US TV

Review: State of Affairs 1×1 (US: NBC)

State of Affairs

In the US: Mondays, 10/9c, NBC

Katherine Heigl has been a movie star for so long, it’s hard to remember that she made it big on TV first. Sure, she was something of a teen movie doyenne, playing both Steven Seagal and Gerard Depardieu’s daughters in Under Siege 2 and My Father, The Hero respectively, but it was in first Roswell and then Grey’s Anatomy that she really got noticed, before eventually hitting the big time in Knocked Up.

Unlike most of the world, tired of the endless series of identikit rom-coms that have characterised her career since and aware of her ‘difficult’ reputation, I have a lot of time for Heigl. She’s done her best to change the rom-com dynamic, trying to inject some feminism and even some swearing so that women aren’t continually gentrified and oppressed by the genre. But she could certainly do better than 27 Dresses for starters.

Apparently, she thinks so, too, which is why she’s returned to TV to do something completely different: playing a gun-toting CIA analyst in State of Affairs. Something of a melange of everything from Homeland through The Threat Matrix (bet you thought no one would mention that show again), it sees Heigl advising her former mother-in-law-to-be – the US president (Alfre Woodard) – about the top threats facing the United States’ interests around the world, be it abducted doctors in Africa or Islamist terrorists… in Africa. And along the way, she’ll have to face politics, in-fighting, special forces, psychiatrists, security teams and someone who knows her dirty little secret.

And although pretty much every aspect of the show has been put through the NBC low-quality “generification machine”, if you were expecting it to be an epic disaster that would maintain Heigl’s status as a hate figure in the entertainment industry, you’d be surprised, since it’s okay. It’s not great, but compared to what it could have been, it’s a slight eye-opener.

Here’s a trailer.

Continue reading “Review: State of Affairs 1×1 (US: NBC)”

News: Fox to remake Luther, HBO developing Cortes, Stuart Townsend to recur on Elementary + more

Film casting

Trailers

  • Trailer for Seventh Son with Jeff Bridges

Theatre

Internet TV

UK TV

New UK TV show casting

US TV

US TV show casting

New US TV shows

Weekly Wonder Woman

Weekly Wonder Woman: World’s Finest #28, Smallville Continuity #12, Sensation Comics #14

World's Finest #28

It was a relatively quiet week for regular Wonder Woman last week, but in various universes (and times) she had lots to do. Most notably, over on Earth 2 – where she’s dead, of course – we got a flashback to a time when the coming apocalypse was predicted and the immortal Wonder Woman had to venture out into Man’s World to save two children – one Clark Kent and one Bruce Wayne, in fact.

Meanwhile, over in Smallviile: Continuity, there was another child of a different variety for Diana to visit and in Sensation Comics #14, everyone was on acid.

At least it seemed like it, because Gilbert Hernandez of Love and Rockets fame has just started a two-issue story.

More after the jump.

Continue reading “Weekly Wonder Woman: World’s Finest #28, Smallville Continuity #12, Sensation Comics #14”