The Medium is Not Enough

In the US: Sundays, 9/8c, AMC

Wars should, by their very nature, be exciting. The Revolutionary War that brought about the independence of the United States of America from British rule is such a thing of mythology and eulogisation that it’s possibly one of the most exciting wars that can be discussed or depicted. And when you add in spies as well, and get some of the best British actors on TV to take part, surely you’re onto a sure-fire adrenaline fest, no?

No. Because Turn, based on the Alexander Rose novel Washington’s Spies: The Story of America’s First Spy Ring, is a veritable snoozefest.

Largely, of course, this is down to its being on AMC. Although the network has had its fair share of successes – Breaking Bad, Mad Men, The Walking Dead – none of them have got to where they are by packing every hour with a thrill a minute. And Turn seemingly takes great pains to do the same, without giving us sparkling dialogue or interesting characters to make the journey worthwhile.

Although the show is clearly going somewhere, the pilot episode really doesn’t give you that many reasons to go with it. Commendably avoiding the “British army were just as bad as Nazis” route trodden by The Patriot, Turn does take relative pains to be equitable to the Brits and to avoid hoary old cliches (no one says “The British are coming! The British are coming!” since most Americans still thought of themselves as British, for example).

Unfortunately, it does this by giving us a reluctant farmer (Jamie Bell) as a hero, his dodgy accented father (Kevin McNally) with a foot in both camps to talk a lot, a dull wife (Meegan Warner) and a slightly more interesting ex (Heather Lind) for Bell to pine over, and a British army officer (Burn Gorman) to pass out the law honourably in difficult times. The screen practically goes grey with boredom as soon as any of them appear. And when your TV can’t be bothered to watch what you’re watching, a show is in trouble.

Angus Macfadyen (Robert the Bruce in Braveheart) could be good fun as a Scottish mercenary-come-black ops ranger working for the Brits, if he weren’t mumbling every line, and Seth Numrich’s organiser of the Culper Spy Ring is so square-jawed and all-American-before-there-was-an-all-American that he disappears in a cloud of blandness in virtually every scene he’s in.

I dare say further down the line – maybe one season or even two seasons from now – something might have happened and the hours of TV-viewing involved will have paid off a little. But at a time when there’s just so much good TV on – hell, this is on the same night as just Game of Thrones, Silicon Valley, The Good Wife and Shameless alone – I doubt many people will have accompanied it that far or that it’ll all have been worth it.

In the US: Sundays, 10pm, HBO
in the UK: Acquired by Sky Atlantic for summer 2014

Geeks and nerds are hard to do well. The natural instinct of US comedy writers – typically arts graduates who know next to nothing about science and technology – is to mock them mercilessly and hold them up to be objects of ridicule. Even when seemingly siding with nerds (cf Revenge of the Nerds, Weird Science), writers still regard them as ‘the other’ and targets for the comedy more often than not – hapless losers who succeed despite their apparent social failings, unattractiveness, etc, rather than who have worthwhile character traits.

Look at Big Bang Theory, which supposedly is on the side of the geek, but which still gives all the nerds 1970s clothing and haircuts and has ‘normal’ people around to look down on them. Or at least that’s how it started (it’s improved a bit not a lot).

And in a lot of ways, HBO’s new comedy Silicon Valley is no different. Set inside a Silicon Valley ‘incubator’ – a collection of start-up businesses all under one roof being helped to become successful by a mentor – it’s a show that very precisely satirises the people, the working style, the business practices, the culture and pretty much everything else in California’s technology capital. Very precisely – having written about technology (as well as TV) for the best part of 20 years, a lot of it is very familiar to me, even if it is exaggerated.

But at the same time, this is a comedy from Mike Judge. Best known for the affectionate but teasing portrait of Texan family life that is King of the Hill, he’s also the progenitor of the much-loved cult movie Office Space, which did a fabulous job of mocking working life.

So although the geeks and nerds on display in the show are as much the butt of the humour as in any other show, not only is it quite affectionate mockery, no one escapes it. Best of all, it’s also very funny.

Here’s a trailer and if you liked that, you can watch the entire first (censored) episode, too (if you live in the US).

Continue reading “Review: Silicon Valley 1×1 (HBO)”