You’re The Worst

What have you been watching? Including You, Me and the Apocalypse, Limitless, The Muppets, Scream Queens, Doctor Who and Y Gwyll

2 October 2015 Rob Buckley 38 Comments

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.

I always forget. I always go “Look how much I’ve done!” in the first week of each new Fall season, then forget that in the second week I’ve got to watch all the new programmes that start airing that week as well as the ones that began the previous week.

My, what a lot of tele I’ve watched this week.

Still, unbelievably, I’m actually up to date. This week, I reviewed the first episodes of the following new shows:

And after the jump, you’ll find reviews of the latest episodes of: 800 Words, Blindspot, Continuum, Doctor Who, Heroes Reborn, Life in Pieces, Limitless, Minority Report, The Muppets, The Player, Rosewood, Scream Queens, Y Gwyll and You’re The Worst. Some of them won’t be making it to a third-episode verdict, particularly since the Barrometer is currently in a tanning salon somewhere in the Gorbals so too busy to pass judgement on anything, but you can find out which after the jump.

On top of all that, I also managed to watch the first episode of another new show, this time from the UK.

You, Me and The Apocalypse (UK: Sky1; US: NBC)
As with most US/UK co-productions, particularly those involving Sky, this is a lukewarm affair that satisfies no-one, perhaps best evidenced by the change in the show’s title from Apocalypse Slough. It sees a comet approaching the Earth, meaning that everyone goes a bit whacky at the prospect of the coming Apocalypse that will result when it hits. However, the action of the first episode is all set in the lead-up to the lead-up to the comet, introducing us to several different groups of people from around the world who are going to all end up together at some point. These include Mathew Baynton, Joel Fry (Plebs), Pauline Quirke (Birds of a Feather), Rob Lowe (like you need to know who he is), Paterson Joseph (Peep Show), Jenna Fischer (The Office US) and an almost unrecognisable Megan Mullally (Will and Grace). Unfortunately, it’s all a bit weak and pathetic, not really knowing who its audience is, despite the occasional choice joke. The only exception to this is Rob Lowe’s bad minded Catholic priest who is the Vatican’s Devil’s Advocate. Otherwise, eminently missable.

But if you think after all that I had any time to watch any movies or go to the theatre, you have a higher opinion of me than I do.

Continue reading “What have you been watching? Including You, Me and the Apocalypse, Limitless, The Muppets, Scream Queens, Doctor Who and Y Gwyll”

US TV

Review: Grandfathered 1×1 (US: Fox)

1 October 2015 Rob Buckley 13 Comments


In the US: Tuesdays, 8/7c, Fox

Last year’s big trend in new shows was the romcom, with a blitz that included Undateable, Welcome To Sweden, Marriage, Selfie, A to Z, Marry Me and Manhattan Love Story. Most of them deservedly died a fiery death, while others were better but have largely limped on or been put out of their misery this year.

The one deserved winner from the lot was FX/FXX’s You’re The Worst, a semi-realistic romcom about a narcissistic, awful couple, who somehow make you love them all the same. And it seems like it’s had some influence on broadcast TV, because now we have Grandfathered, a semi-realistic romcom in which a terrible awful human being is somehow quite lovable.

It stars John Stamos of Full House fame as a 50-year-old, narcissistic restaurateur who’s never settled down and spends all his time wooing 20-something models whose names he can never remember. The only woman he doesn’t chase after is his lesbian assistant – her being a lesbian was a job requirement.  

So far, so the plot of anything involving Adam Sandler, David Spade et al.

Then one day, he gets two surprises. The first is the 26-year-old son he never knew about turning up on his doorstep; the second is Stamos’ newborn granddaughter who he brings with him. Now Stamos has to learn how to be both a father and a grandfather as quickly as possible.

The plot, to a certain extent, should be setting off warning bells, if not a full-scale run for the hills. However, Grandfathered is surprisingly smart. For one thing, playing the mother/grandmother of the piece and ‘the one who got away’ is the fabulous Paget Brewster from Friends, Criminal Minds and Community – a woman whose IMDB profile photo is of her holding a fish.

Paget Brewster with a fish

Brewster has a great line in deadpan delivery, but she also gets some great lines. As soon as she starts delivering the standard clichés of “boy-men who are forced to grow up by events” comedies (“If you think one day looking after a baby makes you think you know what it’s like to be a parent…”), she almost instantly gets to subvert them (“…hell, I can’t believe you made me say that. I’m cool. I watch Portlandia. I almost went to Coachella last year until I decided not to.”) and because it’s Brewster, it feels real.

Stamos also gets some good lines (“I’m a 50-year-old bachelor. We’re society’s most worthless people”) but alarm bells go off again when it’s revealed that part of the show’s ongoing plot is going to be Stamos’ educating his newfound son (Josh Peck) in the ways of women so that he can woo the mother of his baby, who regards him as merely a friend and a good dad. Here again, though, rather than a neverending series of lessons in negging, ‘treat them mean, keep them keen’, etc, Stamos’ messages to his son tend to be more along the lines of, ‘Have you considered making an effort, wearing some nice clothes?’ and the like.

The show makes references to and even includes a clip from Kramer vs Kramer, but does a much better job than that movie does of creating loving male parents/grandparents without creating antagonistic female characters for them to fight. Grandfathered has a heart and Stamos isn’t incapable of change, he just has to learn.

Grandfathered‘s biggest issue for UK audiences is that a lot gets lost in translation. Even the title is a US pun that won’t be obvious to most UK viewers (to ‘grandfather’ means to make someone exempt from something), and that’s before you even start on the cultural significance of something like Coachella. 

The show also makes a big deal of Stamos, who was the star of the huge Full House during the 80s, something which also gets referenced a lot. His character is to some extent ‘Jesse Katsopolis’ all grown up and there are photographs in Grandfathered of him from that time just to emphasise the point; Full House star Bob Saget even makes the first of several series appearances in the pilot. 

And, of course, we never got Full House over here. To us, Stamos is one of the doctors off ER at best, but more likely a complete unknown. Full House references and parallels will be equally mysterious to most of us (heaven knows what we’re all going to make of Netflix’s sequel/updating Fuller House when it hits the Internet). 

So while Grandfathered is a surprisingly enjoyable, grown-up, unmisogynistic romcom that both male and female viewers can enjoy, it’s probably not going to be as funny for UK viewers as for those in the US. It’s definitely worth a watch, since it’s got bags of charm and heart, as well as Paget Brewster, but you might spend your time wondering if you’re missing out on something. 

What have you been watching? Including Blackhat, 800 Words, Y Gwyll, Doctor Who and Continuum

25 September 2015 Rob Buckley 13 Comments

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.

And relax. It’s here. The Fall 2015-16 season is here. And I’ve got covered.

Elsewhere, I’ve reviewed all of this week’s new programmes in glorious detail:

Wow. Ain’t that a lot? I’m actually impressed with myself there. I’m about to be even more impressed: after the jump, I’ll be reviewing all this week’s regulars, too: 800 Words, The Bastard Executioner, Continuum, Doctor Who, Y Gwyll and You’re The Worst.

But before I even get to those, I even found the time to watch a movie. It’s like I just fed 5,000 people with some cod in breadcrumbs, isn’t it?

Blackhat (2015) (iTunes)
Although to be honest, I wish I hadn’t. I love Michael Mann. Chris Hemsworth is great in Thor. But Michael Mann directing a movie about hacking in which Chris Hemsworth is the main hacker? Oh dear.

Still, that’s not the most oh dear thing about Blackhat – that would be the fact it’s basically a Chinese co-production in which Hemsworth and Mann are almost hitchhikers, tagging along for the ride. The plot is that the two Chinese leads (Leehom Wang, Wei Tang) who work for the benevolent Chinese police come over to the US after one of their power stations blows up to find out what they can from the man who engineered the malware that caused it: Wang’s former college roommate Hemsworth. He then has to track down criminals who may be almost anywhere in the world, with any target and any aim.

Mann does his best to both understand computer crime and make it interesting, but he’s no Sam Esmail and this is no Mr Robot. Without sufficient purchase on the material, Mann just goes through the motions. There’s a perfunctory romance between Tang and Hemsworth for no good reason. The merry band just fly from SE Asian country to country on sightseeing tours, turning up in the middle of beautiful looking locations for no genuinely good reason. And the story eventually sort of ends, not like Heat but like that episode of The Wire in which Omar gets attacked in prison. You barely know the film’s finished.

It looks beautiful, of course, given Mann’s presence. But it’s soporific, mildly propagandist, doesn’t know its material and almost never manages to excite.

Continue reading “What have you been watching? Including Blackhat, 800 Words, Y Gwyll, Doctor Who and Continuum”

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

18 September 2015 Rob Buckley 11 Comments

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”

What have you been watching? Including Narcos, Hand of God, You’re The Worst, The Last Ship and Impastor

11 September 2015 Rob Buckley 8 Comments

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.

Once again, we’re in that slightly fallow period between seasons, where almost nothing new has started yet and everything old has already finished or has only one episode left. That’s why most of this week’s reviews have been previews:

Fortunately, though, there’s not been nothing at all on and after the jump, I’ll look at the few regulars that are still on or that have just returned: Hand of God, Impastor, The Last Ship and You’re The Worst.

But the big holes in the viewing schedule that are still to be filled meant that I’ve actually been able to watch a whole new series in one go:

Narcos (Netflix)
I didn’t quite manage to watch it in one weekend, but since tassiekev recommended it last week, I made a start on it on Friday and had got through all 10 episodes by Tuesday.

Slipping under most people’s radars like so many Cessnas heading into Miami from Colombia during the 1980s, Narcos is a dramatisation of the story of Pablo Escabar’s reign as a drugs lord, starting from the late 1970s when he sees the potential in exporting new drug cocaine into the US before making its way through the events of the 80s and early 90s that rocked Colombia and eventually other parts of the world.

Initially, the show feels like GoodFellas, with DEA agent Boyd Holbrook providing a helpful voiceover that’s at times comedic. But while it does occasionally jump around in time, the show quickly becomes almost documentary-like, with little of the standard tropes of drama: there’s no strong narrative drive, no “good guys win, bad guys lose” and no themes illustrated by suitably balanced sceens.

Instead, Narcos retells the events in all the real-world’s messiness, showing just how much of a war was going on in Colombia in the 80s, a war almost reminiscent of the IRA’s similar campaigns in England at the time. Perhaps the show’s only real directorial flourish is the use of the original photographs and footage from events, rather than mock-ups featuring the actors, whenever they appear in the story. And Holbrook’s narration quickly becomes hardened and surprisingly anti-Reagan for a show that’s made in a time when half of America seemingly reveres the former president in the same way they revere Jesus.

Like a lot of other Netflix shows (eg House of Cards, Marco Polo, Daredevil), Narcos revolves around one absolutely stonking central performance – in this case, Wagner Moura, who plays Escobar. It’s a mesmerising affair that manages to convey Escobar’s friendliness, ambitions and his capability for extreme violence that makes him seem like a modern day Kublai Khan, despite being perpetually clad in tatty shirt and trainers.

What’s even more extraordinary about Moura’s performance is this is effectively Netflix’s first Spanish language show, with about 80% of the dialogue in Spanish, and Moura is Brazilian and didn’t speak any Spanish until six months before production started. The show’s come in for some criticism from Colombians, because despite being lavishly shot in Colombia and the rest of the cast being almost universally Spanish speakers, they’re either not Colombian or not doing the right accents. Nevertheless, it’s to Netflix’s credit that it’s making something so heavily subtitled because the story demands it.

With Pedro Pascal (Game of Thrones)’s more nuanced DEA agent providing a strong counterpoint to both Holbrook and Moura, this is Netflix’s best new show in quite some time and heartily recommended. Season two’s already been commissioned, in case you were worried.

Continue reading “What have you been watching? Including Narcos, Hand of God, You’re The Worst, The Last Ship and Impastor”