Classic TV

Nostalgia Corner: Northstar (1986)

9 January 2014 Rob Buckley 12 Comments

Northstar

As mentioned yesterday, over the years, there’s been quite a vogue for TV shows about humans upgraded through technology. In a little game of “spot the odd one out”, though, I included Northstar in that list. Did you spot it? Naughty me, hey?

In fact, Northstar actually represents a similar but subtly different genre: the ‘accidentally upgraded’ human. In these stories, through some kind of accident, usually natural but not always, someone gets superpowers. I say superpowers, because whether it’s The Amazing Spider-man, The Incredible Hulk or The Flash, the source of the story is usually a comic book, where such things used to be de rigeur*.

Often, though, these shows got stuck at the pilot TV movie stage. One ABC pilot, The Power Within (1979), for example, saw a stunt flyer struck by lightning and get the power to zap people with electricity. He also needed a special Gemini Man-esque watch to stop him from accidentally zapping things. I’d show you a clip, but there aren’t any, so here’s the video cover instead.

The Power Within

A few years later, again from ABC, came Northstar, starring Greg Evigan (of later My Two Dads fame). This saw Evigan playing an astronaut who gets zapped in the eyes by sunlight while on a spacewalk. Then when he gets back to Earth, whenever he’s exposed to sunlight, his body and brain go into superdrive, his eyes go all weird and flashy, and he becomes fabulously smart (stage one) and powerful (stage two). Unfortunately for our Greg, too of a good thing is bad for his health and his brain and body start to overheat (stage three), meaning that he can only go super-sun-powered for a short space of time, before he needs to sit in the shade and cool off for a bit.

Co-starring the lovely Deborah Wakeham as the scientist who has to help him cope with his newfound abilities, and Lethal Weapon/Dharma and Greg’s Mitchell Ryan as the army general he ends up working for, it wasn’t the smartest of shows, as you can probably tell, given that early on, when Evigan is presented with a numeric keypad for opening a door, he’s told there’s over 1,000 combinations. Or that Wakeham’s hubby is missing in the Andes as part of a 12-man anthropological expedition. But it’s fun.

Enjoy!

PS If Northstar sounds vaguely familiar to you and yet you never watched it, it might be because it’s one of the 70s and 80s shows satirised by Jack Black and Ben Stiller with Heat Vision and Jack. Full marks if you can spot all the references in just this title sequence alone:

* Not always. There’s The Invisible Man, of course, who’s a crossover between the technology-upgraded and the accidentally upgraded. The Gemini Man got his powers through an accident with technology, too. As did Jake 2.0. So sue me, there were two odd ones out.

The BBC’s Rich Inner Life of Penelope Cloud, Zoe Saldana’s Rosemary’s Baby and Channel 5’s Suspects trailer

9 January 2014 Rob Buckley Post a comment

UK TV

New UK TV shows

US TV

New US TV shows

New US TV show casting

US TV

Mini-review: Intelligence 1×1 (CBS)

8 January 2014 Rob Buckley 8 Comments

CBS's Intelligence

In the US: Mondays, 10pm/9pm CT, CBS

Ever since The Six Million Dollar Man, TV history has been littered with shows about ‘upgraded’ humans: The Bionic Woman, The Bionic Woman (again), Chuck, Jake 2.0, Northstar – the list goes on.

Fancy another one, this time starring Sawyer from Lost?

Here, since that “super strength” and “super speed” thing is so passé (and scientifically impossible – plus they’re doing it on Almost Human anyway), we have former Delta Force soldier Sawyer from Lost getting a chip implanted in his head that allows him to connect to computers wirelessly and access data, control them, etc, through a sort of sixth sense. He can even do virtual walkthroughs of crime scenes, in order to provide something more visually exciting than him just squinting a lot.

He’s also got issues to do with his wife, who may (or may not) be dead and/or have been a terrorist/CIA agent. Still, nobody’s perfect, hey?

Because this is airing on CBS, it’s vitally important that he have a slightly dull team backing him up, just like with NCIS, The Mentalist, Criminal Minds, Elementary, Unforgettable etc. This one’s run by Marg Red Head from CSI. She barks orders and sits on chairs in various combinations.

However, despite being ex-Delta Force, Sawyer from Lost is too reckless so Marg Red Head from CSI decides the show needs to be more like Eleventh Hour and give the US government’s most important asset – more important than the President, even – a protection detail with a grand total of one member of staff: Red Riding Hood from Once Upon A Time. Her job is to talk sassy, be duller than Marg and be both professional and sexy, without having any real chemistry with Sawyer from Lost. And to get shot and captured a lot.

To round off the members of the cast that have a personality is the obligatory CBS nerd – Doctor Alien from Star Trek: Enterprise, who’s the guy who came up with the chip idea in the first place.

This first episode is a bit of a damp squid, however, since rather than showing us just how awesome Sawyer from Lost and his chip is, it’s dedicated to showing us how awesome the Chinese are as spies and developing/stealing their own version of the chip. It’s also clear that the chip actually does give super speed and super strength, judging by how many bullets Sawyer from Lost can avoid simply by walking quickly.

It’s not without charms, and it’s a pleasant throwback to a simpler age. And although it’s very much a show that you need to switch your brain off to watch, surprisingly, given its set-up, you’ll actually find far stupider shows on television right now.

All the same, this is just another CBS procedural that fits the CBS procedural template with just one or two tweaks. You’re better off watching CBC’s Intelligence, instead.

US TV

Mini-review: The Assets 1×1 (US: ABC; UK: Alibi)

8 January 2014 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

In the US: Thursdays, 10/9c, ABC

One of the US biggest traitors is CIA agent Aldrich Ames. Convicted in 1994 of spying for the Soviet Union, it’s thought that he compromised the second-largest number of CIA assets in the nation’s history.

You’d have thought that the march of time and a TV movie starring Timothy Hutton would have made his story less toxic, but The Assets, an eight-part mini-series that started on ABC last week about the investigation of Ames by CIA officers Sandra Grimes and Jeanne Vertefeuille, not only has the privilege of being the lowest rated drama premiere ever on one of the four main TV networks, it appears to star an almost entirely British cast and only one American.

Comparisons with The Americans will abound, given it’s another spy show set roughly in the same time period and stars another Welsh Rhys – Matthew Rhys rather than Paul (The Cazalets), who plays Ames. It’s certainly a little instructive to do so, since The Assets is to The Americans what ABC is FX: louder, less subtle, softer hitting, drowning in cheesy music (yes, Nashville, I mean you) and more interested in female characters and sacrifice for families.

The focus of The Assets is very much Sandra Grimes (Jodie Whittaker of Broadchurch and St Trinian’s), the author of the book on which the story is based. The first episode begins with the capture of both an asset and a case officer, the suspicions that raises and how Grimes then gets drafted by the head of the CIA into investigating a much larger problem in the agency. Against this backdrop we see Grimes’ home life, which initially looks like it’s going to be the standard “working women must be punished!” set up but actually reveals a very supportive husband dealing with an often-absent wife.

That is, assuming you can hear any of the dialogue – which although clunky at times, actually takes very few prisoners with its talk of tradecraft, dead drops, et al – over the constant terrible background music.

We then go on to see debriefs and the growing suspicion of Grimes, before her hard work reveals there must be a mole in the agency.

Whittaker is good, Rhys is great, a lot of the rest of the cast struggle to maintain US or Russian accents. Everything looks quite good, albeit not as good as The Americans and a bit 1980s TV movie – which you might think appropriate, but simply dressing people in hats doesn’t qualify as “convincing portrayal of Moscow” in this day and age. If this had been made on cable, it almost certainly would have been a much better show. One to watch if you’ve nothing better to do or are interested in the subject, rather than because it’s much good. Assuming, that is, ABC doesn’t cancel it before the next episode.