Breakfast and morning TV shows are almost self-parodies, even the ones that don’t feature Piers Morgan. Having to fill up hours of the day during which the viewers are typically doing housework, they’re like televised versions of the stupidest parts of the stupidest women’s magazines, filled with banal segments with no quality filters and staff who are hoping to use them as the next step in their upward progress towards better jobs.
So you’d think that a comedy programme mocking morning TV wouldn’t have to do much work. The makers could just coast along, putting out easy gags that are mild exaggerations of what already exists.
Yet Get Krack!n, ABC (Australia)’s latest comedy show, has clearly put the work in to produce something that’s vastly funnier and cleverer than you’d ever have expected. Indeed, I think if Chris Morris and the rest of The Day Today team had been starting out today in Australia – and had been women – they’d have made something almost identical to Get Krack!n. It’s that good.
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! Ah go on. Go on, go on, go on
Here we are at the third of my post-August WHYBW catch-ups. If you recall, the first was to catch up with all the boxsets I’d been watching; the second was to catch up with all the movies; and this third one will deal with new shows and episodes of all the regular shows I’ve been watching over August.
However, as you may have noticed, as always things haven’t quite gone according to plan. Already, I’ve slipped in a review of the complete third season of Narcos. But on top of that, I’ve gone and watched some more movies, too. Whoops. You’ll see which ones in a tick.
I’ve also not seen as many new shows as I’d wanted to. My usual “if it starts in August, I ain’t watching it” rule means that 21 Thunder, Gone, Get Shorty and The Sinner, to name but a few, aren’t even getting a plot summary out of me – let that be a lesson to you, broadcasters! – but as well as a couple of Amazon boxset shows that need my attention – The Last Tycoon and Comrade Detective – I’ve still to watch some new shows that just about slipped in under the wire.
That means Get Krack!N (Australia: ABC) will probably be getting reviewed on Thursday, seeing as episode two goes out on Wednesday. I’m also in two minds as to whether to review The Deuce (US: HBO; UK: Sky Atlantic). On the plus side, it’s from David Simon (The Wire, Treme) and stars James Franco and Maggie Gyllenhaal; on the minus side, it’s about the rise of the porn industry in New York in the 1970s, so might be a bit too risqué for my blood. Still, it doesn’t officially premiere until 10 September, so I’ve still plenty of time to preview it.
All of that cunningly means that after the jump, I’ll be reviewing:
Movies: Just Friends (2005) and Doctor Strange (1978)
New (ish) shows: Odysseus (France: Arte; UK: TV5)
Regular shows: כפולים (False Flag), Game of Thrones, Shooter and Twin Peaks
Returning shows: Halt and Catch Fire and The Last Ship
Yep, I gave up on Will – as did TNT, to be fair. See you in a mo…
The firsttwo seasons of Narcos demonstrated just what a truly global television company intent on producing quality output can do.
Shot on location in Colombia almost entirely in Spanish and using real-life news footage to reinforce its message, Narcos depicted the real-life efforts of the US’s Drug Enforcement Administration to stop the famous drug kingpin Pablo Escobar’s operations in Colombia and beyond. It was a slow-burning but ultimately mesmerising critique, showing the complexity of the drugs trade, crime, law enforcement and life in South America almost as well as The Wire did. It also had a tour de force performance by Brazilian actor Wagner Moura that dominated proceedings.
However, season two ends up with the capture/death of Pablo Escobar, so what would Narcos be about for its final two seasons, you might wonder. More importantly, given that the show thrived on its sheen of veracity, what would it do for leads, given not only the departure of Moura but also the fact its two DEA agent heroes (Pedro Pascal and Boyd Holbrook) had little to do with the Colombian drug trade after their ultimate location of Escobar?
Answers at last
Now we have our answers, some of which were partly provided at the end of season two. Season three follows the fate of the four Colombian ‘godfathers’ (played by Alberto Ammann, Damián Alcázar, Francisco Denis and Pêpê Rapazote) of the so-called Cali cartel, as they try to negotiate their way to a surrender and a future as legitimate businessmen – something that not all of them want and that the other cartels might take advantage of.
Still at the DEA, though, is Pedro Pascal who also gets to take over narration duties from Holbrook. Although the CIA and even the US ambassador are playing a more strategic, political game, Pascal wants to do the right thing, and he’s going to try to bring all of Cali to book before they’re able to negotiate their own terms. There are also two new DEA agents (Michael Stahl-David and Matt Whelan), who unlike Holbrook have been trained from the outset to deal with the new sophistication of the cartels. Unfortunately, even they don’t quite realise just how deep and far the fingers of the cartels have penetrated every aspect of Colombian society.
Importantly, season 3 doesn’t quite follow the same template as the previous two seasons since a huge part of the season is Matias Varela’s smart, considered head of Cali security. A former engineer who’s looking to go legit, he’s not a bad guy at heart, so the question is whether he’ll be able to stomach Cali operations for much longer, particularly once his friends and their families start getting murdered by his own employers…
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! Ah go on. Go on, go on, go on
As I mentioned on Friday, TMINE is easing its way back into this whole ‘talking about tele’ thing, following a rather long and self-indulgent vacation. But that goes doubly, perhaps even trebly for WHYBW, given there’s been a whole month of entertainment since the previous WHYBW. I’m also still playing catch-up a bit.
So rather than try to tackle everything in one go, I’m going to stagger it all into manageable chunks. At some point in the next week or so, I’ll look at the new shows and the episodes of the regular shows that I’ve been watching; I’ll also do a separate entry on all the movies I watched.
But today, it’s time to go boxset-mad. Yep, left to my own devices (literally) and with a whole bunch of streaming services offering downloads now, I was able to take a few boxsets of TV shows on holiday with me to watch. I didn’t manage to get through all of them, but as well as Marvel’s The Defenders, which I’ve already reviewed, I managed to get through no fewer than three boxsets, some old, some new – and then I only went and watched another when I got back.
After the jump, then, let’s talk about Netflix’s Ozark, and Amazon’s Sneaky Pete and The Tick. Oh, and The Pillars of the Earth, because my wife wanted me to watch it. That’s an old one you’ve probably seen, though.
Marvel’s The Avengers was one of the highest grossing movies of all times. Small surprise therefore that Marvel should attempt to reproduce its unique superhero formula on the small (laptop) screen with its Netflix series, giving us four individual superheroes in their own shows before finally bringing them together in a fifth show – The Defenders.
And here we are at last. Two seasons of Daredevil (one excellent, one poor), one season of Jessica Jones (excellent), one season of Luke Cage (weak) and a season of Iron Fist (I’ve watched it three times now, so screw you, haters) has allowed some of the supporting cast to move around a bit, but here we finally are, getting all four superheroes interacting with each other, teaming up and even sometimes twatting each other with sticks.
The show picks up a few months after the other shows. Daredevil (Charlie Cox) is ostracised from his former legal partner Foggy (Elden Henson) and would-be girlfriend Karen (Deborah Ann Woll), and a bit mopey after his ex-lover Elektra (Elodie Yung) was killed by some immortal ninja called The Hand. He’s hung up his costume and is now trying to lead a normal life as a lawyer, mostly doing legal work pro bono for the downtrodden. But Foggy is looking out for his former friend and his new boss Hogarth (Carrie-Anne Moss) might have some legal work for him, too – looking after a certain private investigator friend of hers called Jessica Jones (Krysten Ritter), who’s bound to get into trouble sometime soon…
Not yet, though, since she’s still buried in a bottle, following her murder of mind-controlling rapist David Tennant. Thankfully, she’s managed to brush off both the legal charges and infamy that came with that, but she’s not ready to take on any new clients yet. That is, until a woman comes to her door asking her to track down her missing architect husband and she starts to get threatening phone calls.
Meanwhile, Jones’ former boyfriend Luke Cage (Mike Colter) is just getting out of prison, thanks to some nimble legal work by Foggy, and has to work out what he can do to look after the people of Harlem, particularly the young black men who are succumbing to the allure of crime in his neighbourhood – particularly that instituted by a white clad man known only as ‘the African’ (Babs Olusanmokun).
Could it all have something to do with the errant billionaire Danny Rand (Finn Jones), currently off hunting down the Hand in the Far East with girlfriend and former Hand-member Colleen Wing (Jessica Henwick), following the Hand’s apparent destruction of the seventh city of Heaven, K’un-Lun, which Rand was charged to protect, being the immortal weapon known as The Iron Fist?
You betcha. And you can bet that somehow it’s all going to involve their various storylines intersecting at some point to fight a common enemy – Sigourney Weaver, as well as some ‘Big Bads’ from previous seasons.
Of course, the Marvel Cinematic Universe isn’t the only time that a whole bunch of superheroes with independent lives ended up uniting to defeat a baddie: the once much-adored Heroes did the same thing on the small screen. I say once because as soon as everyone got together, the whole show went to pants.
So the question is: is Marvel’s The Defenders more Avengers or more Heroes? Answer coming up after the jump. Spoilers ahoy and liable to smack you in the face.
