This is Scoot McNairy in Halt and Catch Fire.
This is what Scoot McNairy actually looks like
Spooky, huh? Big kudos to Halt and Catch Fire‘s make-up department and to McNairy.
US TV
Halt and Catch Fire
What have you been watching? Including Reckless, The Last Ship and Crossbones
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.
Despite the fact that a few shows have finished and I’ve decided to drop a few others from my regular viewing, I have a wee backlog of NBC’s new comedy-action show Taxi Brooklyn to get through. Fingers crossed, a review of the first two episodes of that later. I’ve already reviewed some new shows elsewhere, though:
- Tyrant (US: FX)
- Constantine (US: NBC)
- The Flash (US: The CW)
- The Leftovers (US: HBO; UK: Sky Atlantic)
I’ve also given another new show a try:
Reckless (US: CBS)
Absolute bobbins. As soon as you say the word ‘southern’ to an American from one of the northern states, apparently, through some form of word association, ‘sexy fun times’ is the first thing they think of, because what we have here is a desperate attempt to get in predominantly female viewers with a cop show set in the south that sees lots of cops and lawyers having sex and flirting with each other. Being CBS, though, it’s so tame and old hat that when people start sexting pictures of themselves, they still use email and no naughty bits are exposed, yet despite that, the female cop in question (Georgina Haig) gets fired. She decides to sue and hires lawyer Anna Wood to prosecute the police department; the PD hire her flirt partner Cam Gigandet (The OC, Never Back Down, Twilight), prompting muchos sparks. Except it turns out that another cop might have been raped by a bunch of other cops and things take a serious left turn.
There’s a good cast, including Adam Rodriguez (CSI: Miami), Shawn Hatosy (Southland) and Gregory Harrison (Logan’s Run). But the script is dreadful, perhaps even knowingly so at times – legal eagle Gigandet sails a motor boat to work in the morning, wearing his suit under his waders the whole time – and the gang rape of a woman by police officers after they’ve drugged her doesn’t exactly equal the sexy fun times the producers are after.
After the jump, a round-up of the regulars, with reviews of 24, Crossbones, Halt and Catch Fire, The Last Ship, Murder In The First, Old School, Penny Dreadful and Undateable.
Continue reading “What have you been watching? Including Reckless, The Last Ship and Crossbones”
What have you been watching? Including Belle, Halt and Catch Fire, and Continuum
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.
The heat’s back on again, both in terms of the summer weather and the arrival of new shows, so I’ve not been able to get round to/force myself to watch FX’s Middle Eastern-yet-largely Caucasian dictator and familial rapist show, Tyrant. I’ll try to get round to that by Monday, assuming that all these Dulux swatches I’m keeping my eye on have lost enough moisture that I can compare them accurately. But I have reviewed two new shows:
- Dominion (US: SyFy)
- The Last Ship (US: TNT)
One was better than the other.
I also managed to watch a couple of movies. Well, one and a half.
Belle (2013)
Jane Austen but with a black woman and slavery. Gugu Mbatha-Raw (Undercovers, Bonekickers (yikes), and Touch, but best known as Martha Jones’ sister Tish in Doctor Who) excels as the daughter of a slave whose aristocrat father places her with his uncle to look after – his uncle being the highest-ranked judge in England (Tom Wilkinson). Based on a true story, it’s a two-threaded piece, on the one hand examining the place of black and mixed race women in 18th century society, with Belle too high-born to eat with servants yet because of her skin too low-born to formally eat with her own family. She may have a £2,000 income a year, unlike her impoverished, equally-illegitimate white cousin, but that doesn’t mean anyone wants to marry her either. Contrasted with that is a case being examined by Wilkinson in which slaves are thrown overboard a ship and the ship’s captain tries to claim on the insurance for loss of cargo. The two threads mirror each other, with Wilkinson’s growing awareness of Belle’s station informing his opinion on the case and vice versa. The cast are fabulous, with Penelope Wilton, Miranda Richardson and Emily Watson shining, too, although Tom Felton (Murder in the First, but best known as Draco Malfoy in Harry Potter) is horribly typecast as an evil racist aristo. Some tear-jerking moments and a lovely romance, but a little too gently paced and in need of trimming in places.
Monuments Men (2013)
Another film based on a true story, this sees George Clooney, Matt Damon, John Goodman and others as somewhat past-it art experts at the end of World War 2 flying out to Europe to try to rescue whatever art they can before the Nazis steal it or destroy it – or the Allies bomb the hell out of it. That’s the first half-hour anyway, but we gave up after that because pretty much nothing much happens. There’s no good dialogue, the direction is limp, there’s no action, no scenes of note: there’s more excitement in a Pathé newsreel.
After the jump, a round-up of the regulars, with reviews of 24, Continuum, Enlisted, Halt and Catch Fire, Old School, Penny Dreadful, Suits and Undateable.
Continue reading “What have you been watching? Including Belle, Halt and Catch Fire, and Continuum”
What have you been watching? Including Murder In the First, Continuum, Suits, Old School and Undateable
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.
A slightly slower week this week, with only one new show unveiled – SyFy’s Dominion. Hopefully, I’ll be reviewing that later today, but so far it looks like possibly the worst TV show ever made. Although obviously The Starlost still provides strong competition there.
After the jump, a round-up of the regulars, with reviews of 24, Continuum, Enlisted, Game of Thrones, Murder In The First, Old School, Penny Dreadful, Suits and Undateable.
Third-episode verdict: Halt and Catch Fire (AMC)
In the US: Sundays, 10/9c, AMC
Oh, what a shame. After two episodes that might have led the viewer to believe they were looking at AMC’s new Mad Men, Halt and Catch Fire has fallen at the third hurdle.
Set in Texas’s so-called Silicon Prairie in 1983, the show looks at the PC revolution from the vantage point of four people, aiming to go into the PC clone business: a mesmerising salesman (Lee Pace), a punk girl programmer (Mackenzie Davis), a tired hardware engineer (Scott McNairy) and his more talented wife (Kerry Bishé). However, much like Pace’s character, the show promised a lot up front and is now failing to deliver on its promises.
The first episode gave us the set-up, with the near-sociopathic Pace turning up at the fictional Cardiff Electronics with a stunning game plan for how he’ll force the company to take on IBM by entering the PC cloning business, recruiting the brightest and best – McNairy and Davis – to do his bidding. And despite the show relying on an audience that can at least understand what’s involved in reverse-engineering a PC BIOS chip – and maybe even actually be able to do it – it was an excellent and engrossing piece of work. Pace was stunning as the visionary Steve Jobs of the piece and the script was thoughtful and clever.
Episode two continued this, never quite doing what you thought it was going to do. After a slow first half, the episode really took off with a glimpse of the terrifying business tactics IBM used in the 1980s. Pleasingly, the female characters got some rounding out, particularly Davis who got to show off at IT – and proper IT, not the dumbed down TV IT you get on something like NCIS. Pace continued to astonish, too, giving us a barely contained force of nature hiding behind the bland face and intonation of a born salesman, but who steals and has few ideas of his own.
Unfortunately, episode three gave us the first script written by anyone except show creators Christopher Cantwell and Christopher C Rogers, and it appears they might be the key to the show’s success or otherwise, because the stack of cards came tumbling down. Not completely and to a certain extent, the show was realistic enough to show that genius thoughts don’t necessarily arrive the first time, but may need time, effort and surprising sources for inspiration to be produced, but certainly most of the show’s main attractions got dropped – or at least there weren’t the dialogue and character moments needed to distract from the potentially flawed architecture.
It didn’t exactly help that the episode separated off the characters so they barely got to interact with one another or that Bishé’s character was the only one who got a chance to excel. Meanwhile, Pace’s masterplan was revealed merely to be “Let’s stick it to my old employers”, rather than anything with any real insight into revolutionising the PC industry. McNairy just moped for an episode and was squeamish over an obvious metaphordead bird. And Davis, channelling Tom Cruise in Risky Business, danced around an office all night, looking for inspiration, before heading off with the least convincing punks since Ralph Fiennes in Prime Suspect.
Then, of course, we got that scene, in which Pace (spoiler alert) seduces the husband of a potential investor of whom he disapproves, purely to put her off the deal. It’s a surprising character moment, presumably meant to indicate just what he’s prepared to do, but it comes out of nowhere and massively spins the show away from the plausibility it’s been trying to provide for the previous two episodes.
The show still isn’t without its charms and obviously could still recover. Any show that starts an episode with Gary Numan’s ‘Our Friends Electric’ is clearly full of potential awesome and we could yet see a reason why we should be routing for these characters, other than because they’re the ones the show is about. We have not one but two technically gifted female lead characters – that’s 50% of the main cast – both of whom are fully drawn out people. And when the show actually deals with the technical side of things, surprisingly, it’s extremely compelling, even if it’s just discussing how to make a motherboard smaller or reduce its heat output.
Without wishing to sound like Chris Morris in The IT Crowd, what’s needed is for the disparate characters to act like a team – presumably that’s the end game but the producers are taking their time getting there, and although this is an AMC show, speed is somewhat of the essence, given the nature of the subject matter and the show’s own plot requirements. We also need to be able to root for the team and as most of the characters are already aware, there’s literally nothing exciting about their clone – this isn’t Apple, this is Compaq. No one was excited by a Compaq PC, not even Compaq. They’re bored, so we’re bored.
So here’s hoping that from episode four, with presumably (spoiler alert) Bishé’s joining of the team, we’ll be heading for more interesting territory, because a bunch of people griping while producing a dull office product is just not a fun affair, no matter how much empty sex, weird scars and sick wildlife there is along the way. On the other hand, we might just get an episode in which someone forgets to back up their data. Let’s hope the producers pick the right option.
Barrometer rating: 2
Rob’s prediction: Hopefully the show can recover but anything more than one season is looking unlikely at the moment