Streaming TV

What have you been watching? Including Ghosts and CSI: Vegas

It’s “What have you been watching?”, your chance to recommend to fellow TMINE readers anything you’ve been watching this week

What do more shows make? More fun! Obviously. Yes, the US has started pumping out some more new shows now we’re entering October, which makes I actually have something to write about instead of whinging the whole time.

I’ve actually tried a few new shows, but my tolerance threshold has been sharply reduced by Covid so I didn’t get as far watching more than a few minutes of them.

Squid Game (Netflix) seems to be the show all the cool kids are talking about right now. It’s a Korean drama that involves some childhood playground game called ‘the Squid Game’ that has absurdly complicated rules about getting into a zone and holding the zone and pushing and pulling and stuff.

All grown up, one of the players has a gambling problem that means he steals money from his mum. And then he gets called to play the same game as an adult, but with a few heavily modified, possibly lethal rules.

I didn’t get far enough to decide whether I liked it or not. It could have been the new Saw, in which case I’m glad I didn’t watch it. It could have been the new Parasite (2019), since there were aspects of the guy’s home set up that reminded me of the con-family’s home. Either way, it almost certainly wasn’t for me, judging by the trailer.

Also on the quick for the chop list was One of Us is Lying (US: Peacock), which seemed basically to be like a lethal version of The Breakfast Club (1985). Adapted from the novel of the same name by Karen M McManus, it follows five high school students who enter detention, where one of them dies under suspicious circumstances and an investigation ensues.

I’ve seen The Breakfast Club. I don’t want to watch the murder mystery young adult version. The programme also had me annoyed almost from the point I saw the poster for it. Bah! Kids!

But I did manage to watch all the way through to the end of two new shows.

CSI: Vegas (US: CBS)

Facing an existential threat* that could bring down the Crime Lab, a brilliant team of forensic investigators must welcome back old friends and deploy new techniques to preserve and serve justice in Sin City.

Rob says: ‘It’s nice to see old friends’

A limited series follow-up to CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, this sees a lot of the original (read: popular, alive, available, financially interested) show’s cast reunited for what can only be described as a very numpty, CSI: Miami plot.

Here, the now blind Jim Brass (Paul Guilfoyle) is attacked in his home by a killer, who’s been hired by someone with a grudge against the forensics lab. He lures back Sara Sidle (Jorja Fox), who teams up with the new crime lab nerds to investigate the mystery, which turns out to be linked to a kidnapper Brass put away. That in turn links in more former crime lab bods, including by the end of the episode Gil Grissom (William Petersen) – it’s not a spoiler if it’s in the main titles!

For the most part, this is the Sara show, pleasingly enough, as she mills about being shown the ways of the new lab and what advances have been made in forensics since her day, by new lab boss Paula Newsome. It all feels very backdoor pilot to a revival of the show, rather than just a limited series, but given that the new cast are some of the worst actors I’ve ever seen in a TV show, even an American TV show, even the Brits (Mandeep Dhillon), I doubt I’ll be tuning in for that, even if Sara and Gil stick around.

It’s all massive sci-fi nonsense, of course, and the attempts to create some new nerds with moderately different personalities from all their nerd predecessors is reasonably flawed. The plot, as usual, involves violence to women, women being abducted, etc, which is pretty distasteful. There’s various side-mysteries that need to be solve on the path to solving the main mystery.

Yet, it wasn’t bad. Seeing the old cast again was pleasing and Fox shows she could have been a decent TV lead if only she’d been given her own show. I might stick around for episode two, because my mother in law is a fan of the original and she might well like it. Let’s see what she says once she’s seen the first ep.

* An existential threat? Does Jean-Paul Satre have a knife at their throats?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIkCYP2HxFw

Ghosts (US: CBS)

A young couple, whose dreams come true when they inherit a beautiful country house, only to find it’s both falling apart and inhabited by many of the deceased previous residents.

Rob says: ‘A decently funny adaptation of the BBC original’

This may sound familiar to you, given it’s based on the BBC show of the same name. However, since I largely gave up on UK TV about five years ago, it was all new to me.

And I quite enjoyed it!

Again, stop me if you’ve heard this already – or maybe it’s been artfully constructed to be as different from the original as possible – but while the story’s not that fresh (haunted home, young couple move in, ghosts are upset, but then one of the couple turns out to be able to see them), the show at least does something fun with the different ghosts and the couple.

The ghosts both represent ages past. Each ghost largely therefore represents a different minority group who was oppressed or another group with horrific prejudices; the newer ghosts understand tech better than old ghosts and so on.

So we the rich woman who runs the house having a hatred of the Irish, a gay Civil War soldier, a Black Southern flapper-singer, a 90s Wall Street broker with horrific misogynistic tendencies – all the way back to the Vikings and native Americans, in fact. Wall Street broker can go on about Tara Reid’s movies, old ghosts only know about movies, older ghosts still have to be reminded that’s theatre that’s projected while the oldest ghosts don’t know what projection is. You get the idea.

That formula actually lends itself though to some quick, sparky dialogue and self-deprecating dialogue that shows that no matter what era you’re from, there’s winners and losers, the bigoted and the enlightened for the time – who now look a bit backward. There’s also the occasional (but only very occasional) bit of horror, just to add a little bite to the meal.

The cast are all solidly funny. Rose McIver (I, Zombie) knows how to do supernatural and funny in her sleep, but to her credit stays awake and provides a good anchor point for the whole thing. Utkarsh Ambudkar (Free Guy) is capable of better but isn’t hugely subtle here; all the same, he provides a suitably strong counterpoint to McIver.

I really enjoyed the first episode, so I’ll be back for more.

The regulars

The regulars list is back down to two shows. For one week only, because it was the last episode of The Cleaner last week, with Greg Davies bumping into the woman (This is England‘s Jo Hartley) he’s been pining for since she dumped him on his 30th birthday: ‘The One’ of the title. As usual, it’s a two-hander with Davies generously giving Hartley as many zingers in the script as he gives himself.

But it’s also a poignant piece about growing old but not quite being old yet, moving on, deciding (or not deciding) what to do with your life and working out who is genuinely The One, with the episode title also presenting a pleasing ambivalency: Hartley is Davies’ ‘one’ (who got away) but is she ‘the one’; is he the ‘one’ she should never have left or is he ‘the one’ she escaped from; and is Davies’ ‘the one’ actually someone else and he’s been so hung up on the Hartley that he’s never realised that maybe there’s another ‘one’.

Although it has the least acting pyrotechnics and jokes of the series, for my money it was the best.

Only Murders in the Building also turned in the finest episode of the season so far, with the episode that (more or less) explained the show’s whole mystery. But with one character deaf, it was largely played out both in ASL and in near total silence, beyond the simulated sounds a deaf person might hear – the noises from their own body. It was a genuinely well done piece of TV that actually managed to integrate all the previous episodes together and make sense of them, too.

Don’t watch this unless you want to be spoiled, BTW, but it’s a pretty fascinating look at how they shot the whole thing. In particular, how will deaf viewers watching the episode know when it’s gone silent?

But what did you watch?

Streaming TV

What have you been watching? Including La Brea

It’s “What have you been watching?”, your chance to recommend to fellow TMINE readers anything you’ve been watching this week

Surprisingly, last week’s huge flurry of new shows seems to have been the extent of the Fall season in North America. I assumed it would be bigger and longer than… a week. Maybe there’ll be more this month, but that would involve me looking to find out. Sounds like work, doesn’t it?

I prefer to just bump into new shows these days. Did you know IMDb TV is going to be a thing? I’d heard a bit about it and knew there was a new Judge Judy show on it, but that’s about it, so figured it was just reality TV.

But now I’ve just stumbled onto the fact that apparently, they’ve rebooted Leverage with the entire original cast and Noah Wyle but not Timothy Hutton (for very, very obvious reasons). And here’s a trailer for Leverage: Redemption, which is going to start in just a few weeks. Isn’t that some good stumbling?

I also stumbled across Fires, which is ABC (Australia)’s retelling of last year’s wildfires in Australia. Remember when that was going to be the thing of 2020?

Anyway, that’s just started but is verboten in this house, on the grounds it’s about something real and miserable.

That meant the only new show I have to share with you is this piece of rubbish.

© NBC

La Brea (US: NBC)

A massive sinkhole mysteriously opens up in Los Angeles, separating part of a family in an unexplainable primeval world, alongside a disparate group of strangers.

Rob says: ‘Lost meets The Lost World = Twice as Lost’

It’s pretty obvious right from the outset of La Brea that this is going to be an awful TV show. All the standard tools for character compression get thrown out like balls from a tennis practice machine, with us clear within the first minute of a random car journey to school that the three characters have moved house, are a family, one has lost her leg somehow, have left the father somewhere else for ‘reasons’, the mum (Natalie Zea) is feeling guilty of being a ‘helicopter mom’ and more. Not for a moment is it natural dialogue.

By minute two, a massive sinkhole has opened up and we’re having car chases on pavements in reverse, people running out the way, buildings falling and more.

Never for one second are you expected to be bored or to have to use your brain. Don’t worry – you won’t need it.

Before you know it, half our family are in a grassy wonderland that looks a bit Canadian that’s apparently under LA somehow, the other half are stuck up above and think the first lot are dead. But fear not, they’ve just fallen down some kind of portal into a primeval dimension, filled with CGI wolves, sabretooth tigers and sort of vultures.

Meanwhile, Air Force dad (Eoin Macken from Nightflyers) turns out to have been diagnosed with schizophrenia but – oh wow, isn’t this handy and coincidental – has actually been having visions of what’s happening in this parallel world and can now see that his wife and all these other helpfully diverse people (surgeon/Navy SEALs, psychologist with guns, heroin smugglers) are all still alive! And must be saved! Please believe him!

One of the characters references Lost. I presume that’s as a sort of preemption to prevent people from accusing it of being Lost. “We’re not going to point out the similarities if we actually are just doing Lost are we?”

It is Lost. Sorry. That little ruse didn’t work for Catherine Tramell in Basic Instinct; it won’t work here either.

But it’s also The Lost World. That’s a really hard one to portmanteau with Lost, isn’t it? Shall we just say it’s twice as Lost?

Clearly, it’s The Lost World. Maybe even Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth. Or more likely that thing with Doug McLure.

Anyway, it’s terrible. Everyone’s stupid. There wasn’t even one moment of plausibility in the whole thing, even before the sinkhole opened up. The effects are poor. The set-up is dumb. Even Natalie Zea can’t save this one.

And, of course, it’s an NBC show with a central ‘secret’ that will be eked out across multiple seasons and then cancelled before there’s any real resolution, unless Netflix saves it (cf Manifest). And this one is going to get cancelled very quickly. That means there are even fewer reasons to watch it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxFt4Fwl200

The regulars

Otherwise, it was just the regulars. So, first up, I’m not going to be reviewing What We Do In The Shadows any more. For starters, I’m getting a bit bored of it, so I’m not sure there’s much point. It’s a bit funny every week, but that’s about it. There’ll probably be one awesome episode this season, which seems to be the tradition, but one awesome episode isn’t really enough to sustain reviews.

It’s also a comedy and as with Modern Family, which I did watch until the final episode but stopped reviewing at about season 4, there’s only so much you can say about an episodic comedy anyway before there stops being a point. So I’m going to keep watching What We Do In the Shadow but not review it.

Only Murders in the Building gave us more of Selena Gomez’s character, but as usual, Martin Short steals the show with his podcast antics.

The Cleaner was a more interesting affair, since it was basically Greg Davies (old bloke) meeting some young guy who’s obsessed with both social media and the 80s and Davies educating him about what the 80s was really like. But the two also came to a sort of interesting rapprochement that I quite enjoyed, so it wasn’t just an old guy going ‘Tsk, tsk! The kids today, hey?’

But what did you watch?

Streaming TV

What have you been watching? Including Foundation

It’s “What have you been watching?”, your chance to recommend to fellow TMINE readers anything you’ve been watching this week

There has been a plethora of new shows out in the US and Canada over the past week. On the one hand, this is promising: things are returning back to normal and this is normally the fall season, when TMINE would review as many as it could.

On the other, it did fill me a little with despair.

In the US, we have FBI: International, another spin-off from CBS’s FBI that reminded me of that terrible Criminal Minds spin-off that filled me with rage a few years ago.

NCIS: Hawaii: another spin-off from CBS’s NCIS.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GQ6uxKgtxA

Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, Peacock’s attempt to give us something as astonishingly terrible as both Dan Brown’s books and the movies adapted from them.

There were other shows, such as anthology show The Premise (and I don’t review anthology shows anyway), but I think I gave up at that point daring to dream anything good was going to come at that point.

Canada didn’t help me either. We had the ‘raucous dramedy’ (ie rubbish) Moonshine from CBC, about the owners of a ramshackle summer resort on the south shore of Nova Scotia who are keen to retire but whose adult children are battling for control.

Strays, a spin-off from Kim’s Convenience.

And Family Law , in which “Abigail Bianchi, a recovering alcoholic and lawyer goes to work with her estranged father and two half-siblings. She’s never worked in family law before, and suddenly finds herself having to manage not just her clients family dysfunction, but her own. She must learn to navigate working with her father and siblings she doesn’t know as part of her probation, all while trying to maintain her sobriety.”

No.

So the only new show I watched and thus am able to review so far is…

Foundation (Apple TV+)

This is an adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s series of novels about a Galactic Empire that’s about to fall apart? How do they know that? Because a mathematician called Hari Seldon has developed something called ‘psychohistory’, which enables him to predict how large groups of people are likely to behave. He says that the end can’t be averted but the return to civilisation can be sped up if there are two ‘Foundations’ created to act as a repository of knowledge for civilisation – and to keep an eye on things.

The series boasts a decently stellar cast, including Jared Harris, Lee Pace and… Reece Sheersmith. No, really. It also looks astonishing. The effects and design are amazing.

It’s also one of the most boring TV shows I’ve ever seen. It singly failed to involve me at any point. It’s been so long since I read the Foundation series that I can’t really remember enough of it to say if it was a failing of the originals. But I read all three, as well as the later additions Asimov added, so I must have been motivated to do that.

Whatever the case, nothing about the first two episodes made me want to watch any more of it, with its lack of real characters, just ideas and attempts to do hard sci-fi that fell flat many, many times. But given the lack of anything else appetising to watch, I might still tune in for the third episode on Friday.

Hark at me talking about ‘tuning in’ to a streaming show. How old am I?

The regulars

Otherwise, it was just the regulars. What We Do In The Shadows was moderately funny, but largely unforgettable, although its visit to Atlantic City did make me realise just how not the Las Vegas of the East Coast it is. I was also mildly amused to see the whistle stop tour of Europe: it did actually look like they’d been to Greece, although maybe not London.

Only Murders in the Building was pleasing, as we moved the action along and began to suspect Selena Gomez less. The podcast elements remain the show’s most amusing point, though.

The Cleaner had that nice lady from Cabin Pressure in one episode, while the other was more about vegan disabled people. They were both pleasant enough ways to pass time, but not exactly a riot of laughs. I’ll keep watching, though.

Greg Davies in BBC One's The Cleaner
Streaming TV

What have you been watching? Including The Cleaner

It’s “What have you been watching?”, your chance to recommend to fellow TMINE readers anything you’ve been watching this week

As I suspected last week American Rust, an adaptation of Philipp Meyer’s novel that Showtime described as “a compelling family drama and a timeless story told through the eyes of complicated and compromised chief of police Del Harris (Jeff Daniels) of a Pennsylvania Rust Belt town full of good people making bad choices” was about as fun as a hernia operation. Honestly, why do networks think:

  1. People want to watch miserable sh*t right now, after a year and a half of misery (at least a year and a half – apparently, in the Before Times, there were things to be miserable about other than Covid, too, but I struggle to remember those days so can’t confirm that)
  2. Miserable = quality TV while happy = lightweight TV?

It’s just such an odd couple of equations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKNhNdZBD2A

I also tried Australian Gangster (Australia: Seven). That’s billed as “Drug dealer, gangster, gym-junky, Lamborghini driver, husband, father, Australian Gangster is a four hour TV series about the life and death of a new breed of Sydney criminal. The kind that doesn’t care about playing it safe or keeping a low profile or even getting caught. Our main character is emblematic of the type of modern gangster that only really cares about looking good on Instagram, making a name for himself in a new, wannabe glamorous crime scene, while at the same time trying to manage the pressures of family life.”

I mean, it’s an obvious attempt to do a new Underbelly, just as a new Underbelly comes out, but want to guess how much fun it was? I mean it opens with a man being mildly threatening to a teacher because his kid has speech issues and so goes around biting everyone.

Do you know what that made me do? It made me watch some British TV.

The Cleaner (UK: BBC One)

“After CSI have done their stuff, the cleaner mops up the grisly remains. For Wicky, a bloodbath and the pub is all in a day’s work. Comedy written by and starring Greg Davies.”

And it’s odd. Mildly funny, but odd. Essentially, it’s a series of two-handers, with Davies turning up at a property to clean it after someone has died and then chatting with whomever he finds there for 30 minutes. So far we’ve had Helena Bonham-Carter, as a widow and suspected murderer who has returned to the scene of the crime; and David Mitchell, as a somewhat irate writer with writers’ block.

It’s somewhat reminiscent of Davies’ Taskmaster in some regards, with the dialogue usually being a battle of wits, before Davies just plays a meanness trump card to win. His character is little different from his standup persona, too, although there are fewer mentions of his mother.

But, I enjoyed it. Bonham-Carter was pleasingly dotty but also sympathetic as the woman who hated her model-making, unromantic husband but never got round to killing him. Mitchell was the “angry logic, you’re all imbeciles” persona we’ve come to expect, but also a figure of sympathy after a while.

It’s all a bit rough and loose, and your enjoyment is likely linked to how much you like Greg Davies. But it was definitely worth my time enough that I’d watch it again.

The regulars

On top of that, I now have two regulars to watch! It’s a true embarrassment of riches. They’re after the jump. But what have you been watching?

Continue reading “What have you been watching? Including The Cleaner”