In the US: Mondays, 8/7c, Fox In the UK: Acquired by Channel 5. Starts early February
Behold! Feast your eyes! Do you know what this is?
Well, firstly, it’s epic testament to how sh*t I was at Aldus Pagemaker 4.0, 22 years ago when I was still at university. Did you know there’s a difference between black & white and greyscale? I didn’t, apparently.
But secondly, you are looking at what is the very first magazine in the UK to contain an article about The X-Files. Well, the second magazine to be exact, but it was the first article written by someone who’d actually seen it. It was certainly the first magazine to have one Fox Mulder and one Dr Dana Scully on its cover.
See, I’d recently read that TV Zone, which contained an article about The X-Files culled from a press release, saying how good it was. Intrigued and since I had Cambridge Cable (which became NTL which became Virgin Media), which carried that new fangled Sky 1 and therefore The X-Files, I decided to watch it. I was sufficiently impressed by the episode, Squeeze, to decide to dedicate the cover of the university TV society magazine I edited to The X-Files.
Before you knew it, I was publishing the UK’s very first X-Files (and Baylon 5) fanzine. Probably the only one, too. And learning about greyscale and even colour printing at the same time. And thus my career in TV-magazine publishing was born.
We did very well for ourselves, once BBC2 decided to show The X-Files and it became a national phenomenon. In fact, we lasted a good few issues.
But to fill our pages, we came up with all sorts of exciting wheezes. We reviewed the episodes. In fact, we came up with the hugely novel and mind-blowing idea of importing NTSC videos of the episodes as they aired in the US, converting them to PAL, and then watching them so we could preview the episodes before they aired in the UK and tell people if they were any good. Can you imagine the cunning?
How we thrilled as we watched FBI agents Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully (Gillian Anderson) investigate the supernatural, particularly aliens who liked to abduct people, especially Mulder’s sister. How we – or rather I – tried desperately to prove that Mulder and Scully were ‘a thing’ in ‘The X-Files romance guide’, while my partner in crime, Jonathan Templar, poo pooed the evidence right in front of his eyes. I wanted to believe… he didn’t. How silly did he feel eventually, hey?
But all good things had to come to an end. In particular, we discovered, as young people often do, that time is not infinite and neither is energy, and if you’re working two jobs to make ends meet, it’s hard to publish a magazine as well. Particularly one that involves having to talk to that beardy bloke in Forbidden Planet who likes to have sex with teenage girls because they ‘have no frame of reference’.
Shudders.
Also, we went off The X-Files, which somewhat ruined the whole magazine. I can’t remember the exact point we fell out of love with the show. Was it the first time or the second time it turned out that the previous definitive explanation for Mulder’s sister’s abduction was an elaborate government hoax? Maybe it was the third time. Perhaps it was when David Duchovny decided to leave. I can’t even remember seeing those Doggett (Robert Patrick) episodes, let alone the ones with Annabeth Gish when she replaced Anderson. I think the last one I saw was with Scully staring at a spaceship underwater off the coast of Africa.
Or perhaps it was just because The X-Files was of its time. It fit the zeitgeist of the early to mid-90s nicely, with government conspiracies, UFOs, a man and a woman working perfectly happily and largely platonically together, mutually respectful of each other’s skills (can you imagine that?). And then the late 90s hit and suddenly all those conspiracies seemed just a little bit passé.
Now, of course, conspiracy theories are back in vogue. Fox News used to have Glenn Beck literally drawing on blackboards to illustrate how the world is run by any number of secret conspiracies.
He may be gone, but Fox News carries on his work and with Edward Snowden revealing that Big Brother really is watching us all, some conspiracies don’t look quite as unlikely as they used to.
And so it is, into this age of the Internet and smartphones and stealth drones above us, Fox has given us back The X-Files in a new series in which The Truth Is Out There, We Want To Believe, and it really all could be a case for Mulder and Scully. If only they were still together. And working for the FBI.
And even if I can’t remember exactly why I stopped watching it the first time round, it did remind me of at least one reason: FFS, Chris Carter. Would you just quit it with “That thing we know definitively was true? That we actually saw happen? That was just an elaborate government plan. This is the real truth.”
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.
The usual “TMINE recommends” page features links to reviews of all the shows I’ve ever recommended, and there’s also the Reviews A-Z, for when you want to check more or less anything I’ve reviewed ever. And if you want to know when any of these shows are on in your area, there’s Locate TV – they’ll even email you a weekly schedule.
It’s been another huge week, full of new shows, continuing shows and returning shows. I’ve struggled manfully with them, but despite delaying WHYBW to Saturday to give me a little extra time to get through everything and then write about them, I’m still to cover three new series:
Mad Dogs (Amazon Instant Video): Shawn Ryan’s US remake of the Sky 1 original brings back Ben Chaplin in a different role but none of the other cast for this relocated show about a bunch of old friends (in both senses of ‘old’) who reunite for a plush holiday in the middle of sunny nowhere. Before you know it, everything ends up going a bit criminally pear-shaped and holiday heaven becomes holiday nightmare. I haven’t even watched the pilot of this, which has been sitting on Amazon for a while now, but given the original didn’t overly impress me and I gave up after about three episodes, I’m not sure I’m going to be in much of a rush to watch this version either. I do hope they explain why it’s called Mad Dogs, given the lyrics are ‘Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noonday sun’.
Baskets (US: FX): Co-created by Louis CK, Zach Galifianakis and Jonathan Krisel, this sees Galifianakis playing dual roles as twin brothers, one of whom aspired to clown school in Paris, but who ended up becoming a rodeo clown. It’s apparently a bit Marmite, but I’ll try to review it in the first half of next week.
Stan Lee’s Lucky Man (UK: Sky 1): Marvel’s Stan Lee gives us James Nesbitt as a Brit cop, down on his luck, who gets a magical bracelet that reverses his fortunes. It’s Stan Lee, so could be fun, but it’s also Sky 1 so could be stupid/mediocre beyond belief. Again, first half of next week for this one.
Despite those three failings, I have managed to cover rather a lot this week already, with reviews or previews of the first episodes of:
The meat of the week’s viewing has, however, been continuing and returning shows, so after the jump, you’ll find reviews of the latest episodes of (deep breath): 100 Code, American Crime, Arrow, Billions, Byw Celwydd (Living A Lie), Colony, Endeavour, The Family Law, The Flash, Grandfathered, Limitless, Man Seeking Woman, Occupied (Okkupert), Rebellion, Second Chance, Les hommes de l’ombre (Spin) and Supergirl. Oh yes, and the two-hour premier of the new season of Marvel’s Agent Carter. Pardon me if you were hoping I would carry on with Idiotsitter, but no thank you.
I’m pretty sure something’s going to have give on that list soon, but I’m not quite sure what yet. Pity the first show to turn in a duff episode.
This week, I also moseyed on down to the cinema to watch a movie:
Room (2015) Adaptation of Emma Donoghue’s book of the same, which sees five-year old Jake (Jacob Tremblay) discovering that the small room he’s lived in his whole life may not be the extent of the universe and that his mother (Brie Larson) has been keeping some important and very disturbing details from him. While that scenario (inspired by real cases) doesn’t sound like a very enjoyable subject matter, both the book and the movie quickly switch things around and give us a genuinely moving tale of parental love, the adaptability of children and finding hope in extremis, so if you think it’s not your thing, you might find you’re completely wrong.
Not quite as initially claustrophobic as the book, the movie is still a magnificent piece of work, with Larson and Tremblay justifiably getting all kinds of award nominations. William H Macy appears for almost no good reason, except to remind you of all the roles he used to get before he ended up doing Shameless (US). Recommended – you won’t even be able to watch the trailer again afterwards, without wanting a cathartic little cry.
