TV reviews

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

NBC's The Brave
US TV

Review: The Brave (US: NBC)

26 September 2017 Rob Buckley 3 Comments

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

And so it begins. Spurred on by the success of both USA’s Shooter and the defence-spending happy Donald Trump, this US Fall season is going to be marked by a whole slew of almost certainly interchangeable military dramas designed to appeal to the ‘rust’/’flyover’ states. First up is The Brave.

So interchangeable are these shows that right up until I started writing this entry, I thought The Brave was a CBS programme. It looks just like one. We have a tiny unit of special forces operatives (cf CBS’s The Unit) tasked with going overseas to defend Americans (cf CBS’s Criminal Minds: Beyond Borders). We have a bunch of manly men (and a woman) out in the field, while back home in Washington DC, we have a bunch of nerds led by a woman in a suit (Anne Heche) telling them what to do while she stands in front of a big array of monitors (cf CBS’s CSI, CSI: Cyber, Intelligence).

It’s just so CBS. It even starts with a ridiculous statement at the start that in no way would piss off any other US or other government’s agencies:

You’ll note ‘increasingly’ offers the show a little latitude here.

And when our team gets sent on its first mission of the series to rescue a member of Doctors Without Borders who’s been kidnapped in Syria, we get dialogue like, “When are these bleeding hearts going to learn it’s just too dangerous to help people out here” and “We are fighting people who want to wipe us off the planet. That means we have to be as ruthless as they are.”

Except The Brave‘s not a CBS show. It’s on NBC.

Huh.

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Star Trek: Discovery
Streaming TV

Review: Star Trek: Discovery 1×1-1×2 (US: CBS All Access; UK: Netflix)

25 September 2017 Rob Buckley 10 Comments

In the US: CBS All Access. New episodes Sundays
In the UK: Netflix. New episodes Mondays

One of the most controversial aspects of the recent Star Trek movie reboot was Admiral Pike’s statement that Starfleet is a humanitarian and peacekeeping ‘armada’. It wasn’t an organisation dedicated to discovery but to war, it seemed.

Which cut straight to the heart of what many fans though Star Trek should be. Was it a marvellously liberal show about war being bad and tolerance being good, or not? The official line is that Star Trek is a show all about peace and love – and discovery. ST:TNG – discovery in a spaceship. ST:DS9 – discovery by having everyone come to a space station… and then in a spaceship. Star Trek: Voyager – attempt to be edgy and full of conflict for three episodes before it’s discovery in a spaceship. Star Trek: Enterprise – discovery in a spaceship.

Star Trek: Discovery

Ironically, we now have Star Trek: Discovery, the first Star Trek show to be about full on warfare from the outset and which therefore has people questioning if it’s proper Star Trek.

Well, maybe in retrospect Gene Roddenberry decided that Star Trek was totally anti-war, but you only have to look closely at that original series for a few minutes before you notice that there’s a lot of mentions of war and of the Federation having fought wars in the past. How many Neutral Zones are there, for example, to stop various empires coming into conflict with the Federation again? Why exactly are people training hard in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan to fight Klingons as part of their academy training? Hell, Captain Kirk even says in Errand of Mercy “I’m a soldier, not a diplomat”, which should tell you something.

So, it’s fair to say that Star Trek: Discovery is as much Star Trek as any of its predecessors. It also wants you to know it, too. Set ’10 years’ before the USS Enterprise goes off on its five year mission, Discovery sees Sonequa Martin-Green playing a girl orphaned by Klingon raids as a kid and who’s brought up on Vulcan by Spock’s dad Sarek (James Frain). Subsequently, well versed in the art of logic, she ends up as first officer on Michelle Yeoh’s slightly clapped out old starship. Seven years later, they’re off investigating a damaged space-thingy on the edge of the Federation’s border with the Klingon Empire when you guessed it, the Klingons pop up for the first time in a century. Anyone reckon they’re interested in peace?

Queue the start of the next great Klingon War.

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The Orville
US TV

Third-episode verdict: The Orville (US: Fox; UK: Fox UK)

25 September 2017 Rob Buckley 4 Comments

In the US: Thursdays, 9/8c, Fox
In the UK: Acquired by Fox UK to air in Autumn

As I discovered while watching the first episode of Seth McFarlane’s new ‘pastiche’ of the Star Trek universe, it’s not actually a pastiche at all. In fact, it’s basically just Star Trek again, but with a few lewder jokes, a bit more workplace comedy and enough changes to names, places, species and Federations to make it ineligible for format-infringement lawsuits. Go into it expecting a slightly duller Star Trek, rather than a new Galaxy Quest, and you might even find something to enjoy.

Indeed, McFarlane himself says that he intends this to be something other than straight pastiche, swapping between outright comedy one episode to straight drama the next. Hopefully, the characters and their interplay will be what keeps us watching, he reckons.

So I went into the next two episodes with an open mind. Is it going to be a comedy this week? A romance? What?

Nope. It’s more Star Trek. As of episode two, we get a new title sequence and a theme tune that’s possibly even duller than Star Trek: Voyager‘s, despite the obvious attempts to emulate it and the fact it wasn’t thought humanly possible to have a duller title sequence than Star Trek: Voyager‘s. We also got what was more or less, bar a couple of changes, Star Trek‘s pilot episode, The Menagerie.

Episode three – directed by the show’s exec producer Brannon Braga (exec producer of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Voyager, and Star Trek: Enterprise) – started out more promisingly with some jokes at the expense of the Star Trek holodecks. Said jokes were even funny for a change.

We then get… another old Star Trek: The Next Generation episode. I’m not sure exactly which one – any of the many trial episodes, such as The Measure of a Man, crossed with any of the “what line must we draw in accepting other people’s cultures?” episodes (eg The Host, Half a Life). For a bit of relevancy, the question under debate was “Should we perform sex-reassignment surgery on babies?”, although the waters were so muddied philosophically and the general intellectual tone of the debate was so low that by the end, the question was more “Can women make a contribution to society?” Still, that’s the state we’re living in right now, so maybe that discussion is as topical as trans rights is.

BUT IT WAS STILL STAR TREK AND NOT VERY GOOD STAR TREK AT THAT.

To be fair, in terms of scripting it’s at least as good as Star Trek: Voyager and most of the first couple of seasons of Star Trek: Enterprise. That’s not saying much, but it is a step up at least.

It’s equally fair to say that The Orville is the best acted, best written, unlicensed Star Trek cosplay with the best production values and special effects you’ll ever see. Like most cosplay, it adds little (here, a replicator that makes cannabis brownies), just remains in thrall to the original.

So if you want to watch Seth McFarlane in his own Star Trek, imagining he was once married to Adrianne Palicki, The Orville might be the show for you. Otherwise, Google “Star Trek funny episodes” and you’ll be bound to turn up something from the original shows that’s much much better.

Barrometer rating: 3

The Barrometer for TheOrville

Professor T
Streaming TV

What have you been watching? Including Professor T, Lethal Weapon and כפולים (False Flag)

19 September 2017 Rob Buckley 17 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. But it’s what you have you been watching? I bet it’s better than what I’ve been watching.

I’ve been both lazy and hard-working this past week. On the one hand, despite knowing every year that the US is going to start launching all its new shows around now, I’ve not actually bothered looking at the schedules. I just assumed it would all be chocka by now, so I cleared the decks accordingly.

Except it’s not been chocka at all, so I’ve ended up watching a whole load of extra TV in the gaps I’ve left. That means that this week, as well as previews of new US shows The Good Doctor (US: ABC; UK: Sky Living) and The Mayor (US: ABC), I watched all the first season of Tin Star (UK: Sky Atlantic) and all the second season of Glitch (Australia: ABC; UK: Netflix) for TMINE’s newly inaugurated ‘Boxset Monday’.

Impressive, huh? What will I do next Monday, hey? Probably nothing as I’m going to be busy on Monday, so take Glitch as a downpayment.

On top of all those shows, I’ve been trying to watch an awful lot of other new shows and movies – to somewhat limited success, I have to admit.

The rubbish

I tried to watch the second episode of Dear Murderer (New Zealand: TVNZ), but my hopes of a nice spy trial episode were dashed once it became apparent that the trial was going to be thinly spread across the entire season, with our ‘hero’ instead mostly losing lots of cases using the same attempt to inject reasonable doubt into proceedings every time. So I gave up on that.

I also tried to watch Netflix’s pastiche of true crime documentaries, American Vandal. That lasted about 10 minutes before I realised it was basically about a US high school kid accused of spray-painting penises on people’s cars. So I gave up on that.

I also tried to give The Edge of the Bush (Australia: ABC) a whirl. That’s a short-form character comedy in which a small cast play a large number of very stupid, related people: “What happened on The Edge of the Bush? Something so powerful it will bring the Watts family calisthenics dynasty to its knees.” I got through about five minutes of that before I decided the jokes were so bad, I couldn’t even.

For reasons unclear to me, Netflix, Amazon and iTunes have simultaneously decided to carry a movie that was actually a recent failed attempt to resurrect ‘The Saint’ as a TV series. Since it was free on Netflix, I decided to give The Saint a whirl, but it only took me about 10 minutes and a very bad humorous fight scene before I understood why it had failed and gave up. Even though Eliza Dushku and Ian Ogilvy are in it.

Lots of failures then. But I did have greater success elsewhere. Although I didn’t quite have time to watch the second episode of Bang today as I’d planned, there were of course the usual regulars: Get Krack!n, Halt and Catch Fire and The Last Ship as well as the series finale of כפולים (False Flag). I also watched the first episode of returning regular Lethal Weapon and the second episode of The Orville.

But since I still had a moment or two spare over the weekend, I tried the first two episodes of Belgium’s Professor T. And together with my lovely wife, I also gave two movies a try: The Lobster and The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2. All that after the jump.

Continue reading “What have you been watching? Including Professor T, Lethal Weapon and כפולים (False Flag)”

Glitch
Australian and New Zealand TV

Boxset Monday: Glitch (season two) (Australia: ABC; UK: Netflix)

18 September 2017 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

In Australia: Thursdays, 8.30pm, ABC
In the UK: Netflix. Available from November 28

The first season of ABC (Australia)’s Glitch was one of the high points of 2015.

The best of the “dead are coming back to life shows”, Glitch gave us a relatively unique slice of ‘Australian gothic’, where the returned came back to tell us something about Australian history, as well as people and possibly about the importance of death itself to the universe, with a bad guy who might have a point. With some genuinely spooky moments, its second season is going to be much anticipated.

The show got an almost instant renewal, but it’s only now that we’re getting a second season. Trouble was, the Australian acting industry is quite small and actors move around a lot, not just between networks but also between countries, looking to find fame and fortune in the US. Series lead Patrick Brammall not only had existing commitments with No Activity, Offspring and Upper Middle Bogan, he also went to the US for a while for an attempted remake of Upper Middle Bogan. Meanwhile, the ubiquitous Rodger Corser got his own show, Doctor Doctor, which is already on its second season and doing well internationally, while local doctor Genevieve O’Reilly has been off in Canada on Tin Star.

Still, there’s nothing like a bit of Netflix cash to make things happen, and with the show doing well globally, here we are at last with the second season. When we left our dead friends in 2015, we were on the verge of discovering what a mysterious pharmaceuticals company might have to do with their return; although the deceased’s memories were taking a long time in coming back, with Corser unable to even remember his own name, former town mayor Ned Dennehy was remembering that he had some aboriginal descendants, while Hannah Monson was remembering that she’d not had a good time of things. On top of that, Brammall was torn between his returned wife (Emma Booth) and his new wife (Emily Barclay).

On top of that, they’d had their own ‘grim reaper’ chasing after them – the recently deceased Andrew McFarlane, seemingly returned by death itself to restore the natural order of things by killing off the returned. They stopped McFarlane but would Barclay, who nearly died giving birth, take his place?

Season two does a surprisingly good job of answering almost all those questions and tying up all the hanging plot threads, as well as introducing some new characters. But there’s a fair old bit of retconning going on to take account of the cast’s new pecking order and schedules, and that Netflix money has somewhat changed the tone of the show. More on that, including a few spoilers, after the jump…

Continue reading “Boxset Monday: Glitch (season two) (Australia: ABC; UK: Netflix)”