The Medium is Not Enough

Ooh look: it’s another season finale forced by the writers’ strike. How not at all surprising.

More surprising is that I’m still writing about Moonlight.

As you might recall, I gave the first episode of the show, which was absolutely appalling, a somewhat scathing review. But miracles do happen and Moonlight had improved sufficiently over the next few episodes for me to pass a fifth– rather than a third-episode verdict.

I still wasn’t that impressed though.

But I stuck with it, mainly because I felt sorry for Sophia Myles being stuck over in the US while David Tennant was breaking up with her. And while I wouldn’t say the show improved drastically, it has still continued to moderately entertain and surprise over the course of its season.

Continue reading “Season finale: Moonlight”

In the US: Tuesdays, 10pm ET/PT, CBS. Returns February 12th

In the UK: Hallmark, etc, when the time is right

Cast your mind back a while. Jericho was, for a while, one of the big hits of Fall 2006. An odd mix of right-wing lunacy and left-wing lunacy, it asked what would happen if nuclear bombs went off in almost every city in the US. Soap opera for survivalists, it turned out, with our noble survivors planning farming patterns, how to avoid nuclear fallout and how to shoot at anyone from a neighbouring town who moved – while deciding whether to leave their wives for the pregnant mistresses. All this was married with the tale of a cool black undercover CIA guy who knew that wacky people who thought the US should have attacked the USSR in 1962 were behind the bombs.

As I said – you get lunacy from both ends of the political spectrum in Jericho. But it was more entertaining than it sounds. Honest.

Then oops. After running non-stop all Fall, after the Christmas break, ratings fell off because everyone forgot it was on, and the show got cancelled at the end of the first season.

But you know what? If you send truckloads of peanuts to CBS TV executives, it turns out that they’ll revive a show – for seven episodes at least. And in the vacuum left by the writers’ strike, maybe it could get those stellar ratings back again when it airs next month.

Continue reading “Preview: Jericho 2×1-2×3”