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. There’s also the Reviews A-Z, for when you want to check more or less anything I’ve reviewed ever.
Who launches new shows at the start of December? Not many networks, which is why I haven’t reviewed too much in the past week, although you may have caught my third-episode verdict on Shooter (US: USA; UK: Netflix) if you were hanging on my every word.
But with Thanksgiving over, all the regular TV shows have come back – at least until their Christmas breaks in a week or so. That means that after the jump, I’ll be taking a look at the following regulars:
Canada Travelers
US Ash vs Evil Dead, Chance, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, Designated Survivor, DIrk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, Falling Water, The Flash, Frequency, The Great Indoors, Lethal Weapon, Lucifer, People of Earth, Son of Zorn, Supergirl and Timeless
The Internet
Goliath
For one week and one week only, thanks to the fact there was the four-way superhero crossover on The CW, Arrow also makes a return. Will I stick with it afterwards? Maybe – after all, not only will I be dropping at least one show this week, I’m also going to be promoting a show, too…
Surprisingly, though, a couple of networks decided that actually, the start of December is a perfect time to launch a new TV show:
Incorporated (US: Syfy)
Hailing from no less a pair of minds (or at least their production company) than Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, Incorporated is one of those ‘futuristic thriller’ things set in the near future where the whole world’s gone to pot: corporations now run everything and either you work for them in the ‘green zone’ living it up and holidaying on the beaches of Reykjavík now that global warming’s properly kicked in or you live out in the ‘red zones’ in favelas, fighting for your life while trying to make a quick buck selling one of the last three or so cigarettes made from real tobacco that exist in the world.
Against this backdrop, you have former red-zoner Sean Teale (Skins) sneaking his way around a top company at the behest of Ian Tracey (Continuum, Intelligence, Travelers) in order to find out where the sister of pal Eddie Ramos is. Can he work his way to the top of the corporate ladder, by any means necessary, including framing his rivals so they get a visit from scary Dennis Haysbert (24, The Unit)?
Incorporated is ostensibly a futuristic industrial espionage thriller, but is really 49% Gattaca, 49% Elysium and 2% Soylent Green. While clearly a lot of thought has gone into imagining this future Earth of self-driving cars and face transplants – although even today we have better IT – little thought has gone into working out why we should care about Teale and his problems or any really complex bits of industrial tradecraft. Oh look, here comes a scene where Teale has to steal some data from a computer while he’s in someone else’s office. Can he copy it all in just a few minutes? Now – maybe not. In 2074? Of course he bloody can with his 100Tbps USB 23.0 interface and still have time left over to play holographic Tetris with his cranial implant.
The only interesting and new thing about the show that I noted was the use of capoeira as the favella martial art of choice, which was a nice touch. Otherwise, slow-moving and oddly devoid of human interest.
פאודה (Fauda) (Israel: Yes; UK: Netflix) Somewhat different from Netflix’s other Israeli spy show – the comedy Mossad 101 – this is a political thriller from Lior Raz and Avi Issacharoff, based on their experiences of doing military service in the IDF’s Duvdevan special unit. It sees former Mista’arvim (undercover counter-terrorist) commander Lior Raz (The Gordin Cell) being lured from his vineyard to supervise an operation – the capture of a Hamas leader known as ‘the Panther’ (Hisham Sulliman), whom Raz supposedly killed two years earlier. Except the Panther isn’t dead and everything doesn’t quite go as planned…
As with most Netflix ‘originals’, this is actually a simple acquisition, this time from Israel’s Yes network, where the show aired last year, winning no fewer than six of Israel’s equivalents of BAFTAs, the Ophirs, including Best Drama. I’ve only watched the first episode so far, and that’s a relatively plot-heavy piece that leaves little time for any real character development. But it’s action-packed, sympathetic not only to Arabs but also Hamas (surprisingly enough), and is pretty even-handed, with our heroes even taking unarmed civilians hostage at one point.
There’s nothing I’ve seen, beyond its novel setting and authenticity, to make it stand out from any other good guy/terrorist Moby Dick piece, but it’s certainly promising enough to make me want to watch more.
The Crown (Netflix)
I’ve been promising for weeks to cover this, but we’ve been stalled at episode 8 for a month now, so time to at least discuss what I’ve seen so far. The first of seven or so seasons, each focusing on a different decade of her life, The Crown is a moderately fictional biopic of none other than Queen Elizabeth II (Claire Foy from Crossbones, White Heat, Going Postal).
Season 1 starts off giving us a woman who had no plans to do much except be a wife, mother and horse breeder, until the death of her father King George VI (the miscast Jared Harris from The Other Boleyn Girl, Mad Men, Fringe, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadowsand To The Ends of the Earth, when Netflix should have stumped up the cash to get Colin Firth to redo his The King’s Speech turn) catapults her and hubby Philip (Matt Smith – Doctor Who, Terminator: Genisys) into one of the most constitutionally important roles in the UK. In an age of increasing modernity, with the monarchy increasingly looking like an anachronistic relic, Foy then has to find a role for herself as well as for the Crown, while juggling the competing demands of her husband, duty, previous kings and queens, her randy sister Margaret and Prime Minister Winston Churchill (John Lithgow).
While there are attempts to give the show some Game of Thrones-like qualities, thanks to the machinations of Churchill, abdicated uncle Edward VIII and quasi-father-in-law Lord Mountbatten (Greg Wise), The Crown really sits as a halfway house between writer Peter Morgan’s The Queen and The Audience. Oddly episodic for Netflix thanks to the nature of real-life, the show is something of an unplanned origin story, going from historic incident to historic incident in the 1950s, showing us how Elizabeth might have evolved from someone whose most important thought was whether to take her husband’s adopted surname to being someone with the power to depose the government if she so chooses – albeit running the risk of losing all power if she ever exercises it.
Unlike The Audience, which was firmly on Elizabeth’s side, making her an ambitious woman with plenty of ideas for government that she has to put to one side, The Crown is less concerned with this Elizabeth and her supervising of Margaret’s scandalous love life, and is more on the side of Philip, something helped perhaps by Smith’s magnificent performance/impersonation. Here, Philip’s more notorious qualities are toned down to make him a sympathetic, dedicated naval officer (albeit one who would rather have been in the air force), loving husband and father, and firm embracer of modernity, forced to abandon his ambitions and kneel to his wife by the necessities of the throne and the Crown.
There are parts of The Crown that feel made up, particularly anything to do with Edward VIII or Churchill, and although a little research reveals that they are actually absolutely true, it doesn’t help with the show’s verisimilitude. Foy, who’s shown herself to be sparky in other shows and is almost perfect casting as the young Elizabeth, is nevertheless done no favours by Morgan. He tosses her a few bones, such as being able to repair a truck thanks to her wartime service as a mechanic, or her requests for a proper education to supplement the constitution-focused training she got as a child, which she’s able to use to outmanoeuvre polticians. But that’s largely drowned out by thankless duty after thankless duty after tragic loss being dropped on her shoulders – such is the burden of ‘the Crown’.
But it’s beautifully made, highly enjoyable, far more palatable than Downton Abbey, frequently funny, frequently tear-jerking, often romantic and just like Elizabeth, finds a reason for the monarchy in this day and age.
We will watch the rest of it. Just as soon as lovely wife’s finished Master Chef – The Professionals, The Grand Tour, My Kitchen Rules Australia, and Strictly Come Dancing. Oh yes, and The Walking Dead.
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. There’s also the Reviews A-Z, for when you want to check more or less anything I’ve reviewed ever.
Ironically, just as I’ve started catching up with everything again, we’re about to enter the lull in US TV marked by Thanksgiving December. That means that this week will probably be marked by ventures into Internet TV again, including, I hope, a return to Le bureau des légendes (The Bureau). But always expect the unexpected, since there’ll be a few new shows popping up, I’m sure. Hell, Australian Community TV just debuted the six-part ghostly Sonnigsburg, so I’m sure there’ll be something coming along I wasn’t expecting.
Elsewhere this week, I reviewed Good Behavior (US: TNT) and Shooter (US: USA; UK: Netflix). We’ve still not got round to watching any more of The Crown,Westworld or Humans, and I’ve not yet made a start on Y Gwyll, so that means that after the jump, we’ll be looking at the latest episodes of Ash vs Evil Dead, Chance, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, Designated Survivor, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, Falling Water, Frequency, Good Behavior, The Great Indoors, Lethal Weapon, Lucifer, People of Earth, Supergirl, Timeless and Travelers, as well as the season finales of Doctor Doctor and Hyde and Seek. One show’s getting promoted, at leat one show’s getting dropped – can you guess which?
But first, as well as a film review, a slight diversion from TMINE’s normal remit…
The Grand Tour (Amazon) TMINE’s dedication to scripted shows wasn’t always so pure, back in the day. That meant I used to cover shows that included Top Gear. That stopped a while ago, in part because of the shift in focus caused by there not being enough time in the world to watch unscripted as well as scripted TV, but also in part because I stopped watching Top Gear – it had simply stopped doing anything new, and I was bored.
Following Jeremy Clarkson’s leaving the BBC, James May and Richard Hammond in his wake, the Top Gear trio signed up with Amazon to do a new show. What manner of show it would be we didn’t know, because Clarkson allegedly had a non-compete clause prohibiting him from doing another car show. Given the name, The Grand Tour, maybe it was just going to be a bunch of the old Top Gear travel documentaries.
Anyway, for old time’s sake, I decided to ‘tune in’ today to see what The Grand Tour was like.
Guess what. It’s… a car show. More so, it’s Top Gear again, just a bit swearier and a bit glossier. More or less every feature of Top Gear has, in fact, moved over to The Grand Tour (note the reversed initials in the title), with just a few changes.
For starters, in its first episode at least, it simply relocates its studio setting from an old hangar in SW London to a tent in the Mojave desert, with each subsequent episode relocating the show to another part of the world (Johannesburg and Barbados have been promised).
From inside the tent, surrounded by a native audience, the trio then do the same bickering routine as always, with plenty of races with supercars to break that up. However, everything is done on an Amazon budget, with computer graphics, travel to Portugal for races, et al. And where an element might have got copyright-infringingly close to Top Gear, the show makes changes to the format. Gone is the Stig, replaced by… The American, a tame Nascar driver, for example, and since they can’t use the Top Gear track to test cars any more, they’ve had to use a different one.
As I said, the reason I gave up on Top Gear was that it stopped innovating. Unsurprisingly perhaps, it’s all the changes, rather than the keepers from the Top Gear format, that are the best bits of The Grand Tour and remind you how good the former was before it started coasting. The celebrity guest spot was great; the new parts of the track are great; the more scripted aspects of the audience interactions are great; the celebrity guests spot was great.
Where it was at its most dull was when it was Jeremy Clarkson just driving around in a supercar to amuse himself. Nearly nodded off at that point I did.
As a show, Top Gear was at its best when it was all three of the hosts together in an engine-driven bickerfest travelogue in the style of Three Men In A Boat. The fewer of the hosts together and the more it was about cars, the less interesting it became. If the producers of The Grand Tour remember this and remember not to rest on their laurels, The Grand Tour could become what Top Gear once was – a weekly fixture in our house.
Hypernormalisation (iPlayer) I’d already given you the bingo card, but I’ve now had a chance to watch this latest Adam Curtis documentary about why the world is the way it is. Impeccably timed to arrive in a post-Brexit, post-Trump world, it shows how attempts to create stability without politics has given us an era in which everything seems real, nothing seems true and no one wants to do anything about it through politics for fear that the boat will be rocked in ways no one can predict.
Clocking in at just under three hours, Hypernormalisation gives us all manner of brilliant and astonishing documentary footage, but is still the least persuasive of Curtis’ oeuvre so far. Ironically, given that Curtis critiques our need for simplistic answers to complex problems, his argument is probably too simplistic to be true. But it still takes us to exciting thoughts and considerations about the world that are probably close to the truth but which nevertheless are just hints at the real truth – if such a thing now exists.
All the same, simply through reminding us of all manner of things that have long since been forgotten about, as well as of the fact that what’s normal now wasn’t always, it’s well worth a watch.
In the US: Tuesdays, 10/9c, USA In the UK: Wednesdays, Netflix
I think it’s fair to say that America loves guns. Or at least has a lot of them: 300 million at last count, on a population of 325 million. And if you have a lot of guns, they tend to get used, sometimes with tragic consequences.
Which has caused all kinds of problems for USA’s Shooter, a show that loves guns rather a lot. Originally scheduled to air mid-July, it was postponed at first by a week following the shooting in Dallas. However, following the shooting in Baton Rouge, USA decided to move Shooter from its summer schedule to November.
Shooter sees Ryan Phillipe (Secrets and Lies, Cruel Intentions) once again take on a role to which he’s slightly ill suited – a former marine sniper. Wounded in action by the Chechnyan sniper who killed his best friend, he’s perfectly happy with his wife and daughter, until his former CO turned secret service agent Omar Epps (House, Resurrection) approaches him for help. Said Chechnyan sniper has threatened to kill the President and Phillipe is one of the few people in the world with the skills to work out how he could do it and so prevent it. Except things are not quite as they seem…
Based on the 2007 movie of the same name, which in turn was based on Stephen Hunter’s book Point of Impact, this pilot episode follows the film and to a lesser extent the book pretty faithfully, meaning that if you’ve seen the movie, there’ll be almost no surprises as to what happens at the end of the episode.
That said, there have been a few tweaks. Epps’s characters might not be the obvious double-crosser that Danny Glover was, while Cynthia Addai-Robinson (Arrow, Spartacus)’s disgraced FBI agent and potential ally to Phillipe is a moderately interesting gender-change to the Michael Peña character, even if she’s not quite as interesting as he was. The fact Phillipe now has a family, rather than a Kate Mara to hook up with, also changes the dynamics of the story a little.
As I mentioned when I reviewed Graves, shows with conservative politics are relatively rare and Shooter is clearly aimed at viewers of that disposition, right down to our hero’s family saying grace before meals. Its dedication to honourable men and women, doing honourable things in service, is a refreshing change, too, even if we know a great big conspiracy is potentially looming round the corner. Its big, big, big love of guns (aka “defenders of freedom”), which it inherited from its source material, is also a little different, even if does come across like a product review page in Guns & Ammo at times.
But dramatically, it’s not really innovating much and the opening scene in which Phillipe starts shooting orthodentists because they’ve used the wrong kind of gun and rounds to hunt a wolf is astonishingly clumsy. Characterisation is weak, largely fitting people into particular plot functions rather than making them fully fleshed out human beings. Dialogue is often dreadful, particularly anything between Phillipe and his wife, who judging from her lines must have been a sniper herself. And the constant use of low-budget CGI “bullet time” shots for, erm, bullet shots makes the show look cheap and a bit silly.
As a piece of action-thriller TV, Shooter‘s pretty good, though. Clearly, that’s mainly down to the source material but sometimes it transcendents that material to avoid some of its sillier ideas. Whether subsequent episodes, which will have far less to work with, will be as good or whether Phillipe will be shooting more dentists remains to be seen.
