The Almighty Johnsons

The Politician
Airdates

When’s that show you mentioned starting, TMINE? Including Light As A Feather, Stella Blómkvist, Special, Chambers and The Politician

29 March 2019 Rob Buckley 2 Comments

Every Friday, TMINE lets you know when the latest TV shows from around the world will air in the UK

A couple of acquisitions this week, but only one without a premiere date. I should also point out that I’ve already mentioned that The Murders (Canada: CityTV; UK: Universal) now has a premiere date in my review of it this week.

The Bad Seed

Acquisitions

Premiere dates

Light as a Feather
Light as a Feather (© Rachael Thompson/Hulu)

Light as a Feather (US: Hulu; UK: All 4)
Premiere date: Monday, April 1

Four best friends invite the shy new girl out on Halloween, but they soon regret their decision when she suggests they play a twisted version of Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board.

That’s basically the story, with the slight fillip of one of them possibly already being possessed before they play the game. Not scary, not exciting. Didn’t get further than episode one.

Stars: Brianne Tju, Ajiona Alexus, Peyton List, Brent Rivera, Liana Liberato and Haley Ramm.

Episode reviews: 1

Stella Blomkvist

Stella Blómkvist (Iceland: Sjónvarp Símans; UK: Sundance Now)
Premiere date: Thursday, April 4

Stella Blómkvist is a young, cute, libertine, tough, confident, intelligent, Icelandic lawyer with a flexible moral compass, who investigates mysterious murder cases. A friend at the police calls her when there’s a criminal in need of a lawyer.

Netflix's Special
Punam Patel and Ryan O’Connell in Netflix’s Special

Special (Netflix)
Premiere date: Friday, April 12

US Netflix Original based on Ryan O’Connell’s memoir I’m Special: And Other Lies We Tell Ourselves. It follows Ryan, a gay man with mild cerebral palsy, who decides to rewrite his identity and finally go after the life he wants. After years of dead-end internships, working in his pyjamas as a blogger and communicating mostly via text, Ryan eventually figured out how to take his life from bleak to chic and began limping towards adulthood.

Stars Ryan O’Connell, Jessica Hecht, Punam Patel, Marla Mindelle, Augustus Prew, and Patrick Fabian.

Uma Thurman and Tony Goldwyn in Netflix's Chambers
Uma Thurman and Tony Goldwyn in Netflix’s Chambers

Chambers (Netflix)
Premiere date: Friday, April 26

US Netflix Original. A young heart attack survivor becomes consumed by the mystery surrounding the heart that saved her life. But the closer she gets to learning the truth about her donor’s sudden death, the more she takes on the characteristics of the deceased, some of which are troublingly sinister.

Stars: Uma Thurman and Tony Goldwyn

The Politician

The Politician (Netflix UK)
Premiere date: Friday, September 27

US Netflix Original. The Politician follows Payton Hobart, a wealthy student from Santa Barbara, California, who has known since the age of seven that he’s going to be President of the United States. But first he’ll have to navigate the most treacherous political landscape of all: Saint Sebastian High School.

To get elected Student Body President, secure a spot at Harvard, and stay on his singular path to success, Payton will have to outsmart his ruthless classmates without sacrificing his own morality and carefully crafted image.

Stars: Ben Platt, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jessica Lange, Zoey Deutch, Lucy Boynton, Bob Balaban, David Corenswet, Julia Schlaepfer, Laura Dreyfuss, Theo Germaine, Rahne Jones and Benjamin Barrett.

What We Do In The Shadows
Australian and New Zealand TV

Review: Wellington Paranormal 1×1 (New Zealand: TV NZ 2)

16 July 2018 Rob Buckley 5 Comments

In New Zealand: Wednesdays, TVNZ 2, 8.30pm
In the UK: Not yet acquired

Taika Waititi is so hot right now. Eagle V Shark may have had a cult following, but it didn’t elevate him to stardom. You might have noticed him in Green Lantern…

…but it didn’t exactly give him free rein to be hilarious. 2014 vampire house-sharing comedy What We Do In The Shadows, which he co-wrote with Flight of the Conchords‘ Jemaine Clement, might have done better business than the original short film, but it still didn’t quite set the world alight.

However, the marketing muscle of Marvel Studios meant that Thor: Ragnarok finally unleashed the hilarity of Taika Waititi around the world. Naturally, that has meant there’s a lot of interest in his latest projects, which include a US series of What We Do In The Shadows with Toast of London‘s Matt Berry.

What We Do In the Shadows

Wellington Paranormal

Before that, though, we have a somewhat more niche project that’s actually more of a Jemaine Clement affair, given he’s the co-writer of the first episode. It’s a New Zealand TV show called Wellington Paranormal that’s a spin-off from What We Do In the Shadows, and features two of that movie’s characters, Officers Minogue (Mike Minogue) and O’Leary (Karen O’Leary), but none of the vampires. A sort of cross between Cops and The X-Files, it sees the hapless duo Mulder and Scullying up to haplessly investigate incidents of the paranormal at the insistence of their sergeant (Maaka Pohatu), who’s been collecting evidence for years suggesting that Wellington might have its own hellmouth (maybe).

The first episode concerns a case of demonic possession that might ultimately lead to the dead coming up from hell to take over the Earth through the Bucket Fountain in Wellington, which was apparently created by Satanists in the 60s. As you might deduce, just like The Almighty Johnsons before it, Wellington Paranormal plays on the low-key, friendly, not especially Earth-shattering nature of New Zealand life, as well as satirising genre conventions. O’Leary and Minogue generally have little to do in their regular line of duty and when they experience a demon projectile-vomiting, they merely advise it where to direct its bodily fluids. They chase after ‘unusually athletic’ housewives, castigate people for breaking the laws of gravity, and advise them not to rotate their necks 360º as it’s bound to hurt. Minogue’s claim to there being a sexual tension between him and O’Leary is met merely with an uncomfortable, embarrassed silence.

However, if you’re expecting something designed to ride on the backs of both Clement’s and Waititi’s current popularity to achieve worldwide success, you’ll be surprised. This is a low-budget affair clearly devised as something for a New Zealand audience watching TV NZ’s second channel (not even its first). There are plenty of jokes that you might need Wikipedia to get if you’re not from NZ – the Bucket Fountain joke only really works if you’ve ever spent time watching it in real-life – and you really do have to have an appreciation for the New Zealand style of comedy to find Wellington Paranormal a laugh-a-minute, rather than a titter-a-minute show.

There is plenty to raise a giggle most of the time, and there’s even a belly laugh from time to time (such as O’Leary’s encounter with a fence), but it’s not something that even tries for the hilarity of Thor: Ragnarok, let alone achieves it.

Wellington Paranormal

Not Ghosted

On the plus side, it’s at least light years ahead of Ghosted and the 25-minute runtime does fly by, as there’s never really a let-up in the show’s antics. The characters are more jokes and set-ups for punchlines than real characters, but that’s often usually enough to work, and the genre pastiching does score more than a few hits.

Just don’t expect something that’s going to set the world alight or make your sides hurt from all the laughing.

Thor: Ragnarok
Film reviews

Movie Monday: Thor – Ragnarok (2017)

26 February 2018 Rob Buckley 5 Comments

Once in a while on Monday, TMINE will review the select few movies it’s had time to watch when it’s not been watching TV. The film reviews A-Z lists every film ever reviewed here

The Marvel Cinematic Universe is a varied one. It has the James Bond-style adventures of an African King in Black Panther, the West Coast techno-adventures of Iron Man, the outer space comedy of Guardians of the Galaxy and the magical, reality-warping drama of Doctor Strange. Even within individual franchises, there’s diversity. Captain America was a Rocketeer-styled World War 2 period drama, for example, while Captain America 2 was more of a gritty Parallax View piece of spying.

So you never know what you’re going to get with any given Marvel movie. Thor began as a romance, in which geeky scientist Natalie Portman discovers that the buff bloke she met on a New Mexico road is really Thor, the Norse god of Thunder, exiled from Asgard and looking for redemption, if only his mischievous brother Loki will let him return home.

Thor 2: Dark World was a little bit funnier, but a little bit more of the same, as Thor helps protect the Earth from some Dark Elves who are after Portman. No one really liked it, particularly since there’s literally no way to get the Northern Line from Charing Cross to Greenwich, certainly not in the middle of a battle.

Thor: Ragnarok

Now we have Thor: Ragnarok. Fans of Norse myth will of course know that Ragnarok is the prophesied end of the gods, when giant wolves, serpents and the like come to kill the gods, so expectations were naturally for something a bit sombre, particularly since the Marvel franchises come in packs of at most three movies (eg Iron Man, Captain America) so this was also set to be the last of the Thor movies. Then, of course, there’s Cate Blanchett playing Hella, the Norse goddess of Death. Again, a move that didn’t suggest laughs a minute.

Certainly, watching Thor: Ragnarok, there is an underlying sadness to proceedings, when favourite character after favourite character from previous movies meets a quick and untimely death. But in the hands of director Taika Waititi (Eagle vs Shark, What We Do in the Shadows), it’s fair to say that Thor: Ragnarok is also the funniest Marvel movie to date. Seriously, it makes Guardians of the Galaxy look like a Ken Loach movie at times.

That’s despite Thor losing his mighty hammer Mjölnir, splitting up from Portman and landing up on a planet where he has to fight to the death for Jeff Goldblum against the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo).

Continue reading “Movie Monday: Thor – Ragnarok (2017)”

Sorry Australia: Hyde & Seek, Rosehaven, The Secret Daughter and The Wrong Girl

17 October 2016 Rob Buckley 2 Comments

Sorry, Australia. And indeed fans of Australian TV. For ages, I’ve been promising to review all manner of new and exciting – and, it turns out, not so exciting – Australian TV shows. However, thanks to a deluge of US and Internet TV, I’ve being failing hopelessly.

This weekend, however, I made a massive effort to play catch up with all of them. I’ve not been 100% successful, since I’ve not yet started SBS’s Deep Water, but since that’s a four-part mini-series that’s already finished, I might as well watch all the episodes before letting you know what I think of it prior to its eventual BBC Four airing.

After the jump and to save myself a whole lot of time, mini-reviews of the first few episodes of all the other shows. Just to give you a tantalising preview of what I’m going to say, though:

  • Definitely watch: Hyde & Seek (Nine)
  • Probably watch: The Secret Daughter (Seven)
  • Maybe watch: The Wrong Girl (Ten)
  • Don’t watch: Rosehaven (ABC)

Continue reading “Sorry Australia: Hyde & Seek, Rosehaven, The Secret Daughter and The Wrong Girl”

US TV

Review: Roadies 1×1-1×2 (US: Showtime; UK: Amazon Prime)

8 July 2016 Rob Buckley 2 Comments

In the US: Sundays, 10pm ET/PT, Showtime
In the UK: Mondays, Amazon Prime

Although the theory of ‘the auteur’ is eminently quibblable, it’s fair to say that you can spot the work of Cameron Crowe a mile off. Whether it’s Jerry Maguire, Almost Famous, Elizabethtown or We Bought A Zoo, his work is usually characterised by an indie sensibility; a central male-female, potentially romantic relationship; quirky dialogue; a focus on music; and a lot of heart but not much brain. You won’t get very far through Roadies, Showtime’s new series about those unsung heroes and heroines of the live music industry, before proclaiming it as possibly the most Cameron Crowish piece of work that Cameron Crowe has ever done.

Crowe’s never been one for putting plot above character, so it’s a little hard to say what Roadies is actually about, other than that it’s a show about roadies – and the first episode is an introduction to all of them. The ostensible focus of the show are Luke Wilson (Idiocracy, The Royal Tenenbaums, Legally Blonde, Enlightened), the tour manager with a failed marriage and who now sleeps with women literally half his age, and Carla Gugino (Watchmen, Threshold, Wayward Pines), the production manager with a failing marriage and who doesn’t sleep with anyone. They have such The Thin Man chemistry together and obvious devotion to one another, everyone who meets them thinks they’re married – except they’re not!

However, Crowe seems more interested in Imogen Poots (28 Weeks Later), the young roadie who’s heading off to film school because she’s stopping believing in the music. If only she could recover her faith. Most of the first episode follows her around as she slowly rediscovers that faith thanks to all her fellow roadies, who are all a motley bunch of amiable characters: Ron White, the old hand who may have murdered two people but all the bands like; Keisha Castle-Hughes (Game of Thrones, The Almighty Johnsons, Whale Rider), the lesbian; and Peter Cambor (The Wedding Band), the guy from New Jersey who worked with Elvis Costello for a while and got stuck with his accent. There’s also Machine Gun Kelly, a roadie for another band with a strange relationship with Poots, which gets explained at the end of the first episode (spoilers, sweetie).

Crowe’s one real concession to plot comes from Rafe Spall (The Shadow Line, I Give It A Year), the semi-menacing English finance guy who used to work in sports and ‘real estate’ so doesn’t really get music, but who’s been sent over to make some budget cuts. Who’s for the chop? Probably not Poots, judging by the other age-inappropriate, Crowe-typical relationship that gets thrown into the mix. Probably no one, in fact, as Spall gradually learns that it’s love and people, not numbers, that keeps everything working backstage and you remove a piece of that bizarrely intricate puzzle at your own risk.

That first episode is in many ways lovely and heart-felt, albeit a bit saccarine and divorced from reality, with obvious love for music and people oozing from every scene – even for Spall and the creepy stalker girl who wants to do odd things with microphones (Jacqueline Byers). The trouble with auteurship, though, is that unless you’re Aaron Sorkin and prepared to consume superhuman amounts of cocaine to write a classic script every couple of weeks for umpteen years, it’s not something that can transfer over easily from film to TV.

The result is that even though Crowe directs the first two episodes, he hands over writing duties to others from episode two. Winnie Holzman (My So-Called Life) is the first to pick up the slack, but although she’s good in her own right, she’s not up to being Cameron Crowe. The result is faux-Crowe and a little bit painful to watch without his heart-on-a-sleeve gushing. It doesn’t help that Wilson pretty much checks out after the first episode, even if everyone else is working hard, particularly Spall whose role switches from menacing to comedic from the second episode. To be fair again, Wilson does give a near-perfect performance as someone who’s coming down after smoking heinous amounts of weed, so there’s that one small concession to reality, at least.

If you like Cameron Crowe, it’s worth watching the first episode at least, as long as you consider it as a one-off short movie. Watching any more than that would be intolerable. You can watch a trailer below, and if you’re in the US, you can watch the first episode for free here.