TV reviews

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

Stranger Things 2
Streaming TV

Boxset Monday: Stranger Things 2 (Netflix)

6 November 2017 Rob Buckley 5 Comments

Did you love Alien? Or did you prefer Aliens? They are, of course, two films with a lot of similarities, including the fact Sigourney Weaver and the same HR Giger-created alien feature in both of them. Yet they also have quite different sensibilities: Alien is a haunted house movie in which a danger that the protagonists have to avoid might be round every corner; Aliens, on the other hand, is a war movie in which the dangers keep coming at the protagonists who have to do what they can to survive, largely by running away.

I point this out for a couple of reasons. The first is that Stranger Things is back. Netflix occasionally likes to dump shows like The OA into our laptops with zero fanfare and so it was with Stranger Things, which popped into our ‘New on Netflix’ queues way back in July 2016 without so much as a kazoo to announce the fact. Indeed, all I managed to get to say about it before I went on holiday was:

I might do a longer review of this when I get back since although I paid almost minimal attention to it while it was in production and only reluctantly decided I’d give it a try this week for the sake of completeness, I’m so glad I did, as it’s an almost painfully beautiful, near-perfect recreation of the 80s, as well as 80s genre movies and TV, taking in everything from ET and Goonies through to The Thing and D.A.R.Y.L. I loved pretty much every second of it, from its title sequence and music through to the plot itself, which even though you can probably guess most of it just by extrapolating from other shows or anything by Stephen King, is delightful, with an innocence you just don’t get any more. One of my favourite TV things this year, give it a go, as it’s only eight episodes and Winona Ryder’s in it. A second season has already been commissioned.

And so it came to pass that it was one of my top shows of last year.

Now we have Stranger Things 2 (not just ‘the second season’ of Stranger Things in case you’re wondering why you can’t spot it on your Netflix iOS app), which arrives with vastly more trumpeting following the success of Stranger Things. The show follows on a year after the original with the same cast as before and the same plots as before, too. Our heroes are still at middle school in Hawkins, Indiana (that’s probably somewhere near Eerie, I’m guessing). Will’s back, of course, as is the thing he coughed up at the end of Stranger Things. Psychokinetic lab experiment Eleven isn’t back, but she’s not too far away, it’s safe to say, given she’s front and centre in the poster and the trailer.

The hole in the world that leads to the parallel dimension known as the ‘Upside Down’ is back, too. That’s not good, mind, because although the ‘demogorgon’ of the first season is deceased, there’s a whole lot more on the other side of the Hawkins gateway to the Upside Down and it wants to come through. Worryingly, not only can Will see it, it can see him, too.

But it’s also the start of a new school year, and there are new arrivals in town, including a couple of uber-cool siblings from California, one of whom is called ‘Mad Max’ and soon draws the boys’ attention. Will our young heroes and heroines survive not just whatever comes out of the Upside Down for them but the social inequities of middle school life and first loves? And will they ever tell everyone what happened to poor old Babs?

Some spoilers (although I’ll do my best to avoid them) after this lovely trailer and the jump.

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SWAT CBS
US TV

Review: S.W.A.T. 1×1 (US: CBS)

6 November 2017 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

In the US: Thursdays, 10/9c, CBS

It would be tempting to think of S.W.A.T., CBS’s new mid-mid-season replacement drama, as the latest and last of the current trend in military shows that’s so far given us The Brave, SEAL Team and Valor. After all, watch any cop movie or TV show and you’l have quickly gleaned that S.W.A.T. (Special Weapons And Tactics) are a sort of militarised version of the US police who dress in black, have lots of guns and grenades, drive army-grade vehicles and burst into buildings to shoot criminals who also have lots of guns.

The truth is actually a little different, of course. The US and even Los Angeles aren’t so violent that they can justify having a bunch of dedicated armed ninja on staff, doing nothing but hanging around all day waiting to shoot things. So for the most part, SWAT officers are regular cops who receive specialised training but go about doing regular police work until they get the call – they usually carry their SWAT gear around in the backs of their cars, in fact.

Knowing this fact doesn’t actually make S.W.A.T. that much less mystifying, though. Even knowing that it’s an adaptation of a 1975 TV series that starred The Baron‘s Steve Forrest and Vegas‘s Robert Urich isn’t going to help you either, although it will help to explain the music played over the pilot episode’s final scene.

Because firstly, it’s actually not all that violent. More weirdly, though, rather than being a reboot of the original TV show, this new S.W.A.T. is really CBS’s answer to Marvel’s Luke Cage.

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Babylon Berlin nightclub scene
TV reviews

Review: Babylon Berlin 1×1-1×2 (Germany: Sky 1; UK: Sky Atlantic)

2 November 2017 Rob Buckley 4 Comments

In Germany: Fridays, 8.15pm, Sky 1. Started October 13
In the UK: Sundays, 9pm, Sky Atlantic. Starts November 5

Ask any Brit who didn’t take GCSE or A-level History what Germany, particularly Berlin, was like during the inter-war years, they probably won’t have much of an idea. Chances are that if they have a clue at all, that clue is going to be based on the movie Cabaret.

It’s a movie that subtextually looms over Babylon Berlin, Sky Deutschland’s epic new attempt to break into the international TV big leagues, following the success of Deutschland 83 and Amazon’s You Are Wanted. Yet while it fleshes out that cinematic snapshot of a society, Babylon Berlin is very much its own beast and owes as much to that other staple of German fiction, particularly TV fiction, the ‘Krimi’.

Based on the books of Volker Kutscher, Babylon Berlin is set in Berlin in 1929 and follows young police inspector Gereon Rath (Volker Bruch) after he arrives from Cologne to investigate a porn ring.

Volker Bruch as Gereon Rath in Babylon Berlin
Volker Bruch as Gereon Rath in Babylon Berlin © Frédéric Batier:X Filme

However, as the deaths begin to mount up, it soon becomes clear that the pornographers have connections to more dangerous people. On top of that, there’s a revolutionary band of Poles and Russians in town (the Fourth International), about whom the Bolsheviks, now led by Stalin, might have something to say, too. Needless to say, Bruch is on the case, even if it takes him to those debauched nightclubs you might have heard so much about…

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The Letdown
US TV

What have you been watching? Including The Letdown and Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency

1 November 2017 Rob Buckley 14 Comments

It’s “What have you been watching?”, my chance to tell you each week what movies and TV I’ve been watching recently and your chance to recommend anything you’ve been watching. TMINE recommends has all the reviews of all the TV shows TMINE has ever recommended, but for a complete list of TMINE’s reviews of (good, bad and insipid) TV shows and movies, there’s the definitive TV Reviews A-Z and Film Reviews A-Z. 

 

As mentioned yesterday, thanks to my having to deal with the antics of some customer service reps at Three (“Sure we can add that number to the new phone on your business account” – no, not my phone, that phone. Please don’t change my number) and Amazon (“Sorry, we’ve lost your order. It’s gone missing in transit.”), I didn’t have time to do “What have you been watching?” yesterday. But never fear, here it is.

Although I managed to review both of YouTube Red’s new shows, Ryan Hansen Solves Crimes on Television* and Lifeline, Boxset Monday took a bit of a back seat this week, since I was away at the weekend and BBC America decided it would be a chuffing good idea to air three episodes of the new season of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Agency (about which more later). Still, I’m now about halfway through season 2 of Stranger Things (Netflix), so Boxset Monday should be back on… Monday.

I had actually planned a replacement Boxset in case I didn’t manage to watch all of Stranger Things, but I only managed to watch two of the six episodes of 4 Blocks (Germany: TNT Serie; UK: Amazon), since it’s impossible to watch it on a commute (or even a weekend train journey next to a devout Muslim woman and her four-year-old daughter), given the number of scenes set in a strip club and/or porn cinema. Still, that’s in the pipeline, too.

Coming up in the next few days, a review of S.W.A.T. (US: CBS) and a preview of Berlin Babylon (Germany: Sky Deutschland; UK: Sky Atlantic). And maybe some other stuff.

But after the jump, I’ll be running through those new episodes of Dirk Gently, as well as the latest episodes of the regulars: The Brave, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, Great News, Marvel’s Inhumans, Mr Robot, My Myself and I, Professor T, SEAL Team, Star Trek: Discovery, Travelers, and Will & Grace. On top of that, I also watched the first episode of new Australian ‘comedy’ The Letdown. All of that after the jump.

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Lifeline
Streaming TV

Review: Lifeline 1×1 (YouTube Red)

30 October 2017 Rob Buckley 10 Comments

If you decide to base a TV show around time travel, it immediately causes problems in terms of plotting. Travelling forward in time isn’t a problem, but travelling or sending information backwards through time potentially results in effect preceding cause. Small wonder that scientists argue that either such time travel impossible or it requires the existence of ‘many universes’.

TV doesn’t have many universes, but it does have script writers who can make reverse time travel happen at the stroke of a Final Draft macro. But making their plots make sense afterwards? That’s trickier.

Take Lifeline, which is YouTube Red’s time travel drama series very, very loosely based on the Robert Heinlein short story Life-Line. The premise of it sounds reasonable enough at first. The idea is that there’s a life assurance company called Lifeline that knows when its clients are going to die so sends in agents to prevent those deaths. Which is nice, obviously, but how exactly does the company know the times of death so accurately?

Ah. Glad you asked. You see, all their clients get an implant in their arms that broadcasts their vital signs back in time 33 days. As soon as those broadcasts start indicating the client is having a hard time of it, the company steps in to save the client – among whose number are Lifeline‘s exec producer Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. He even appears in the company’s promotional video.

Sense no

Now, already you’re thinking to yourself of some possible problems. If the insurance company can send itself messages from 33 days in the future, why is it even bothering with being an insurance company when it could just be winning the lottery every week?

This is the point where the script writer could issue some sticking plasters and say that that would change the future somehow before it happened and your Lotto numbers would never come up.

Except Lifeline says the future is fixed. That’s why there’s no point simply sticking the future deceased in a locked room for 33 days, for example. Fate will somehow find a way to off the unlucky person.

Hmm. So why bother trying to save anyone at all, if the future is fixed? Surely they’ll die no matter what, while you’re cashing in your Lotto tickets?

Now come the plasters. Lifeline argues that the future is fixed… until just before the point the information comes from, after which everything goes onto a new timeline. Whatever shall be shall be, que sera sera – at least for 32.99999997 days.

Doesn’t make any sense does it? That’s just meaningless. Why 33 days? Why not 5? If it’s that close, won’t the Lotto numbers or stock prices still be valid, and you don’t have to dick around with that assurance malarky any more?

Still, that’s the set-up and you’ll spend roughly 90% of the show’s half-hour run remembering that it makes no sense, which is a tad distracting.

But assuming you can if not accept then tolerate that nonsensical basis for the show, what do the writers do with it?

Up-set the

More nonsense, that’s what. Although it’s nonsense with a certain amount of imagination and intelligence all the same. A paradox? Yes. Welcome to time travel, newbie.

So, as well as the capacity to send messages back in time, said insurance company’s boss (Usman Ally) has the ability to send people forward in time, too. (He has other secret technologies, include a memory-wiper. What he’s doing in the life assurance industry, I couldn’t say).

Rather than letting agents lead a normal life and just getting them to show up in 33 days’ time, Lifeline actually sends them forward in time 33 days to just before the fatal problem emerges. Chief among the accident-averting agents is Zach Gilford (Friday Night Lights, The Family), who also happens to be married to fellow agent Amanda Crew (Silicon Valley).

Here the show does work relatively nicely as a metaphor for busy, jetsetting couples who only get to spend a few days together each month and who are missing out on life in general. Sure, everyone points out how young you stills look, but that’s because you’ve only lived a few weeks out of the past two years, while they’ve had to live through all of it. And they do seem to have a nice time at work.

But again, wouldn’t Lifeline be worried that everyone notices its agents are all the same ages as when they were recruited? How long could you be an agent for before you had to retire? How long would you want to be?

Stop asking questions. Questions won’t make you happy.

By the end of the first episode, however, everything’s gone a bit pear-shaped, someone’s breaking the rules and some people are dead. Oh no. Wouldn’t it have been nice to have had a warning about that sooner?

Stop it.

Anyway, that’s your free episode. After that, you’ll have to stump up another £1.89 per episode for the remaining five episodes to see what happens.

End the

By the end of it, as well as enduring a hefty amount of nonsense, I’d realised that I had no real interest in watching any more of it. Sure, the somewhat cheap production values nostalgically reminded me of some classic straight-to-VHS 90s movies such as Megaville. Crew is actually quite good, too, and Ally is enjoyable as the benevolent (or is he?) boss.

But Gilford is a bit nondescript. Most of the other characters have no personalities at all or are dead. The one fun thing about the first episode – Crew and Gilford’s relationship – ain’t happening any more. And all that really leaves at the end is the utterly nonsensical set-up and it’s arbitrary, nonsensical rules.

So there’s just nothing there to really make me want to see how it turns out. The first episode is free and you can watch it below, after the trailer. I wouldn’t recommend it though.