Lost

Friday’s “ABC comedies good, NBC comedies bad” news

30 September 2011 Rob Buckley 2 Comments

Film

  • Trailer for Contraband, with Kate Beckinsale and Mark Wahlberg
  • Malin Akerman joins Tyler Labine in Cottage Country

Comics

British TV

  • Abigail Thaw joins Inspector Morse prequel Endeavour
  • Sky Arts acquires The Onion News Network [subscription required]

Canadian TV

International TV

  • John Hurt joins Holy Grail mini-series, Labyrinth

US TV

US TV

Review: Pan Am 1×1

26 September 2011 Rob Buckley 13 Comments

In the US: Sundays, 10/9c, ABC
In the UK: Acquired by BBC2

Again, stop me if you’ve heard this one before…

There’s a lot of talk about people harking back to the ‘easier’ times of the 60s, to wanting to once again enjoy a time when sexism, racism and homophobia were acceptable. When women know their ‘place’ and that was too look pretty and not do much.

That, apparently, is the appeal of Mad Men. And why there are now two other shows set in the 60s, vying for our attentions: The Playboy Club and now ABC’s Pan Am. 

Of course, this is cobblers. Mad Men is successful because it allows us to look back and condemn those times and because it actually has good writing, good acting and good characterisation. And while Mad Men has certainly helped to get these two shows on our screens, American TV has been making ‘period pieces’ like this for years, whether it’s Swingtown, Band of Brothers, John Adams, Life on Mars or Bonanza.

Like Mad Men, these new 60s shows also allow us to look back at the 60s and condemn, yet while The Playboy Club has decided to tread the dark path of the crime drama while showing us a certain amount of the sleaze at the Chicago Playboy Club and what women’s lives were like at the time, Pan Am has gone light and fluffy when doing the same, trying to show us a world in which the air hostess was the height of glamour and empowerment and a job to which apparently any intelligent woman would aspire, whether it was to get away from her own life or because she’s a secret CIA agent.

Yet, despite all the things that Pan Am could and should have ripped off from Mad Men, even with the help of West Wing producer Thomas Schlamme and a cast that include Christina Ricci, it’s gone for possibly the worst option: it’s picked up on Mad Men‘s pacing. Pan Am is about as exciting as an eight-hour flight across the Atlantic.

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US TV

Review: Person of Interest 1×1

24 September 2011 Rob Buckley 7 Comments

Person of Interest

In the US: Thursdays, 9/8c, CBS

Heroes have had a tendency to be laconic for quite some time now. History buffs will of course know that the word comes from ‘Lacedaemonia’, the very ancient Greek name for the equally ancient Greek city-state of Sparta, whose people were famously short on words, but when they said something, it was always pithy and usually involved fighting or killing people (the most famous “Laconic phrase”, “Μολὼν λαβέ” or “Come and get them”, is one of the mottos of the Greek First Army Corps and the United States Special Operations Command Central).

So heroes have been largely required to be short on words for a good few thousands years now. But can a hero be too laconic, I wonder?

I ask this purely because in Person of Interest, we have Jim Cavaziel playing a former US Army Ranger recruited to help prevent crimes before they happen by a clever, rich software engineer played by Michael Emerson (Linus in Lost). And our hero hardly says anything and when he does, he mumbles. I think we actually have a hero who’s way too laconic, here.

So first, if we have a lesson to take away from Person of Interest, it’s that heroes really shouldn’t mumble quite so much if they’re going to be laconic.

And if we can be uncharacteristically verbose and unlaconic and take away two lessons from Person of Interest, it’s that even if a script is pure cobblers, your entire set-up is completely implausible and you have a lead actor who’s largely inaudible and inexpressive, you can still have a relatively watchable TV show purely through less talk and more action.

How Spartan.

Here’s a trailer.

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US TV

What did you watch last week (w/e September 14)?

19 September 2011 Rob Buckley 5 Comments

Time for "What did you watch last week?", my chance to tell you what I watched last week and your chance to recommend things to everyone else (and me) in case we’ve missed them.

My recommendations for maximum viewing pleasure this week: still nothing, apart from The Daily Show, since everything regular has finished, although Doctor Who‘s obviously good.

  • Bin Laden: Shoot To Kill: Very gripping documentary on how Osama Bin Laden was found, with plenty of interviews involving the Americans involved, including President Obama. Well worth a watch.
  • Strike Back: Project Dawn: about the same as last week, perhaps a little less humorous. Action good, bad whenever it starts trying to give people characters, but the arrival of Iain Glen and AAA from Lost this week is welcome. Women get treated almost universally badly, a lot of gratuitous female nudity, and the American guy gets shot a lot.

And in this week’s list of movies:

  • Snatch: Surprisingly boring Guy Ritchie film. Not worth watching at all
  • Tales From Earthsea: Bizarre, low-quality anime version of various elements of Ursula Le Guin’s superb Earthsea series of books (if you haven’t read them, read them immediately). Completely misses the point of the books. You’d have thought, given it’s Studio Ghibli, that it would have been a lot better, but it wasn’t. Oh well.
  • Pirates of the Caribbean 4: Surprisingly boring, rather than bad. It’s just people running around doing stuff, really. Looks expensive though.

But what have you been watching?

"What did you watch last week?" is your chance to recommend to friends and fellow blog readers the TV and films that they might be missing or should avoid – and for me to do mini-reviews of everything I’ve watched. Since we live in the fabulous world of Internet catch-up services like the iPlayer and Hulu, why not tell your fellow readers what you’ve seen so they can see the good stuff they might have missed? And keep an eye on The Stage‘s TV Today Square Eyes feature as well for British TV highlights or you’ll be missing out on the good stuff.

US TV

Review: Ringer 1×1

15 September 2011 Rob Buckley 9 Comments

Sarah Michelle Gellar in Ringer

In the US: Tuesday, 9/8c , The CW
In the UK: Acquired by Sky Living for broadcast this autumn

Twins, huh? Why does there always have to be an evil one?

Ringer, in which former Buffy The Vampire Slayer Sarah Michelle Gellar plays a pair of twins, one good, one evil, is no different, but slightly cleverly, it’s not obvious at first who the evil twin is or who the good twin is.

Bridget is a bad girl. A former stripper and prostitute, she’s also an addict who beats up police officers and steals their guns.

Siobhan is a good girl. She has the perfect marriage, lives in luxury in New York and the Hamptons with her English husband (Ioan Gruffudd), and has oodles of cash.

Neither has seen each other in six years. Siobhan hasn’t even mentioned Bridget to her husband.

But the thing is, Bridget is actually the good twin. She’s on a 12-step programme to recovery from her addiction, she’s taken a job as a waitress and she’s helping the Feds because she witnessed a murder.

Siobhan? Well, she treats her husband like dirt, she’s having an affair, loathes her step-daughter and she’s evil, evil, evil.

As Bridget finds out when she gets to New York and ends up taking over Siobhan’s life.

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