Want to watch the new series of Dallas on TNT on Wednesday in the US – it’ll be coming to Channel 5 in the UK later in the year – but never saw the original? Or perhaps you did see the original series, but given that was 20-odd years ago now, everything’s a little hazy now? Well, don’t worry. TNT has put together this behind-the-scenes trailer that interviews the cast while also giving you a brief run-down of what the show is all about and how it all started.
After Saving Hope, here’s another show that doesn’t quite merit a full review. Longmire appears to take a page out of AMC’s book – as well as Craig Johnson’s series of mystery novels – by being a slow-moving character piece about a widowed sheriff out in Wyoming – the eponymous Longmire (the Australian actor Robert Taylor, best known as one of the agents from The Matrix).
Longmire doesn’t really have a lot to do, at first, beyond dealing with an uppity but friendly new female deputy from out Phili way (Katee Sackhoff from Battlestar Galactica), a male deputy who wants his job, his lawyer daughter (Cassidy Freeman from Smallville) and a bunch of native Americans who don’t like him and are either off running mobile brothels or being corrupt reservation cops – all apart from that nice Lou Diamond Phillips, of course. Then the unthinkable happens – there’s an actual crime and Longmire has to investigate it, doing as little talking as possible.
It’s beautifully shot on location in, surprisingly, New Mexico. It has an impeccable cast, has some real attention to detail and manages to offer a relatively fresh view on crime stories, although it’s not a million miles away from Justified‘s ‘modern western’. It’s also touching as well, with Longmire’s love of his deceased wife shining through.
But it reads like a last hurrah for conservatism and patriarchy, with the old, white straight guy being smarter and more honourable than everyone else, particularly city folks, women and those pesky Indians who aren’t to be trusted. And despite a few action scenes, it’s not the most exciting of shows either.
Still not bad so far, although since the trailer for the next episode has Sackhoff stripping by a pole in a club, I might be switching off in protest. Not that I count towards ratings, of course. Oh well.
In Canada: Thursdays, 9pm ET/PT , CTV In the US: Thursdays, 9/8c, NBC
I can’t quite muster the enthusiasm to write a full review of this, since it’s quite a bad, quite a boring show. Essentially, you have Erica Durance (Lois Lane in Smallville) and Michael Shanks (Daniel Jackson in Stargate SG-1) as irritating, arrogant doctors who work together and are about to get married. Unfortunately, there’s a car crash, Shanks is nearly killed and he ends up in a coma.
You might think that was the end of that, but he then spends not just the rest of the episode but quite probably the rest of the series in an out-of-body experience, moving around, talking to ghosts and anyone else in a coma presumably, mulling over whether he was too much of a dick when he was alive.
Meanwhile, in the background to all of that, you have an incredibly tedious standard medical procedural where every patient has an Issue that needs to be dealt with.
Weirdly, we’ve already seen this done before very recently with A Gifted Man and it wasn’t that good then. What makes this worse is that rather than the lead interacting with the invisible lover as per A Gifted Man, Shanks and Durance don’t actually get to interact at all now Shanks is disembodied. To some this may seem romantic; to others, it means the show is even less interesting than it otherwise would have been. Even the addition of a supposedly hunky, sensitive Australian ex-lover for Durance to triangle with doesn’t lift the script anywhere above forgettable.
Durance is fine, showing slightly more range than she was allowed in Smallville, but only a little. Shanks is very one-note, which is disappointing, given we know from Stargate that he’s pretty versatile. The rest of the cast might as well be made from polystyrene for all they matter, but at least you can like them, unless Shanks’ and Durance’s characters.
Although the central concept is at least interesting, it’s tedious, derivative, shows no sign of getting much better, so don’t bother with it.
We’ve already has a look at and seen a few isolated scenes from The CW’s forthcoming 2012-13 TV season, but the network has now released some proper trailers for Beauty and the Beast, Arrow and Emily Owens MD, which you can see after the jump. Notice how there’s very little ‘beast’ in Beauty and the Beast, because, you know, who likes ugly things? Or is that missing the point of the whole story?
