Sherlock

What have you been watching? Including Killer Women, Chicago PD, Banshee, Sherlock and The Bridge

13 January 2014 Rob Buckley 10 Comments

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.

Although The Assets went and got itself cancelled, lightening my viewing load slightly, lots of new shows inconveniently launched themselves over the past few days, which means I haven’t had a chance to watch many of them. That means Enlisted, Helix, Bitten and True Detective are going to have to bide their time in the viewing queue, as are the return of Shameless (US) and Cougar Town, although I’m about an episode in (of the three episodes already shown) of Helix and it’s not bad so far – no BSG though.

I did give two new shows a go, though:

Killer Women (ABC)
Tricia Helfer is a recently divorced former beauty queen and Texas Ranger. Uh huh. That’s the level we’re dealing with. Although clearly not entirely serious, it’s pretty dreadful all the same and not even as good as Walker, Texas Ranger, unfortunately. Given its ratings, it’s likely to be murdered by ABC soon, too.

Chicago PD (NBC)
A spin-off from another Dick Wolf show, Chicago Fire, this essentially sees an elite group of cops in Chicago’s ‘intelligence’ division ‘bending’ the law in order to keep the streets clean. While not divorcing itself from reality in the same way that Killer Women does, it’s a love-letter to human rights violations and corruption that’s unpleasant viewing that isn’t redeemed by a great cast or interesting characters.

Death Comes To Pemberley (BBC1)
A murderous sequel to Pride and Prejudice, but so much more PD James than Jane Austen and lacking in any warmth that I couldn’t get into it.

Shows that I’ve been watching but not really recommending:

Ground Floor (TBS)
The show’s starting to get slightly more innovative in its story-telling techniques, with a fun dream sequence this week. There’s also a cliffhanger. At this rate, I’m going to be popping it onto the recommended list, although my wife did sit and watch a couple of minutes of it with me before saying, “What’s this? It’s not very good is it?”

Almost Human (Fox)
Quite a fun episode (sci-fi idea this week: Dorian runs out of charge and his personality starts to go all ‘low blood sugar’) but one that’s firmly based in 20th century ideas of people, rather than even early 21st century ideas.

Agents of SHIELD (ABC/Channel 4)
Tahiti – not such a magical place after all, but I think we’d all guessed that. And it turns out that the explanation for why it wasn’t such a magical place was even less magical than we’d all hoped. Sky gets all agenty, too. Like we care.  

And in the recommended list:

Sherlock (BBC/BBC America)
As usual, the Sherlock series template was as follows:

  1. A great episode by Steven Moffat
  2. A dreadful second episode
  3. One other very good episode

So praise be, we went out on a Stevie high, one fueled by a sterling performance by Lars Mikkelsen (The Killing, Those Who Kill), who should be the next Bond villain, just like his brother Mads (Hannibal). It wasn’t entirely flawless, but it certainly reminded me of why we fell in love with the show in the first place. Well done, Stevie. Not so sure about the final reveal, but fingers crossed, there’s more to that than meets the eye.

Elementary (CBS/Sky Living)
On the other hand, Elementary reverted to ‘case of the week’, this time reversing the experiment in character development with Detective Bell that they’d been playing with for all of two weeks. Nice to see Paul Sorvino turn up, though.

Community (NBC/some random UK channel)
Not as funny as the previous week’s double-header, episode three was a darker affair, with not just one but two returning characters and a somewhat sad finish for another character. Probably won’t do the ratings any good, but it was appropriate, nevertheless.

The Bridge (BBC4)
Already shaping up to be better than the first season, The Bridge is treating us with Saga Noren moments aplenty as well as lovely character moments for Martin (particularly his defence of Saga to one of his colleagues), while giving us a villain who’s plausibly far less of the improbably omniscient and omnipotent Jens of season 1. Thoroughly recommended.

Banshee (Cinemax)
Not quite the smash, bang return I was expecting, given the first season’s kinetic arrival in our lives. More, instead, a recalibration for the second season, given how many of the plot threads got burnt through by the end of the first season. A few of the usual Cinemax sex excesses, although none as egregious as Strike Back’s soft porn, and no decent fights, and Lucas is far too appealing to every single woman in town for plausibility’s sake, but a good solid opening ep nevertheless. Except for the fact Julian Sands was in it. Who ordered that?

“What have you been watching?” 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?

Theatre reviews

Mini-review: Coriolanus (Donmar Warehouse)

10 January 2014 Natalia Romanova 1 Comment

Where: Donmar Warehouse, 41 Earlham Street, Seven Dials, London, WC2H 9LX
When: 6 December 2013-8 February 2014. Broadcast to cinemas on 30 January
How long: 2h30 with 15 minute interval
Tickets from: £10 (you’ll be lucky, though)
Starring: Tom Hiddleston, Mark Gatiss, Birgitte Hjort Sørensen

Birgitte Hjort Sørensen as Virgilia and Tom Hiddleston as Caius Martius Coriolanus Photo by Johan PerssonCoriolanus is one of my favourite Shakespeare plays, Ralph Fiennes’ Coriolanus one of my favourite Shakespeare films/productions, and Tom Hiddleston’s one of my favourite current actors, so the Donmar Warehouse production of Coriolanus was something I was looking forward to considerably. The story of a Roman general whose love of Rome is matched only by his hatred of the average Roman, it looks at the nature of democracy, how much we rely on people who might not have our best interests at heart but without whom we couldn’t survive, and the nature of politics and loyalty.

It’s also one of Shakespeare’s war plays. This is an important point because the Donmar is an intimate venue and having armies clash on stage isn’t really within its purview. Indeed, bar a couple of fight scenes employing some reasonably good stage jiu jitsu and swordfighting, the Donmar production is a resultantly somewhat talky affair, something that the director goes to considerable lengths to obscure, perhaps with one eye on the fact this will be beamed into cinemas at the end of the month. There’s all manner of things dropped from the ceiling, when the cast aren’t sat on chairs at the back of a scene watching proceedings they’re marching up and down stage to rearrange on them and stand on them, Tom Hiddleston gets his top off and has a shower, there’s climbing up and down ladders and walls – the list goes on.

Hiddleston is the headliner and although he’s very good, he’s slightly miscast for the role: Coriolanus is a cold, imperious eagle of a man, whom no one but another soldier could love; Hiddleston, despite his best efforts, is effortlessly charming and even amusing, light because of his age, rather than a venomous ball of entitlement. It doesn’t help that the director, Josie Rourke, aims for comedy whenever possible, which detracts from the play’s hard edge, or that Coriolanus’ arch-enemy, Hadley Fraser’s Tullus Aufidius, is equally young and not especially threatening. Indeed, with his Saxon/Viking outfit and his army of Northerners ranked against Hiddleston’s Southerners, it sometimes feels like an episode of Game of Thrones, except Hiddleston is the Rob Stark of the piece, Fraser the Theon Greyjoy.

Also in the cast is TV’s Mark Gatiss (Doctor Who and Sherlock writer and actor, but let us not forget The League of Gentlemen), whose Menenius is perhaps more lounge lizard than need be, but he deals with both comedy and drama well. Birgitte Hjort Sørensen (Borgen) plays Hiddleston’s wife, but gets roughly five lines so you wonder why she bothered coming over from Denmark at all, other than for the experience. In fact, it’s Deborah Findlay, who plays Volumnia, Coriolanus’ wife, who comes out of the play best, effortlessly dominating every scene she’s in, in part thanks to a generous performance by Hiddleston.

It’s a good production, imaginative in many ways, but perhaps one that thinks its audience will balk at its relative bleakness and over-compensates.

What have you been watching? Including Doctor Who, Sherlock, Elementary, Community, The Bridge and The Ground Floor

6 January 2014 Rob Buckley 20 Comments

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.

There have been lots of Christmas specials and few regular TV shows over the holiday period, some of which I watched, some of which (thanks to the iPlayer’s one-week cut-off) I didn’t:

Doctor Who (BBC1/BBC America)
Bye bye Matt Smith, hello Peter Capaldi. A little bit of a smorgasbord of things here, with Steven Moffat once again reverting to usual form following The Day of the Doctor, particularly poorly thought-out, identical female characters (although Clara had a personality for once, which was nice). Stevie hates having to do anything that feels like a sequel so he injected as much original but meaningless and silly stuff into The Time of the Doctor as possible. It also meant he glossed over really, really important things (the Doctor dying, the conspiracy of Silence) in mere minutes that should have kept him in episodes for months but would have required that dreaded sequel word again. Even the cameo from Karen Gillan was a poor idea (poor Clara). But bits of it worked quite well, loose ends were tied up and there were some touching moments (the death of Handles) and good ideas (wooden Cybermen). It wasn’t quite the proper send-off we’d hoped for Matt Smith, but it wasn’t the worst Doc send-off we’ve ever had and we now have 13 more Doctors to look forward to.

But back in the world of regular TV, I saw:

Ground Floor (TBS)
Possibly the best episode so far, since, for a change, it focused on the Ground Floor and how undouchy they are compared to the Top Floor. Briga Heelan got her groove back and we saw that at least one woman works on the top floor. We also got our first Doctor Cox Scrubs joke – eight episodes they managed before slipping one in. And then there was the HR video…

And in the recommended list:

Sherlock (BBC/BBC America)
The Empty Hearse
Well, I say recommended but… Okay. In many ways it’s brilliant, but this season has effectively seen the show shift from being an innovative take on Sherlock Holmes and crime dramas, with a hint of comedy, to being a fully fledged comedy with implausible characters (well, one anyway). The New Year’s Day episode was written by Mark Gatiss who chose for his pastiche genres: Sherlock Holmes (the Robert Downey Jr movie) and… Steven Moffat. Strange it was indeed to see Gatiss emulating his co-writer, but it was like a bad carbon copy of Stevie’s finer season 2 moments. Overall enjoyable, with plenty of wry in-jokes (Martin Freeman’s wife playing Watson’s fiancé, Mary Moran; Benedict Cumberbatch’s parents playing Holmes’ parents; Cumberbatch re-using his dodgy Cabin Pressure French accent), but lacking in self-discipline – if it has just dialled itself back a bit, taken a deep breath and remembered what reality looks like, it would have been really good. As for the lack of true explanation for how Sherlock survived despite the multiple explanations that we did see, I did quite like that, even if it we ended up going through numerous levels of meta to get there.

The Sign of Three
Then there was last night’s episode. Now, the second episode of every Sherlock season is usually almost irredeemable sh*t and last night’s was no exception. In its defence, it was supposed to be a complete change of pace, a comedy character piece all about Holmes and Watson, rather than a proper crime story. It also had a pretty good plot structure, with several unsolved crime stories told in flashback that are eventually solved at the end of the episode (although if you didn’t see that coming, frankly, I’m surprised you even know what drama is, let alone what a TV looks like). But the trouble was it was 60 minutes of the utterly ridiculous and insultingly poor – and worse still, dull – before a final 15 minutes that tried to redeem what had come before and could only do so partially. It also had to twist Sherlock’s character into all sorts of weird knots to make him fit the script. How can a man who doesn’t understand human emotions at all be able to make deductions the way he does? To say he may lack empathy is one thing; to say he has no comprehension is quite another. And frankly, the hints at the stories we didn’t get were far more fun than the ones we did get.

But a lovely cameo by you know who.

Elementary (CBS/Sky Living)
By contrast, Elementary delivered one of its finest episodes. While it’s debatable just how much like Sherlock Holmes Jonny Lee Miller’s character is – The Mentalist and House give you better deductions and cases than Elementary – its Irene Adler/Jamie Moriarty is a tour de force in chilling evil. Or is she? This was a touching examination of the two characters’ bonds. I wonder where they’re taking this – redemption or double crossville? And what were all those hints by Moriarty that she knew she would soon be free about? Unlike Sherlock, this made me want to watch another episode.

Community (NBC/some random UK channel)
After the disastrous, Dan Harmon-less fourth season, it was a delight to watch last week’s double bill to be able to say Community is back and almost back to form. With a hell of a lot to do to reboot the show – in true Community fashion, the episode was called Re-Pilot and even referenced its own reboot as well as Scrubs‘ – the writers pulled out all the stops and by the end of the second episode, harmony was restored, cameos performed and the show was put back on the rails. Let’s see where this baby goes now.

The Bridge
And they’re back! Just as Sky’s remake finished, season 2 of The Bridge (aka Bron/Broen) returned, complete with the proper Martin and Saga. While not quite as sharp as the first season and perhaps a little more distant from reality again, it’s still an excellent piece of work, Saga Noren is still wonderful (and more plausible now that she actually knows something about emotions) and I heartily recommend it. I even managed to watch both episodes live on a Saturday night, that’s how good it is.

“What have you been watching?” 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?

The Mighty Boosh film, Only Fools and Horses returns and 15 mins of RTD’s Helix

6 January 2014 Rob Buckley 5 Comments

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