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.
The usual “TMINE recommends” page features links to reviews of all the shows I’ve ever recommended, and there’s also the Reviews A-Z, for when you want to check more or less anything I’ve reviewed ever. And if you want to know when any of these shows are on in your area, there’s Locate TV – they’ll even email you a weekly schedule.
Summer’s approaching fast now – although judging by the weather, not in the UK – but it’s not here yet, which means the only new show I’ve had the option of reviewing has been Your Family Or Mine. I might have to start watching some UK TV again. Oh dear.
It also means that after the jump, I’ll be looking at another season finale, as well as the last few remaining episodes of a whole bunch of shows. So brace yourself for my thoughts on the latest instalments of American Crime, American Odyssey, Arrow, The Blacklist, Community, The Flash, Forever, Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD and Silicon Valley. One of those is for the chop from my viewing list, one of those has had the chop from its network’s viewing list, one of them’s still on the bubble and the rest look set to return for another season at least. I’ll leave you to work out which is which.
But I’ll also have a look over another episode of Wayward Pines. I know you’re looking forward to that, too.
…renews: American Crime, Castle, Agents of SHIELD, Agent Carter, Galavant, Secrets & Lies, How To Get Away With Murder, Black-ish, American Crime and Fresh Off The Boat
As we’re heading towards summer and old shows have started to finish but new shows have yet to start, I decided to use some of the free time that’s given me to play a little bit of catch-up with some of the shows I missed for one reason or another.
Your Family Or Mine is one such show. That began all of five weeks ago while I was away on my Easter break and compounded with the fact it airs on TBS – a network whose motto should probably be “what do you mean you’d forgotten about us? But we’ve got shows like… and… Oh. Take your point” – it’s basically slipped under my radar until now.
Which is odd, because on paper it’s an interesting show. For starters, it’s not only got Ed Begley Jr in the cast, it’s got Richard Dreyfus in his first series regular role since 2001’s The Education of Max Bickford. On top of that, it’s been adapted by Greg Malins (Friends, Ground Floor) from the Israeli show Sabri Maranan.
To make things even more interesting, despite essentially being a multi-cam, low budget, less diverse Modern Family, it’s got an unusual format. The show revolves around married couple Kyle Howard (My Boys) and Kat Foster (’Til Death, The Goodwin Games), whose lives in turn revolve around visiting each other’s families – Dreyfus is Howard’s father, Begley Jr is Foster’s. The unusual thing here is that the show takes it in turns – rather than giving us separate plots involving both families each episode, all the odd-numbered episodes are set exclusively at Dreyfus’s snooty/crass, brother-full household, while all the even-numbered episodes are set at Begley Jr’s touchy-feely, sister-full household. It even has different title sequences for the different weeks.
So, on paper, fine and possibly even interesting. The trouble is that in practice it’s just dreadful, which is why I only bothered with the first two episodes, despite five having now aired. Even that was too much.
For starters, the jokes veer between unfunny and just downright awful, and the unifying theme of the Howard family is “they’re epic dicks”. Much of the first episode is about Howard remotely spying on his new babysitter using a nannycam, which eventually fascinates the whole family as her friend turns up and they start talking about boys. The women, of course (!), want to know what happens about the babysitter’s boyfriend problems and whether her relationships survive; the men, of course (!), wonder if the college girls really ‘will go wild’ when a friend drops by – just as the porn movie they’ve apparently all watched would suggest.
This gives us a vivid scene of the 68-year old Dreyfus feverishly hoping that the teenagers in question will end up scissoring each other, preferably in the shower, right before his eyes. Try to burn that image from your mind, if you can.
On top of that, we have Howard’s younger brother illicitly setting up parties for those very same teenagers in Howard’s house and illegally selling Viagra, Howard’s doctor brother not caring – or even knowing – that his wife has been studying for a psychology degree for six months, and Howard’s mother (JoBeth Williams), who hates both her daughters-in-law, trying to get her to use her psychology training to prove Foster is an unfit mother.
You can pretty much see the odd-numbered episodes are not just an affront to comedy and human decency, but borderline paedophilia mixed with sociopathy.
The even-numbered episodes aren’t much better. While Dreyfus and his wife (Cynthia Stevenson) are at least quite a pleasing and loving couple, the two themes here is they all think Howard’s a dick who’ll mess everything up and all the girls are idiots. Much ‘hilarity’ ensues as Howard accidentally accuses one sister of dressing like a stripper, the other of having no fashion sense.
So skip the even-numbered episodes, too.
There’s not even much to ameliorate the situation more generally. Both Howard and Foster have inherently dull characters to play and they’re the show’s lynchpins. Filmed in front of a studio audience – I’m assuming not a live one, though, or at least if they were when they started watching, they weren’t by the end, almost certainly having improvised rudimentary suicide tools from their clothing and seating – the show doesn’t really lend itself to subtle performances, either. And even beside the jokes, the episodes’ plots are obvious and easy to guess – if you can’t spot what the revelation will be about the picture in the first episode, there really is no hope for you.
Not only then must we clock this up as yet another of TBS’s recent comedy disasters (10 Items Or Less, Men At Work, Are We There Yet?, Glory Daze), but also another Israeli comedy format import disaster (cf The Ex-List, Traffic Light). Perhaps not only should US networks stop trying to make what’s funny in another culturally different country funny in their own countries, but also TBS should get out of the comedy game altogether…
As I’ve remarked once or twice, I’m a sucker for a ‘killer virus’ movie or TV series. There’s a few of them around right now – fewer now that Helix has been cancelled – but these things tend to go in cycles. In the early 70s, there were killer viruses all over the place, thanks in part to Michael Crichton’s career-making book The Andromeda Strain. After taking a break in the 80s – the arrival of AIDS made it all seem a bit close to home – the 90s saw a resurgence in interest in viruses, thanks to Richard Preston’s Ebola-centric The Hot Zone, which quickly led to the Dustin Hoffman movie Outbreak in 1995
But my suckerhood for killer viruses means that I also remember the far less influential – and quite obvious cash-in – The Burning Zone. Airing on the UPN network in 1996-97, it saw a team of US investigators travelling the world to fight outbreaks of disease wherever they found them.
At least that was the idea. Trouble was no one was quite sure the best way of making viruses sexy so in a singularly interesting way, The Burning Zone was actually the very model of science itself that practically every week, there was a great big experiment in formats, as the producers – who themselves changed frequently – tried their best to work out what the audience wanted, whether that meant changing the show from science fiction to science fact, firing the stars, changing the settings, or turning villains into heroes.
