In the US: Sundays, 9pm ET/PT, Epix. Starts October 16 2016
In the UK: Thursdays, 9pm, More4. Starts October 2015 2018
‘Peak TV‘ is the name given to the idea of there being too much TV for us to consume. Thanks to the Internet, cable, et al, it’s a lot easier for a company to ‘transmit’ content; also, more and more people want to make content. As a result, that means there’s an awful lot of TV out there being made by an awful lot of people. However, there’s only so much talent in the world and it’s starting to get spread pretty thinly, particularly around the world’s media industry, which means that there’s a lot of bad TV made by people who don’t actually know how to make good TV.
A while ago I came up with the idea of ‘cargo cult TV‘ – TV going through all the motions of a genre but without really understanding the rules of that genre. As a result, it’s missing something essential. I’d like to expand that to encompass the idea of people making TV but not really getting TV.
Take Epix. Until recently, Epix like AMC – aka American Movie Classics – before it, was content to air other people’s content before suddenly deciding to make some TV shows of its own. The first to make it out of the gates is Berlin Station, created by spy novelist Olen Steinhauer and set in… well, you can probably guess.
Now Berlin Station goes through all the motions of being both a proper spy show and a proper TV show. Nevertheless, it’s cargo cult TV. Something intrinsic’s missing from it, preventing it from being either a spy show or a good TV show.
Like other cargo cultists, Steinhauer and Epix have done their best to emulate TV producers. They’ve recruited a great big, top notch cast. The hero of the piece is our very own Dick Head, Richard Armitage, who’s no stranger to spying thanks to Chris Ryan’s Strike Back, Captain America and Spooks. They’ve got Michelle Forbes (Homicide, The Killing (US), In Treatment), Rhys Ifans (Elementary, Twin Town), Tamlyn Tomita (Babylon 5, The Joy Luck Club) and Richard Jenkins (Six Feet Under), too.
They’ve found a German co-production partner, hired some actual German actors and flown all the way to Berlin to film everything. They’ve even done what every other political show has done of late and ‘stolen from the headlines’ – and, of course, since there are very few headlines about spying these days, that means Yet Another Edward Snowden whistleblower plotline. And they’ve hired a proper European film director for the first two episodes – Michaël Roskam (The Drop)
All of which is designed to fool the viewer into somehow thinking they’re watching a top, premium cable TV show.
Except they’re not. They’re watching pure cargo cult TV arse.
In the US: Fridays, 10pm, Cinemax In the UK: Sky Atlantic. Starts October
Good direction can go a long way towards making a not-great show seem better. Quarry is such a show, benefitting pretty much with every scene from Greg Yaitanes’ direction. The former Banshee exec producer and director might not have created Quarry, but directing every episode of this first season, he’s certainly made his mark on what is simultaneously both Banshee and ‘anti-Banshee‘.
As I pointed out in my review of Quarry‘s first episode, thematically the two shows have a lot in common, with Logan Marshall-Green’s ex-Vietnam-vet turned hitman ‘Quarry’ enduring a lost love, the lure of a criminal lifestyle that draws him in and the simultaneous acknowledgement of crime’s costs, just as Banshee‘s ‘Lucas Hood’ had to experience. Since then we’ve also had greater emphasis on Damon Herriman, the gay fellow criminal who helps Marshall-Green, who is the Job of the piece.
But while Banshee was also often very beautiful to look at, it was a fast-paced, modern show that revelled in its pulp origins and ultra-violence, whereas Quarry wants to be a languid, visual, 70s, noirish piece that finds violence upsetting. All Quarry’s acts of violence are coming back to haunt him, practically in every scene, whether they’re his alleged war crimes from Vietnam or the murders he committed in the first episode.
The ex-soldier turned hitman isn’t exactly a new trope, but it’s more or less only Yaitanes’ direction and the largely non-American cast that lift it out of the ordinary and into the realm of quality TV. Would the second episode have been much good without the bravura first person POV car chase? Not a chance. Indeed, the whole show could have been a slower moving, slightly less ridiculous Blindspot if it had had a different director.
But visuals can only get you so far. Quarry‘s plot is slow-moving, its characters unappealing, its message muddled and confused. It’s not saying or doing anything you won’t have heard before in countless genre shows and movies. In fact, it’s probably saying less, and you could have watched Peter Mullan doing more or less the same act he’s doing here over on ITV in The Fixerfor free.
Nevertheless, just as you would look at a painting for its aesthetics rather than its plot, you could certainly watch Quarry just to see some genuine innovation in visual storytelling on US TV. The story itself is no great shakes, but the visuals could keep you going for a whole season.
Barrometer rating: 3 TMINE prediction: Might make it to a second season, but a harder sell for Cinemax than Banshee
While my general antipathy to TV shows based around the music industry is well known and formalised enough that I can claim to be “tough on music TV, tough on the causes of music TV”, another general genre dislike I have is for TV shows based around sport. This is less well known because there aren’t generally that many sports shows on TV – a Ballers here, a Barracuda there, a Necessary Roughness over there, a Back In the Game at the back, but that’s about it, fortunately.
But I do, even when it’s a sport in which I’m interested, such as MMA. Sorry, Kingdom.
A show about baseball like Pitch? That would normally stand no great a chance of my watching it than that a whelk has of surviving a supernova. But thanks to a bit of recasting back in March that saw Elisabeth Shue replaced, Pitch managed to make me slightly interested in the fact it even existed by hiring a certain someone special.
Yep, after being unceremoniously dumped in the Legends season 2 reboot last year, TMINE’s first TV love, Ali Larter, is back on our screens, this time playing a baseball agent. Fingers crossed this isn’t another sporting event she’s going to be edited out of, too.
Big yawns so far on the plot, but Pitch is all about what happens when baseball team the San Diego Padres recruits the world’s first ever female Major League baseball player (Kylie Bunbury). She may not be as strong as the other pitchers, but she does have a secret weapon taught to her by her father (Michael Beach) – a surprising ‘screwball pitch’ that enables her to fox the batters.
Can she cope with the pressure, the expectations, the adulation of little girls everywhere, the demands of her dad, the misogyny of the Internet and sports commentators, and the dickery of her team-mates, including the now slightly aging captain Mark-Paul Gosselaar (Saved By The Bell, Truth Be Told, Franklin and Bash, Raising the Bar)?
To be honest, I didn’t really care, probably because baseball is a sport that’s basically as dull as rounders but which you need to drink beer during to make remotely tolerable. But Pitch also makes the entire first episode play out like every other ‘underdog against the odds’ sports drama you’ve ever seen, from the initial failure that makes our heroine think she’s never going to make it all the way to her triumphant – but not too triumphant, because that wouldn’t be realistic – breakthrough at the end. Gosselaar even has to deliver a powerful motivational speech near the end when Bunbury’s at her lowest and so aware of the formula is he that he actually says before it, “If this were a movie, this is the point where I would give you a powerful motivational speech that would help you win.”
Yawns.
There is a little variety, with Gosselaar and Bunbury’s former teammate Mo McRae turning in surprisingly amusing performances. ‘Character actor Bob Balaban’, to give him his full title, is marvellous as the Padres’ owner. And there’s also a whole bunch of people, none of whom I recognised or even came to close to recognising, who I’m pretty sure either play baseball professionally or talk about it on TV. If you like baseball, that might appeal to you for a reason almost as unfathomable as your liking baseball.
There’s also a very big revelation towards the end of the episode that’s actually pretty clever. However, that can only be pulled off once, leaving subsequent episodes to fend for themselves with the show’s standard foundations instead.
But apart from Gosselaar, Larter (of course) and just generally wanting to root for the first female anything, even something as pointless as Major League pitcher, there’s not much in Pitch for anyone who doesn’t like a sport where you spend as much time plugging data into Excel spreadsheets and using the AVERAGE() formula as you do watching players standing around with big wooden sticks.
“Tough on sports TV, tough on the causes of sports TV” – I wonder if it’ll catch on?
