Every week or so, TMINE flags up what new TV events BAFTA is holding around the UK
Moved to its somewhat odd new regular slot of Tuesdays, here’s the latest update on what BAFTA is doing TV-wise around the UK. At the moment, BAFTA seems to be focused on its Welsh activities, mind. Just announced is an additional date and location for Matthew Hall to talk about writing (more details on the first announcement) – he’s now going to be at JP studio, Bangor University, on Wednesday, 20 February at 1.30pm. You can book tickets if you’re a member by emailing Vicki.
But there’s one new event, which is for an S4C drama that if I not overlooked (as The Killing Timesis reviewing it), couldn’t quite find the time to watch.
Preview: Final episode of 35 Awr + Q&A (Carmarthen)
Sunday, 24 February 2019 – 7:30pm
Yr Egin, College Rd, Carmarthen SA31
Boom Cymru and S4C present the final installment of the eight-part series that is set in a jury room, featuring 10 people deliberating over a murder case.
Written by BAFTA Cymru nominee Fflur Dafydd (The Library Suicides) and starring Lisa Marged (Parch, Wolfblood) and Jâms Thomas (Gwaith Cartref).
The screening will be followed by a Q&A with cast and key creatives.
We have an allocation of members’ tickets. Email Vicki to reserve your place.
Follow the series every Sunday at 9pm on S4C and catch up with episodes you may have missed on the iPlayer.
Young adults are apparently the most stressed out of any generation ever. Perhaps that’s why so many of them are murderous right now, even vicariously in a period piece such as Deadly Class. Even those of them who have grown up in forests with only their fathers for company and who’ve never met another living person are off killing people, apparently.
At least, if you believe Amazon Prime’s new show, Hanna, a remake/reboot of the 2011 Joe Wright movie.
Hanna’s sister
It sees Esme Creed-Miles – who eerily looks precisely 50% like dad Charlie Creed-Miles (The Gemini Factor, Press Gang) and 50% like mum Samantha Morton (Minority Report) – take on the Saoirse Ronan role as the titular wood-dwelling Hanna. She’s been camped out in a Central European forest since she was rescued by secret agent dad Joel Kinnaman (The Killing(US), Robocop, Altered Carbon) from a special institution when she was just a baby. Why was she there? We don’t know. Why has dad kept her from the world? Because he reckons that the evil secret agent woman in charge of chasing them down (Kinnaman’s The Killing (US) co-star Mireille Enos) is going to come after them if she discovers that they survived the car crash that killed Creed-Miles’ mother.
In the 16 years or so since, dad has been home schooling Creed-Miles in languages, geography and how to kill a man with just your thumb – presumably so she can look after herself or at least go to finishing school. Unfortunately, one day, she decides to disobey dad’s edict not to leave their little area of the forest and comes across a Polish wood chopper. After twatting him around a bit, she warms to him and ends up going exploring with him, which even more unfortunately leads to the wood chopper being arrested – and Enos discovering that Creed-Miles and Kinnaman are still alive.
Hantastic?
And that’s more or less it for this first, preview episode of the series, which will premiere in full on Amazon next month. Which makes it hard really to tell if it’s any good. Creed-Miles is fine, Kinnaman is fine, Enos is fine. There’s all the gloss and production values you’d hope for from Amazon or even a Netflix production, with some lovely forest location filming and even a bit of Paris (or maybe faux Paris), too.
But the cast don’t really have that much to do. If you’re hoping that Kinnaman and Enos will even get to speak to one another, let alone have a scene together, you’ll be disappointed. Kinnamon gets to be punchy and test Creed-Miles on the population of Hanover, but there’s not really much of a familial bond between him and her, perhaps through design, perhaps not. The fight scenes are very good, but don’t do anything you’ve not seen before.
And as a plot… well, half an hour of wandering round the forest doesn’t really count.
Wait and see
So while Hanna might be a great show, Amazon’s decision to try to preview the series to whet our appetites is a weird one. I feel like I’ve already started the show and when episode two finally arrives in a month or so, I’ll be restarting after a long gap of time. And this first episode is certainly not spectacular enough – or even particularly engaging – to make me feel that’s going to be a worthwhile endeavour.
I’ve also already seen the original movie, and given this sticks relatively closely to the original story, I’m not that sure if watching something five times longer that’s basically the same is a good use of my time either.
So if you were planning on watching this, I’d advise holding off until the rest of the series becomes available.
Groundhog Day is many things. For sure, it’s a much-loved, classic comedy of the 1990s and one that stars Bill Murray at that. That should be enough to make it noteworthy.
But it’s also a genre-defining movie. The tale of man doomed to relive the same day, day after day, no matter what he does, it is much emulated. If you watch as many TV shows as I do, you’ll notice that pretty much every long-running sci-fi show will do a Groundhog Day episode, whether it’s Stargate SG-1, Dark Matter, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Doctor Who, Fringe, Star Trek: Discovery, 12 Monkeys, Supernatural, The X-Files or Travelers, to name but a few.
Indeed, I’ve seen so many now, it feels like I’m in my own TV Groundhog Day, and one of my golden laws of sci-fi TV is that any sufficiently long-running sci-fi show will eventually do a Groundhog Day episode of its own.
So iconic is Groundhog Day that most shows don’t even try to hide what they’re doing and will even namecheck It. It’s also made it into the dictionary now.
Not Groundhog Day
Look up at the first part of that definition and you’ll suddenly remember that Groundhog Day is named after a real-life event celebrated in the US on February 2, in which a groundhog is used to predict the weather (this year: an early spring). So kudos to Netflix on three scores.
First, for releasing Russian Doll, its version of Groundhog Day, on February 1, just in time for the actual Groundhog Day, but with no fanfare pointing this out.
Second, for not mentioning Groundhog Day throughout the eight episodes, despite having a computer game designer as a heroine who drops copious mentions of other genre movies and TV shows.
And third, for doing something that while having much in common with Groundhog Day somehow manages to do something surprisingly different with its central time loop.
No doll
Given the need for there to be some cause for a time loop, most shows that use ‘the Groundhog Day’ scenario are by their very nature sci-fi shows, with the likes of Daybreak being one of the very few exceptions – until now.
But beyond a slight horror theme that gets more and more pronounced until the surprisingly disturbing seventh episode, Russian Doll is actually a dark relationship comedy. Co-creator and star Natasha Lyonne plays the eponymous Russian Doll and Bill Murray of the piece, ‘Nadia Vulvokov’. When the action starts, she’s at her 36th birthday party and there appears to be a vortex in her bathroom, not that she pays much attention to it. At the party, she meets a guy called Mike (Jeremy Lowell Bobb) and hooks up with him. However, on the way home, she’s hit by a taxi… and killed.
And is back in the bathroom again. What’s going on, why is this happening, how can she escape from the loop and how many times will she have to die along the way?
It wasn’t brilliant, and I’m not sure this would have added that much, but here you go.
In payment for your 10,000 retweets, here's a scene between Lucy and Agent Christopher, shortly after Flynn's death. We thought it was a lovely moment between the two of them, but had to cut it for time. #Timeless@TimelessSPTV#ClockBlockerspic.twitter.com/GcLZnu9gmU
