just in case it turns out there’s something scary on the other side.
It’s “What have you been watching?”, your chance to recommend anything you’ve been watching this week
For once, I actually managed to watch and review all the TV I promised to watch and review last week. Well done me. True, Boxset Monday ended up as Boxset Tuesday, but that’s largely because Squinters turned out not to be Boxset Monday-worthy material.
Later in the week, I’ll be dealing with HBO’s Here and Now, as well as anything else that pops up despite the Winter Olympics. But today, there’s the latest episodes of the current roster of regulars: Baron Noir, Black Lightning, Corporate, Counterpart and The Magicians. Star Trek: Discovery‘s season finale has aired, too, but taking its place in the viewing queue is the returning DC’s Legends of Tomorrow. Lastly, it turned out that High Maintenance returned a few weeks ago without my noticing, so I’ve been playing catch-up with that.
In Australia: Available on ABC Me
In the UK: Netflix. No premiere date yet
Wu Cheng’en’s Journey to the West is a classic of Chinese literature – indeed, it’s one of the four great classic Chinese novels. The story of Buddhist monk Tripitaka’s quest for some sacred scrolls, aided by his magical disciples Monkey, Sandy and Pigsy, naturally enough it’s been adapted numerous times for TV. However, while the book is obviously well known in the East, in the West, people often watch these shows without realising that what they’re watching is an adaptation of anything at all, let alone Journey to the West.
Funky Monkey
If you’re American, the most recent adaptation of Journey to the West was Into the Badlands. You might not have realised this, but to be fair, that’s because it had almost nothing to do with the original story. Nevertheless, it was theoretically an adaptation.
However, if you’re British, Australian or a New Zealander and of a certain age, you’re almost 100% likely to know of at least one, far more faithful adaptation of Journey to the West: Monkey!
A huge hit, it was made by Nippon TV/NHK in Japan then dubbed into English by the BBC, but probably only 1% of the audience at most knew it was both a surprisingly faithful yet also free adaptation of Journey to the West.
New legends
Watching The New Legends of Monkey, I think we’ll have pretty much the same situation for a whole new generation of viewers. Aimed squarely at the same ‘children and young adults’ market as Monkey, it also acknowledges all the changes in storytelling that TV has undergone in the past 30+ years, moving us further away from the original Journey to the West to give us something that as its name suggests is a bit more Monkey meets Hercules: The Legendary Journeys
Ditching any Daoist or Buddhist influences completely, The New Legends of Monkey relocates the action from China, India and the Silk Road to a fantasy realm inhabited by humans, gods and demons. Most of the gods have been gone for 500 years, leaving demons to run the realm unhindered. A resistance movement exists, but they’re pinning their hopes on tracing the location of the ‘Monkey King’ (Chai Hansen), a god imprisoned in rock for centuries but whom they can revive if they place his crown on his head.
Trouble is, the demons want to stop them, so it’s left to serving girl Luciane Buchanan to first find and free Monkey, then locate the Sacred Scrolls that he hid before his imprisonment. Adopting the identity of monk Tripitaka, she soon recruits two other gods, Pigsy (Josh Thomson) and Sandy (Emilie Cocquerel), to help her and Monkey find the Sacred Scrolls, all while the demons try to stop them, prompting numerous martial arts fights. Of course, it would all go a lot quicker if Monkey could summon that cloud of his…
