There’s a couple of interesting interviews for Who fans: Graeme Harper talks about his work on the last series over at Ain’t It Cool News; and Lis Sladen talks about The Sarah Jane Adventures over on BBC Norfolk.
News
Lost arrives on Sky One on November 18th
Love Lost? Live in the UK? Have a sodding great big dish strapped to the side of your house and pay an exorbitant subscription charge each month? Then you’ll be delighted to hear that Lost, season three, will be arriving on Sky One on Saturday 18th November. It’ll also be on Sky One HD if you’ve really wasted your money and bought an HD set and a Sky HD subscription. And for true money wasters, it’ll be on “Sky by broadband” as well, subject to technical requirements and your having Sky Sports 1 and 2 and/or Sky Movies 1 and 2.
Woo hoo.
The good news is that the six episodes that will have aired in the US by then will all get aired before Christmas; Sky will continue the season in February, with each episode airing just a few days after it airs in the US.
Lost trivia: have you noticed that whenever a major character dies, it’s always at the end of their flashback episode? So if you know, thanks to trailers, that someone’s going to die, as soon as you see the flashback, all sense of mystery is removed and you know exactly who’s going to pass on. Just mentioning that in passing and not because I’m hacked off as a result about last night’s episode. Oh no.
US TV
Fifth-episode verdict: Standoff
The people have spoken. Three episodes isn’t always enough, it seems, so today, I inaugurate the first of my fifth-episode verdicts. I’m not sure there are going to be any hard and fast rules about what gets a fifth-episode look-in, although if I can’t make up my mind by a show’s third episode, it’ll almost certainly get one.
So here goes with number one: Standoff, a show that BSkyB’s customer magazine has already declared a “ratings smash hit”, despite all evidence to the contrary. Maybe it’s because it’s coming to Sky One this month, but can they see something I can’t? My third-episode verdict came down on the side of “average”; the show’s already had an unofficial hiatus while the producers waited for scripts to be completed and new consulting producer Tim Minear came on board; and Minear has just had his own pilot, Drive, picked up, with Fox saying he’ll stay with Standoff until its 13-episode run finishes. That’s quite an achievement for Minear: normally his shows have to be broadcast before they get cancelled, but that’s expensive and if he can cut costs by getting shows cancelled before they air, good on him.
So I’ve now sat through the first five episodes of Standoff, and I have to say, it gets even more average by the fifth episode. Utterly, utterly formulaic, utterly, utterly unbelievable. Sorry to spoil any potential viewers, but by episode five, we have Livingston going all jelly-like because he’s having to negotiate with someone who’s taken a surgeon hostage – and he hates hospitals because his mother died in one. They put this man in stress situations? The other facet of the show, the illicit relationship between Livingston and his partner, appears to have been put into suspended animation and is now there purely to allow his partner to be nurturing and for otherwise rubbish bits of dialogue to have slightly more meaning (“You just do your job,” says Livingston. Ooh. There’ll be hell to pay later.)
Standoff has now moved down officially from average to an even lower rating. As you may have noticed, I’ve chosen this moment to inaugurate a new ratings system as well: “The Carusometer”. This goes from
0 Anti Caruso: a programme so good that if it were placed in the same room as David Caruso, the two would annihilate each other, leaving behind just the faintest sound of a sigh of pleasure. An example is The Wire.
to
5 Full Caruso: a programme so bad that every single aspect of it seems to have been put together by David Caruso. An example is Angela’s Eyes.
The Medium is Not Enough has declared Standoff to be a 4 or “Major Caruso” on The Carusometer quality scale. A Major Caruso corresponds to “a show that David Caruso might exec produce or star in, or maybe write during a lunch break, perched at a strange angle on the side of a boat”.
The Bourne Ultimatum gets its baddie
It’s already filming yet until now, it didn’t have a baddie. Now The Bourne Ultimatum, the last in the original Robert Ludlum trilogy to be filmed with Matt Damon as Jason Bourne/David Webb, has got itself an evil Spanish-speaking assassin at last: Edgar Ramirez. You might have seen him in that Keira Knightley rubbish, Domino, but that’s unlikely.
Why Spanish-speaking? No idea, although the villain of the book, The Bourne Ultimatum, is Carlos The Jackal, the infamous Caracas-born terrorist. Interestingly, Carlos’ real name was Ilich Ramírez Sánchez and Edgar Ramirez was also born in Caracas. However, Ramirez will be playing an assassin called Paz. Fun parallels though, right?
Eddie Izzard leaves 24
Eddie Izzard has managed to last only one day of torture at 24. He was supposed to be playing a baddie, but now he’s not and the part is going to David Hunt, another English actor. Depending on whom you talk to, Eddie was either a bit of a diva and got given a push or he couldn’t juggle 24‘s filming requirements with those of his own show, Riches.