Battlestar Galactica

What have you been watching? Including Backstrom, Young Drunk Punk, 19-2, Spiral and Galavant

26 January 2015 Rob Buckley 16 Comments

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. And if you want to know when any of these shows are on in your area, there’s Locate TV – they’ll even email you a weekly schedule.

Lots of new shows to deal with this past week, including 12 Monkeys. Unfortunately, it’s my busy time of the month, so I won’t be able to deal with them at length and there’s a few third-episode verdicts I’m going to have skip, too. Fortunately, though, all the new shows don’t really warrant full reviews…

Backstrom (US: Fox)
Despite having been canned by CBS straight after its pilot, this adaptation of Leif GW Persson’s Bäckström books has been resurrected over at Fox and once again demonstrates that the US really shouldn’t be adapting Nordic Noir. It stars Rainn Wilson from The Office as the eponymous Backstrom, a Portland police detective who’s best thought of as Gregory House MD but without the talent, the charm or the looks, bungling his way from crime scene to crime scene being lazy and offensive and being proved right because the script demands it, rather than because of any insight. So the producers think it very funny that Backstrom have the nearest – and indeed only – black person around arrested because he’s black so probably was involved in the crime. My, how comically racist! Except the black person is involved in the crime – how actually racist!

There’s some decent supporting characters, including an MMA-beat cop (Page Kennedy); a New Age medical examiner (Kristoffer Polaha from Ringer, Valentine, Life Unexpected), whom everyone reacts to like he’s English, even though he doesn’t even have an accent; an investigator whom everyone reacts to like she’s French, because she is (Beatrice Rosen); and Dennis Haysbert (The Unit, 24) as Backstrom’s boss. But this is as lazy as Backstrom himself, trying to fake being intelligent and gimmicky by having Backstrom ‘empathise’ (saying out loud, “I am character x, I feel y, therefore I would have done z”) and come up with insight such as “Anyone who says ‘Absolutely not’ is absolutely lying”, rather than actually being intelligent or having insight.

Weirdly, between moving from CBS to Fox, there’s been some recasting and a lot of the funnier and smarter stuff has been removed, making it worse not better than it was before.

Young Drunk Punk (Canada: City TV)
After last year’s slew of 80s nostalgia shows in the US, time for some 80s nostalgia from Canada, with Young Drunk Punk, in which two teenage nerd punk-wannabes search for their destinies after leaving high school. Despite being written by and starring Bruce McCulloch (Kids In The Hall) this is very much like the previous half dozen Canadian comedies that have come by in having a total laugh count of zero.

After the jump, 19-2, Arrow, Banshee, Constantine, Cougar Town, Elementary, The Flash, Galavant, Gotham, The Ground Floor, Hindsight, Man Seeking Woman, Marvel’s Agent Carter, State of Affairs, Spiral (Engrenages) and Togetherness. One of them’s on the verge of getting recommended, one of them’s going to be dropped, and one of them is on the borderline. But which ones? You’ll find out after the jump.

Continue reading “What have you been watching? Including Backstrom, Young Drunk Punk, 19-2, Spiral and Galavant”

US TV

Review: 12 Monkeys 1×1-1×2 (US/UK: Syfy)

20 January 2015 Rob Buckley 16 Comments


In the US: Fridays, 9/8c, Syfy
In the UK: Acquired by Syfy UK. Begins 9pm, 27 February 

For quite some time now, Syfy has been coasting. Gone are the halcyon days when Battlestar Galactica was the toast of the town. Indeed, with a schedule intermittently packed with wrestling, reality shows and knowingly bad B-movies, it was possible to surmise that Syfy had changed its name from the Scifi channel not just for trademarking purposes but so it could avoid having to show sci-fi, with what little it did airbeing anaemic-to-poor knock-offs (Alphas) or imports (Continuum, Being Human, Bitten). 

However, for the past couple of years, Syfy has been trying to raise its game in original programming. Sometimes, the quality’s been awful (Dominion, Z Nation), sometimes it’s been okay (Defiance, Helix), but so far, nothing’s been great.

12 Monkeys doesn’t quite change that track record, but given what’s gone before it, it’s surprisingly good. The film, 12 Monkeys, was a Terry Gilliam classic, itself based on the Chris Marker’s 1962 ‘photo-roman’ La Jetée, in which a time traveller from the future comes back to the modern day to prevent armageddon. However, time paradoxes mean that the story has more than a twist or two.

Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys, as well as being a movie rather than a series of photos, adds many plots and sub-plots to Marker’s story, portraying a virus-devastated future from which Bruce Willis returns to find out the source of the virus and prevent the future from happening. Along the way, he meets a doctor (Madeleine Stowe), with whom he falls in love and convinces he’s from the future, and a psychiatric institute inmate (Brad Pitt), who is the head of ‘the Army of the 12 Monkeys’, the likely cause of the virus. And again, as with La Jetée, there are plenty of timey-wimey twists.

This new TV version moves things on slightly and straightens out some of the twists. Our new hero is Aaron Stanford – best known as Pyro in X-Men 2 but also doing serviceable secret agent turns in both Nikita and Traveler – and he’s come from 2043 to find out the source of a viral outbreak that’s set to happen in 2017. Why him? Because in the future, the few remaining survivors of the virus find not only a time machine that can ‘splinter’ someone back in time but also a message from a CDC doctor, Amanda Schull (Louis’ helper in Suits), saying that he is the one who must help stop the virus from getting out. Will he convince her of what’s going to happen? Will he be able to find who’s really behind the viral outbreak? And how many time paradoxes will he encounter along the way

Here’s a trailer.

Continue reading “Review: 12 Monkeys 1×1-1×2 (US/UK: Syfy)”

Classic TV

Preview: Space: 1999 – The Bringers of Wonder (Special Edition)

1 December 2014 James Cooray Smith Post a comment

Space: 1999 - Bringers of Wonder

Space: 1999 - Bringers of Wonder

Starring: Barbara Bain, Martin Landau
Price: £13
Released: December 8 2014

Today is a day of firsts. Not only is it December 1st, the first day of Advent, it’s also the first time since I started this blog up way back in 2005 (gosh, nearly 10 years ago!) that I’ve published a guest post. Isn’t that amazing?

This first guest post is by noted author and critic Mr James Cooray Smith, who has bitten the bullet and done something I could never do: watch Space: 1999 again. In this case, he’s watched the forthcoming limited edition Blu-ray release of the show’s only ever two-part episode, The Bringers of Wonder, as well as the cinema version of said two-parter, Destination Moonbase Alpha – get it while it’s hot, because only 1,999 copies of this are being produced.

After the jump, Jim will let you know what he thinks and reveals that the show is officially considered a form of torture in the US. Before then, here’s a trailer, and if you’re feeling brave, I’ve also provided the two episodes in question, so you can see what you’re going to get (NB: watching the episodes may be considered illegal under Geneva conventions of all kinds):

Continue reading “Preview: Space: 1999 – The Bringers of Wonder (Special Edition)”

The BarrometerA Barrometer rating of 3

Third-episode verdict: Constantine (US: NBC; UK: Amazon Prime)

10 November 2014 Rob Buckley 10 Comments

In the US: Fridays, 10/9c, NBC
In the UK: Amazon Prime

Three episodes into Constantine, the latest attempt to adapt DC’s Vertigo horror comic Hellblazer in another medium, and we’re seeing marked signs of improvement after a very variable first couple of episodes. The pilot (which was modified slightly for the transmitted first episode to get rid of Lucy Griffiths) wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great: a PG-13 bit of horror, with a variably-accented, atypically moral John Constantine, that was about on a par with the average first season episode of Supernatural. Matt Ryan’s Constantine is a watered down version of the comic book character: a non-smoking, generic working class Brit (accent says lots of places in the North, driving licence says Liverpool, slang says London), a man constantly acting like an unnuanced supernatural tough guy, rather than a mercurial amoral, trickster, prepared to manipulate and betray in the interest of the bigger picture (or himself).

Things didn’t get any better with episode two. In fact, they got worse, as it was a truly dreadful, virtually unwatchable affair: a sub-Grimm bit of dullness, with Constantine chasing generic monsters in a mysteriously Welsh-obsessed Pennsylvania mining town. Bringing in anti-Romani racism just for larks, it was about stupid and soporific as it’s possible for a show about the paranormal to get, without its writers having been trepanned first – and that’s despite the show bringing in Angélica Celaya as a considerably more interesting replacement for Griffiths. 

But the third episode has given me hope. While the ‘threat of the week’ was the somewhat generic ‘cursed LP’, the general furniture of the story was a whole lot better. The script by BSG/Smallville veteran Mark Verheiden drew a lot on the comic to flesh out Constantine, bringing in his punk band background (a bit of time travel maths or a longevity spell might be needed to square that) and favoured adversary/supernatural bystander Papa Midnite and his Ace of Winchesters. There was humour and general bad behaviour, too, and the show should get Brownie points for both an excellent use of ‘Anarchy in the UK’ and a couple of Doctor Who references that included a dimensionally transcendental house and the Constantine equivalent of psychic paper.

Constantine is still a tame affair that uses gore as a substitute for true horror. It relies on the iconography of the comic to give us the TV version of Constantine, Zed, Chas and other characters, but without giving us any real meat to their bones or signs that these are real people with real pasts, rather than Very Important Things That Had Happened To Them. And its plot are generic at best, unwatchable at worst.

But the show’s definitely getting there now. It’s drawing on some of the comic’s best bits to give us some things we haven’t really seen on TV before. Constantine is doing proper Hellblazer-esque magic. And we’re getting a proper roster of characters built up.

If it’s to survive in the ratings and be something more than Supernatural meets Grimm, the show needs to put on its big boy pants and truly embrace the darkness and Hellblazer‘s combination of heresy, politics and the personal. That’s assuming its got any chance of attracting back anyone who watched its offensively poor second episode, which is unlikely. And, of course, one good episode doesn’t mean everything that follows is going to be golden.

However, after the second episode, I was fairly certain I wasn’t going to be watching Constantine after the third, so it might still be in with a chance.

Barrometer rating: 3
Rob’s prediction: If it makes it to a season, I’ll be surprised, two seasons and I’ll be amazed, but some piece of dark magic might still save it

Trailers for all two of SyFy’s new shows: Ascension and Dominion

16 May 2014 Rob Buckley 4 Comments

After that big slab of new shows that NBC, ABC, Fox, CBS, TNT, TBS and even to a lesser extent The CW are putting out in the Fall, SyFy’s upfront presentation of a mere two shows looks a bit rubbish. Even more rubbish is that Dominion is due out in June, Ascension in November. And most rubbish of all are the shows themselves – at least, judging by the trailers.

Dominion, which stars Anthony Head doing his best American accent (cf Jonathan Creek, Free Agents), is a spin-off from dreadful Paul Bettany starrer Legion. The show carries that on in a transformed post-apocalyptic future, 25 years after an army of lower angels, assembled by the archangel Gabriel, waged a war of possession against mankind. If you enjoy this, you are probably a very unique and special snowflake of a person.

Ascension, which stars Tricia Helfer, who’d almost certainly rather be on ABC in a second season of Killer Women rather than back on SyFy, imagines that while Kennedy was busy exhorting America to aim for the moon back in ’63, he was also sending off a covert colonising spaceship full of families on a 100-year long voyage. Seems plausible, doesn’t it?