TV reviews

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

Tin Star
UK TV

Boxset Monday: Tin Star (UK: Sky Atlantic)

18 September 2017 Rob Buckley Post a comment

In the UK: Thursdays, 8pm, Sky Atlantic

Since Sky Atlantic’s outset, it’s had two missions:

  1. To make you want to buy a Sky HD add-on, by showing you some beautiful locations and lots of pretty celebrities
  2. To mess around with genre, so you never know what you’re going to get

The first has been a feature of virtually every Sky drama, whether it’s been the Spanish-set Falcón, the Riviera-set Riviera or the Iceland-based Fortitude, all of which were beautiful to look at, not all of which were great drama.

The less obvious, genre-switching remit has been there from the outset, too. Why have a drama about a trans woman meeting her hitherto unsuspected pre-transition children and another about a contract killer when you can have both in the form of Hit and Miss? Fortitude, of course, initially looked like a simple piece of Nordic Noir, with a murder on an isolated island, before ultimately becoming a piece of sci-fi horror about (spoiler alert) parasitic wasps from before the dawn of time.

Now we have Tin Star, a new Sky Atlantic show created by Rowan Joffe (The American, 28 Weeks Later) that sets out to fulfil both Sky Atlantic remits. It sees Tim Roth playing an ex-Met officer who emigrates to a small Canadian town with his family in order to give them a safer, better life. He’s also a recovering alcoholic and believes that without the stresses of London, his chances of a relapse are smaller, too.

However, an oil company wants to set up operations near the town and sends PR woman Christina Hendricks (Mad Men) and security officer Christopher Heyerdahl (Hell on Wheels) to persuade the townsfolk. The townsfolk could do with the cash, both from the company and the workers they’ll bring; Sheriff Roth points out that they’ll bring crime with them at levels the town might fight difficult to deal with.

A year later, all is as Roth predicted. And when he takes a stand, his house and family are attacked. Before you know it, there’s a family tragedy. Who did it? What will Roth do in response? Can he stay sober? Will he want revenge?

Indeed, Tin Star is billed as a revenge thriller. But who’s getting revenge on whom? And can Sky Atlantic do a straight revenge thriller, or is it all going to be something a whole lot weirder than that?

I’ll try to keep the spoilers to a minimum after the jump, as I reviewed the entire first series. Enjoy this trailer first, though.

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ABC's The Mayor
US TV

Preview: The Mayor 1×1 (US: ABC)

14 September 2017 Rob Buckley Post a comment

In the US: Tuesdays, 9.30/8.30c, ABC. Starts October 3

For much of the past year, there’s been an ongoing race to see which TV show will be the undoubted first of ‘the Trump era’. Did The Good Fight get there first with its inclusion of the Trump inauguration, alt-right characters and people being discriminated against for voting Trump? Arguably not, as it wasn’t really about Trump.

How about any of the legion of forthcoming military shows due on US screens within the month? Are they going to claim the title by arguing that they speak to conservative concerns?

If they do, they’ll be too late because we now have The Mayor. On the face of it, it’s an unlikely winner, given it’s about a small-time Californian rapper (Search Party‘s Brandon Micheal Hall) hoping to hit the big time. However, Hall decides to boost his career by entering his city’s mayoral elections. His ignorance of policy shines through at debates, much to the disgust of his opponent’s totally clued in and competent manager (Glee‘s Lea Michele).

But his appeal to ‘the common man’ nevertheless means that when election day rolls round, he actually wins the contest he had no intention of winning and has to become mayor.

“Did the Russians hack the voting machines?” asks his best friend and campaign manager.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner. The Mayor is ‘Trump Show: The First’.

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The Good Doctor
US TV

Preview: The Good Doctor (US: ABC; UK: Sky Living)

13 September 2017 Rob Buckley 5 Comments

In the US: Mondays, 10/9c, ABC. Starts September 25
In the UK: Acquired by Sky Living to air in Autumn

Back in 2014, I made a confident prediction:

I’m confidently predicting synesthesia as the TV Aspergers for 2015. All the shows will be doing it soon – you’ll see.

I wasn’t 100% on the money, but synesthesia did pop up in a few shows and CBS did try a synesthesia pilot back in 2016.

However, my unspoken assumption was that TV was so over Aspergers. It was done with it. It had been in everything already, so now was the time to find something newer and groovier for TV drama to work with.

Oops. My bad. Here we are, at the start of the 2017-2018 US TV season, and we have ABC(US)’s The Good Doctor, which is centred on an Aspie. Yep, following all the lovely racial and sexual diversity work ABC’s been successfully glopping out onto people’s screens for the past few years, it’s now the turn of us ‘disableds’ for a bit of special treatment. It’s nice but it does feel a bit 2013 all the same.

Freddie Highmore (Bates Motel) is the central Aspie of the piece. He’s just starting out at a prestigious hospital as a surgical resident. So far, so uncontroversial.

However, forget 2013 – it’s almost like the past 10 years haven’t happened for The Good Doctor, because even though Abed’s been making movies on NBC’s Community and Ben Affleck rolling-pinned his way into the special forces in The Accountant, ABC isn’t quite sure if Aspies can hold down a job…

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Dear Murderer
US TV

What have you been watching? Including Dear Murderer, Bang and The Orville

12 September 2017 Rob Buckley 23 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? So tell us! Tell us if you want to live

As the temperature outside starts to get colder, things start to hot up again in the world of tele, which means new shows are starting to pop up again on both network TV and Internet TV. Elsewhere, I reviewed the hilarious Get Krack!n (Australia: ABC) while in the new ‘Boxset Monday’, I reviewed Amazon’s Comrade Detective.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. I’m currently four episodes into Sky Atlantic’s slightly bonkers Canadian-set Tim Roth revenge thriller Tin Star, but I’ll Boxset Monday that next week so you’ll have to wait until then to hear my opinion.

There have also been three other new shows in the past week: TVNZ (New Zealand)’s Rake-ish Dear Murderer, S4C (UK)’s bilingual gun drama Bang and Fox (US)’s The Orville. I’ll be covering all of them after the jump, as well as the regulars –  כפולים (False Flag), The Last Ship and the premature season finale of Shooter. See you in a mo.

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Amazon's Comrade Detective
Streaming TV

Boxset Monday: Comrade Detective (Amazon)

11 September 2017 Rob Buckley 3 Comments

Boxset Mondays

I have a new idea for Mondays that as with all plans probably won’t survive contact with the enemy (ie September’s US TV schedule and all the new shows). It’s called Boxset Monday, and the plan is that every Monday, I’ll review an entire ‘boxset’ that I’ve managed to watch either over the weekend or since the previous Monday. Given how Internet TV is changing broadcast TV, resulting in instant releases, shorter seasons et al, I think this is a necessary response. It’s just a question of how much of a life I actually ever plan on having as to whether I can pull it off…

Anyway, we’ve had two unofficial Boxset Mondays so far, both of them from Netflix: Marvel’s The Defenders and season three of Narcos. So now it’s the turn of Amazon with Comrade Detective.

Comrade Detective

Comrade Detective is an odd beast. The ostensible idea is that during the 1980s, one of the most popular Romanian TV shows was a buddy-buddy cop show in which two police detectives do more or less the exact same things that their American counterparts did, just in Romania under the Soviet system. But it was also a propaganda tool, designed to show the power of communism and the wickedness of capitalism to USSR citizens.

Although even Stanley Kubrick was a fan, following the collapse of the USSR, the programme was then almost completely forgotten about. But now some lost episodes have been recovered from the archives, restored to their former glory, then dubbed by famous actors so that we in the West can see what the East was hooked on during the Cold War.

However, in actuality, what we have is a 6x30ish minute season of a satirical TV show created by Brian Gatewood and Alessandro Tanaka (Animal Practice, Dice) that’s designed to mock US TV shows and movies of the 80s and highlight the hidden Western propaganda within those works. Although initially planned to be based on Czechoslovakia’s Třicet případů majora Zemana (Thirty Cases of Major Zeman), it turned out that obtaining the rights to an old Central European TV show and then dubbing it was actually harder than filming an entirely new show from scratch.

So they did that. They actually wrote an entire TV show, got it translated into Romanian, went to Romania and filmed it with Romanian actors and with Romanian production staff, then got the likes of Channing Tatum, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Chloë Sevigny, Nick Offerman, Jake Johnson and – wowzers – (spoiler alert) (spoiler alert) Daniel Craig to dub their original English-language scripts on top of it. They even got in that Jon Ronson to provide introductions to episodes with Tatum, to add an air of verisimilitude. Impressive, no?

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