Fam on CBS
US TV

What have you been watching? Including Schooled and Fam

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

It only took about a week before WHYBW missed its scheduled slot, but given how much new stuff has recently arrived and how much old stuff has returned to Tuesdays and Wednesdays, please forgive me. Still, I was wondering what I was going to do on Thursdays…

The Passage
THE PASSAGE: L-R: Saniyya Sidney and Mak-Paul Gosselaar in THE PASSAGE on FOX. ©2018 Fox Broadcasting Co. Cr: Steve Dietl/FOX

This week’s reviews

To be frank, I’ve done a crap-load of reviews and previews since last time, too.

Please peruse them at your leisure, whether you intend to watch the shows or not.

Schooled
ABC’s Schooled

New shows

Coming up in the next week, I’ll be reviewing The CW’s Roswell reboot, Roswell, New Mexico. Season two of The Punisher will be hitting Netflix this Friday, so I’ll undoubtedly be watching that. And if anything else pops up I’ll review that, too, if I can.

After the jump, though, despite my already extensive viewing schedule, there’ll be reviews of two other new shows I managed to catch: Schooled (US: ABC) and Fam (US: CBS). Gosh, mid-season replacements that are also sitcoms. Cos they’re always funny, hey?

I’ll also be talking about series five of Cuckoo (UK: BBC Three), which I know isn’t a new show and it’s not even a show new to me, but I think it’s probably the first time I’ll have talked about it on the blog.

The Orville

The regulars

Although Counterpart decided to take a break this Sunday, a whole bunch of other shows decided to return this week. That means that after the jump, there’ll be the season (and probably series) finale of the one remaining regular, Happy Together, as well as new episodes of returning regulars Magnum P.I.Corporate and True Detective. Joining them will be the second episodes of both Cavendish and Project Blue Book.

And for reasons that will become clear, I’ll also be talking about every episode of The Orville that’s aired since I gave up on it after its third episode.

See you in a mo…

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US TV

Review: The Family 1×1-1×2 (US: ABC)

 

In the US: Sundays, 9/8c, ABC
In the UK: Not yet acquired

Virtually everyone who goes to prison in US TV dramas deserves it. In fact, frequently, they don’t get enough prison and it’s clear that by the end of the episode they deserve more of it; there also plenty of people who deserve to be in prison but who aren’t because of ‘technicalities’ such as no evidence, yet the cops know they should be.

Why don’t we just let the prosecutors and the cops do what’s right and stick anyone they think is guilty of a crime in jail forever and ever, hey? That would sort out the crime problem, wouldn’t it?

Well, trouble is, not everyone found guilty of a crime – or even suspected of a crime – is actually guilty, as John Oliver recently pointed out:

A few TV shows have faced up to this reality, including Life, Rectify and most recently ABC’s Secrets and Lies. But largely, the accused-but-innocent man, while guilty of something like adultery, isn’t guilty of anything too bad.

So you’ve got to at least credit The Family with addressing moral ambiguity in a deeper way than before. Here we have former Brat packer Andrew McCarthy coming out of partial acting retirement to play a man accused of kidnapping, murdering and probably raping the young son of his neighbours, aspiring politician Joan Allen (The Bourne Supremacy, Manhunter) and her husband Rupert Graves (Sherlock). When they find videos on his computer of children being abused, it seems like an open and shut case for rookie cop Margot Bingham (Boardwalk Empire, Matador), and McCarthy is sent away to prison.

Ten years later, Graves and Allen have separated and the children, who include The Newsroom‘s Alison Pill, are all grown up. Then the son they thought had died turns up on a road, having been kidnapped and imprisoned Room-style for close to a decade. McCarthy may be a paedophile but he is innocent of the murder, so is released back into the community.

Can the real kidnapper be found? What will happen to the family now the son has returned? How will the community treat McCarthy once he’s among them again? Can McCarthy be a nice man who’s kind to kids and should be allowed to be around them, even if he does have some rather nasty videos? 

These are just some of the interesting questions the show poses, even if it answers none of them well. However, another question is: “With such an interesting subject matter and strong cast, how can it be so astonishingly dull?”

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US TV

Review: Code Black 1×1 (US: CBS; UK: Watch)


In the US: Wednesdays, 10/9c, CBS
In the UK: Thursdays, 9pm, Watch. Starts October 29 

CBS is, of course, the king of the police procedural in the US. Police procedurals of all ilks dominate its schedules and the ratings, and arguably it does them better than any other network.

However, for years, it’s tried to extend its procedural dominance into the medical realm, with a seemingly neverending stream of shows that quickly turn out to be low-rated, instantly forgettable one-season wonders: Three Rivers, 3 Lbs, Miami Trauma, A Gifted Man.

In fact, I’ve written pretty much this exact same intro to every new medical procedural CBS has come up with every year, so much so I’m bored of it. Maybe you are, too.

Trouble is, I fully expect I’ll be writing it again next year since CBS’s latest medical procedural, Code Black, is a yawnfest that’s almost certainly going to get cancelled by the end of the season. It’s based on Code Black, a 2013 documentary about LA County General, which is one of the largest and busiest teaching hospitals in the US, employing more than 1,000 residents at a time. The name ‘code black’ refers to when an emergency department’s resources are so overstretched by an influx of patients, it can’t take it any more, and while most EDs in the US only experience four such events a year, LA County General experiences it 300 times a year.

Time for more resources, obviously. Except that wouldn’t make for a great TV show.

And neither would Code Black, in which a whole bunch of competitive, disparate, highly dull medical residents all learn how to be ED doctors at the hands of ‘dad’, aka Marcia Gay Harden (The Newsroom, Damages), ‘mom’ being Luis Guzmán (Narcos), the senior nurse who looks after them all. Harden’s a bit hard and lacking in bedside manner following ‘an incident’ three years previously, something that concerns caring, sharing fellow doctor Raza Jaffrey (ElementaryHomeland, Spooks) but not so much hospital administrator Kevin Dunn (Samantha Who?), since Harden’s abrasive training produces the best doctors.

And that’s it, really. It’s basically ER but busier, not taking the time to do more in terms of characterisation rather than have people explain who they are and how totes awesome they are, before performing perfunctory acts of dickery. It’s just blood on the floor to blood on the floor, while a camera unsuccessfully rushes around to try to convey the impression of the original Code Black documentary. Nice, if you like medical porn, dull if you want an actual drama.

The trouble is if you just rush all the time in an attempt to convey pressure, you’re not going to end up with tension. You’re going to end up with confusion. And then boredom.

The camera goes here, the camera goes there, while the cast mumble their lines or shout them so that you never hear them. All you’ll really know most of the time is that people are ill and the doctors are trying to help them. Learn much about the US medical system from it all? Grow to love a character? Probably not.

There are scenes, almost all of them involving Dunn, where the show is allowed to breath and for characters to grow. But they’re few and far between, and sometimes oddly positioned, such as when Dunn starts talking about his eczema in the middle of surgery, to emphasise the point that people are spending too much time on characterisation and need to get back to some advanced doctoring.

But, ultimately, Code Black is just procedure with very little human interest. See you back here next year with the intro?

What have you been watching? Including Blunt Talk, The Island/Το Νησί, Y Gwyll/Hinterland, Impastor, Continuum and You’re The Worst

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 – they’ll even email you a weekly schedule.

Can you feel it? Can you? It’s coming. It’s nearly here. It’s the Fall 2015-16 US TV season! Hoorah!

But not until next week. Not properly, anyway, which is why the only new US TV show I’ve reviewed this week is FX’s The Bastard Executioner and the only regular US shows I’ll be examining after the jump are the season finale of Impastor and the latest You’re The Worst. In desperation, I even went back a few weeks to give Patrick Stewart’s new August-debuting series a go, too.

Blunt Talk (US: Starz)
Patrick Stewart plays a former British marine turned US chat show host whose ratings are on the down turn. He ends up high on drugs and alcohol, and in the arms (and bosom) of a young, transgender prostitute, and is promptly arrested – well, once he’s stopped beating up the cops. What will happen to his career now?

This is a comedy by the way. It’s not one of those crazy old-fashioned things with jokes, but instead mainly seems to get by on seeing Stewart not being a ‘English gentleman’. This might amuse Americans, unused to English people doing such things, but as Stewart himself points out in the show, we’re a bit more used to idiosyncratic Englishmen here.

The only rays of hope in the show are the moments Stewart has by himself with Adrian Scarborough (Gavin & Stacey, Plebs), his former Falklands batman, which are actually pretty good fun, even if filtered through a strange US prism.

Overall, by the end of the first episode, I really wasn’t sure what the point of the show was. It’s not satirising anything, it’s not doing a The Newsroom or a The Larry Sanders Show. It’s just Stewart being a mild-mannered, self-harming dick.

Here’s a trailer.

But that’s it for US TV. Oh well.

However, there’s more to the world than America. Indeed, elsewhere, I’ve reviewed the first episode of Australia and New Zealand’s new 800 Words, and after the jump, I’ll be looking at the continuing adventures of Canada’s Continuum and the return of Wales’ Y Gwyll/Hinterland. There’s lovely, hey?

And as if all that wasn’t enough, I broke a rule and took a look at some Greek TV.

The Island/Το Νησί (Greece: Mega)
The reason for my rule-breaking is that this year marked the 10th anniversary of the publication of Victoria Hislop’s The Island, a novel set in the first half of the 20th century on the Greek islands of Crete and Spinalonga. On Spinalonga is a fortress where Greece used to send people with leprosy until a cure was discovered in the 1950s and the story is about various love affairs, some of which involve people who end up on the island, and how that affects their families.

As well as a Q&A with Hislop, the night featured an airing of the first episode of Το Νησί, Greek television’s 2010/11 24-part adaptation of the novel, which despite being made for €4m and a couple of bottles of raki, is actually very lavish and emptied the streets when it aired. Indeed, it has only ever been beaten in the ratings twice, both times by sporting events, one of which was the opening of the Athens Olympics.

The adaptation is pretty faithful to the book, right down to the modern-day London bookending, which features a pre-Downton Abbey Dan Stevens. It’s all very lavish and well made in Greek terms, too, although equally, it’s very Greek and emotionally drawn out, too. Acting’s pretty good, with Evgenia Dimitropoulou playing a double-role of both the modern day Alexis and her own aunt Anna – as Alexis, she does a good job of playing a British-Greek girl who doesn’t speak Greek that well (hers is about as good as mine, in fact), although she seems to understand an awful lot, even some quite obscure words such as λεπρός (leper), when she winds up in Crete.

The series has never aired in the UK, surprisingly, although I’m sure BBC Four will get round to it some day. However, you can watch all of it on YouTube, albeit without subtitles, if you hunt around.

There were a few celebs among the audience at the Q&A, including Patrick Barlow and Robert Young, but one in particular pretty much stalked me all over Blackfriars and at the Q&A the entire evening. He made his bilingual acting debut in the first episode of the series, which I’ve embedded below – see if you can spot him. I’ll give you a clue – he first appears at the 3m59s point.

Continue reading “What have you been watching? Including Blunt Talk, The Island/Το Νησί, Y Gwyll/Hinterland, Impastor, Continuum and You’re The Worst”