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What have you been watching this week (w/e October 1)

1 October 2010 Rob Buckley 5 Comments

Kale Ingram in Rubicon, the hardest gay man in town

Lovely wife is off in Barcelona with her pals at the moment, so there’s a slight backlog on things we watch together – 30 Rock, Community, Modern Family, Cougar Town, Being Erica, Life Unexpected and Hellcats. I’ve also yet to muster up the enthusiasm to watch Detroit 1-8-7, My Generation and Boardwalk Empire and I’ve decided not to bother with Lone Star now it’s been cancelled. And as for Undercovers, The Defenders and The Whole Truth, there’s just not enough time in the world to be giving some shows a second chance. I’ve also got Outsourced episode 2 to watch, Law and Order: LA and I might even given Downton Abbey a try, despite it being on ITV. This is a very busy time of year!

  • Better With You: Just like with the first episode, there’s some good writing, there’s a good cast, it makes you laugh. It has its fair share of cliches, mainly to do with the oldest couple, but they’re reasonably tolerable. But the horrible, horrible laughter track and studio audience are like fingers on a blackboard. I’m not sure despite the fact it’s the only really funny new comedy so far this season that I can actually carry on watching it.
  • Chuck: It seems like the Buy More is turning into “the place where guest stars who would like to cameo on Chuck turn up”. This week it was the turn of the Old Spice guy who proved nearly as awesome as Captain Awesome – glad to see him back, too, because he is just awesome. Otherwise, a mixture of fun and… oh no, it’s the Buy More crew back. And is it my imagination of is Chuck just not bothering to “flash” much these days.
  • Dexter: A surprisingly emotional start, with our Dexter mourning the departure of someone close to him at the end of last season. Some real nice touches, no obvious serial killer adversary for our Dexter and it looks like the real enemy for him this year is going to be himself. No Julia Stiles yet (she’ll be along soon), which I’m looking forward to. So very promising.
  • The Event: Hmmm. Pretty much everything you guessed was going to happen during the pilot has now turned out to be the case. If I spend the reason of the season having every mystery proven to be obvious, I’m not going to be best pleased. Episode three is apparently the point at which things change in interesting ways, so I’ll stick around for that one, but the appeal of the show has dropped significantly as the silliness factor has kicked in.
  • Hawaii Five-0: Talking of very silly indeed, Hawaii Five-0 tried to do Sneakers this week and it was all a bit laughable. With no Len Wiseman directing, the action quickly fell apart, giving us possibly the stupidest, most badly edited catfight I’ve seen since the 70s. WTF is up with Daniel Dae Kim on that motorbike? And what age is Grace Park trying to play? But the Danny/Steve pairing is a fun one, the return to original series format (a guest helper of the week for Five-0) is a nice touch and the scripts are enjoyably stupid, so I’ll probably stick with this one for now.
  • House: Distinct lack of women on the main team all of a sudden. But an acceptable episode, even if the new “nice” House is hard to take seriously.
  • Mad Men: I’m up to speed at last! Very much enjoying the season so far and enjoying the hoops Don is being made to go through. Didn’t like Lane’s father (W Morgan Sheppard from Max Headroom et al) but I do like Don’s new girlfriend and the relationship he has with her.
  • Parenthood: A much more balanced episode, with both men and women getting decent plot lines. But the last minute “Asperger’s kid takes an interest at last” moment didn’t ring true, Monica Potter’s character is just collapsing and not enough is actually happening – it’s actually hard to say what the point of Parenthood is since there’s no real plot drive towards anything. So I’m on the verge of giving up. Just not quite yet.
  • Raising Hope: I gave up after five minutes into episode 2, on the general grounds it wasn’t funny.
  • Rubicon: Not much happening at all still. But it’s engrossing and I have to say Kale – not the hero but his boss – is proving to be one of the most interesting characters on TV for some time: a gay man in a relationship, successful, happy, talented, the hardest man in town despite being in his 40s or 50s, a former US Marine yet possessed with some of the finest taste in interior decor around. No one really quite like him on TV. Makes the show worth watching all by himself.
  • Running Wilde: Even Peter Serafinowicz couldn’t really rescue this one. A few funny moments, but way too few. I’ll probably watch next week’s though.
  • Shit My Dad Says: We lasted two and half minutes on this before giving up. Not funny in the slightest.
  • Smallville: I thought I’d give this one a try again, given it’s the last season. Still as dumb as a box of hammers, and way too comic strip, but it was good to see John Schneider get to cameo. Ditto Dr Fate, even if Chloe isn’t going to be around much now. I think I’ll skip a few more episodes until Supergirl’s back.
  • Stargate Universe: Not the rip-roaring return I was hoping for, given the strength of the various cliffhangers last season. Everything’s been wrapped up a little too neatly. I also wasn’t happy to see the return of the people they’d left behind on that planet, which robbed that episode of one of the show’s most magnificent ambiguities. The constant darkness also means I can’t see what’s going on half the time. But I’m interested to see what they do with the Lucian Alliance people with Robert Knepper about.
  • Supernatural: And… I’m out. The end of last season was a natural conclusion to the previous five years, so I think I might as well leave while the show is on a high. The departure of Eric Kripke as showrunner seems to have robbed the show of some of its strengths, since this first episode was dull and was just a traipse over the glories of past episodes. The new format felt very crowbarred into the show (spoilers: look! It’s me your dead grandfather! And here are all your cousins! Let’s go fight bad guys). None of it really rang true. So I think I’ll cut this out of my schedule.

But what have you been watching?

As always, no spoilers unless you’re going to use the <spoiler> </spoiler> tags, please. If you’ve reviewed something on your blog, you can put a link to it here rather than repeat yourself (although too many links and you might get killed by the spam filter).

Friday’s Mad Move news

1 October 2010 Rob Buckley Post a comment

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What have you been watching this week (w/e September 10)

10 September 2010 Rob Buckley 10 Comments

Him and Her

I’ve just about caught up with my backlog, with only this week’s Dark Blue and the first ep of Hellcats to watch. I’ll be reviewing the first ep of Nikita next week – let’s just say for now that it was pretty dreadful and Maggie Q and trees are made of the same material:

  • Covert Affairs: Very dull this week, but at least Anne Dudek got something to do for a change. Interesting revelation at the end.
  • The Gates: Has gone very dark, which is nice, and at last the werewolves’ secret is out. One of the better shows of the week, but not quite sparkling enough to recommend unreservedly.
  • Him and Her: BBC3 thing with Russell Tovey and Sarah Solemani that sees an unemployed 20something couple getting up to not much in their flat. In fact, they never actually leave it and not a lot actually happens – it’s more a comedy of relationship observations. Not laugh out loud funny, but should provoke wry grins from anyone who’s ever lived with someone else; definitely worth tuning in for the next episode at least.
  • Mad Men: About five episodes in and despite the first ep being a bit lacklustre, I’d say this is the best season so far. Very much enjoying it and the pacing’s improved a lot.
  • Persons Unknown: Caught the last two episodes. Wow. That was a complete waste of time, it turned out. I almost liked the ending, but it wasn’t satisfying enough to justify the previous stupidities and since the creators promised there’d be no unanswered questions at the end, I think they need to be sued for breach of contract. Odd to see Robert Picardo turning up as an evil mastermind, complete with That Mitchell and Webb Look evil hair and costume.
  • Scoundrels: It’s finished now, by the looks of it. Didn’t go out with a whimper or a bang – it just sort of stopped. Overall, it was okay, but never really found itself. Hopefully the cast will go on to better things.

But what have you been watching?

As always, no spoilers unless you’re going to use the <spoiler> </spoiler> tags, please. If you’ve reviewed something on your blog, you can put a link to it here rather than repeat yourself (although too many links and you might get killed by the spam filter).

US TV

Review: Rubicon 1×1-1×6

2 September 2010 Rob Buckley 6 Comments

In the US: Sundays, 9pm/8c, AMC
In the UK: Acquired by BBC4

It used to be that you could rely on AMC for one thing: movies. That’s what AMC used to stand for – American Movie Classics. But after it changed its name to AMC in 2003, before you knew it, it could be relied on for another thing: re-runs of The Sopranos.

Mad Men changed all that. Suddenly, AMC was in the business of making TV drama. Excellent TV drama. Slow, excellent TV drama that takes a long time to develop and in which not much happens for a long time.

Then came Breaking Bad, a slow, excellent TV drama that took a long time to develop and in which not much happened for a long time, and The Prisoner, a slow bad TV drama that took a long time to develop and in which not much happened for a long time.

Rubicon, AMC’s latest TV drama, is a conspiracy theory show set in the world of American spies that echoes movies like Three Days of the Condor, Parallax View and The Conversation. It stars James Badge Dale (24, The Pacific) as an analyst who begins to see crossword clues take on greater significance – and Miranda Richardson, whose husband commits suicide after he receives a four-leafed clover.

Anyone want to guess what it’s like? I’ll give you a clue – you’ll have to wait until episode five before you’re even going to get a hint at what’s going on… and it gets good.

Here’s a trailer.

Continue reading “Review: Rubicon 1×1-1×6”

US TV

What have you been watching this week (w/e July 30)

30 July 2010 Rob Buckley 4 Comments

Mad Men 4x1

I’ve given up on a few shows over the last fortnight, most notably Leverage, which has been boring the pants off me of late (YMMV), and Rizzoli & Isles, which made Women’s Murder Club look like a documentary. But here’s what I have been watching

  • Burn Notice: This season is really just fantastically unmemorable at the moment. I literally can’t remember what’s happened in it within about an hour of viewing it. But while I’m watching it, it’s fun.
  • Covert Affairs: Embarrassingly for Burn Notice, despite Covert Affairs being a duller show, it is making Burn Notice look a bit daft in comparison to the far more realistic tradecraft that goes on here (not that it’s that realistic, of course). I am enjoying Covert Affairs, and the arrival of Sendhil Ramamurthy (who despite having a US accent normally, still sounds like he’s putting one on) is excellent news. But despite the awesome Piper Perabo, it doesn’t quite have that magic it needs to make it must-see TV.
  • The Gates: Glad they’ve finally pushed a couple of revelations, but we’re going to need a few more answers soon, IMHO, to avoid this becoming dull.
  • The IT Crowd: Last week’s wasn’t quite as funny as previous weeks’ episodes, but it still had some great moments.
  • Mad Men: Season four’s here and it’s a little dull, I have to confess. A few nice moments and obviously the first ep was largely dedicated to establishing where everybody is a year on from season 3, but it didn’t really come alive until its last few moments. Oh, and the Advertising Age guy’s shorthand? All good teeline, but together, didn’t mean a thing. Absolute gibberish.
  • Persons Unknown: Massive outbreak of silliness in the last two episodes. Sigh. I knew it couldn’t last.
  • Rev: The first episode not written by the series creator and the first I didn’t enjoy. It just felt a bit nasty, to be honest.
  • Royal Pains: Doesn’t quite have the edge of last season, the demotion of Jill to an occasional walk-on is a real body-blow to the show, as is the absence of Boris at the moment. But Anastasia Griffith is fine and the Pretty Woman reference last week was fun.
  • Scoundrels: Now, I’ve never been to a strip club (I just haven’t. Honest), but even I know that the one they have in Scoundrels is pretty tame – much like the show. It’s chugging along though, has some fun moments, and some fun characters. It just flounders as soon as anything too much like drama hits it. Also had the first Terminator in-joke of the season this week, which only took five episodes. Well done on the restraint guys.
  • Southland: Onto episode four and it’s just become a slightly soapy mush, which is very disappointing given its first couple of episodes. I’m going to stick with it, particularly since I hear season two focuses on the two interesting characters from the first two eps, but that was a real plummet in quality.
  • Top Gear: Rubbish interview of Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz, but nice to see them both do so well in the circuit. The Ayrton Sena piece was a surprisingly lovely tribute as well. Generally, though, this season has lacked a certain pizazz.

But what have you been watching? Anyone catch The Pillars of the Earth?

As always, no spoilers unless you’re going to use the <spoiler> </spoiler> tags, please. If you’ve reviewed something on your blog, you can put a link to it here rather than repeat yourself (although too many links and you might get killed by the spam filter).