BFI events

What TV’s on at the BFI in October/November 2013

30 September 2013 Rob Buckley Post a comment

Louis Jordan in Count Dracula

It’s time for our regular look at the TV that the BFI is showing, this time in the months of October and November 2013. And what a pick there is. There’s a big collection of TV previews, including episodes of the news series of Wizards Vs Aliens and This Is Jinsy, the first episode of Yonderland from the Horrible Histories cast, the first episode of the final series of Poirot mysteries on ITV, including a Q&A with David Suchet, and Mark Gatiss’s adaptation of The Tractate Middoth, complete with documentary on MR James and Q&A.

On top of all that, there’s a season of Gothic movies and TV, including Channel 4’s Dead Set, BBC1’s classic Louis Jordan adaptation of Count Dracula introduced by the director, and a panel discussion about vampires that involves none other than Russell Tovey, Anthony Head and Toby Whithouse.

Sign me up.

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US TV

Mini-review: The Crazy Ones 1×1 (CBS)

30 September 2013 Rob Buckley 4 Comments

The Crazy Ones

In the US: Thursdays, 9/8c, CBS

There will come a point when you’re watching The Crazy Ones, some time quite early on in the episode, where you’ll begin to wish for the sweet release of death. Anything to avoid having to watch the rest of the horror. And given the episode is only half an hour long and you could naturally just turn off the TV, to make the viewer wish for death that quickly is an impressive feat.

The Crazy Ones is a great example of how not to do an advertising show. Mad Men has already shown us how to do one well; Trust Me was fine if not brilliant; this monstrosity gives us Robin Williams and Sarah Michelle-Gellar as father and daughter advertising executives ‘humorously’ trying to come up with ideas for inspiring adverts.

Except the writer isn’t one of the many talented individuals behind Mad Men, it’s David E Kelley, whose talent appears to have shrivelled up of late, giving us saccharine-coated, misogyny-laden war crime after war crime in the form of The Wedding Bells, Harry’s Law, Wonder Woman, Monday Mornings and now this.

The result is we have to endure Williams riffing on old McDonald’s adverts using material that was out-of-date 20 years ago while Gellar just fusses around like she has no personality beyond ‘daughter of Robin Williams’. She does get to punch something and hurt herself, just to show symbolically that she may have been Buffy Summers once, but you don’t have to worry about her being a strong woman in anything Kelley puts together.

Oh yes, there’s Kelly Clarkson singing about meat and sex. No, really, they got Kelly Clarkson in to twerk about beef patties. She agreed to that, too.

The show’s got 15.5m viewers, which shows that you can pretty much put hate crimes, pictures of goldfish or soothing images of pine trees on CBS and people will still watch it in droves. But for the sake of your sanity and your family, do not watch this. Even this trailer is a threat to your life and it’s all the best bits from the pilot.

US TV

Mini-review: Masters of Sex 1×1-1×2 (Showtime/Channel 4)

30 September 2013 Rob Buckley 2 Comments

Masters of Sex

In the US: Sundays, 10pm ET/PT, Showtime
In the UK: Tuesdays, 9pm, Channel 4. Starts October 8

Although most people rate the works of Einstein and Schrödinger as among the most important works of science of the 20th century, the Masters and Johnson report has perhaps as much claim to the title as those do. A pioneering exploration of human sexuality, it overturned millennia of incorrect thinking, revolutionised attitudes towards homosexuality and provided a radical new look at female sexuality.

The team behind it were almost as interesting as the report itself. William Masters was a noted expert on human fertility while Virginia Johnson was a twice-married former nightclub singer who wanted a job as a secretary and caught Masters’ eye when he was looking for a female partner who could help him with his work – which, initially at least, somewhat unusually involved prostitutes and couples being randomly and anonymously assigned to have sex with one another.

The study is the basis for the biographical Masters of Sex, which sees the always fabulous Michael Sheen and Lizzy Caplan (gosh, The Class seems so long ago) play Masters and Johnson respectively. The series is a somewhat straight look at the arrogant, repressed and controlling Masters and the more-free spirited, personable Johnson, who is ultimately the one with the people skills to recruit volunteers. It’s also a Mad Men-esque look at the mores of the time, not just sexual but attitudes towards women – a time when the married Masters could suggest to Johnson that they have sex to avoid ‘transference’ to the study and pretty much firing her for saying no.

As you might expect, there’s more than a few sex scenes, with the usual greater female nudity than male nudity, even when not strictly necessary to the plot. Strangely, though, it’s quite a coy show, not quite as ready to deal with discussions and depictions of sexuality as you might have expected. The story is engrossing, largely because of the personalities of Masters and Johnstone. The cast are all great, particularly Sheen and Caplan.

But it’s not going to be for everyone, since the plot is a little drawn out, and after a couple of episodes, my interest has started to wane, despite being primed to enjoy this. I’ll stick with it, though.

UK TV

Review: Atlantis 1×1 (BBC1/BBC America)

30 September 2013 Rob Buckley 11 Comments

BBC1's Atlantis

In the UK: Saturdays, 8.25pm, BBC1. Available on the iPlayer
In the US: Saturdays, BBC America. Starts November 23
In Canada: Space. Starts October 12

Ever since Plato first mentioned it (and perhaps even before that), people have been fascinated by the story of Atlantis, a fabulous city that eventually sunk beneath the waves at the behest of Poseidon. Depending on who you talk to (and leaving aside some of the more exciting and loonier of theories), it was either a morality tale that Plato entirely fabricated or a memory of a genuine place, possibly even the Minoan colony on Santorini, which was destroyed c1600BC. Finding, locating and exploring it have been dreams of men and women ever since.

Equally, TV has been fascinated by both Atlantis (witness BBC1’s recent drama-documentary Atlantis, Stargate: Atlantis, Aquaman, The Man From Atlantis et al) and Greek myth (I ran down a big list of them a while back, if you’re interested), so it seemed natural that sooner or later there would be a show that united the two*: in this case, Atlantis from the producers of Merlin and the creator of, surprisingly enough, Misfits.  

However, as we discovered with Xena: Warrior Princess, Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, Clash of the Titans, Wrath of the Titans et al, there is something of a temptation as soon as the setting is ‘BC’ and Greek myth and/or history is involved to take 2,000 years of history and countless cultures from across the Mediterranean and squish them all into one big lump.

So brace yourself purists, because here we find a (seemingly) modern day guy called Jason (possibly of the Argonauts) sent back in time to Atlantis, a city that looks very craggy and North African and almost everyone dresses like they’re in a Sinbad movie (or even Prince of Persia or Sky1’s Sinbad). There he meets Pythagoras (sixth century Greek philosopher and mathematician from the island of Samos) and Hercules (Roman name for the Greek hero Herakles, who in myth lived around the 14th and 13th century BC and pretty much everywhere in Greece except Atlantis).

Surprisingly, Atlantis is ruled by King Minos (13th or 16th century BC ruler of the island of Crete) and he has to preside over a tribute of Atlantean victims (originally, victims demanded in tribute from Athens by Minos in return for continued peace) to a half-man, half-bull creature called the Minotaur, who was a man cursed by the gods for some reason (actually, the son of Minos’ wife Pasiphaë, who had a passion for bulls, after Minos decided to keep the bull Poseidon had given to him especially to sacrifice). Guess who’s going to have to kill it? I’ll give you a clue – it’s not Theseus, future king of Athens.

Sigh.

Nevertheless, for all that messing around with myth, Atlantis is a relatively fun but flawed piece of Saturday night family entertainment that’ll probably keep me watching for a while, at least. Here’s a trailer – minor spoilers ahoy after the jump:

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