In the US: Saturdays, 9pm EST, Starz In the UK: Not yet acquired
Whatever else can be said about Starz’s Ash Vs Evil Dead, there’ll always be the fact that every week, it gives us Bruce Campbell, doing what he does best – fighting the Evil Dead. But the show has more than that. It has comedy. It has horror.
The precise ratio of comedy to horror varies with every episode. Most of the time, Ash Vs Evil Dead is quite funny but filled with a lot of gore, typically involving Bruce Campbell using his chainsaw-for-a-hand to chop off a head, disembowel something, etc. Watching Campbell do this, as his idiotic Ash character does something even more idiotic each week, is a joy to behold.
What it wasn’t until this week, though, was scary. Gory, yes. Scary no. But all credit to the show, as episode three gave us a demon rather than a zombie/Deadite, and was actually very creepy. It was less funny, but as I said, the ratio tends to vary.
What the show hasn’t yet worked out is how to make us give a toss about Campbell’s young helpers. Or the FBI agent chasing after them. And while it does have the obvious asset of Lucy Lawless in the cast, she only gets to show up for about a minute each episode – something that results from the fact each episode is only half an hour long, so there’s not much room for development or anything that properly services the main plot.
So Ash Vs Evil Dead‘s biggest asset is also its biggest problem: Bruce Campbell. It’s his show and there’s not much else that’s interesting about it. It’s fine as comedy-horror goes, and far more enjoyable compared to any other horror show on TV right now, but that comedy-horror only really works when Bruce is around.
I’ll certainly carry on watching it, because Bruce is Gold. But I can’t help but feel the show is coasting a little, getting by on Bruce when it could be doing a lot more. Maybe we’ll get that in time, once Lucy Lawless shows up in earnest to show the kids how it’s done. Then it might be dead good. See what I did there?
Barrometer rating: 2 TMINE’s prediction: Not as great as it could and should have been, but still top comedy-horror, and Starz has already renewed it for a second season.
I’m starting to wonder this season if there’s any point in anyone reviewing just the first episodes of new TV shows. It was always a slightly questionable area, given how series can get better or worse over time. That’s why the blog gave birth to first the Carusometer and then the Barrometer to measure TV quality over time. But now shows are simply deciding to become different shows from the second episodes. Review just the first episode? You’re almost reviewing a different show now.
Agent X is a case in point. It’s not a show that’s actually got much better over its first three episodes, but it has become different. The first episode – first two in fact – was clearly an attempt to do an American James Bond, albeit with more than a hint of National Treasure, with Sharon Stone becoming vice president of the United States, only to discover there’s a secret article of the Constitution that gives her responsibility over a secret agent, who covertly sorts out US enemies, foreign and domestic. Unfortunately, said ‘Agent X’ is played by the most average US TV actor imaginable, Jeff Hephner, and the infinitely more interesting Stone gets to do little but turn up to parties and make phone calls. Meanwhile, her helper monkey Gerald McRaney tries to do Simon & Simon again, but without another Simon to help him, making it a lot less funny than it was in the 80s.
James Bond was an odd choice for inspiration, particularly given the show was created and is exec produced by William Blake Herron, who co-wrote The Bourne Identity. Indeed, both Herron and TNT seem to have thought so, too, because episode three switched from Bond to Bourne, right down to the music and the occasional shakey-cam. It also decided to add a whole new sub-plot about a secret conspiracy against the government from within, one involving Stone’s deceased husband.
The change is probably a good idea. Unfortunately, Herron and co are the wrong people to implement it. While Hephner is better suited to the ‘average Joe’ concept of a Bourne – who in the books, at least, had surgery to make him look more average – he’s still an utterly uninspiring and implausible action lead, up there with Chris Vance’s TV Transporter in the scheme of things, but not even that charismatic or handy in a fight scene. Not that the stunt scenes are any good, being bereft of good direction or innovation. They try to be clever, but ‘man hiding behind a series of doors and then opening them’ isn’t as clever or interesting as the show thinks it is.
Stone’s still relegated to doing nothing much; McRaney just gets to growl and mentor Hephner into being duller; and it’s all still deep bobbins of the highest order. I might hang around for another episode or two to watch Stone and see if the conspiracy arc goes anywhere interesting. But to be honest, it’s going to be a bit of a chore.
Barrometer rating: 4 TMINE prediction: Cancelled by the end of the season or subjected to a major Legends-style reboot for season two
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.
The first of the mid-mid season shows made their way on to our screens/Internet connections this week. Elsewhere, I’ve reviewed the first episodes of Agent X (US: TNT), Donny! (US: USA) and Blood and Water (Canada: Omni). However, they’re not the only new shows that have started this week:
Master of None (Netflix) Aziz Ansari’s best known from Parks & Recreation, but here he’s playing a thinly disguised version of himself – Dev, a small-time Indian actor living in New York and trying to get his break in a business that’s still not ready to accept Indian actors as anything except taxi drivers, doctors and convenience-store clerks, and then only with Indian accents. This is something that Ansari has one or two opinions about, which he shares with his other Indian friends, as well as his Asian friend and black lesbian friend.
It would be tempting to assume this is basically Ansari’s version of Curb Your Enthusiasm, but actually, it’s far more reasoned, genteel, likable Curb Your Enthusiasm, with each episode almost self-contained and exploring not just discrimination against Indians by the media, but a different facet of modern life, during all of which Ansari tries to be reasonably respectful and thoughtful in extremis. The first episode looks at kids and parenthood, with Ansari discovering that being the fun uncle only works for an hour or so, and that a full afternoon looking after kids is more than he can bear. However, of the six episodes I’ve watched so far, it’s actually the least funny.
Fortunately, things pick up after that, with some genuinely amusing episodes, particularly one that sees Colin Salmon doing a ‘Patrick Stewart on Extras‘, and Parents, which is a spot-on look at the relationships between older parents and young adults, particularly first-generation immigrant adults. Guest stars including Claire Danes, H Jon Benjamin and Noah Emmerich also give the show a greater pedigree than you’d otherwise have thought.
While Ansari’s squeaky voice gets annoying after a while, this is the first Netflix comedy so far that’s been worthy of the name, and I’ll be trying to watch the rest of it as soon as I’ve finished writing this.
Flesh and Bone (US: Starz) Short version: Showgirls meets Whiplash at the ballet Long version: A surprisingly loving, beautifully shot, eight-part mini-series about an abused young woman (Sarah Hay from Black Swan) who runs away from home to make it big at the ballet. Her talent is spotted by the head choreographer (Ben Daniels), who decides to make her a star, but he has very strict training methods.
All of which is lovely and beautifully done, with some excellent acting, and even though I’m absolutely not a ballet person, some of the dancing was absolutely stunning and even moving. However, so far, the long version doesn’t sound Starz enough, does it?
So first add in copious nudity, sex and drug-taking, lots of mean girl scenes, maybe a hint of lesbianism. Then have new girl ballerina equivocating about whether to moonlight with another ballerina as a stripper to make ends meet. Then add in some truly hilariously bad scenes, such as when the choreographer is vigorously bumming another bloke over his desk while repeating to himself things like “I am the master of all I survey.”
I think I would have watched this were it not for that kind of epic stupidity and excess that tend to dog Starz shows. But I doubt I’ll get much further with it now.
I’ve passed a third-episode verdict on Supergirl (US: CBS; UK: Sky1) elsewhere, so after the jump, a look at the latest episodes of Arrow, Ash vs Evil Dead, The Beautiful Lie, Blindspot, Doctor Who, The Flash, Grandfathered, The Last Kingdom, Limitless, The Player and You’re The Worst. But first, a movie:
Spectre (2015) (at cinemas now) I actually saw this last week but completely forget to include it in my round-up. That should give you a clue as to what I thought about it.
As the name suggests, this introduces old Bond’s eventual arch-enemy Spectre to us, except here it turns out that it’s been Spectre orchestrating everything from Casino Royale onwards, for all kinds of pointless personal reasons involving Bond. Meanwhile, Andrew Scott (Moriarty in Sherlock) is a new surveillance-obsessed bigwig intent on unifying MI5 and MI6 and getting rid of the 00 section in the process.
It’s fine. Nothing great bar Craig and a marvellous four-minute long pseudo-tracking shot at the beginning, but fine, although there are parts of it that will make you feel like a great big chunk of story has been removed. It’s more or less the same structurally and thematically as Skyfall. There’s one age-appropriate Bond girl (Monica Bellucci), one age-inappropriate Bond girl (Léa Seydoux), a baddie who finally looks like he can take on this muscled incarnation of Bond (Dave Bautista), and Christoph Waltz does a homeopathically weak version of his usual routine, as the head of Spectre. I would give you the name of his character, but you can guess it.
Spectre‘s basically the conclusion of the Daniel Craig James Bond series, which has been setting up all the aspects of the Bond character from the previous films, just so that he can retire now it’s all been set up. Of the four Craig movies, it’s probably the second or third best, and like the previous Logan-Mendes Skyfall, it actually seems to enjoy the sexist and hokey aspects of the old series that it’s trying to reintroduce, despite the pains Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace took to try to make Craig’s Bond a modern hero.
