Time has flown again, since The Medium Is Not Enough emerged blinking into the world a stupifying 12 years ago, primed to make sarcastic comments about foreign TV, mainly from the US, mainly in languages I can speak, with reviews of Prison Break, Supernatural, and Global Frequency.
Normally, I recall at this point what I’ve learnt in the past year. However, I’ve reached the age where I’ve both achieved true wisdom, so have apparently learnt nothing new, and have started to lose my memory, so I probably did learn something but have now forgotten it.
Oh yes. That was it. My learning is that French TV has more than one good TV programme, now that Canal+ has added Baron Noir and Le bureau des Légendes to its portfolio of Engrenages (Spiral).
One thing I would say, though, is that I think Peak TV has peaked. There are more and more networks on more and more media, it’s true. But judging by the number of networks who dipped their toes in the water of scripted content a few years ago, shivered a bit, and have now retreated back in the warm, embracing confines of unscripted in the past few months, I’m thinking we’re starting to see some obvious winners emerging from the melée and that there’ll be fewer new dramas as a result.
As always, a great big thank you to all the regular commenters: Mark Carroll, JustStark, bob and GYAD (who might have been picked off at the back by hyenas in the past few months). Another big thank you and welcome to new arrivals Eagled and Ian Miller for giving me hope in the darkness. But a thanks to absolutely everyone who even left a single comment in passing, particularly Craig Grannell, Toby, idleworm, Robin Parker and Adam Bowie.
Same time next year everyone? I say that every year, don’t I?
BBC One/Two green light: series of Little Women adaptation (with PBS US), real-life political drama A Very English Scandal, Tokyo detective drama Girl/Haji (with Netflix), adaptation of The War of the Worlds, counter-terrorism drama Informer, adaptation of Black Narcissus, NI family drama Come Home, Stephen Poliakoff semi-autobiographical series Summer of Rockets and anorexia incarnate drama Overshadowed
TMINE’s about to take its traditional Christmas and New Year break. I’ll be back tomorrow but after that, normal business won’t resume until January 3rd or 4th with the Daily News et al. But a new tradition I started last year was to leave you with a specific question to keep you occupied: what were your favourite new shows of the year? As always, let everyone know your choices and the reasons below or on your own blog.
For the record, after the jump are my Top 1213 from all the countries around the world, as well as that new-fangled Internet thing, in no particular order, with the addition of one I mysteriously left off this morning. Merry Grafelnik, everyone!
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.
The usual “TMINE recommends” page features links to reviews of all the shows I’ve ever recommended, and there’s also the Reviews A-Z, for when you want to check more or less anything I’ve reviewed ever.
Well, look at that. I’m back blogging in August. Okay, the Daily News won’t be back until September and I’m not going daily until then for anything else, either, but there’s a good chance I’ll be peppering August with further posts, including a look at the latest Amazon pilots, such as The Tick,Jean-Claude Van Johnson and I Love Dick, I hope.
Elsewhere, I reviewed the first season of Baron Noir (France: Canal+; UK: Amazon Prime), which was my holiday project, and I left you with my thoughts on Stranger Things (Netflix) and Star Trek Beyond (2016) before I went. But surprisingly, since then, there hasn’t actually been much new TV and as I did quite a purge before the holidays, the only regulars I’ll be covering after the jump are The Last Ship and Mr Robot, as well as everything up to the season finale of Outcast. I also haven’t been to the movies, being away and all, not even to see Jason Bourne.
But we did watch one movie rather a lot:
My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 (2016) (iTunes) The sequel to the worldwide success that was wedding culture-clash comedy My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002), My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 brings back virtually the entire cast to just about manage to do something different, with Nia Vardalos and John Corbett’s daughter Elena Kampouris (American Odyssey) having to choose whether to go away to college or not, while facing the constant pressure to get married to a good Greek boy; meanwhile, Vardalos’ parents discover the priest at their wedding didn’t sign the certificate, meaning they’re going to have to have – you guessed it – a big fat Greek wedding.
Vardalos’ script is mostly a mother-daughter story, but is also partly a rejoinder to the original movie’s stereotypical portrayal of Greek culture, emphasising its potential for acceptance and diversity as well as the cloying conservatism shown in the original movie. Wisely, it also gives Andrea Martin far more to do. However, there are few of the original’s insights, various plot lines (eg Corbett’s relationship with his parents) go virtually nowhere, the Greek (what little there is of it, even between people who are from Greece) is atrocious, and the general message of hope and pushing boundaries of the original is destroyed, with Vardalos’ travel agency having closed between movies, forcing her to work for the family restaurant again, and her brother’s artistic talents going precisely nowhere either.
Nice to see everyone back together again, but a shame that Vardalos doesn’t have much left to say, it seems (did she use it all up on the TV series?).
There can be few channels around the world as reliable as Canal+ when it comes to producing quality TV. Chances are, provided it sticks to French, any Canal+ series you watch is going to be HBO-good.
A case in point is Baron Noir, a remarkably prescient and impressive political series that is everything that Les Hommes de L’ombre (Spin)and Marseilleshould have been but weren’t. Airing in France in February and March this year, but available in the UK on Amazon, the show somehow managed to anticipate both this year’s Brexit and the Corbyn/Smith Labour leadership competition and relocate them to France, taking in all of left-wing French politics along the way.
And when I say ‘all’, I mean all.
The show is about the mayor of Dunkirk, Kad Merad (Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis), an old-school socialist who’s spent years fighting (sometimes literally, with a baseball bat) for the poor, oppressed working classes. He’s best friends with fellow socialist and presidential candidate Niels Arestrup (Un prophète, De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté, Quai d’Orsay), to the extent that he’s willing to steal money from social housing projects to help fund his campaign. However, soon there are ructions between the two friends and before you know it, Merad and Arestrup – both sometimes helped, sometimes hindered by new-wave technocrat Anna Mouglalis (Romanzo Criminale, Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky) – are pulling strings and levers behind the scenes of French politics to block each other and further their own, the party’s and the country’s interests, all while trying to avoid ending up in prison through Mutually Assured Destruction.
While the opening episode of the show gives the impression that this is going to be a show about corruption – and certainly that is an element – most of the first season is about political dirty-tricks and manipulations at every level of politics: everything from how to disrupt a local council election through how to manipulate the media and use party rules to counter your enemy’s plans through manipulating the Assemblée nationale all the way up to the EU and how to play it off against your own national interests by threatening to leave it to ‘ensure your country’s sovereignty’. Advised behind the scenes by real-life French politicians, it’s a real eye-opener, not least because it actually manages to film inside the Palais Bourbon itself, but also because of the differences between French and British politics – it’s a long time since anyone had to take Troskyites and communists seriously here. Well, it used to be, anyway.
If Baron Noir has a message, it’s that there are no friends in politics yet if you do screw over your friends in the short-term, chances are that things will go badly for you in the long-term – you just have to know how to balance all the options and bring people back on side. Merad spends most of the season in a whirl of plots and counter-plots, playing one person against another, usually with their knowledge, often by giving inspiring speeches about the left and the need to look after the oppressed/fight the National Front – think Jeremy Corbyn if he had charisma and leadership skills.
Beautifully shot and acted with some cracking music, the show nevertheless isn’t without flaws. Merad is implausibly attractive to women of all ages and there’s one relationship involving him where not only the audience but the couple themselves are surprised it’s taking place at all. It also meanders a little, dropping interesting plotlines and characters, and focusing too much in later episodes on that housing project, which so dominates the first episode. For English speakers, there’s also the subtitling, which starts off fine but starts to lose it a little mid-season, such as by switching the French-Algerian’s Mercad’s reason for entering politics from helping ‘les Arabs’ to helping ‘minorities’ and frequently taming down some of the more interesting, fruitier language (it’s a real tragedy that the marvellous ‘putain ville de merde’ ends up as ‘this town sucks’, for example).
But if you want a House of Cards that’s not only European but better than Netflix’s, Baron Noir‘s your boy. Give it a whirl – there’s a second season on the way in France next year. Here’s a French-language trailer for you to get an idea of what it’s like.
