It’s a little hard to critique the reality of fairy tales. Should an overworked maid join a union, go on strike, become an economic migrant or lobby for an increase in the minimum wage to alleviate her condition? Or she should hope that a fairy will grant her a beautiful outfit and that a handsome prince will end up wanting to marry her because she dances well? Logically, option one is the better, more realistic one, option two the anti-feminist, passive one. Yet we all know that option two pans out for Cinderella whereas option one would have consigned her to perpetual indenture.
Watching modern TV fairy tales The Arrangement and Famous In Love, it seems that “hoping to be catapaulted to fame and fortune by becoming an instantaneously successful movie superstar when another hot major movie star takes a fancy to you during an audition” is the current US equivalent to holding out for that pumpkin carriage. They’re also about as realistic.
The Arrangement, it has to be said, is by far the better of the two shows, while Famous In Love is a great big slap in the face to aspiring actresses everywhere. It sees Bella Thorne (the long-time star of Shake It Up but last seen as the unsuprising ‘surprise’ death in the first episode of MTV’s Scream) playing a slightly bored, but otherwise happy economics student who’d much rather be an actress. Despite apparently having had no acting training, she still goes with bestest gal pal Georgie Flores to an audition to star in a movie franchise guaranteed to be the ‘next Harry Potter‘ and wows everyone, including star Carter Jenkins, with her unparallelled acting skills and highly kissable lips. Before she and the audience know it, she’s hired to play the lead.
But does being rich and famous bring you happiness? Flashforwards to the future successful Thorne seem to suggest otherwise. But what makes her so miserable? Well, there’s the rub. Is it just the lack of private life? Is it a doomed future real-life relationship with Jenkins? Is it a potential estrangement from her still-struggling actress pal Flores? Is it the possible loss of hottie bestest boy pal/romantic interest Charlie DePew, who can’t compete with superstar Jenkins? Or is it something else to do with the machinations of Hollywood?
Time will tell, I’m sure.
Famous In Love is billed as the replacement for Pretty Little Liars, so don’t be surprised that about 50% of the plot is actually about various possible pairings of the assembled characters, as well as rivalries between friends and enemies. Similarly, there’s also a mystery to be solved – namely what happened that estranged Jenkins from his former best friend Keith T Powers and caused popstar Pepi Sonuga to disappear from the public eye – and a closeted lesbian (no, no clues).
However, it’s not even close to the quality of PLL and The Arrangement shows how pretty much every part of the show can be done better. Thorne is likable and quirky enough for sure, but the dialogue and scripting causes it to be so forced, you start to feel sorry for her, given the acres of supposed ‘nervous rambling’ she has to wade through every other scene. The fact she gets to go to the top of her profession without having served her dues in dead-end waitressing jobs or even trained in her art, unlike The Arrangement‘s Christine Evangelista, makes pumpkin-based transportation seem like an earned plot development. Hell, she hasn’t even had to sit in the audience enduring Inside The Actors Studio before she made the big time.
Perhaps the only thing of note about Famous inLove, apart from it being one of the few TV shows to actually have the female lead in the infamous ‘Friend Zone’ at its outset,is that there’s a British showbusiness reporter in the thick of things. Literally an hour before I watched the episode this morning, I suddenly wondered to myself. “Whatever happened to Nathan Stewart-Jarrett from Misfits? He was always complaining there weren’t any acting jobs for middle class black Britains, just gritty stuff set on gang-run estates. Maybe he went over to the US to seek his fortune.”
Guess what, reader. Stewart-Jarrett plays that very same showbusiness reporter. How spooky.
If you have to watch one show like this, watch The Arrangement. But you probably don’t have to watch either, to be honest, so maybe watch Misfits instead.
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.
I’m back. <INSERT PERTINENT DOCTOR WHO QUOTE HERE>.
Oddly, I haven’t missed much in my absence, since not many new shows have started, while plenty have wound up or have taken an Easter break. In fact, I’ve had the time to rewatch all of Marvel’s Iron Fist, as well as an episode of The Champions.
Iron Fist actually held up quite well on a second viewing, although it turns out not to have any hidden depths at all that I missed and the fight scenes do often look quite bad on a bigger screen. But it’s still hugely enjoyable, the soundtrack’s truly marvellous, and it and season 1 of Daredevil are so far the only Netflix Marvel shows that I’ve even been inclined to rewatch.
Next up, of course, is Marvel’s The Defenders, which will be arriving in August during TMINE’s annual break. I presume it’s because they don’t want me to comment on the fact that Daredevil is wearing Iron Fist’s costume in the teaser trailer. Too late, boys. Too late.
As well as the regulars, I’ve also had time to play catch up on a few shows that I’d got behind on. That means that after the jump, I’ll be looking at the final episodes of DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, The Good Fight and Imposters, as well as the latest episodes of The Americans and The Magicians, the return of Doctor Who and the back end of the second season of The Man in the High Castle.
Fortitude I’m now working on so I should have a round-up of the final episodes next week. I’ll also be a lot further along in Midnight Sun, which I’d probably have watched already if the upgrade to the Sky Go iOS app hadn’t resulted in the download rights on the whole series being revoked for some odd reason, meaning I couldn’t watch any of my previously downloaded episodes while I was away.
The Prison Break revival started while I was away, I know, but frankly, I suspect the show’s time has gone and I’ve had enough Wentworth Miller and Dominic Purcell of late on DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, anyway.
Some time in the next few days, I’ll be taking a look at ABC (Australia)’s Hugo Weaving-starrer Seven Types of Ambiguity, which rather than being a documentary about literary criticism is a sort of Rashomon-ish look at a child abduction from the different points of view of all involved. However, awkwardly, as well as being only six rather than seven episodes long, each episode is from a different character’s perspective (I think), so I’m unsure whether I have to watch the whole thing or not.
I did try to watch The Son, AMC (US)’s mini-series Western that stars Pierce Brosnan. Potentially, it sounded quite interesting, with Brosnan playing an old Texan cattle baron during the First World War, while we get flashbacks to his life growing up among the Comanches as a boy after they kill his family. However, it’s AMC, so amazingly slow and boring, so I didn’t even make it through the first episode.
I also gave one other show a try:
Return of the Mac (US: Pop) Yet another one of those TV shows in which celebrities play ‘themselves’ with hilarious results (cf Lopez, Donny!, et al), this sees former New Kid on the Block Joey McIntyre playing a version of himself who wants to do serious acting. Unfortunately, no one else wants him to do serious acting, so when he pitches with his agent to a female-led network, apart from the drooling by the 30- and 40-somethings who used to worship him when they were young, he has to endure the fact they only want to offer him a late night talk show. Can you imagine?
Produced by fellow New Kidder Donnie “Not Mark” Wahlberg and Jenny “Vaccines are Evil” McCarthy, who also cameo as “themselves”, the show struggles to do much beyond set up very easy jokes about reality TV, celebrities, McIntyre and his career, without coming close to even Donny!‘s low bar in finding a remotely interesting gimmick to supplement these low balls.
About the only thing it does well doesn’t even involve McIntyre, as it’s all about his wife’s work with a gloriously over the top stylist. January Jones cameos for all of a minute and is better than everyone else in the cast, despite being January Jones. That should tell you something.
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.
The last WHYBW for some time now, since I’m off on vacation for a week from Wednesday and then there’s the double Bank Holiday weekend that is Easter directly after that. Maybe I’ll try to squeeze it in on the 13th or 18th, although I’d actually have to watch TV while on holiday to manage the former, which just ain’t happening; maybe it’ll even be the 24th. But WHYBW will be back, I promise.
The airwaves have been a little quieter of late, but I’ve somehow not managed to watch any of Shots Fired, which means I doubt I’ll ever get round to playing catch-up. Midnight Sun I’m going to try to binge-watch somehow, since it got better after last week’s ep-and-a-half review. If I find the time, I might play catch up on Fortitude, too, and I really will try to watch You Are Wanted.
Elsewhere, I’ve reviewed Nobodies (US: TV Land), which means that after the jump I’ll be looking at the latest episodes of The Americans, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, The Flash, The Good Fight, Imposters and The Magicians, as well as the season finale of Legion. But I have watched one other new TV show and a movie, too.
Imaginary Mary (US: ABC) I love Jenna Elfman. I really do. Okay, the scientologist thing is off-putting, she’s really fun, really charismatic and really watchable. So why is it that everything she’s been in since Dharma and Greg and Keeping The Faith has been just heinous? Growing Up Fisher, 1600 Penn, Accidentally On Purpose– she was great, they weren’t. And neither is Imaginary Mary.
The show is basically what happens if you have one idea and precisely one idea only. Here, the idea is that sports PR woman Jenna Elfman’s childhood best friend comes back to help her in her adult life, when she finally starts having to deal with kids, a grown-up relationship et al. But that’s where the ideas run out.
The work of three men, it feels like the closest they’ve come to ever meeting a woman is to read a book on Greek myths to learn that Artemis is a perpetually adolescent goddess so they could name Elfman’s PR firm “Artemis PR” – that’s the level of subtlety we’re dealing with here. Elfman’s character has apparently never even met a child, let alone spent time with one, but then again, the writers don’t seem to have met any children either, since they’re all the sorts of moppets that can be assembled from tropes in other TV shows.
I mean, do you think, even for a second, that the teenage son of Elfman’s new boyfriend would ask her for advice on how to be popular with other teenagers, a mere five minutes after meeting her, while simultaneously confiding to her that he has a folder on his laptop that contains… “pictures of boobs”? Would that ever happen?
It’s also unclear exactly what the idea is behind Imaginary Mary, who just reappears unprompted after disappearing from her life when Elfman was 18 and started having sex. Yes, that’s right 18. And now she’s back, and after a brief double-take from Elfman, everything carries on as before. Elfman doesn’t go to a doctor or a psychiatrist now she’s started hearing and seeing things, even though ‘Mary’ carries on talking and appearing in full view of her wherever she is, making it impossible for her to do other things (do the writers even know how an imaginary friend works?).
And what does Mary do? Not much. She’s just there, being a bit furry and wacky. No real commentary, nothing daring, no real attempt to expose Elfman’s subconscious or animus. just “Look, I’m back”.
Bar Elfman, it’s almost unwatchably bad. Steer very, very clear.
Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them (2016) Dull entry to the Harry Potter universe set in the US in the 1920s that misses pretty much all the opportunities to do something more grown up and interesting in favour of more of the same but with some cute magical animals. It unlikeably stars mumbling Eddie Redmayne as an animal-helping wizard who travels to the US to be nice to some different animals, where he gets caught up in the current anti-animal prohibition and has to deal with ‘no-mags’ (aka Muggles) who want to get rid of wizards.
Yet despite the opportunities for fun and variety, as well as some scary-level magic, it’s really unfathomably dull. Redmayne’s wizard is just plain annoying and unheroic. The other characters don’t have a tenth of the qualities of Hermione and co that might make you want to spend time with them. All it really has going for it are those fantastic beasts, which are great fun.
In the US: Wednesdays, 10pm, TV Land. Starts tonight
Friends are the worst, aren’t they? They say they want the best for you, but when you get the best, they’re jealous – and usually think they either deserve it more or that they can use you to become successful, too. Well did they ever think there was a reason it was you, not they who made it to the top? Do they?
So, I do wonder if Nobodies, the new Melissa McCarthy-produced comedy for TV Land, is really her way of getting her own back on her less successful friends. It’s created, written by and stars a whole bunch of people whose names are all in quote marks: “Hugh Davidson”, “Larry Dorf” and “Rachel Ramras”. They all used to be in an improv troup, “The Groundlings“, along with Oscar winners “Jim Rash” (Community) and “Nat Faxon” (Ben and Kate, Married, Happy Hour), “Maya Rudolph” (Up All Night) and “Melissa McCarthy” (you know who she is). Except all of the latter group are doing just fine, while “Davidson”, “Dorf” and “Ramras” are, well, nobodies. Unless you count writing for an animated Nickelodeon series about a farting boy as a proper job.
After a Groundlings reunion where they’re billed as “The Others”, they decide it’s time to aim for the top and they have a script for a TV show, Mr First Lady, that they’re going to farm around town to do it. Trouble is, they need a star name attached to it. Hmm. Whom will they try to get on board?
Nobodies is intended to work at many levels. On one level, it’s a satire of Hollywood and the TV business, with unsuccessful writers forced to go through all manner of indignities and meetings to try to get their projects made. Their ideas will get rejected and mocked, their lives sneered, right up until the point they could become useful, after which it’s all smiles.
On another level, it’s a satire of friendships, celebrity or otherwise, the tensions between people who aren’t quite best friends but who also aren’t distant, and the indignaties of being unsuccessful.
And on another level, it’s about various celebs putting their names in quote marks to play hil-ar-ious versions of themselves. This episode we got guest “Jason Bateman”, while still to come are “Allison Janney”, “Kristen Wiig” and “Kristen Bell”. You think I’m joking about this bit, but that’s how they’re all identified in the end credits.
The trouble is that Nobodies is funny at none of these levels. Not one. Not until a guest star turns up. “Jason Bateman” was actually very funny, playing basketball and getting a crippling knee injury; “Rudolph”, “Faxon” and “Rash” – you can see why they’ve done well for themselves.
Then it’s Davidson, Dorf and Ramras again and you can tell instantly why they are the Paul Shearers of this world, while Faxon, Rash and Rudolph are the Fry, Laurie, Slattery and Thompsons. Is Melissa McCarthy making this series just so everyone knows by reflection why she’s doing so well right now? Maybe not, but it certainly feels like it by the end.
There’s a certain accuracy to the friendships in Nobodies, at least, so it’s not a complete loss, if you do accidentally watch it. But, honestly, if you do watch, you’ll just be encouraging Davidson, Dorg and Ramras to try to do more, when they could be getting on with life, doing good as accountants, doctors or dog walkers or something.
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.
After last week’s Marvel’s Iron Fist (Netflix) and Snatch (US: Crackle) action, with only a verdict on Making History(US: Fox) for a bit of variety, I’ve had time to play catch-up with my viewing. After the jump, I’ll be talking about the latest episodes of The Americans, DC’s Legendsof Tomorrow, The Flash, The Good Fight, Imposters, Legion and The Magicians.
But that’s not all. We’re nearly up to date (shucks) with Westworld now, but I’ll save my comments to next week, when there’s a good chance we might have finished it by then. I also should have reviews of Shots Fired (US: Fox) and Nobodies (US: TV Land) up this week, as well as possibly Amazon’s first German-language show You Are Wanted.
On top of that, I’ve even been to the theatre and watched quite a few episodes of some new shows that I don’t have time to review in full:
The Arrangement (US: E!)
E!’s choice for its first venture into scripted television was slightest unwise: The Royals, a slightest farcical, hugely unfunny piece about the British royal family. The Arrangement is a slightly wiser pick that plays to E!’s core competencies: salaciousness and celebrity.
A thinly veiled allusion to… (hey libel lawyers – can I say who? No. Oh. Okay…) a certain celebrity couple, it sees Christine Evangelista (Lucky 7) playing a smart but careerless young actress. One day, she attracts the attention of superstar actor Josh Henderson (Desperate Housewives, Dallas) at an audition for his new movie and before you know it, he’s whisking her off in his private jet to buy islands.
However, looking after Henderson’s career are producer Lexa Doig (Arrow, Andromeda, Continuum) and Michael Vartan (Alias), the proprietor of a self-help institute that has rather a few similarities to Scientology. Before Evangelista’s even on her second date, they’re getting her to sign a $10m marriage contract that plots out the two love-birds’ relationship, including pretty much every aspect of what Evangelista can and can’t do with her life. Should she sign it, become world famous as Henderson’s wife and kick start her career in his movie? Or is the creepy weirdness of it too off-putting?
The show is actually surprisingly credible and even a bit of slow burn, clearly intent on showing how an actress and definitely not a specific one who’s smart and talented and who raps about Shakespeare in her spare time could walk eyes-open into a relationship with a charming actor who’s still famously a nut-job, in preference to waiting tables and dealing with her two-timing beau.
The first episode is quite a delightful little romance in its own right, as Evangelista and Henderson ‘click’, have a whirlwind romance and then have a lot of basic-cable sex in Venice and Mexico. It’s not perfect – I didn’t know whether I was supposed to be laughing when Evangelista excels at her audition by crying through lines like “I got close to you so that I could devise the perfect plan to kill you”, after which Henderson chases after her to say “That’s what acting is supposed to be” in a way supposed to indicate how deep he is – but it was quite sweet, quite fun and it felt like a certain degree of E!’s collective knowledge about celebrity lifestyles had gone into it.
It’s over the course of the next couple of episodes that the show becomes a bit more mundane and darker, as we see Henderson punching out photographers who come after Evangelista and Vartan getting heavies seemingly to take out ex-girlfriends of Henderson. The third episode feels less about the ongoing themes and more about “Gosh, wouldn’t it be nice to have a lot of money. Oh no! People might sell old photographs of me for money now I’m famous!” There’s still a degree of smartness to proceedings, including time jumps in the narrative, and the leads are all still firing on all four cylinders, but it’s less fun than it was when it started.
Whether the show will become simply a modern-day Cinderella, with Henderson throwing off Vartan the Wicked Stepmother in favour of true love, or whether it’ll all end in divorce, murder investigations and recriminations, isn’t clear at this point. But there are enough hints that it’s not going to be all ball gowns and coaches that it might well be worth sticking with.
Barrometer rating: 3
Midnattssol/Jour Polaire (Midnight Sun) (France: Canal+; Sweden: SVT; UK: Sky Atlantic)
A curious bit of Nordic Noir that feels like SVT (Sweden) wished it could have more episodes of Bron/Broen (The Bridge), Canal+ (France) wished it could have more episodes of The Tunnel (Tunnel), so the two of them sat down together to create a weird French/Swedish/English hybrid of the two. Midnattssol/Jour Polaire (Midnight Sun) sees a bizarre murder involving a French national take place in rural Sweden. Lead investigator Peter Stormare (Swedish Dicks, Fargo, Prison Break) asks the French police for their help and they send Leïla Bekhti (Paris je t’aime, A Prophet). But soon it turns out that it’s not the only murder and that the murder victim was a member of the French Foreign Legion.
Midnight Sun is strange. Even before the title sequence has rolled, we have “Death by being attached to a helicopter rotor and whirled around a lot”, which is just plain nonsense. Then at the end of the first episode (spoiler alert) Stormare dies of a stroke after the entire ground opens up in front of him – the nearby iron ore mine is so huge, so important that the fact it’s causing quakes and other problems means that rather than the mine be closed down, the town itself is being moved instead. Which is an odd choice that suggests a bit of funding money was needed.
After that, the focus is more on Bekhti’s relationship with Stormare’s deputy, Gustaf Hammarsten (The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo), which is a far more comedic partnership, although Stormare’s relationship with his wife is still both warm and amusing. By contrast to the experienced Stormare, however, Hammarsten is inept, constantly joking and constantly has problems with his teenage daughter.
The show also plays to cultural differences. Bekhti speaks French back in France and with other French people; Hammarsten and Stormare speak Swedish; none of them speak each other’s languages so the rest of the time, the dialogue is in English. But that still leaves plenty of time for jokes, with Bekhti’s request to Hammarsten to say a Swedish place name results in “It’s spelt as it’s pronounced”, which results in Bekhti telling a colleague to “just Google it”. Meanwhile, Hammarsten and Stormare’s boss is advising about the use of the French word ‘bordel’ (brothel) as a way of meaning ‘it’s a mess’ (well, it does but… What could possibly go wrong?), which is something a French audience will certainly have fun with. As the name suggests, Bekhti also has to deal with the Insomnia-esque issue of the constant daylight in her new home away from home.
However, the central dynamic of the two investigators isn’t that compelling, Bekhti’s having to deal with the news of her brother’s death and occasional desire to impale her hand on spikes usually makes her a little joyless, and I’m a bit tired of grotesque deaths and mutilations by genius killers, even if you aren’t. I’ll probably watch some more of it, because later episodes look at the local native culture more, but this isn’t the instant classic Broen/Bron was.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (Old Vic – Until 6 May)
The play that made Tom Stoppard’s name, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead takes two minor characters from Hamlet who appear in a few scenes and are then declared dead, and catapults them into their own play, imagining what they got up to in between scenes and using those dialogues to discuss the nature of fiction, the nature of theatre, what it is to be a thinly drawn supporting character and to critique Hamlet itself. The play is an amazing piece of work, clever and witty, written in modern day English except whenever it meets up with the mothership again, where it uses the original’s dialogue.
However… the two leads are Daniel Radcliffe and Joshua McGuire playing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern respectively (or is that Guildenstern and Rosencrantz?). Whichever way round it is, it was the wrong choice, because while McGuire is perfectly good and has decent presence, Radcliffe, who has the more passive character, is… passive and uncharismatic as the role demands, but far more so than necessary, resulting in a chemistry-less pairing and McGuire doing all the heavy lifting. Director David Leveaux also allows the two to rush the dialogue, perhaps to keep the play to its very tight two and a half hour runtime, meaning that it’s almost impossible to savour the writing and sometimes to even hear it.
Both McGuire and Radcliffer, however, are eclipsed by the more seasoned David Haig (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Yes, Prime Minister) as the leader of the strolling players. Direction is fine, although quite sexualised, and the party of teenage schoolkids behind me couldn’t quite cope, so spent the whole time commenting on it. Try to ensure you don’t have an audience of easily embarrassed schoolkids behind you if you’re going to watch it.
To be honest, not a great production, but a perfectly solid one and enough of the text shines through that it’s still no failure. Try the movie instead, though.
