US TV

An archive of articles about US television programmes and production.

US TV

What have you been watching? Including Growing Up Fisher, Secrets and Lies, Red Road, Suits and Agents of SHIELD

14 March 2014 Rob Buckley 12 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.

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.

Despite my having been away for a while, I’ve managed to catch up with many of the regular shows and even tried out plenty of new shows. Although I’ve now got three episodes of new Canadian medical show Remedy to wade through, I’ve been able to post reviews of:

I did also try one other new show:

Growing Up Fisher (US: NBC)
DJ Nash’s semi-autobiographical series, in which the Fisher family – blind attorney JK Simmons, mother Jenna Elfman and son Eli Baker – surprisingly grow closer after the parents get a divorce and Simmons finally gets a guide dog called Elvis. It’s nice, it’s got Jason Bateman doing the voiceover for that Arrested Development feel and David Schwimmer from Friends is an exec producer, too. Elfman and Simmons are both good. However, it’s not very funny, just mildly uplifting, and most of the humour revolves around Simmons’ blindness. If you find people being blind and trying to do things funny, it might be more up your street.

But after the jump, reviews of Agents of SHIELD, Helix, Red Road, Secrets and Lies, 19-2, The Americans, Banshee, Community, The Doctor Blake Mysteries, Elementary, Hannibal, Line of Duty, Suits and True Detective.

Continue reading “What have you been watching? Including Growing Up Fisher, Secrets and Lies, Red Road, Suits and Agents of SHIELD”

US TV

Review: Resurrection 1×1 (ABC)

14 March 2014 Rob Buckley 9 Comments

Resurrection ABC

In the US: Sundays, 9/8c, ABC

Sometimes, miracles really do happen. I’m not talking about the dead coming back to life – well, not yet I’m not. I’m talking about the fact that two people around the world can have practically identical ideas and for both these ideas to be turned into TV series.

In France, for example, there was a movie called Les Revenants (‘The Returned’), which in turn became the basis of a Canal+ TV series by Fabrice Gobert called Les Revenants that was shown on Channel 4 in the UK and the Sundance Channel in the US. In it, the dead come back to life in a small town, revealing all kinds of issues and relationship problems, including in some cases mysteries about how they died. In particular, there’s a weird boy who’ll do your head in.

Meanwhile, over in the US, a man called Jason Mott wrote a book called The Returned, which has new become the basis of ABC’s Resurrection, in which the dead come back to life in a small town, revealing all kinds of issues and relationship problems, including in some cases mysteries about how they died. In particular, there’s a weird boy who’ll do your head in.

Spooky, huh? And I haven’t gotten started on the fact that the almost identical Babylon Fields is being remade right now, as is Les Revenants.

Here’s a trailer.

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News

News: A French Broadchurch, a Dutch Cheers, CBS renews multiple shows + more

14 March 2014 Rob Buckley Post a comment

Keeley Hawes in Doctor Who

Doctor Who

French TV

European TV

US TV

  • CBS renews: NCIS, NCIS: Los Angeles, Person of Interest, CSI, Hawaii Five-0, Blue Bloods, Criminal Minds, Elementary, The Good Wife, Two and a Half Man, Mike & Molly, The Millers, Mom and 2 Broke Girls
  • Wednesday ratings

US TV show casting

  • Emily Bergl promoted on Shameless, Andrea Bogart to recur on Ray Donovan
  • Jorge Garcia to be a regular on Hawaii Five-0
  • Brandy to guest on The Soul Man

New US TV shows

New US TV show casting

  • Greg Stults to star in CBS’s Cuz-Bros (if Enlisted gets cancelled)
  • S Epatha Merkerson to recur on NBC’s Babylon Fields
  • David Morse and Sophie Okonedo to co-sar in CBS’s Wall Street drama
  • Thomas Lennon to star in CBS’s Odd Couple remake
  • Kat Foster and Kyle Howard to star in TBS’s Israeli comedy remake Your Family or Mine, Danny Comden and Andrew Lees to recur
  • John Cho to star in ABC’s Selfie
  • Oder Gehr to be a regular on ABC’s Richard LaGravenese pilot, Kyle Jones to recur on ABC’s Damaged Goods
  • Ben Koldyke to co-star in NBC’s Mr Robinson, Manish Dayal joins The CW’s Identity
US TV

Review: Working The Engels 1×1 (Global/NBC)

13 March 2014 Rob Buckley 3 Comments

Working The Engels

In Canada: Wednesdays, 9 et/pt, Global
In the US: NBC. Airing in 2014

Now the story of a wealthy family who lost everything and the one sondaughter who had no choice but to keep them all together.

I’m in something of a dilemma here, since my lovely categorisation system has broken down. Working the Engels is a co-production between Canada’s Global network and the US’s NBC network – the first ever Canadian-American sitcom. So does it suck because it’s Canadian or because it’s on NBC?

The show starts with a lawyer dying, leaving his wife (Andrea Martin from My Big Fat Greek Wedding) and family in debt to the tune of $200,000. US or Canadian? It’s not clear since this is one of those shows of nebulous geographical location. Neither is it clear why he wasn’t in a limited liability partnership. Presumably he was a very bad lawyer.

Anyway, the kids rally round, or at least the mousey lawyer daughter (Kacey Rohl who played Abigail Hobbs in Hannibal) does, and her pill-popping, airhead sister (Azura Skye who was Jane on The WB’s Zoe, Duncan, Jack & Jane) and minor criminal brother (Benjamin Arthur from CityTV/HBO Canada’s Less Than Kind) come along to both help and accidentally hinder her efforts to bring the family legal practice back into the black. Except it turns out that most of the deceased’s clients were either pro bono or stupid.

Written by Miss Congeniality’s Katie Ford and her sister Jane Cooper Ford, Working the Engels‘ comparisons with the much revered Arrested Development are obvious. Unfortunately, that’s merely in terms of set-up since it’s not very funny.

The script is short on laughs and pretty much every joke is signalled a mile off and has exactly the punchline you expect. Rohl underplays, everyone else overplays in exactly the same way that virtually every Canadian sitcom you care to think of demands (cf Satisfaction, InSecurity, Seed, 18 To Life, Men With Brooms, Hiccups). The equally requisite physical comedy is ineptly handled and directed. Skye and Arthur’s characters do slightly bad things but do it so nicely, it’s hard to consider them the drop-out liabilities the script demands. The supporting characters are mere stereotypes – the overbearing female boss, the obsequious male Indian, the valley girl client and so on.

In short, there are no redeeming features. Other than a naked Asian guitar-playing character. I’d not seen one of those before but I think she’s only in the pilot.

If I wanted to find something positive to say, I’d say that it is at least well meaning and gentle, rather than insultingly poor and crass, with everyone trying to ‘zing’ each other, like so many US sitcoms of late (e.g. Mom, The Millers, Super Fun Night). I only felt the urge to turn off a couple of times while I was watching it and that was more because I was bored than because I hated it.

But that’s about it and I think the fact NBC hasn’t announced an air date for it yet should speak volumes – if NBC won’t show it, it must be bad.

Here’s a trailer anyway.

US TV

Review: Believe (NBC/Watch) 1×1

13 March 2014 Rob Buckley 6 Comments

NBC's Believe

In the US: Sundays, 9/8c, NBC
In the UK: Thursdays, 9pm, Watch. Starts March 27th

There used to be a time when I’d look forward to a show that had the name JJ Abrams attached. Even to this day, Felicity has its fans and although Alias went to seed in the second season, it was a real gamechanger and made Jennifer Garner’s career. Lost cemented Abrams’ reputation, even if he had minimum involvement with it, as did Fringe – at least in some quarters.

But largely, Abrams’ reputation rests on those shows – and it’s a foundation of sand. Look over his CV, and even if you discard the pilots he made that never saw the light of day, such as The Catch, Anatomy of Hope and Shelter, you’ll see he’s mainly produced turkey after turkey. Remember Six Degrees, Undercovers, and Alcatraz? Almost Human wasn’t exactly a tour de force, and if you’re still watching either Revolution or Person of Interest, you have my sympathies.

So now I approach any TV show with Abrams’ name attached with a fair degree of caution. To a certain extent, that’s because Abrams’ playbook has become quite clear. He stocks up the pilot with a sci-fi or fantasy scenario, fills it full of random mysteries and questions that must be answered, adds a secret organisation with answers to these mysteries of the in-world universe that have no implications at all in the real world, adds in a few ‘wow’ moments, a few martial arts fights and then, over the course of the series, slowly ekes them out, adds more mysteries, before finally revealing the largely unsatisfying answers. Not always, but that’s usually how it goes, assuming they don’t get cancelled before they’ve had a chance to reveal all.

So behold Believe, Abrams’ latest show in which a mysterious organisation led by Agent Dale Cooper (sorry, Kyle MacLachlan) is hunting down a young girl with secret powers over pigeons. Yes, pigeons. Oh, she can do other things, too, like predict the future and read minds. How? Good question. She just can and she might change the world as a result, so the baddies want to control her.

However, there’s another secret organisation led by Delroy Lindo that wants to protect her. So they bust a wrongly convicted death row prisoner (Jake McLaughlin from the TV version of Crash) out of jail and put him in charge of protecting her… for the rest of his life. Not the best idea in the world, you might think, so why have they done that? Well, that’s a mystery. Kind of. But it all revolves faith and belief.

It sounds a bit rubbish, it is a bit rubbish, and with yet another central mystery of no real-world import, a secret organisation, etc, you’d be forgiven for thinking this was Abrams working by numbers. But, actually, it’s Alfonso Cuarón (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Children of Men, Gravity) and Mark Friedman (The Forgotten) who are the creative forces behind it, so despite its Abrams-ness, there are a few quirks to it you might not have been expecting.

Like that it’s deliberately silly to the extent that the main baddie is worried she won’t be home in time for her mum’s birthday with all the child-hunting she’s got to do.

Here’s a trailer. It’ll tell you the answer to at least one of the mysteries mentioned above.

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