US TV

An archive of articles about US television programmes and production.

What have you been watching? Including Goliath, Finding Dory, Chance and Frequency

28 November 2016 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 that I haven’t already reviewed and your chance to recommend things to everyone else (and me) in case I’ve missed them. There’s also the Reviews A-Z, for when you want to check more or less anything I’ve reviewed ever. 

Thanks to the Thanksgiving holidays in the US last week, lots of programmes were taking a slight breather and few new ones decided to stick their heads above the parapets. That means it’s been a quiet week for TMINE, with only Search Party (US: TBS) to deal with in the ‘new’ category and the regulars reduced to just Chance, DIrk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, The Flash, The Great Indoors, Lucifer, People of Earth, Supergirl, Timeless and Travelers – I’ll be dealing with them after the jump.

On the plus side, though, that did mean I could not only play catch-up with an Internet TV box-setted into our laps a little while ago, I could also watch a couple of movies.

Goliath (Amazon)
‘A legal thriller by David E Kelley! Whoopdy doo,’ I thought. Like most people, I immediately think of the likes of Ally McBeal, Boston Legal and Harry’s Law when I hear Kelley’s name; unlike most people, I also think of his reasonably poor efforts with Wonder Woman, the dismal The Crazy Ones and the putrid Wedding Bells. 

However, Kelley hasn’t always been king of fluffy backlash legal dramas. Back in the day, he created The Practice, a supposed antidote to the cutesy view of legal work perpetrated by LA Law; on said show, the story editor was one Jonathan Shapiro, a former Rhodes Scholar and professor of law.

Together, they’re responsible for Goliath, a legal drama that stars Billy Bob Thornton as a former top lawyer who’s fallen on hard times. Then Nina Arianda (Hannibal) turns up needing Thornton’s help with a case involving the supposed suicide of an engineer who worked for a major arms manufacturer. Before you know it, Thornton’s David is taking on the Goliath that is his old legal firm, which includes ex-best friend William Hurt, ex-wife Maria Bello (Prime Suspect) and newby lawyer Olivia Thirby (Dredd 3D), and the might of the US defence industry.

Mostly, this is a show that owes a lot more to Shapiro than Kelley tonally, being about legal clevery dickery and shady big name clients in the same way that Suits was when it started. Shapiro’s legal knowledge really shines here and Goliath goes through all manner of things you’ve probably never seen in a legal drama before (“complex cases”, using the rules of contempt to get evidence admitted, etc). It’s also quite dark, with bodies being found in car boots, witnesses being run over, police abuse and more.

But Kelley’s name isn’t on the sign simply to drum up trade. There’s a definite air of Kelleyisms to Goliath around the edges, ranging from some actual jokes through the daft names the lawyers at Hurt’s firm call each other (“The Mole”, “The Mouse”), Hurt’s facial scarring and his use of a clicker to communicate when he wants to be annoying, Thornton almost representing the forces of the un-PC against the PC tyranny of the Goliath-like enemy (Thirby has a stammer and uses the American Disability Discrimination Act to counter Thornton’s tricks; Bello is gay and has a girlfriend who also works at her law firm), to some distinctly dodgy attitudes towards women and some ethical issues to be considered, such as revenge porn and whether lawyers should break privilege to report wrongdoing by their clients. Arianda’s practice even feels a lot like the one in Harry’s Law.

Goliath is still a lot better than I was expecting, probably being the second-best original Amazon drama after The Man In The High Castle that I’ve seen. It’s also a lot tenser – I’m six episodes through the eight episode run and each episode has managed to ratchet up the claustrophobia as Thornton’s got closer to the truth and increasing danger. I’ll probably watch the final two episodes tomorrow, in fact.

But it’s still got enough Kelley daftness, is slow-moving enough and fails to make you care enough for the characters that I can’t really recommend it. If you like John Grisham-style legal dramas, though, this is certainly worth a look-in.

Frequency (200)
Since the TV adaptation is currently airing on The CW/Netflix and I’d never seen the original, I thought I’d give it a whirl just to compare and contrast, especially since it’s currently free on Amazon Prime. At its heart, like the TV series, Frequency is about a father and his grown-up child cop managing to communicate by radio over several decades and using information about the future to change the past – again, to prevent the father’s imminent death and to subsequently stop the change in history that is the mother being murdered by a nurse-hating serial killer.

Starring a whole bunch of people now famous from other TV shows (Jim Caviezel, Shawn Doyle, Elizabeth Mitchell, Andre Braugher, Noah Emmerich), it’s pretty much the same as the first season of Frequency so far, but with a few interesting changes, such as the dad (Dennis Quaid here) being a fireman not a cop and there being a 30-year time difference, not a 20-year difference. It’s a lovely idea and the film has an emotional depth that a lot of sci-fi movies lack, but I think I actually prefer the TV version, since the longer running time gives that a chance to explore a whole bunch of issues that the movie has to leave to montage moments at best, and the gender-swap to a daughter evens out the original’s not inconsiderable sidelining of women. 

Still, given it was set in 1999 (nearly 20 years ago now, guys), it’s almost like watching time travel anyway, with its reference to Yahoo! as a good stock option.

Finding Dory (2016)
The tear-jerking Pixar delight, Finding Nemo, saw a widower father searching the world for his partially disabled son, following the latter’s kidnapping. The twist? They were fish.

Here, in this sequel, their mentally challenged best friend Dory (Ellen Degeneres) comes to the fore as she remembers she had a family back in the day and despite her inability to form short-term memories, goes looking for her mother and father, Nemo and co in tow.

For about the first 10 minutes, this feels like a retread of the original but after that, Finding Dory sets its own path, introducing all-new characters and species that live in or near the marine park that Dory thinks her parents might be living in. It’s a lovely piece of work again, with some top moments of comedy and joy, but it never quite hits the emotional highs (or lows) of the original and the final act starts to descend into the silly. Admittedly, it is a movie about talking fish so silly is relative, I guess.

Something both parents and kids can enjoy, but not quite an absolute classic. 

Continue reading “What have you been watching? Including Goliath, Finding Dory, Chance and Frequency”

When’s that show you mentioned starting again, TMINE? Including Travelers and Timeless

25 November 2016 Rob Buckley Post a comment

In an exciting new feature I’ve just thought of, every Friday (usual fingers crossed), I’ll be letting you know about any announcements that have been made during the week about when new imported TV shows will finally be arriving on your screens, whether those screens be of the TV, a computer, a mobile device or your direct brain feed. Assuming there have been any announcements, of course.

That’s probably about all the introduction you need.

This week (well, month really, since there’s a bit of catching up to be done):

Hope that helps!

US TV

Review: Search Party 1×1-1×2 (US: TBS)

24 November 2016 Rob Buckley 3 Comments


In the US: Nightly, 11/10c, TBS

One of the conclusions of Adam Curtis’ Hypernormalisation was that thanks to individualisation and the Internet, people are now more invested in the virtual world than the real world, making political solutions to problems all but impossible.

So now you’ve seen the documentary, here’s the dramedy: Search Party. Arrested Development‘s Alia Shawkat is an aimless twentysomething, drifting through life without any real ambitions or interests of her own, it seems. But she’s no different from shallow boyfriend John Reynolds, shallow gay friend John Early, shallow actress friend Meredith Hagner and shallow ex-boyfriend Brandon Micheal Hall, all of whom are more invested in texting, Twitter and selfies than anything real.

But then Shawkat spots a missing person’s poster for a college friend who’s disappeared and decides to investigate, perhaps in an effort to connect properly with someone else. Can she drag everyone else back into the real world with her to help her? 

Despite airing on TBS, whose motto should really be “We’re occasionally funny, but never as much as Comedy Central”, Search Party is barely a comedy at all; it’s also a lot smarter than you’d expect, thanks to the likes of indie movie makers Sarah-Violet Bliss and Charles Rogers (Fort Tilden, The Color of Time) on the writing team.

The show is in part a cry for self-involved millennials to reach out and connect – and it has some acute observations about how disconnected everyone now is. Reynolds would rather masturbate to his own fantasies in bed than have sex with Shawkat when she’s right next to him. Neither of them know what to do when they hear sounds of domestic violence in a neighbouring flat, so they do nothing, even when glass starts smashing. No one remembers anyone else, unless there’s an online record of their actions, and no one is willing to commit to anyone else if it draws them out of their bubble, their fear of the real world and real feelings is so great. Hagner even has to turn to a writer on one of her TV shows to ask for his advice on what an event in the real world might mean, and no one is that sure about what’s real and what’s not, anyway. After all, Hagner is an American actress pretending to be a fictional actress pretending to be a policewoman who works with another American actress pretending to be an English actress pretending to be an American policewoman. Can anything be trusted to be real or has everything been hypernormalised now?

But at the same time, the show is more complicated than a simple hippyish “why don’t we all just reach out and touch someone to make the world a better place?” It has a New York-mistrust of others and strangers. When Shawkat reaches out to someone, they turn out to be crazy or aggressive; when Reynolds finally tries to help the abused woman living next door, she simply shrieks insults at him until he goes away. Even when Shawkat goes to the police for help with the missing girl, the police are equally atomised, unwilling to become involved in another person’s life to help her, and Shakat, as with the rest of her peers, lacks the social skills to persuade them, instead resorting to insults herself.

The show is almost too clever, with metatextual references to Anna Karenina (“She dies at the end”) and comments about how the search is often more interesting than the discovery are almost designed to put you off watching further. Yet at the same time, it’s not clever enough. Like the oddly similar Girls, it gives you a set of pampered heroes and heroines you want to die a horribly fiery death. Unlike Girls, it has almost no wit or comedy to alleviate that desire, making it an almost Scream-like show, crying out at the loneliness of modern life yet not making the alternative look any better.

Search Party is an interesting idea that’s as alienating as its characters are alienated. I don’t want to reach out and join this party, I’m afraid.