TV reviews

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

Laurie Davidson as William Shakespeare
TV reviews

Preview: Will 1×1 (US: TNT)

6 July 2017 Rob Buckley 3 Comments

In the US: Mondays, 9pm (ET/PT), TNT
In the UK: Not yet acquired

TNT’s Will is a drama told in a bold, contemporary style and played to a modern soundtrack that exposes all of Shakespeare’s recklessness, lustful temptations and tortured brilliance.

A sentence like that is almost designed to raise the hackles of any true Englishman. “It’s American. It’s going to be rubbish,” is the knee-jerk reaction that’s almost genetically programmed in us. Some of us might even instantly head to the iPlayer to watch BBC Two’s Ben Elton Shakespeare sitcom Upstart Crow, even if we’ve never watched it before, just to show solidarity.

And yet… I have to say I loved Will. I found it really exciting in the same way that The Knight’s Tale and Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet were. Perhaps that shouldn’t be too surprising, since Will is written by and show-run by Baz Luhrmann’s long-time writing partner Craig Pearce, and directed by Elizabeth‘s Shekhar Kapur.

The show professes to depict what happened in the ‘lost years’ of Shakespeare’s life, before his eventual fame as a playwright in London. So we see the minor actor and glove maker Will Shakespeare (Laurie Davidson) depart from his wife Anne Hathaway (Man Down‘s Deirdre Mullins) and kids in Stratford then head off to the big smoke to see if he can sell his new play.

Here, Will gets lucky as he comes across Alice Burbage (Olivia DeJonge), who’s impressed enough by both him and his play to introduce him to her father, James (Colm Meaney). Burbage is looking for a new play, since Christopher Marlowe (Jamie Campbell Bower) is too busy working for ‘Her Majesty’s Secret Service’, and before you know it, Will’s first play is being staged.

As you can tell from that brief précis, Will occupies an almost quantum mechanical state of both strict historical accuracy and deliberate massive inaccuracy. Amusingly, in the style of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead but in reverse, everyone in Stratford, including Shakespeare, speaks Shakespearean English, but as soon as he hits London, he finds everyone else speaks in modern dialogue. Indeed, this is a London that is both Elizabethan and modern, the extras dressed like Early Modern English punk rock fans, the soundtrack playing punk hits of the 70s that actors on the stage even dance to.

The series has a punk-infused look and soundtrack (the Clash’s “London Calling” makes an appearance), which comes from Pearce’s belief that “theater then was like punk rock. You had 3,000 people, crammed into these open-aired, circular theaters, and people were screaming, drinking, and fighting.”

Yet the series is also clearly written by people who have done their research. London’s unmistakably a late 16th/17th town, dealing with late 16th/167th century issues. There are beggars, bears and brothels. There are no actresses, only actors in dresses, acting in a theatre that looks like The Globe. The queen’s spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham (Anton Lesser) is trying to ferret out Catholics with the help of Richard Topcliffe (Ewen Bremner), and while the play’s very definitely the thing for Will, there’s action and adventure to be had from the show’s support of the theory that Shakespeare was a secret Catholic who was liable to be tortured to death if anyone ever found out his true religion. And that first play? Edward III

Yet despite Will‘s willingness to endorse theories that aren’t 100% supported by the evidence, creditably and despite Anonymous‘s Campbell Bower presence in the cast, it’s clear that this is a show that 100% supports the idea that Shakespeare’s plays were his own. Indeed, while Anonymous and others argue that only someone with a good, aristocratic education could have written his plays, Will‘s punk aesthetic flips the idea on its head, arguing that only someone of a lower class had the earthiness and drive to write the plays and invent words like ‘bedazzle’ to suit their meters, while educated aristocrats would have been content to keep putting on the works inspired by the classics and stick to the grammar. It even gives us a glorious moment when Will is shown (temporarily) to have written one of Marlow’s plays, rather than vice versa.

The show is unable to avoid Shakespeare in Love territory, however, by showing how his ideas were inspired by real-life. DeJonge cross-dresses so she is free to travel around town unhindered, for example, planting a seed for future fun firmly in Will’s mind and her brother Richard (Mattias Inwood) is a very Falstaffian compatriot, too. Lines from the plays pepper the dialogue, as well, with Will seeing his ‘destiny written in the stars’.

But Pearce is still a talented enough writer that he doesn’t rely on Shakespeare to produce all the good dialogue and is even able to have Shakespeare duel in verse with Robert Greene in a tavern. Lines like “It seems women are only fit for ruling the country, raising children or whoring. I haven’t decided which path to follow yet”, “Thy wit is so stale worms would not eat it” and “Live hard, die young of the pox” make this more than a simple plundering of the classics.

Will‘s a genuinely exciting piece of work with good writing, a good cast and a unique visual style that manages to make Shakespeare and 16th century theatre seem young and daring. Watch it if you can.

Naomi Watts in Netflix's Gypsy
Streaming TV

What have you been watching? Including Gypsy, Downward Dog, Doctor Who, Glow, Riviera, Ronny Chieng – International Student and Westworld

4 July 2017 Rob Buckley 9 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. Go on – I dare you.

The slowdown into summer continues and with the July 4th weekend having just passed, there wasn’t a huge amount for me to watch this week. Elsewhere, I’ve reviewed Spike (US)’s The Mist but that was the only new show other than Netflix’s Gypsy, which I’ll get onto in a minute. In fact, two more shows have had their season finales since last week: Doctor Who (UK) and Downward Dog (US). There’ll be nothing left at this rate…

Anyway, after the jump, as well as those two concluding shows, I’ll be looking at what’s left of the regulars: Glow, Riviera and Ronny Chieng – International Student. And, because I finally had some time to play catch-up, I’ll be looking at the final few episodes of Westworld (US), too – now there’s a blast from the past, hey?

Gypsy (Netflix)

Tediously familiar Chance territory in which Naomi Watts plays a bored psychiatrist trapped in a struggling marriage with Billy Crudup and dealing with a borderline-ADHD, possibly trans eight-year-old daughter and the mundanities and social rivalries of fellow mums. But then she begins to think that maybe she could do more for her clients by interfering in their lives, and in the process add some excitement to her own life. So she does and the boundaries between personal and professional begin to blur once she gets the hots for Karl Glusman’s dangerous ex-girlfriend (Sophie Cook) and begins constructing a boundary-crossing alter-ego for herself.

Gypsy wants to be a clever lesbian erotic thriller, playing with ambiguities about what’s real and who’s real, whether Glusman, Watts or Cook has the best idea of what Cook is truly like, and so on. The trouble is that it’s busy naming its episodes things like ‘The Rabbit Hole’, setting them in bars called ‘The Rabbit Hole’ set in basements you have to climb down stairs to get to, shortly before people say “We’re going down the rabbit hole now.” It’s basically a stupid person’s idea of a clever lesbian erotic thriller. Were it not for the production values, cast and runtime, it would probably be airing late night on Channel 5, having previously been released straight to video back in the early 90s.

I managed an episode and a half before the tedium of it all was too much for me.

Continue reading “What have you been watching? Including Gypsy, Downward Dog, Doctor Who, Glow, Riviera, Ronny Chieng – International Student and Westworld”

Spike TV's The Mist
US TV

Review: The Mist 1×1 (US: Spike)

28 June 2017 Rob Buckley Post a comment

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

Is there a Stephen King formula? Sorry, trick question. King’s obviously a very diverse author, since although he’s best known as a horror writer, he’s turned his hand to everything from The Shawshank Redemption (feelgood prison story) to 11.22.63 (time travelling attempt to live in the sixties to stop Kennedy from being assassinated). Sure, the action’s always almost set in Maine, but that’s really his one definitive defining trait.

Yet one in comes to adaptations, maybe there is a formula, since the adaptations have so often been much of a muchness. If they weren’t, there’d never have been a Darkplace.

Part of the problem is that success breeds imitators who want to latch onto what made the first thing a success and piggyback to the same popularity. CBS’s Under The Dome wasn’t exactly the greatest TV show on Earth – beyond Rachelle Lefevre’s hair – but it was CBS’s surprise summer hit of 2013 and swiftly went from being a limited edition one-off to a full-blown, multiple-season series as a result.

So with Spike once more dipping its toe into the water of scripted content, after its efforts with Blade and The Kill Point made it more or less hide its head in the sand for a decade, it’s perhaps unsurprising that for its glorious return, it’s decided to play it safe and follow both CBS and Hulu in not only adapting a Stephen King story but also following Under The Dome more or less beat for beat, to the extent that The Mist borrows more from Under The Dome in the first episode than it does from The Mist.

We start off in a teeny tiny Maine town full of people with issues that are tediously spelled out for us all up front so that we don’t have to bother trying to do anything too subtly once the action starts. Most of the ‘issues’ revolve around Alyssa Sutherland (Vikings) and her family, especially her gay step-son and her step-daughter who fancies a high school jock, but wakes up after a party suspecting that he’s raped her. Problematically, said jock’s dad is also a police officer.

But there’s also a guy in an army uniform (Romaine Waite) who wakes up on a hillside not remembering much and who comes into town to warn people that there’s something odd in the mist that’s coming towards town. He’s arrested on suspicion of being black and locked up in the jail, where we meet a murderous bad girl (19-2‘s Alexandra Ordolis).

Unfortunately, his warning comes too late, as before you know it, animals are being weird – toads are biting little old ladies and cockroaches are attacking policemen. The mist rolls in, killing anything electric, but woe betide anyone who enters it. Best everyone with the most issues stay locked up together in the shopping mall, hey?

None of this especially subtle stuff. You can see straight from the off what most of the issues are going to be, particularly if you’ve seen Under The Dome. The main difference is that Spike is basic cable, which means it can get away with more swearing and more gore. Once the mist rolls in, suddenly faces are coming off or losing parts, cockroaches are burrowing into flesh, people are being shot in the head. It reads like someone’s idea of what a Stephen King story should be like – it’s horror, isn’t it, so surely there should be nasty unpleasantness.

Even when a little old lady’s husband is shot in the head in front of her by someone driven mad by the mist, the desensitisation process has already began enough that neither the show nor the viewer seems to care. Normally I weep buckets whenever old people are left all alone by the death of their partner, but the scene evoked barely a trace of emotion in me, because The Mist doesn’t really know how to create real people you’d care about.

The Mist is good at gore, but that’s about it. It’s not even a good imitation of Under The Dome, let alone the original Stephen King story. Maybe Spike should have another think about scripted. See you again in 10 years’ time, guys?

A screen-cap from Twin Peaks
Streaming TV

What have you been watching? Including GLOW, Riviera, Logan, Twin Peaks and Ronny Chieng

27 June 2017 Rob Buckley 6 Comments

It’s “What have you been watching?”, my chance to tell you what movies and TV I’ve been watching recently and your chance to recommend anything you’ve been watching.

Redesigning and migrating TMINE took up quite a bit of my time this week, so I didn’t cast my net as wide as I’d hoped in watching new TV. All the same, you’ll be excited to hear that I’ve managed to give two other new shows at try, as well as a movie, and I’ll be reviewing The Mist (US: Spike) in the next couple of days, too.

After the jump, a look at the latest episodes of Doctor Who, Ronny Chieng: International Student and Twin Peaks, as well as the season finale of Silicon Valley. One of those could offer some of the finest visuals TV has ever seen.

But first…

GLOW (Netflix)
Slightly weird half-hour comedy based on the genuinely real 80s phenomenon of GLOW (Gorgeous Ladies Of Wrestling), which has already been the subject of movies and TV shows but here sees aspiring but really rather terrible actress Alison Brie (Community) almost as the point of doing porn to make ends meet before her agent gives her one last potential gig – a new cable TV sports show in which she would be a wrestler. Together with several other oddball women, she auditions to take part, but it’s not until she ends up in a catfight with best friend Betty Gilpin (Masters of Sex, Nurse Jackie) that she gets her chance to appear in the ring.

I got through the first episode without laughing much, except at the over-the-top attempts at 80s LA fashions, which all seemed to be takes on Jane Fonda aerobics videos. But it was amiable enough and silly enough that I’ll at least try episode two.

Riviera (UK: Sky Atlantic)
Glossy French-set, French-filmed thriller in which Julia Stiles (the Jason Bourne movies, Dexter) is apparently happily married to super-rich Anthony LaPaglia (Murder One, Without A Trace) when his yacht gets blown up off the coast of Monaco. The result is… revelations! Maybe LaPaglia got his money through dodgy means. Maybe he was having an affair and slept with ‘party girls’.

All the episodes have been released but I’ve only managed the first, rather insipid one so far. Stiles is fine, but spends most of her time having passive aggressive sit-downs with LaPaglia’s ex-wife Lena Olin or one of Olin’s kids (Misfits‘ Iwan Rheon and Les témoins (Witnesses)’ Roxane Duran). Attempts to inject excitement into all the iciness come from having Amr Waked (Lucy, Engrenages (Spiral), Marco Polo) run around a bit or by promising some excitement soon but never actually producing anything.

Basically, the usual glossy Sky fare with a good cast list (and Neil Jordan in the writing credits) but only two big names who actually stick around for the main action.

Logan (2017)
The X-Men meet gritty reality and the cowboy genre, as we flashforward to 2029. Most of the world’s mutants are dead, with Wolverine and Professor X the only big names left alive thanks to a highly successful stamping out campaign. Even so, Wolverine’s dying from adamantine poisoning and Professor X has dementia over which he’s losing control, causing all manner of problems for anyone and any towns that happen to be in his vicinity. Into the mix comes a woman with a girl who has Wolverine-like abilities, asking our hero to protect her from evil Richard E Grant and the cybernetic Reavers.

It’s basically Shane with superheroes, but a clever piece of work that is sparing with the action but nevertheless has an awful lot of bloody stabbing. It pokes fun at its predecessors as being (literally) comic book fun, divorced from the real world in which people suffer and die, but manages to still enjoy the trappings of the superhero genre.

It’s all a bit bleak though and beyond a couple of cool scenes, nothing to really unique.

Continue reading “What have you been watching? Including GLOW, Riviera, Logan, Twin Peaks and Ronny Chieng”

The Bold Type
US TV

Preview: The Bold Type 1×1 (US: Freeform)

22 June 2017 Rob Buckley Post a comment

In the US: Tuesdays, 9/8c, Freeform. Starts July 11

No two publications are ever the same, inside or behind the scenes. I’ve worked on trade magazines, consumer magazines, newspapers and web sites, in the US and the UK, and while certain elements have been the same, management, culture, processes and budgets have differed almost completely.

So despite the fact The Bold Type is based on the life of former Cosmopolitan editor-in-chief Joanna Coles, it would be tempting to say that pretty much everything that happens in the show is absolute nonsense. But maybe, in the land of insane ad spend, magazines do pay their writers enough that they can live in spiffy Manhattan apartments. Maybe once bright young interns are promoted to the stellar job title of ‘writer’, Cosmo immediately invites them to participate in board meetings where rich old white male board members listen to their feature pitches about vibrators and decide whether to allow them to ’empower women’ like that – in ‘Cosmo‘? ‘Surely not!’ they say, like they’ve just wandered in from Shangri-La and picked up a copy of the magazine for the first time.

Maybe it really is like that. So I’ll stop trying to pick holes in the inaccuracies. Although, seriously? How big was the computer presentation screen in the boardroom? How much did that cost? Can’t they just huddle round a laptop like the rest of us?

Sorry. I’ll stop that right now. Let’s focus on the plot.

The old adage of ‘show don’t tell’ is still a vital tool in writers’ armouries. It lets them know when they should stop sledgehammering everything into the readers’ minds, assume they have a modicum of intelligence and find subtler ways involving plotting, dialogue, direction and acting to tell the story.

The Bold Type. Yep, already ‘show don’t tell’ has been chucked out the window, because it’s a double meaning – as well as being about magazines, it’s about strong, clever young women being bold and daring. And they’re going to tell you that all the way through.

Unfortunately, the writers are either sending up the audience or they’re too inept to actually show you how bold and daring the women are without telling you that the whole time. Indeed, just as 90% of The Playboy Club was contractually obliged to explain just how liberating and feminist working for corporate sponsor Playboy really was, so The Bold Type spends roughly half its run-time explaining how working for Cosmopolitan – sorry, ‘Scarlet’ magazine – really is a top feminist move that all the bright young, talented lead characters have been aspiring to all their lives. It’s not just sex and shopping, but it’s really willing to tackle the brave and daring issues, too. As you learn every other line of dialogue.

The trouble is the other half of The Bold Type is really just about sex and shopping, as well as just how groovy New York City is, which slightly undermines the message. It would also help if when it did try to do anything feminist or political, it wasn’t so utterly, laugh out loud inept at it.

The main storyline of the first episode sees the new promoted social media director at Scarlet Aisha Dee (Sweet/Vicious) – a social media director who actually Tweets the corporate account from her phone, rather than using TweetDeck, HootSuite or something a pro might be use… sorry, I’ll stop that now – trying to prove her worth (variants of “You go, girl” are the inevitable response) by convincing an artist to agree to an interview with the magazine.

Using a thesaurus, the writers of the episode decide that to show just how daring Scarlet and Dee are, the artist will be an Arab woman (Nikohl Boosheri). A lesbian Arab woman. A lesbian feminist Arab woman. A lesbian feminist Muslim Arab woman.

A lesbian feminist Muslim Arab woman who’s going to smuggle sex toys back to her home land! That was Dee’s idea! You go, girl! What could go wrong?

Can you guess what happens next?

Yes, the artist ends up arrested at the airport. Oh dear.

But rarely has there been a funnier moment on TV than when Dee and her Scarlet friends – that’s newly promoted writer Katie Stevens (American Idol) and top assistant Meghann Fahy (One Life To Live) – learn what’s transpired and reach for their phones… only to realise that Tweeting about it won’t save the artist. Not even the best-conceived hashtag campaign in the world will save her.

“If only there was something we could do,” they say, putting down their phones.

Indeed, amusingly, whenever Scarlet magazine boss Melora Hardin comes along to alternate between being a mentor and being a Devil wearing Prada, it’s usually to suggest that the budding writers get off their backsides and do something, rather than trying to social media everything to death.

“It must be terrible not knowing what your ex is up to, now he’s quite Instagram,” she says sympathetically.

“It is,” says Stevens. How will she ever find out what he’s doing? She can think of literally no way of finding out.

So Hardin forces her to… go to his house and talk to him. Gasp.

The Bold Type isn’t so much a show about smart, talented, bold young women working in the world of media as it is a stupid old person’s idea of what smart, talented bold young women working in the world of media must be like. And again, although I’ve never worked at Cosmopolitan and all magazines are different, my experience tells me that there are far smarter, far bolder young women working in journalism right now than The Bold Type would have you think.

Bin it, cancel your subscription and try another title instead is my advice.