Last week, we got the news that there’s a young adult Wonder Woman book series on the way. Okay, technically that was announced in March, but now we have a cover.
Can’t say I entirely approve of the plot – “What Diana doesn’t know is that Alia is a Warbringer, a direct descendant of Helen of Troy, and she is fated to bring about bloodshed and misery” – but since I’m not going to be reading it, I’m not really sure I can complain.
Meanwhile, DC was busily trademarking “Lasso of Truth” for many purposes, including barbecues. Hmmm.
And in the war between Frank Cho and Greg Rucka, more shots were (almost) fired. Cho, best known for some dodgy superheroine artwork designed to wind people up, has been doing variant covers for Wonder Woman for some time. However, when a bit too much backside started to appear in his drawings, Rucka put his foot down and DC showed Cho the door.
Except on Friday, Cho claimed that he’d been approached by DC to write Wonder Woman once Rucka’s left.
They want me back to Wonder Woman as soon as possible, as soon as the writer is gone. So that’s why I’ve already written a Wonder Woman story to go so that as soon as the writer is gone and I’m pretty sure DC and Marvel want me to draw and it makes sense
He also made a few thinly veiled critiques of Rucka:
It’s not gonna be an origin story because I hate origin stories. Every single Wonder Woman book that you pick there’s a goddam origin story where nothing happens.
Except by Sunday, DC had denied everything. Sighs of relief all round.
And that was the news. After the jump, let’s talk about last week’s Wonder Woman (Rebirth), which, erm, continues Diana’s latest origin story.
Sometimes, I’m surprised there’s any scripted British TV at all. Who’s starring in it, given that virtually every actor in the UK seems to have nipped off to the US to try their chances at having a well-paid career for a change. Hell, even Jeff from Coupling gets to be a an ex-Russian special forces soldier over there; here, he’d be some doctor in a low-key BBC Two drama or something.
So widespread is this problem that even the cast of Downton Abbey are heading stateside. Dan Stevens has been paving the way for the others for some time but now Michelle Dockery’s there.
What’s stranger than their managing to get jobs is the kind of jobs they’re getting. Stevens has already been voicing a supercomputer in The Tomorrow People but now he’s going to be a TV X-Man in FX’s Legion. Meanwhile, Dockery is in a new TNT show starting tonight that she has no right to be the lead in whatsoever, you’d have thought.
Based on Blake Crouch (Wayward Pines)’s Letty Dobesh Chronicles, Good Behavior sees Dockery unexpectedly playing the books’ titular former con and conwoman, a drug addict who’s just been let out of jail and working in a dead-end job in roadside café. When she gets fired, she returns to her life of burglary and confidence tricks, but when she overhears two men planning a hit against a woman, she decides to do something nice and save her.
No good deed goes unpunished, of course, and just as she’s about to end the pain with a bucketload of drugs, sexy Juan Diego Botto turns up with an offer she can’t refuse.
Read that description of the plot and tell me your first thought is “Hmm, maybe that Lady Mary from Downton Abbey would be good for the job?” Ridiculous, isn’t it?
Yet, surprisingly, Dockery ain’t half bad. True, she spends a lot of her time in her undies or implausible wigs, which might distract the viewer from her performance a tad. But she does well with what she’s got and is persuasive, as is Botto.
The problem isn’t with them, though – it’s with the source material. While it’s not stupid, it’s very much a piece of male gaze. Dockery’s character is a typical male fantasy – a bad girl with a heart of gold, who naturally does everything for the love of her daughter and her mother, rather than because she’s properly trailer trash, properly criminal or every bit the sneaky equal of Botto. Dockery’s also expected to be both put-upon victim and top con artiste, but trying to be plausibly crushed underfoot by life yet strong willed is a squaring of the circle that would be hard for anyone to attempt even unbewigged.
So little does any of this hold together that I honestly thought I’d missed bits. Wait… she was a waitress cleaning the toilets a minute ago. How is she now burgling top end hotels with her phone buddy? Was it something to do with that wallet she stole? But he can’t have had any money, surely. What did I miss?
Rewind.
Nope. Didn’t miss anything.
If anything, Good Behavior shows that if you get a good cast together and shoot something in a noirish way, it’s almost enough to fool the viewer into thinking a quality piece of work is being produced. But like sister show Animal Kingdom, Good Behavior also demonstrates the vital importance of something actually making sense, if it’s going to aspire to darkness-tinged mimesis.
It’s “What have you been watching?”, my chance to tell you what movies and TV I’ve been watching recently that I haven’t already reviewed and your chance to recommend things to everyone else (and me) in case I’ve missed them. There’s also the Reviews A-Z, for when you want to check more or less anything I’ve reviewed ever.
Made it. Backlog – cleared. TV – watched.
Okay, not quite. I skipped Dark Water because that’s now on BBC Four, so there’s not much point my previewing it now. Oops. Still, it was only a mini-series.
Also, all the new Internet shows I keep listing are going to take a little longer, as are the shows I’m currently watching with lovely wife (Westworld, Humans, The Crown). But everything else is now up-to-date. Well done me.
Given I’ve already passed third episode verdicts this week on The Great Indoors(US: CBS; UK: ITV2) and Eyewitness (US: USA), that means that after the jump, I’ll be looking at the latest episodes of Ash vs Evil Dead, Chance, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, Designated Survivor, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, Doctor Doctor, Falling Water, Frequency, Hyde and Seek, Lethal Weapon, Lucifer, Son of Zorn,Supergirl and Travelers.
In terms of new shows, elsewhere, I’ve reviewed Second Jen (Canada: City), but I have tried a few others, you’ll be happy to hear.
Frontier (Canada: Discovery; UK: Netflix) Set in the disputed Hudson Bay territory of Canada at the turn of the 18th century, Discovery’s first scripted show Frontier sees Jason Momoa as a tomahawk-wielding go-between for all the competing interests that want to kill animals for their fur, including the English, Scottish, Americans and Canadians (who are all either English or French at this point, of course). With its terrible dialogue, motley medley of actors all sporting bad accents no matter their origin, and middling production values, Frontier is unfortunately little more than The Patriot meets Last of the Mohicans, with Momoa clearly thinking he’s in a different show from the rest of the anaemic cast. Practically unwatchable, it’s still not quite as bad as The Bastard Executioner.
People of Earth (US: TBS) TBS apparently being where Daily Show correspondents now go to die, People of Earth gives us Wyatt Cenac as a cynical magazine journalist sent to cover an “alien abductees survivors group” – although they prefer ‘experiencers’ – where he soon begins to realise that those vivids hallucinations of talking deer might be a sign that he, too, has been abducted. So he decides to stay in town and see if he can work out what’s really happening and whether an alien invasion is really underway.
The show is a 50/50 split between two strands. The first strand is the desperately unfunny goings on at the support group, which reminds you of Go Onbut with Cenac’s deadpan instead of the jokes and Matthew Perry’s sardonic quips.
The second is with the aliens themselves – for they are real – where the show is actually a properly funny workplace comedy. Yes, that’s right – a workplace comedy. I mean have you ever considered how much effort goes into faking those cover-ups?
I watched the first episodes, I might keep watching for the aliens. But I might not.
Stan Against Evil (US: IFC) John C McGinley reprises his Scrubs Doctor Cox role here to play a sheriff of a small town near Salem that was once the host to even more witch burnings. However, these were all real witches and demons, who vowed to kill every sheriff the town would ever have. Fortunately for Cox, his learned wife managed to use all manner of magic to protect him, making him the only sheriff to survive the job in the town’s entire history. But Cox is fired, just after his wife’s funeral, so soon a replacement (You’re The Worst‘s Janet Varney) is in town and together, they have to fight all manner of horrors together, since the demons want them both dead.
Coming on the heels of Ash Vs Evil Dead, this is a somewhat poorly timed piece of comedy horror, in which the clueless, frequently misogynistic, outspoken McGinley (“I want you to admit Starsky was gay. He wore a sweater with a belt. Come on, you’re a cop. Follow the evidence!”) has to deal with demons, women and modern society’s general pansiness, with only a suspiciously familiar book of magic to help him. Varney does offer a reasonable counterpoise to him and the plots involve her as much as him, but ultimately this is McGinley’s show and he’s naturally very good.
Unfortunately, the plots themselves are neither as funny nor as gory as Ash vs Evil Dead‘s. I watched the first four episodes of this, and while each offers maybe a couple of laughs, is a little smarter than than Bruce Campbell’s show and the demons (eg goat demons, a succubus) have a bit more variety and a bit more of a scare than the ‘deadites’, it still felt like a bit an effort to get through for some slightly pointless, slightly derivative pieces of work.
I also watched a movie!
Ghostbusters (2016) An all-woman line-up of ghost exterminators (Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon, Leslie Hope) go into business for themselves in New York and have to deal with a bunch of spooks emerging from the afterlife who could threaten life as we know it.
Featuring cameos from all the surviving cast of the classic 80s movie, this 2016 version homages most of the first movie’s iconic moments and props, while simultaneously avoiding being a retread and finding its own sources of humour. McKinnon – best known as Saturday Night Live‘s Hillary Clinton – in particular breaks from the confines of the plot to be something a lot odder and more interesting than you’d expect.
However, the movie plays a lot younger than the original, losing the 80s version’s slightly edgier and stranger qualities, and its denoument goes on for far too long. On the plus side, though, Chris Hemsworth is very funny as the Ghostbusters’ eyecandy receptionist.
Even later this month than usual, it’s TMINE’s coverage of all the BFI events coming your way in December. There’s three big highlights to round off 2016. The first is a preview of BBC One’s latest Agatha Christie adaptation, The Witness For The Prosecution. The second is this year’s Missing Believed Wiped, which among other things will feature the newly returned Avengers episode Tunnel of Fear…
But the bulk of the month will be dedicated to the continuation of the Blackstar season, which will have everything from a showing of Wednesday Play Fable through a Desmond’s reunion to a panel discussion with Carmen Munroe, Don Warrington, Zawe Ashton, Ashley Walters, Isaac Julien and Pat Younge – sounds top!
