The IT Crowd

US TV

What have you been watching this week (w/e May 27)?

27 May 2011 Rob Buckley 10 Comments

The Crimson Petal and the White

Time for “What have you been watching this week?”, my chance to tell you what I’ve been watching this week and your chance to recommend things to everyone else (and me) in case we’ve missed them.

My usual recommendations for maximum viewing pleasure this week: Cougar Town, Endgame, Happy Endings, House, Modern Family, The Shadow Line and Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle. Watch them (and keep an eye on The Stage‘s TV Today Square Eyes feature as well) or you’ll be missing out on the good stuff. Of course, it being May/June, most of them are ending, so I’ll have to come up with a new set of recommendations next week.

Now to the irregulars and new things, as well as a few thoughts on some of those regulars:

  • All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace: Adam Curtis’s latest documentary series, examining how technology has come to – quite literally – rule our lives. One of those documentaries designed more to make you think and examine broad trends rather than create a watertight argument. Well worth watching.
  • The Apprentice: Very creepy.
  • The Crimson Petal and the White: Obviously was on tele a while back now, but we put off watching it while lovely wife was still reading the original book. Very faithful to the book, says lovely wife, and quite disturbing in its visual style, like being on an acid trip for an hour while trapped in a documentary about poverty in Victorian London. I’m not sure I actually like it though, since it’s one of those ones where you can see doom spiralling down on characters right from the beginning because they behave incredibly stupidly. Also, I find it hard to imagine Chris O’Dowd as anything except Roy from The IT Crowd. He just doesn’t seem plausible as anything else.
  • Happy Endings: Not quite as funny as in previous weeks but still good. Just ambiguous enough that you know they weren’t sure they were going to get renewed or not.
  • House: Oops. Last week’s wasn’t the finale after all. Still, what a weird way to end the series. Feels almost like it should have been the last House ever, since it’ll be interesting to see how they come back from this. Not a great episode though.
  • Running Wilde: Not a great way to end the series – felt a bit like they’d given up at this point.

And since people have been mentioning movies they’ve been watching as well, which seems like a sterling idea to me, this week I saw:

  • Tangled: Animated Disney musical version of Rapunzel, with Mandy Moore and Zachary Levi (Chuck from Chuck). Actually quite nice, decent animation, nothing too offend, with a few good comedic touches. But nothing outstanding and a few major plot holes.
  • The Ward: Amnesiac Amber Heard runs around and tries to escape a lot from a mental asylum when it becomes clear that a ghost is trying to kill off everyone in her ward. A return in style by John Carpenter to Halloween/The Thing, with very little gore and a few solid shocks, but a bit loose in the middle and suffers from the usual Carpenter trope of the third and fourth acts turning into lots of running. But the ending’s really good, Heard does well, even if the other girls in the ward are beyond irritating, and Jared Harris from Mad Men excels as the psychiatrist who runs it all.

But what have you been watching?

“What have you been watching this week?” 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 this week. 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?

Monday’s “quite good Torchwood trailer miracle” news

23 May 2011 Rob Buckley 3 Comments

Doctor Who

Awards

Film

British TV

Canadian TV

  • CBC orders Wish List pilot

US TV

  • Trailer for Homeland with Claire Danes, Damian Lewis and Mandy Patinkin
  • Rod Hallett joins Terra Nova
  • Alice Eve to recur on Entourage, Ana Ortiz to recur on Hung
  • Andrea Osvart female lead on Transporter
  • Someone’s (sort of) leaving Supernatural [spoilers]
US TV

What have you been watching this August?

5 August 2010 Rob Buckley 23 Comments

Dark Blue - Season 2

This is going to be the last entry on the blog for most of (if not all of) August, so it’s going to be an open-ended thread for y’all to chat about what you’ve been watching on TV this month – assuming you want to, of course. I’ve a few things in my queue that I’m going to be watching on planes, including Rubicon, ep 2 of Mad Men (which is already looking better than ep 1) and the first two eps of the new Tricia Helfer-enhanced Dark Blue (I’m unsure if this is a good thing or not, but I remain open-minded).

But this week, I’ve been watching:

  • Burn Notice: Reasonably fun, but in the scheme of things, a throwaway ep, bookended with a couple of interesting character scenes.
  • Covert Affairs: The first really good ep of the series, with Oded Fehr as a Mossad agent. It had a real Bourne Identity feel to it, and the activities back at Langley seemed to be more coherent. Fingers crossed the rest of the season will be like this.
  • The Gates: Vampire fun! A good ep, but when will Nick find out about the rest of the Gates’s secrets?
  • The IT Crowd: Nice cameo by that bloke off The Mighty Boosh and as funny as always.
  • Persons Unknown: Silly. But could it all be in their heads?
  • Rev: A nice way to end this series. Not many belly laughs since the first ep, but surprisingly deep with a knowing humour. Fingers crossed for a second series.
  • Royal Pains: Slightly interesting playing around with time and Fringe-esque graphics. Some decent character moments, but I’m missing Hank-Jill and the general edge the show had in season one, even if it’s nice to have Anastasia Griffith around.
  • Scoundrels: Moderately amusing at best, but it does seem to be settling down and working out a vibe for itself.
  • Top Gear: A so-so season over all. It’s definitely losing its appeal now it’s trying to be more serious.

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

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).

What have you been watching this week (w/e July 9)

9 July 2010 Rob Buckley 2 Comments

Fourth of July weekend seems to have knackered most of America’s normal TV output – even stuff that airs during the week since loads of people have gone on vacation so ratings tend to be low anyway – so not much to watch. However…

  • Britain’s Next Top Model: Can you really believe that Elle Macpherson is 47? No, me neither.
  • Caerdydd: I’ve been patiently saving all of the last series of Caerdydd on my Sky+ box to watch in one go. So what happens this week? I cue them up and discover that the vast majority are nothing but a blue screen and those that aren’t didn’t get the English subtitles saved with them – and were all from the previous series anyway. S4C is too backward to release them on DVD so all I’ll say is DAMN YOU RUPERT MURDOCH!
  • The IT Crowd: The Countdown episode. Cracking.
  • Memphis Beat: Watched the second half of episode two and practically fell asleep. At least Jason Lee has something approaching a love interest now, but more or less every line of dialogue is designed to say “You’re in the south now. They’re a different breed here. They just like to talk slow and drink lemonade”. Not sure I’m caffeinated enough to watch episode three yet.
  • Persons Unknown: Bit of a treading water episode in terms of revealing things, although it’s good to know that the guys in charge of The Village are perfectly happy to kill people if necessary. The weird seems to have been dialled down a bit, though, which is a slight retrograde step since that was one of the best bits about it.
  • Rev: Less comedic than the first episode, but good to see them tackling quite a difficult subject – the differences in style between old school CoE and evangelicals. Nice to see the Archdeacon doing something Christian for once, too, but I found the handling of Colin’s (? the mental one anyway) sexual harassment just a little bit suspect, with the Rev’s attitude towards whether something bad had happened to the girl seemingly coloured by whether she was really “an innocent” or not. Might have been good to have got Colin to apologise to her at least.
  • Royal Pains: Part two of the Cuba storyline was fun enough, and still managed to be relatively even-handed about Cuba, which was nice. The Anastasia Griffith storyline was interesting, too, and I find myself siding with her rather than Divia for some reason.
  • Southland: Watched the first episode and was very impressed. Dark, realistic, gritty. The first post-Wire police drama that can withstand the comparisons. You should watch it too – More4, Thursdays, 10pm. Still on 4oD.

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).