Category Archives: Television

Series premiere: Northern Rescue

The PolyBlog
September 26 2019

I tripped over a “new” show called Northern Rescue on CBC, and I thought it was a new “Canadian” show, which more often than not translates as “crappy sub-par show” made on a shoestring budget but meeting Canadian-content rules. Okay, a slight exaggeration. But the number of Canadian shows that I like are few and far between. The ones that are somehow popular are the ones I usually think are embarrassingly bad. The basic premise is a Boston Search and Rescue specialist moves his three kids back to his small hometown to take a SAR job after his wife dies. The job offer is attractive, and his sister-in-law also lives there, so there will be family around. It’s not that unusual a premise, lots of shows have a “post-spouse-death” premise, and I wasn’t expecting much.

Except it isn’t the CBC show I thought it was, it’s actually a Netflix show. Ten episodes locked and loaded. I was fully expecting the show to basically open post-funeral or maybe mid-funeral. Instead, Michelle Nolden (Republic of Doyle) plays the wife who collapses while making dinner, a reaction to a flu bug. Nope, Stage 4 cancer, and death follows shortly thereafter. But the show takes almost 20 minutes to get to the post-funeral stage. Almost half the first episode is pre-death, and I was quite surprised. It’s handled mostly okay, although there is a scene between the mother and oldest daughter that is ridiculously bad. Strike One for me.

William Baldwin plays the father, and he’s fine. I don’t have high expectations for him, his range is limited, but it’s fine for what he needs to do. The three kids are another story.

The oldest daughter is a mess, acting rebellious, getting high, blah blah blah, and as she hints at herself, it started before Mom got sick. There’s a foreshadowing that she might be pregnant, but hard to tell. She basically says there is other stuff going on, but doesn’t elaborate, and the frequent scenes with her acting self-centred and rebellious are terrible. Some of the worst acting I’ve ever seen…wait, maybe it IS a CBC show. The middle child, a son, has almost no presence. There is ONE scene where he kisses a girl who has had a crush on him for years. And the youngest, a girl, who is an academic wunderkind, is now screwing up math tests. The other two kids aren’t bad, but the oldest is enough for it to be Strike Two for me.

John (the father) thinks moving to the small town might be the thing they need to start over and nothing is explored in the episode about the fact that it is actually the idea of the sister-in-law. Played by Kathleen Robertson, I had trouble picturing her. Even reading the CBC bio, I still wasn’t seeing where I knew her from…I knew some of the roles, but nothing was gelling. A trip over to IMDB popped out the truth — she was Clare on Beverly Hills, 90210 a long time ago. I didn’t watch it much, but I at least recognized her. She’s fine in the episode, not a lot for her character to do, but the promotional materials talk about how she wants a family of her own. Oh, crap. Does that mean there’s going to be weird stuff with her and the father? Her ex-brother-in-law? Ewwww.

Anyway, the job is open, he gets the offer, and he calls a family meeting to discuss it. And this is where Strike 3 comes in for me. We saw 16 minutes of Mom preparing for death. We saw another 10+ dealing with the aftermath, but fairly sparse treatment. And then, the discussion with the kids lasts about 2 minutes. That’s it, that’s all. No tearful goodbyes, no pangs of anxiety, nothing. The kids aren’t happy, but well, they’re going. Wait…what? How do we see everything else and NOTHING from any of them about losing their entire lives in the blink of an eye, six weeks after they lose their Mom. WTF? Definitely Strike Three. If that had been the first 3 minutes, sure, why not. But thrown in the middle of a long episode that dwells on everything else? Nope, I’m out.

I have no idea what balance they were going for, but whatever it was, they missed. I still have to predict cancellation, my original prediction.

Series premiere: Unbelievable

The PolyBlog
September 26 2019

I have to confess a bias going into watching this mini-series. First, I’m male. That one’s a bit obvious. Second, I’m jaded about rape stories that tell the same tale over and over again without any real nuancing or adding anything new to the narrative. An insight we haven’t seen before, perhaps. Without it, it seems exploitative and derivative to me. More “ripped from the headlines” tabloidism than a real attempt at worthwhile television.

The quick opening for the mini-series Unbelievable establishes the basis for the eight-episode arc of a 16-year-old woman living at an apartment complex for at-risk youth who wakes up one night to find a man in a ski mask with a knife in her room. She’s raped, and afterwards, calls a strong ex-foster mom to come help her; several contacts later, and the police are called. The first police officer on the scene interviews her to get all the details and she’s remote, detached as she recites the details, slowly and without any volunteering of info. Her foster mom is present. Two detectives show up, interview her again, and again, she is remote and detached through the recitation. They do a rape kit at the hospital, she tells some friends and family, and a group therapy session, and then calls another ex-foster mom who comforts her with warm emotion and support. Meanwhile, the police find almost no physical evidence.

Without being too cold and clinical, there is nothing in the story up to this point that is new or different. It is, for wont of a better term, retreading almost every episode of L&O: SVU and has been seen in news stories or cop shows dozens of times. And it was my main worry with the show…the story is tragic, it’s far too common, and given the state of the justice system for dealing with sexual assaults, the rest of the tale could be rather linear. While the show is a mini-series, not a series, and thus not an option for “renewal”, there was also nothing up to this point that would make it compelling television.

For the remaining part of the episode, there are four elements that affect watchability of the series. First, in favour, there is an extended scene at the hospital as she goes through the examination. Most shows skip over this pretty fast, no lingering, and it is often shown more in “hinting” than in exposition. Not this show. They show the explanations from the nurse, the requirement to repeat everything, and then some of the medical stuff. Dye on her genitals looking for damaged tissue. Antibiotics in case of STDs. A morning after pill in case of pregnancy. The nurses are portrayed a bit smug and insensitive, but the overall hospital visit is a strong addition.

Second, while most stories assume it is the insensitive man who dismisses the victim’s story, they went in a different direction here, with the detectives starting to question the veracity of her story mainly because the ex-foster mother suggests the victim isn’t acting the way the mother thinks she should — and suggests maybe she made it up for attention. This starts a snowball for an almost self-fulfilling prophecy where absence of evidence leads them to conclude evidence of absence. So she gives up, recants to avoid painfully retelling the story again and again. She doesn’t want to but she can’t take it anymore.

Both are relatively strong elements that argue in favour of watching the show. But two elements go the opposite way. As mentioned above, the victim plays the role very detached and remote. This isn’t accidental, it is to show the arc, but it makes it harder to connect with her character. However, a bigger problem is that the smug and insensitive nurse portrayal is nothing compared to the ham-fisted way in which the detectives switch to neanderthal status, her friends all turn against her, and one of her close friends is hurt because she made up part of the story with him (embellishing it a bit for attention). While anyone watching it can easily see that she’s coping through deflection and denial, nobody else can — including the health system professionals involved. Really? A bit amateurish and lacking in nuance.

While my initial worries that there would be nothing new in the story were unfounded, the amateurish acting and character development for the secondary and tertiary characters make it almost unwatchable. The big change for the rest of the mini-series is the addition of two female detectives to investigate the case, and hopefully they will be fully realized characters rather than caricatures.

But I confess I won’t know. I’m out. Not enough “new” to keep watching.

Series premiere: The I-Land

The PolyBlog
September 25 2019

Everytime a new show comes out where something “weird” happens at the beginning with no explanation, everyone tries to compare the show to Lost. Personally, I don’t care if it is better or worse, similar or different, whatever. I just care if the show works. The I-Land premiered this month on NetFlix and was immediately declared a Lost wannabe. Which would be hard to discount in most cases — a bunch of individuals stranded on an island? Heck, even the show itself jokes about the comparisons by suggesting maybe they survived a plane crash.

But for me, the real question is if the show works. The premise is ten people waking up on an island with amnesia — they have no memory of who they are or where they came from, or how they got to the island. The show focuses initially on the one woman waking up with her hand on a conch shell. Which she immediately uses to blow as a horn to attract attention. And that was strike one for me. She has NO idea who she is, where she is, but blowing a conch shell is the first thing she does? Really?

As the show progresses, you see that she’s not alone. Another woman comes from down the island and she too woke up with something nearby — a knife. A third person, a man, comes running down the beach. Now, just to be clear, both of these people were NOT within her line of sight down the beach when she started blowing the conch shell, she couldn’t see anyone. The camera pans and you find others down the beach slowly waking up, but you see that they all seem relatively evenly spaced and that they are all wearing relatively the same clothes. Dun dun dun.

Presumably they have all watched Survivor or even Lost maybe (!), but they start organizing themselves to make a plea for help in the sand, move some logs so they have somewhere to sit, etc. And the first woman extrapolates that if she woke up with a shell, and the other woman woke up with a knife, what did others have? They find all sorts of things — one at each site, including a first aid kit, etc. One woman finds a book called The Mysterious Island, and she basically throws it away. That was strike two for me.

As the episode moves on, there’s drama and conflict, fighting and assaults, a man gets attacked by a shark, blah blah blah. They find him on the beach the next morning, still alive but wounded, work to save him. Meanwhile, the two geekiest of the group have been huddling and doing math stuff. They measure how far apart all the bodies were and come to the conclusion they were all 39 steps apart. Dun dun dun. Furthermore, one of the geeks multiplies 39 by the number of people and then walks that distance to the end of the beach where they find a sign that says FIND YOUR WAY BACK. Mind blown, right?

No, not really. More like strike three for me. First, there’s no reason to do that math at all. Maybe doing a larger search grid around each of the ten sites or something, but multiplying them together to see where it all leads at the end? Hardly. If they had said they wanted to see if there was anything at increments of 39 AND they found something, I would have said “sure, why not”. But not a decision to specifically try the factor of the two. Second, however, much more important to me is that it was inconsistent with the opening. The people WEREN’T all 39 steps apart. Remember when she woke up? She couldn’t see ANYONE. And the two she did meet came running or walking from farther away — far enough she had to WAVE to them. Plus, a bunch of them were clustered together, no more than about 20 feet apart from each other. Certainly not 39 steps. While they at least acknowledge that there is a movie by that name, and then tell you that it isn’t related, they never explain that not everyone WAS that far away.

So let me get this straight. They want us to tune in to figure out the mystery and they can’t even get the basic logic right themselves? No reason to blow the conch shell, but she does; one of them finds a book called the Mysterious Island and she’s ON A MYSTERIOUS ISLAND, and she throws it away without looking at it or flagging for someone else; and they can’t even get the first clue’s explanation right. It was like the people who filmed the opening didn’t know where the script was going and thus didn’t set it up properly.

Sorry, but I’m out. And I’m sticking with my initial prediction of cancellation. I’m not even going to bother asking how nobody noticed they’re all relatively physically fit (no fatties among them), why there are two psychos in the group, or failing to wonder if one of them really still has their memory and is a plant of some sort. Nor am I even going to bother reviewing the basic acting talents on display.

Series premiere: Bluff City Law

The PolyBlog
September 25 2019

I want to see the words “Jimmy Smits” and “successful show” in the same sentence, and not have it be historical flashback. I really do. I like him. I would love for him to find a show where he is actually fighting for something without seeming like a patronizing, sanctimonious do-gooder. I want to see some edge and maybe a little bit of hunger in his character.  And when I saw that he was going to be in a law show, I had hopes, but no, he’s the successful boss and it is about him convincing his daughter to come back to the firm and work with him again, three years after she left. My reaction was the same one I’ve had to most of his outings — I predicted cancellation.

Then the hype machine broke in. NBC has been hyping this show out the wazoo. Bluff City Law. Jimmy’s a lawyer! Wow! And he has a lawyer daughter! Wow! And they’re going to fight for their clients against big companies! Wow! Umm, no. In fact, I have often somewhat cynically predicted and been proven right that the more the show is hyped, the worse it is. Bluff City Law doesn’t break that trend.

Seven minutes. Seven whole minutes, with credits, for the show to start, introduce the daughter as a successful defender of corporate America, show she’s ruthless, show she doesn’t get along with her father, kill off the mother to a stroke, reunite the family for a house wake/eulogy, and convince the daughter to rejoin the firm. SEVEN MINUTES. And it wasn’t even a GOOD seven minutes. It pretty much sucked eggs. Every cliché in the book. I swear someone said “make sure the cast is diverse” and they went to town on it like there’s no tomorrow. Somewhere in minute 9 they introduced a woman who works at the law firm and then subtly (i.e., like a sledgehammer) asked her a bad segue question about her AND HER WIFE. Yep, we GET IT. You have a diverse cast to make up for a lead actress who looks like a pale daughter of Casper the Friendly Ghost, not a former Latino hunk du jour. And let’s just skip over the HUGE RIFT between daughter and father that has kept them separated for a whopping THREE YEARS. That’s not a rift, it’s like they’re on a break. 

So let’s break it down. The three options to make this show work are:

A. Interesting cases — the first case is about a chemical company selling a product that causes cancer. Wow, that’s literally the case of the week on 100s of shows. And they LEAD with that? Okaaaay. Let’s see, where’s the “hidden scientist”? Oh, there they are. Right on cue. The only thing that was interesting was the question in the court room when the hidden scientist testified. It was pretty good. One line in 42 minutes.

B. Tension — Dad and Daughter? Can barely see it. It certainly isn’t believable, mostly because the daughter isn’t believable. Add in tension with coworkers that GOES nowhere, including other lawyers who are displaced by the daughter’s arrival, and you still have nothing. Ex-husband is around too. Yawn. The ONLY thing that works is a sub-plot where another lawyer is delving into a criminal case that seems to have some interesting bits to it. But there’s no tension with it.

C. Acting — Jimmy’s good, but he’s playing the same character he’s tried repeatedly before with little success. There’s no hunger in his character. The last time he delivered a punchy performance was in the last season of West Wing where he was broke, the campaign was faltering, and he went to a TV station to record an advertising spot, which he did off the cuff, and it was raw, and intense, and powerful. I didn’t think Jimmy had it in him, but he did. Nothing even close to that here.

Caitlin McGee plays the daughter, and while I’ve seen her in some small roles, I mostly have seen her in ADs this summer for the show. And there is no fire within. I was bored the whole time.

Hard to know which of the other characters are going to be worth knowing, except the one lawyer, played by Barry Sloane. I kept wondering where I had seen him before, and I *never* would have come up with Revenge. I don’t know if his character will go anywhere.

But it all doesn’t matter because I won’t be watching. And I’m betting nobody else will be either. CANCELLATION, joining all the other shows about lawyers coming back to their hometown to fight for the little guy.

Series premiere: Pennyworth

The PolyBlog
September 23 2019

The various Batman series, film or TV, have rarely given his butler, Alfred Pennyworth much to do. He occasionally has a fun presence, but rarely do you see him in any action role. The series Gotham changed that considerably, with the character helping teach Bruce to fight as well as getting in numerous scraps and fisticuffs himself, building up his backstory of being a former soldier, etc. So it was perhaps almost inevitable that someone would eventually want to build that story up even more.

And yet would anyone really care? The backstory for someone destined to be a secondary or tertiary character in a larger story arc? When I saw the premise for the show, my thought was “pffft” and I predicted cancellation. Now that I’ve seen the opening episode, I am not so sure. 

The premise is that Alfred Pennyworth, former SAS officer who is newly released from service to the Queen, has started his own security company, wanting to be his own man. It’s “early days” in his business so far, so he’s working as a bouncer at a club that looks a lot like an old-fashioned speak-easy. He intervenes to help a patron one night, and it turns out the patron is one Thomas Wayne. Yep, Bruce’s father, long before Bruce is a gleam in the eye. Thomas is working as a supposed forensic accountant, but it’s more light cover than convincing. Apparently, something is happening in British politics, someone told Thomas, and the people involved want to stop Thomas from stopping them. They attempt to kill Wayne, and in the surviving wreckage, they find Pennyworth’s business card. One thing leads to another, and several kidnappings later, Pennyworth is set on a collision course with the Raven Society who are trying to overthrow the government in the name of the Queen, whether she agrees or not.

Jack Bannon plays Pennyworth, and while I haven’t seen him in anything before, he has really strong presence. Despite the fact that he looks like he should be in a boy band. There are two or three scenes where you see his body and face shift from normal mode to action, and it is fascinating to see it click in. One scene in particular, he’s talking to a couple of guys in a club, one is being a bit rude and insulting, and Pennyworth switches to action mode. His line is simple, “Don’t do that”, but it drops like ice. Awesome job, and gave me real love for the episode. I don’t know that the character has anything to do with Batman’s Alfred, but if you just took him as a soldier newly released, the story works fine.

Ben Aldridge plays Thomas Wayne, and I haven’t seen him in much before. He was in Stan Lee’s Lucky Man but not a role I particularly remember. But he has a lively spirit that is fun to see. Youthful, softer than Alfred, seems almost naive at times. Good balance between the two.

Pennyworth starts dating a woman named Esme from the club, and he’s definitely smitten. Esme is played by Emma Corrin, and while a relatively new face, she is going to break big this year. She has amazing presence in the pilot…she reminds me a bit of Jodie Foster in some ways, and even Franka Potente, which is a weird mix, I assure you. Definite presence, far more so in a couple of early scenes and then at the end. She’s also set to play Princess Diana in The Crown, and I think she’s going to rock it.

After those three, there are various sundry characters — two soldier mates of Alfred’s, his parents, miscellaneous bad guys, but it is those three that will make or break the series.

It has a bit of James Bond qualities in it, maybe a touch of Kingsman. But does it have enough to keep it alive? I’m going to keep the same prediction — cancellation. Which is unfortunate for me, as I really liked the premiere.