So here’s something I’ve learnt this week – it turns out that if you can’t actually get the actors you want, there is in fact an entire set of impersonators you can get instead for probably not even a tenth of the price.
Take Breaking In. This has Bret Harrison of The Loop and Reaper as a hapless college student who’s been hacking the college computers to ensure that he never has to graduate and can stay there forever. Except he gets found out by a team of semi-reformed criminals who are hired, Sneakers-stylee to break into places to test their security. They blackmail him into working for them.
So for something like this, with a boss who’s a bit devilish, a bit alpha-male-ish and smokes cigars, you’d want someone like Jack Nicholson. But if you can’t afford Jack Nicholson, you can get Christian Slater instead, since he can do a rocking Jack Nicholson when he wants to.
Now there’s obviously got to be some girl interest for Harrison to pine over. However, she has to be out of his league and just want to be friends. That’s what happened in The Loop. That’s what happened in Reaper. It must be in his contract. So how about we get Missy Peregrym, who did that in Reaper so well? What’s that? She’s starring in some Canadian show? Okay, how about we get Odette Annable née Yustman from Brothers and Sisters instead? They look the same, they act the same. They don’t cost the same.
Now we need some black guy who’s a bit sassy. Clearly, it would be great if we could get Chris Rock or Orlando Jones. No? Fine. Alphonso McAuley’s cheap. He’s barely been in anything. So let’s get him.
So now we pretty much have our cast, how about we get someone to do an impression of a funny script, by nicking a load of bits from other shows, and see where that takes us? Hmm?
Julian Fellowes’ Titanic to star Linus Roache, Geraldine Sommerville, Toby Jones, Celia Imrie, Sophie Winkleman, David Calder and Sylvestra Le Touzel [no link]
It’s been 10 years since the tragedy of 9/11. Do you know how you can tell?
The date. Obviously.
The fact that virtually every new spy show or movie that comes out these days seems to be a comedy – or comedy-drama
In the last few years on TV certainly, instead of the hardcore likes of 24, Threat Matrix et al, we’ve had InSecurity, Covert Affairs, Chuck and Undercovers, to name but a few. To that list – for a brief time at least – let us add Chaos, a show which at first glance looks like a very bad spy comedy but which soon metamorphoses into a surprisingly-not-awful dramedy full of action, crossing, double-crossing and mildly humorous situations.
In it, CIA recruit Rick Martinez (Freddy Rodriguez) arrives on his first day at work to find government cutbacks have already made his job at the Clandestine Administration and Oversight Services (CHAOS) redundant. His boss (Kurtwood Smith) offers him the chance to stay with the agency provided he agrees to spy on a small department full of ‘loose cannons’ run by paranoid genius Eric Close (Dark Skies, Without a Trace, and Now and Again). He does and after they play with him for a while, he soon learns that they may actually be the only members of the CIA doing proper spy work any more…
Because it’s the law on US TV, there are no fewer than three Brits in the cast of seven: Carmen Ejogo, who hasn’t been in much; Christine Cole (as of episode two), whom you might remember from the terrifyingly bad Sky 1 Buffy rip-off Hex; and James Murray, whom you might remember from the quite reasonable ITV1 Doctor Who rip-off Primeval – he got killed by dinosaurs. Well, you would if he weren’t trying to do a (surprisingly acceptable) Scottish accent the whole time, anyway.
