March looks like it’s going to be a quiet month at the BFI for TV lovers. In fact, there’s precisely one event happening and that’s a chat with Kate Adie about her career. Still, Kate Adie’s cool so that’s pretty good.
Monday 6 March 18:15 NFT1 Reporting History: Kate Adie in Conversation TRT 90min Kate Adie is one of the UK’s most trusted and respected journalists. Her incisive and informative reporting from the front line has bought contemporary history into the living rooms of millions of viewers and provided us all with a global perspective on major events. As the BBC’s Chief News Correspondent her assignments have included: the final NATO intervention in Kosovo; the Herald of Free Enterprise disaster; the massacre at Dunblane; the SAS lifting of the Iran Embassy Siege in London; and the Tiananmen Square protest in Beijing in 1989. Join Adie as she discusses her amazing career alongside fascinating clips, followed by a chance for you to ask your own questions. Tickets £16, concs £12 (Members pay £1.70 less)
Champions’ priority booking: February 6 11.30am Members’ priority booking opens: February 7 11.30am Public booking opens: February 14 11.30am
Prices Members: £10.10 Member concs: £7.55 Non-members: £11.75 Non-member concs: £9.20 Under 16s £6.00
Reduced prices for weekday matinees. Conc prices are available to senior citizens, students, unwaged and disability visitors. Proof of eligibility may be required. As always, visit the BFI web site for more details.
It’s “What have you been watching?”, my chance to tell you what movies and TV I’ve been watching recently and your chance to recommend anything you’ve been watching.
It’s been a bumper week for new shows. I’ve already reviewed Superior Donuts(US: CBS), 24: Legacy (US: Fox; UK: Fox UK), APB (US: Fox) and Legion (US: Fox; UK: Fox UK), and passed a third-episode verdict on Cardinal (Canada: CTV/Super Écran; UK: BBC Four), but that still leaves me with Imposters (US: TNT), Newton’s Law (Australia: ABC) and Riverdale (US: The CW; UK: Netflix) to review or pass third-episode verdicts on. I’m keeping my fingers crossed on getting all of them done, but as I’m taking Wednesday off, there might be a slight delay.
But after the jump, this week’s look at the latest episodes of the regulars: DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, The Flash, Fortitude, The Great Indoors, Lethal Weapon, The Magicians, Man Seeking Woman, Powerless,Son of Zorn, and Timeless
In Canada: Wednesdays, 10 pm ET/PT, CTV In Canada (en Français): Thursdays, 10pm, Super Écran In the UK: Acquired by BBC Four for broadcast in 2017
Cardinal is now big news in the UK. With a lot of the ‘world shows’ I review, particularly Canadian ones, I don’t usually expect them to ever end up on UK TV by normal means, although that’s slowly been changing. But Canada’s CTV isn’t really a network that the UK acquires from, so I had thought the chances were even slimmer that anyone but the most dedicated would get to see it outside Canada.
But as of Friday, Cardinal has become not just BBC Four’s first ever Canadian acquisition but, I think, UK TV’s first CTV acquisition. How extraordinary.
You can see from watching it why this would be. Unlike many CTV shows, Cardinal is beautifully made and more to the point, it’s Nordic/Canadian Noir that’ll slot ever so nicely into BBC Four’s Saturday night foreign crime drama schedule.
Adapted from the first of Giles Blunt’s six ‘John Cardinal Mysteries’, Forty Words For Sorrow, Cardinal sees Billy Campbell (Helix, The Killing (US), The Rocketeer) playing the eponymous Cardinal, a Canadian police detective in the fictional Algonquin Bay, who investigates the disppearance of a young girl. Unable to find her, he goes off the rails and is demoted, but a year later, the body of the girl turns up and he is reassigned to what is now a murder case, working alongside new recruit Karine Vanasse (Pan Am, Revenge).
Now the first episode is a tour de force, giving us a genuinely interesting slice of Canadian life in Algonquin Bay, a decent mystery to be solved and subtle performances from the main cast. After that, episode two is a bit of a climb down, consisting largely of people sitting in rooms talking. There’s still the show’s established feel for police procedure and shunning of glossy US police clichés in favour of the plausible and what’s affordable for a small Canadian police department. But it’s people sitting around talking.
Indeed, when the killers show up in episode two, you barely realise they’re the killers, it’s all so low key. It’s only in episode three that everything starts to become evident and the show becomes a cat-and-mouse game between Cardinal and his quarries. And it’s here that Cardinal and I might part ways, because although it’s still a beautifully crafted piece of work, something to which it owes a great deal of credit to director Podz, it’s still Nordic/Canadian Noir and we enter the realm of the dotty serial killer. As a genre trope, that’s fine, if you like that kind of thing, but I’m not a big fan of watching hours of outright sadism, even if it’s all very tastefully done.
The show’s also a little unfocused, with a key plot thread of the first three episodes being the question of whether Cardinal is a corrupt cop, with a covert internal investigation taking up rather a lot of the show’s time. Whether he is or he isn’t, Campbell’s Cardinal is so sad and joyless that it feels like kicking a man when he’s down to even be thinking it, and you can bet, thanks to the side-plot involving his sick wife, that there’s a sad reason for any corruption if it’s true.
Those reservations aside, if Nordic Noir is your thing, Cardinal is a very fine addition to the genre, as beautiful to watch as Ófærð (Trapped)and as well acted as Forbrydelsen (The Killing).
