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US TV

Review: The Leftovers 1×1 (HBO/Sky Atlantic)

2 July 2014 Rob Buckley 2 Comments


In the US: Sundays, 10pm, HBO
In the UK: Aquired by Sky Atlantic. Will air in September

TV is filled with death. For many shows, it’s their staple. What would 24 or Banshee be without their epic body counts? Would everyone love Game of Thrones as much were it not for its regular game of ‘Guess who’s going to pop their clogs this season’? Probably not.

In the real world, though, death generally isn’t quite as desirable, even if it is inevitable. The effects of someone’s death are almost always huge, traumatic and life-changing for those who know them. Religion can provide some comfort for the bereaved. It can even provide some answers as to why death happens at all. TV shows that remember this are few and far between.

So in many ways, The Leftovers is unusual and innovative. Adapted by Tom Perrotta, Lost‘s Damon Lindelof and Friday Night Lights’ Peter Berg from Perrotta’s book of the same name, it takes the Christian concept of the Rapture – in which the true believers in Jesus are taken up into the sky to be with God, leaving behind everyone to be judged before Jesus’s second coming – and gives it a slight twist. What if 2% of the world’s population just vanished, leaving everyone else behind, with no explanation for their departure? What would those remaining behind do? How would they feel? And without angels coming down to explain everything and given that some of that 2% include some very bad people indeed, not just the blessed – I mean, Gary Busey was one of those who disappeared. Gary Busey – could people even be sure it was God and not aliens or some bizarre space-time accident that caused the disappearance?

The answer to this existential dilemma, it appears, is be largely miserable, dull and nihilistic. Strangely, in fact, it seems like the animals have a better idea about what’s going on than the humans do.

Here’s a trailer. If you’re in the US, though, you can watch the whole of the first episode over on Yahoo.

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US TV

Review: Dominion 1×1 (SyFy)

24 June 2014 Rob Buckley 10 Comments


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

It used to be that there was a reason for adapting movies into TV series. Not necessarily a good one, but there was a reason: people liked the movie so why not cash in on that? It always helped if it was a good movie, because that tricky difficult bit – coming up with a proven good idea and a source material that people would enjoy – was already out the way.

So I’m at an absolute loss to understand Dominion. SyFy might as well have beamed onto our screens a picture of a six-legged cat attacking Luke Goss from Bros with a packet of instant custard and a small porcelain statue of the Ayatollah Khomeini and that still would have made more sense than Dominion.

Remember the 2010 movie Legion, in which Paul Bettany was involved in a war on Earth among the angels after God absconds? Liar. Of course you don’t. Even if you had seen it, your brain would have tried to purge the whole unpleasant experience from your memory. You’re probably just thinking of season five of Supernatural. Easy mistake to make.

Fact: There are literally no fans of Legion. None whatsoever. Science has proven this.

But supposing you were bitten by a rabid bat and in your fevered state, your memory became clear, you suddenly remembered Legion and you decided to make a TV version of it. Wouldn’t you want to at least call it Legion or maybe have something in common with the original movie?

Not so with SyFy. Dominion it is and the whole show is set decades after that war between the angels. Humanity is now living in semi-feudal socities sealed off inside gated cities, while humans possessed by lower angels, particularly those in league with the evil archangel Gabriel (cough, cough, The Prophecy, cough, cough), try to assail those cities and infiltrate them. 

Meanwhile, there’s a prophecy of a saviour child who will come to end the stalemate and the war (cough, cough… oh, done this already). Except no one’s quite sure where the good archangel Michael hid him.

Throw in something about nuclear reactors, Anthony Head from Buffy and Alan Dale from Neighbours as human leaders pairing their offspring off with each other, missing dads with angelic script on their bodies, a bit of Battlestar Galactica, a bit of Mad Max, an angelic orgy, some sword fights, some gun fights, some anti-aircraft batteries, some Las Vegas cage-fighting and a cast of British, Australian and South African actors faking US accents for no good reason and without much success and you have just the first two episodes of Dominion – a candidate for the title of ‘worst TV programme ever made’.

Here’s a trailer.

Continue reading “Review: Dominion 1×1 (SyFy)”

US TV

Review: The 100 1×1 (The CW/E4)

24 March 2014 Rob Buckley 2 Comments

 


In the US: Wednesdays, 9/8c, The CW
In the UK: Acquired by E4. To air 2014

Sometimes, the contrariness of US TV amuses me. Watch pretty much any US TV show these days and you’ll spot someone who isn’t American pretending to be American. Whether it’s simply the ubiquitous Canadians who permeate every show that’s shot for budgetary reasons in Canada (pretty much anything on The CW, for example), or the numerous Brits, Australians, New Zealanders and Scandinavians looking for jobs and pay in the US they’re never going to get back home, look close enough and they’ll be there, usually sporting a non-descript Mid-Western accent, in pretty much any show you care to mention. 

Yet, when a show actually calls for some degree of international representation, not only will virtually all the characters be American, even the foreigners the producers bring in will be obligated to pretend to be from someone in Iowa.

Case in point is The 100, set in some distant, post-nuclear future, in which only a handful of humans from around the world have survived. They all live in The Ark, an amalgamation of all the world’s space stations, so naturally you’d expect just a few of them to not be American. Yet they aren’t. Even the obviously and famously Scottish Henry Ian Cusick from Lost is forced to feign US accent.

Bizarre.

Nevertheless, The 100 is a moderately interesting piece for The CW, which is rapidly turning into the ‘more sci-fi than the SyFy’ channel. Yes, we have all the standard tropes designed to appeal to young people of both genders – pretty, clean-cut, fit young things in various states of undress, emoting at each other and worrying about their teenage relationships. But these 100 pretty young things are all juvenile offenders, forced to return as guinea pigs to the irradiated world that is the Earth by the Draconian regime that runs The Ark. Will they all die of radiation sickness, get eaten by rabid rats or club each other to death?

Maybe, actually, which is surprising. In fact, some of them might even get killed before the end of the first episode…

Here’s a trailer.

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US TV

Review: Believe (NBC/Watch) 1×1

13 March 2014 Rob Buckley 6 Comments

NBC's Believe

In the US: Sundays, 9/8c, NBC
In the UK: Thursdays, 9pm, Watch. Starts March 27th

There used to be a time when I’d look forward to a show that had the name JJ Abrams attached. Even to this day, Felicity has its fans and although Alias went to seed in the second season, it was a real gamechanger and made Jennifer Garner’s career. Lost cemented Abrams’ reputation, even if he had minimum involvement with it, as did Fringe – at least in some quarters.

But largely, Abrams’ reputation rests on those shows – and it’s a foundation of sand. Look over his CV, and even if you discard the pilots he made that never saw the light of day, such as The Catch, Anatomy of Hope and Shelter, you’ll see he’s mainly produced turkey after turkey. Remember Six Degrees, Undercovers, and Alcatraz? Almost Human wasn’t exactly a tour de force, and if you’re still watching either Revolution or Person of Interest, you have my sympathies.

So now I approach any TV show with Abrams’ name attached with a fair degree of caution. To a certain extent, that’s because Abrams’ playbook has become quite clear. He stocks up the pilot with a sci-fi or fantasy scenario, fills it full of random mysteries and questions that must be answered, adds a secret organisation with answers to these mysteries of the in-world universe that have no implications at all in the real world, adds in a few ‘wow’ moments, a few martial arts fights and then, over the course of the series, slowly ekes them out, adds more mysteries, before finally revealing the largely unsatisfying answers. Not always, but that’s usually how it goes, assuming they don’t get cancelled before they’ve had a chance to reveal all.

So behold Believe, Abrams’ latest show in which a mysterious organisation led by Agent Dale Cooper (sorry, Kyle MacLachlan) is hunting down a young girl with secret powers over pigeons. Yes, pigeons. Oh, she can do other things, too, like predict the future and read minds. How? Good question. She just can and she might change the world as a result, so the baddies want to control her.

However, there’s another secret organisation led by Delroy Lindo that wants to protect her. So they bust a wrongly convicted death row prisoner (Jake McLaughlin from the TV version of Crash) out of jail and put him in charge of protecting her… for the rest of his life. Not the best idea in the world, you might think, so why have they done that? Well, that’s a mystery. Kind of. But it all revolves faith and belief.

It sounds a bit rubbish, it is a bit rubbish, and with yet another central mystery of no real-world import, a secret organisation, etc, you’d be forgiven for thinking this was Abrams working by numbers. But, actually, it’s Alfonso Cuarón (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Children of Men, Gravity) and Mark Friedman (The Forgotten) who are the creative forces behind it, so despite its Abrams-ness, there are a few quirks to it you might not have been expecting.

Like that it’s deliberately silly to the extent that the main baddie is worried she won’t be home in time for her mum’s birthday with all the child-hunting she’s got to do.

Here’s a trailer. It’ll tell you the answer to at least one of the mysteries mentioned above.

Continue reading “Review: Believe (NBC/Watch) 1×1”

The BarrometerA Barrometer rating of 4

Third-episode verdict: Intelligence (CBS)

22 January 2014 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

In the US: Mondays, 10pm/9pm CT, CBS

Three episodes in and there’s not much really to add since my review of the first episode about the very silly Intelligence, in which Sawyer from Lost in a US government secret agent with a computer chip in his brain and and Little Red Riding Hood from Once Upon A Time is his useless minder. It’s largely the same set-up as every other CBS procedural: a by-the-numbers team that together give Sawyer easily solvable missions that are largely meaningless sci-fi drivel, with by-the-numbers (foreign) baddies (usually Chinese). There’s also a tedious story plot about Sawyer’s ex-wife being a secret agent who may or may not have been/be a terrorist. There’s the occasional element that suggests that there’s at least some understanding of science and technology among the writers, but largely it all gets skirted in favour of, for example, things like edible explosives.

But I will say this: they really should have learned from The Bionic Woman reboot, since the three episodes have spent an awful long time showing us how awesome the Chinese version of Sawyer is and not actually giving us any real missions. On top of that, the actress they chose for the part was terrible and the producers decided that because she’s ‘evil’, she must be both sexual and ‘deviant’ (better for her to be punished, unlike the ‘good’ and passive Little Red Riding Hood), so it was an even worse decision than The Bionic Woman. But with no real idea of why Sawyer’s so vital a US asset beyond an ability to access computers, and with a much better idea of why his Chinese opposite is better, it does feel like we were watching a remake of a much better show we just haven’t seen yet.

With no real sign of any life in this one, a poor set-up, poorer scripts and everything else by the numbers, I’m saying this one’s a miss rather than a hit.

Barrometer rating: 4
Rob’s prediction: Will be cancelled by the end of the season