To quote Master and Commander, what a fascinating modern world we live in. Once upon a time, you needed something called a ‘television set’ to watch television programmes. Imagine that, hey? I mean ask the average teenager what a television set is now and they won’t know, am I right? It’s only if you tell them it’s the screen for their console games that they’ll know what you’re talking about.
The main cause of the step away from broadcasting TV has been the Internet: now practically anyone with enough money can not only make TV but also air it over the Internet to anyone who’ll watch it. No need for a pesky network of transmitters, cables or satellite dishes. The challenge has been to demonstrate that Internet TV is as good as broadcast TV and therefore worth watching.
Companies such as Netflix and Amazon have been doing just that, giving us the likes of House of Cards, Transparent, The Man In The High Castle, Orange Is the Only Black and more. Now comes Sony with TV for its Playstation console network. And it seems intent on proving that actually, Internet TV is pretty sucky and nowhere near as good as that stuff you used to watch on your ‘television set’.
Powers is the Playstation Network’s first foray into scripted original programming. Adapted from Brian Michael Bendis’s graphic novel of the same name, it imagines a world in which superheroes (aka ‘powers’) are real and commonplace, how that world would deal with it and how those superheroes would genuinely act. ‘Arch nemesis’? You’ve been reading too many comics – there’s no black and white in the real world. That guy’s just a dick…
Sharlto Copley (District 9, The A-Team, Maleficent et al) plays a detective in the police’s ‘powers’ division tasked with policing homicides committed by superheroes. A former ‘power’ himself, he lost his abilities in a fight with the Sylar-esque Wolfe (Eddie Izzard) and hasn’t quite adjusted to his loss, something his new partner, Deena Pilgrim (Susan Heyward), quickly comes to realise. Now he’s faced with dealing with someone who’s killing ‘powers’ – and it’s probably the teleporting ‘power’ Johnny Royalle (Noah Taylor), who everyone thought was dead.
Now clearly Sony wanted to produce something that it imagined would draw in games players. So pause for a second and imagine a crude stereotype of games players. Imagine what TV they’d like to watch.
And you’ve pretty much got Powers.
Okay, it’s probably not as bad as whatever you’ve imagined. Yes, there is underage sex between a teenage powers wannabe (played by the thankfully 28 years old Olesya Rulin) and a much older man. Yes, there’s plenty of gore and ickiness. But actually, there are no hot naked babes, only the ever-wonderful, well clothed Michelle Forbes as Retro Girl. And actually the story involves remarkably little action and violence, intent as it is on trying to depict real people in a strange world.
But this is a superhero fest with ample eye-rolling moments, startling bad dialogue and in-show trading cards of all the ‘powers’. There’s also amazingly bad acting, just like in most games. Although Forbes is reassuringly competent, she’s only in the first episode for a few moments, leaving the bulk of the action to Copley, Izzard, Heyward and co, who are clearly under the impression they’re getting paid a lot of money to appear in something that only about five people will watch so are either hamming it up something chronic or phoning in their performances. It doesn’t help that Copley and Izzard are both woefully miscast, clearly hired as names rather than because they were the most suited actors for the roles.
Worse still, someone has obviously been counting beans at Sony and figured that this actually qualifies as just another game and gave all 10 episodes of the show the budget of one. Because everything just looks rubbish. Imagine CGI from the early 90s and that’s what pretty much every special effect looks like – you won’t believe that a man can fly… or shoot lightning bolts or anything else. In fact, ITV2 did a very similar but comedic show a few years ago called No Heroics and it had better effects than this does.
Actually, the whole thing was better. Think on that. A seven-year old, not very good ITV2 show is better in every respect than a TV programme intended as Sony’s Internet TV calling card.
As well as the poor, often tedious pacing of Powers, the largely bland look of the show is a big surprise, given that the director is David Slade, who set the visual tone of the delectable Hannibal. But beyond a few piquant visual flourishes, Powers‘s direction is about as bland as it comes.
There’s a decent enough story lurking under all of this. Unfortunately, it’s Sony who are trying to ‘realise’ it and the result is something pretty poor. Frankly, gamers – even everyone – deserve better than this. And broadcast TV looks like it’s got a good few years left in it as a result.
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 theReviews 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’sLocate TV – they’ll even email you a weekly schedule.
More new and returning TV shows mean the return of the backlog, I’m afraid. Sigh. It’s not easy this job with all its highly demanding… sitting in front of a TV and then writing about it…
Anyway, moving swiftly on, I’ll just promise that I’ll be reviewing Syfy’s TV version of 12 Monkeys either later today when I’ve finished watching it or tomorrow during my lunchbreak. One of those.
Which ain’t bad. The Book of Negroes, I’m afraid, will have to go on the pile of ‘probably quite good mini series I haven’t watched’ because I’m now two episodes behind.
Packing more great, mind-warping ideas into even one short story than many authors achieve in their lifetime, Philip K Dick is (rightly) considered one of the best science-fiction authors who has ever lived. However, his stories can be hard to adapt. Even some of his easier, longer novels, such as Through A Scanner Darkly, which could be taken more or less straight off the page, still needed some imaginative thinking to depict faithfully and the end result, with its massively downbeat ending, still wasn’t the most accessible of works.
Most of his stories, however, are shorter and involve small people in the midst of big ideas, making them much harder to adapt. Much of Blade Runner’s source, Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, actually revolves around the protagonist’s efforts to please his wife by purchasing a real, rather than synthetic sheep as a pet – and the problems of having children in a radioactive environment, thus necessitating his lead codpiece. Total Recall, based on We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, involves a man discovering that he’d inadvertently saved the world from alien hamsters, while Minority Report is more an intellectual exercise about how predicting the future can affect that future – as well as future predictions.
Dick’s Hugo Award-winning The Man In The High Castle is as similarly reality- and identity-wiping as the rest of his work, detailing an alternative reality in which the Nazis and the Japanese win the Second World War and take over the world. The two empires partition the US, and the book details the alternative history and examines how Americans, as well as their rulers, live in this reality. ‘The Man In the High Castle’ is an author who suggests that this is an alternative reality and that history is actually something completely different – although in true Dick fashion, reality turns out to be more fluid and unreliable under both the characters and readers’ feet. Similarly to Dick’s other stories, there’s little plot per se and much of the focus is on smaller characters with small concerns, such as how to run their business to appeal to the new Japanese rulers and how marriages are affected.
Nevertheless, for the past few years, attempts have been made to turn The Man In The High Castle into a TV series. The first efforts started in 2010, backed by the BBC and Blade Runner’s director Ridley Scott. When that fell through, Scott turned to the Syfy channel in 2013, bringing on board X-Files writer Frank Spotnitz. And when that never happened, Scott went to Amazon where finally he got some traction.
There were three big questions at this point, of course. The first was how to turn such a plot-free and inconclusive but much-revered and also potentially inflammatory source into a multiple-episode TV series. The second was whether Spotnitz, who’s been producing hackneyed action scripts for shows such as Strike Back, Hunted and Transporter: The Series for years now, was someone who still had the skills to adapt it. And the third was whether Amazon, very much the also-ran in online programming compared to Netflix, could produce something genuinely good (Transparent apart).
While we don’t quite have the answer, Amazon so far only giving us a pilot episode, it’s fair to say that Frank has shown us the way and given us potentially Amazon’s first genuine series to match House of Cards. Here’s a clip:
