It was a relatively quiet week last week for our Diana… if you discount the massively big spoilers for Wonder Woman that a French magazine has revealed (I’ll spoiler cloak them for you if you don’t want to read them):
Why did Zeus create the Amazons? Because shaping man in his image made his son Ares, incidentally a god of war, mad with jealousy, he convinces the guys to confront each other. To restore harmony between them, Zeus created the Amazons that Ares reduced to slavery. The Amazons revolt with the help of Zeus, who will die of the hand of his son having had time to find Themyscira, their haven of peace where they will grow Diana. (…) Diana Prince becomes Wonder Woman by helping Steve Trevor and a squad of proud arm-in-law in search of one who wants to wipe humanity off the map with deadly gas.
That’s not my translation, BTW (sacre bleu!).
Anyway, if true, that’s an interesting amalgam of all the Wonder Woman origin stories, including Greg Rucka’s current one and even Joss Whedon’s failed movie script, that’s probably going to annoy every fan with a minimum of one detail – you pick which one annoys you most – not least because it’s now about a couple of gods rather than at least one goddess. Let’s see how it all pans out on-screen, though.
In comics, there’s not a been much new. The first issue of Justice League/Power Rangers turnedup but beyond the alternative cover, no Diana.
She calls on gods, he calls on the power of a T-rex. Meet Jason, the Red Ranger, in JUSTICE LEAGUE/POWER RANGERS! http://bit.ly/2jc8SEt
Posted by Wonder Woman on Thursday, 12 January 2017
That means that after the jump, we’ll be looking at Wonder Woman (Rebirth) #14, Batman ’66 Meets Wonder Woman ’77 #4 and Justice League vs Suicide Squad #4, but not necessarily in that order. See you in a click.
It’s “What have you been watching?”, my chance to tell you what movies and TV I’ve been watching recently and your chance to recommend anything you’ve been watching.
Although Amazon’s finally got round to releasing the first season of Sneaky Pete, there’s not been a whole lot that’s new new in the past week, which means I’ve only had Pure (Canada: CBC) and Emerald City (US: NBC; UK: 5*) to review since the last WHYBW. Sorry about that. I’ll try to watch some boxsets when I have the chance.
All the same, for sures, later this week, I’ll be passing a third-episode verdict on Emerald City, which means that after the jump, I’ll be looking at LethalWeapon, Man Seeking Woman, Sherlock and Shooter, as well as the return of The Great Indoors.
But there has been one another new show that I watched this week:
Workin’ Moms (Canada: CBC) Three Canadian mums who have just had babies are ready to start working again. And that’s about it really for plot, although given one’s a high-flying career woman and first-time mother (the show’s creator, writer and director Catherine “daughter of Ivan” Reitman), one’s a no-nonsense psychiatrist mother-of-two (Dani Kind), and the third is a slightly unstable lesbian realtor who carried her partner’s child (Juno Rinaldi)*, you can see there’s a certain variety of experiences being catered for the show.
And indeed that’s really what the show is: a comedy-drama very specifically about the experience of returning to work after having had babies. And when you think about it, while there are shows that have had single mums as heroines and there have been shows that have had mums as characters in the backgrounds, they’ve mostly either got families already or it’s all about the babies and what it’s like to have a baby. It’s almost never been focused on what work is like once you have a baby.
And to be honest, it’s that interestingly specific viewpoint that’s the show’s main and in fact only selling point. The show thinks it’s quite exciting and innovative, such as when it has topless, normal-looking older women in the first five minutes of the episode, which is punningly titled Bare (which works on lots of levels – eg there’s a bear later, there’s a grizzly mum and, of course, they’re laid bare by the experience of being a mum). But it’s not quite the treasure trove of anecdotes and insight that it thinks it is, and frequently it just bubbles along, not doing much. All the same, it was insightful and offered some nuggets that I’d not seen elsewhere on TV. The characters were well drawn and avoided stereotyping, even the men. Plus it had a bear.
Not bad. Not great. Not to be confused with CBC’s Newborn Moms, either.
* There’s a fourth mum (Jessalyn Wanlim) but she wasn’t in the first episode, as far as I noticed.
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.
So now I have to apologise. Sorry, Australia. Sorry, UK. Sorry, Internet. I have failed you, as well as a whole bunch of other countries whose TV I ostensibly review but I never quite get round to.
Oh well. I’m used to failure. Readjusted schedule, then. Some time in the next week or so, I should hopefully be getting through the first few episodes of a whole bunch of Australian TV shows – Hyde & Seek, The Wrong Girl, The Secret Daughter, Deep Water and Rosehaven. As for the US, I should be previewing Epix’s Graves and reviewing HBO’s Divorce. Meanwhile, on the Internet, Netflix’s Easy, Crackle’s Start Up and Amazon’s Crisis in Six Scenes might well be on indefinite hold, but maybe I’ll find the time.
I’ve not yet caught the latest episodes of The Fall and High Maintenance, so after the jump, I’ll be looking over Ash vs Evil Dead, The Good Place, Halt and Catch Fire, Impastor, Lucifer,Westworld and You’re The Worst, as well as the return of Arrow and The Flash. Two of those are for the chop – can you guess which ones?
If you look over all that, you’ll see I did watch an awful lot of TV last week, just not enough. I probably could have watched all of it though if I hadn’t been bogged down with one thing…
Marvel’s Luke Cage (Netflix) Netflix and Marvel’s latest ‘Defender’ is a stonking 13 episodes of… not much. Continuing where Marvel’s Jessica Jones left off, it sees Luke Cage head over Harlem way to keep his head down, but when an old friend gets killed, the bulletproof black man has to wade in to help protect the neighbourhood. But then his past begins to catch up with him…
The show sticks pretty closely to the original Luke Cage comics – I’ve read precisely none of them, but if you watch this video, you’ll be caught up on them and know pretty much the whole plot of the first season. But what do we care about plot? Atfer all, Marvel’s Luke Cage doesn’t, being interested mainly in discussing black culture, history and what is the true and correct course of action for the modern black man of honour. Cage, who is a walking encapsulation of every single African-American stereotype and archetype (gang member, son of a preacher, ex-military, a blue collar worker, frequent denizen of social barber shop, lover, prisoner, medical experiment, boxer et al), becomes a nexus point for modern US politics, wandering around town in a hoodie but able to withstand police bullets, he’s able to demonstrate and confront all manner of arguments, while being the perfect role model at all times. Sweet Christmas, he doesn’t even swear.
And when he’s not doing that, we’re getting a musical interlude down the club, to celebrate black music. Method Man makes a cameo and even raps live about Luke Cage and police brutality.
Unfortunately, despite a cracking soundtrack and numerous homages to blaxploitation movie, that’s really all the show is, despite a grade A, almost exclusively black cast that includes multiple members of The Wire‘s cast (eg Sonja Sohn), Sons of Anarchy‘s Theo Rossi, Alfre Woodward, Banshee‘s Frankie Faison and House of Cards‘ Mahershala Ali. There’s minimal superhero fun, since Cage basically just wanders into rooms, people shoot at him to zero effect and he then punches them unconscious. Even when Cage’s arch-nemesis shows up, their confrontation seems to drag out across about half the season without much really happening.
If you’re expecting crossovers with the other shows or the movies, I’m afraid beyond the now compulsory appearance of Rosario Dawson and numerous references to the other shows and films, you’re going to be disappointed. At most, they offer only a rehabilitation of Justin Hammer.
And the dialogue. Oh gods, the dialogue.
In a sense, Marvel’s Luke Cage is an important show, offering a uniquely black perspective on the superhero genre, just as Marvel’s Jessica Jones was a uniquely female deconstruction of superheroes. But actually watching it, so little of any real interest happens dramatically that all you can do is admire its heart. And how it managed to slip Cage’s original comic book costume in there. That was impressive.
In Canada: Mondays, 9pm, CHCH In the UK: Not yet acquired
Into every generation a slayer is born: one girl in all the world, a chosen one. She alone will wield the strength and skill to fight the vampires, demons, and the forces of darkness; to stop the spread of their evil and the swell of their number. She is the Slayer.
As we discovered back when Marvel’s Jessica Jones first aired, there’s an almost automatic tendency to compare pretty much any supernatural show that
Is about a young heroine…
Who fights some kind of supernatural enemy of some kind…
While dealing with relationship issues, particularly a single foxy man…
While dealing with family issues, sisters and girlfriends…
…to Buffy The Vampire Slayer. I think that’s partly because there isn’t a large enough ‘dictionary’ of comparisons yet. Maybe soon people will be able to think of sufficient shows with female leads that Buffy won’t simply be the first one everyone can name.
All the same, watching Wynonna Earp, CHCH’s co-prod with the US Syfy channel that adapts the comic of the same name, I’m beginning to wonder if Buffy in some way almost created a Joseph Campbell-style template for ‘the heroine’s journey’ that through some form of morphic resonance has slowly become almost the only way for people to think about shows of this kind.
Okay, Wynonna Earp is from the same producer as Lost Girl, so maybe it’s just personal taste at work – that wasn’t exactly a million miles from the Buffy template and reading back over my original review of that piece of fantasy tatt that I’d largely forgotten, pretty much all the criticisms I had are the same.
Wynonna is a present-day descendant of the famous lawman Wyatt Earp, and she’s the top special agent for a special unit known within the US Marshals known as The Monster Squad. She battles such supernatural threats as Bobo Del Rey and his redneck, trailer-trash vampires that are pushing a new killer designer drug called “Hemo”, and the Egyptian Mafia’s mummy hitman, Raduk, Eater Of The Dead, who’s out to do in all the other crime bosses. In her subsequent adventures she finished some outstanding Earp family business while dealing with Hillbilly Gremlins, and Zombie Mailmen alongside her fellow Marshalls.
And here’s the plot of the TV series, which oddly enough for a Western about a famous American lawman, is set in Alberta, Canada:
Wynonna Earp is a modern supernatural western that takes place among the foothills and badlands of Alberta. Our lead Wynonna was raised on an Alberta ranch but is indeed the great great granddaughter of famous lawman Wyatt Earp. When Wynonna returns to her hometown of Purgatory, Alberta on her 27th birthday, she learns that that she is heir to not only Wyatt’s near mythic abilities but also to a family curse that she had been taught to believe was only a myth. Unfortunately for Wynonna, the Earp Curse is real. Each generation since Wyatt’s death, the heir must battle Wyatt’s legendary old West enemies: demons who rise from hell, again and again. But with the help of a mysterious but familiar figure from the past and an agent from a covert joint task force, Wynonna is determined to end the curse once and for all.
See what I mean? They’ve actually done a lot of tinkering with the plot of the comic to make it Buffy… on a Canadian farm. Okay, it’s not identical, because while Wynonna (Melanie Scrofano from The Listener) can do all kinds of acrobatic gymnastics and martial arts like Buffy, she can only kill the demons using Earp’s gun, which is a straight lift from Supernatural.
But she’s snarky and feisty and objects to being a slayer; she’s got an annoying little sister (England’s own Dominique Provost-Chalkley); there’s a hot bloke of questionable loyalties for her to fight with/alongside (Shamier Anderson); there’s a Big Bad to fight (Tim Rozon from Schitt’s Creek); there’s various guys she was with at high school to taunt; and more.
It’s Buffy… on a Canadian farm. Except not even that good. The fight scenes are appalling – possibly the worst I’ve ever seen, and they couldn’t make the wirework more obvious if they’d covered the wires in little flags with Sarah-Michelle Gellar’s face on them. The acting is another order of awful beyond awful, particularly from Scrofano. The mythology is so derivative and uninvolving, it makes Demons look like Eraserhead. It’s sexy, sexy times are more embarrassing than Hex‘s.
I know it’s supposed to be a bit of comic book fun, but only the villains seem to know this. Everyone else seems to think they’re dealing with Tolstoy… and they’re all reciting it as fluently as they would with Tolstoy in the original Russian.
While the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been going great guns for the past decade, the Marvel TV world is in a sorry old state, isn’t it? Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD was largely unwatchable in its first season until Captain America: Winter Soldier gave it a twist that made it really rather good… until the end of the season. Then it all went to pants in season 2 and I didn’t even bother with season 3. It’s about to get even worse in season 4, by the looks of it, now that the only two decent characters in the show are going to get their own spin-off series, Marvel’s Most Wanted, leaving the dregs behind.
Meanwhile, Marvel’s Agent Carter, while having far more engaging characters than SHIELD and the delights of a post-war setting to play with, had soporific, unengaging storylines. As with SHIELD, a tie in with the MCU gave the first season a welcome twist – a glimpse at the Black Widow training programme in Russia, as well as of one of its graduates
But season two was so dull, I didn’t even make it through to the end and chances of the show being renewed are slender.
I did say ‘TV’ but Netflix is different. It’s not TV. Except in Eastern Europe.
Season 1 of Netflix’s Marvel’s Daredevil is one of the best shows the Internet TV provider has so far produced, while Marvel’s Jessica Jones actually managed to exceed it, while simultaneously deconstructing all the assumptions of the superhero genre. Very adult, unencumbered by the restraints of network TV, they make superhero TV shows – and many other dramas – look very inadequate.
When originally announced, Daredevil and Jessica Jones were both part of an attempt to do an MCU-style team-up on Netflix, with the first seasons of those shows to be followed by Marvel’s Luke Cage and Marvel’s Iron Fist to introduce those superheroes, and then by Marvel’s Defenders to bring them all together in one big show. However, both individually proved so popular – Jessica Jones was the top original streamed TV programme in the UK last year – that they’ve both been renewed for second seasons ahead of schedule.
And now, with Iron Fist himself only just getting cast, here’s season two of Daredevil, with blind but superathletic New York lawyer Matt Murdock having to deal with the fall-out from his quest against Kingpin last season, as well as his attempts to escape from his old mentor, Stick. But can the second season match the quality of the first, despite losing showrunner Steven DeKnight? Has it been rushed onto our computer screens too soon? And will Daredevil himself be overshadowed by the season’s two guest ‘superheroes’ – The Punisher and Elektra, both of whom have had their own movies?
Here’s a good batch of NSFW trailers for you to enjoy. Discussion after the jump: multiple spoilers ahoy, obviously, so probably best if you watch the entire second season first – unless you don’t care about being spoiled, of course.
