Tag Archives: fall

Series premiere: Doom Patrol

The PolyBlog
April 27 2019

There are a ton of superhero shows these days, almost an endless supply of DC and Marvel stories. People crave the hero that faces seemingly insurmountable obstacles, maybe an homage to their sense of wear and tear in their daily lives, that the obstacles they themselves face are insurmountable and it is nice to see good triumph over evil at least somewhere. Or it’s just predictable and therefore comforting.

Enter Doom Patrol. A little more along the lines of the darkness of Deadpool, but it is narrated as if it is a spoof on itself. Enter Charles Xavier-lite, albeit still in a wheelchair yet with hair, and four people he has tried to help adjust enough to have some sort of life. A soft spot to land after a horrendous event.

The main character at first is a race-car driver who seems to have been in a horrific car crash and the only thing that could be saved was his brain. So now he is in a metal robot suit. More Frankenstein than Iron Man. He is helped by a man wrapped in bandages from head to toe, an ex-test pilot for the military who went into near orbit and became inhabited by some strange alien energy cloud. And an ex-actress who became possessed by some sort of water spirit who turns into a melted mass of flesh when she gets nervous. Plus, finally, a girl with 64 different personalities in her, most of whom are rude as f***, and later you find out, can turn into a large flaming Torch-like girl.

Oh I wanted to like it based on the actors. Brendan Fraser plays Robotman. Sometimes good, sometimes annoying. The test pilot is played by Matt Bomer, who I really enjoy. Timothy Dalton plays the doctor, and don’t mind him. Diane Guerrero as Crazy Jane isn’t a draw, but I don’t mind her. And while I am not familiar with April Bowlby as elasti-girl, I really quite like her. Yet none of them are enough.

Bad acting, ridiculous narration, strange campy feel to it. More like you’re watching a 1950s spoof of something. It is almost unwatchable. With it being superheroes, and a bit of a Deadpool feel to it, I was initially thinking renewal. Now that I’ve seen it, I’m going with CANCELLATION.

Series premiere: The Passage

The PolyBlog
April 23 2019

When I first read about the show, The Passage, all I noted down was “secret medical facility with experimental drugs and a reluctant guinea pig”. I was NOT expecting the reluctant guinea pig to be a child nor was I expecting the medication to be creating vampires with the goal of immunity to disease with no bloodlust side effects.

The opening episode shows Dr. Tim Fanning becoming infected while looking for some 250-year-old man in the jungle who turns out to be a vampire who bites him. Dr. Fanning survives but is now a vampire. More experiments follow on deathrow inmates, and with each successive trial, they make more progress, until they realize part of the success is the age of the guinea pig. Hence, their desire to get a child to test. Enter a little girl whose mother ODs, and two mercs are hired to transport her to the facility. Except the one lost his daughter three years before (circumstances not explained, but he blames himself) and he starts bonding with her. He’s not sure what the doctors do to the patients, but he’s pretty sure it’s not good, and he decides to go rogue and NOT deliver her to the medical facility. Meanwhile, back at the vampire bin, the vamps are starting to communicate telepathically with the people around them through their dreams.

Lots of creepiness, and I confess I have more interest in vamps and medicine than I do something like The Walking Dead, but it’s a similar zeitgeist. Lurking in the background of the story is a potential global pandemic, and the hope is this research of immunity to disease could save everyone, if they can just stop the vampirism from joining the host.

The show has a pretty large cast — at least three patients (the original doctor, a young woman, and a new recruit); three doctors (a friend of the first doctor, the chief researcher, and a young scientist); two or three security people (the head of security plus his friend, the merc who goes rogue); the girl that they want to use; and the rogue merc’s ex-wife. Of the ten, a good number have had small parts in lots of shows over the years, but few have made impressions.

The rogue’s wife, though, named Dr. Lila Kyle in the show, is played by Emmanuelle Chriqui. I couldn’t place her, partly as she looks normal in the show and when I last saw her, she was a whackjob named Lorelei on the Mentalist. Oddly enough, one of the other supports, the second doctor named Dr. Jonas Lear is played by Henry Ian Cusick and he was also on the Mentalist (as Tommy Volker) although most people would recognize him from Lost.

But of course the two main people are the little girl, Amy, and the ex-soldier-turned-mercenary/agent, Brad. Amy is played by Saniyya Sidney and she has a fair amount of poise in the show (hard to tell how old the character is, but she plays way older so suspect she is actually older than the character). But I was surprised by the agent, Brad. He’s played by Mark-Paul Gosselaar. I thought he was awesome in Pitch a couple of years ago as an aging ball-player; okay as Bash on Franklin & Bash; and I am in denial that he was ever Zack Morris on Saved by the Bell. He does a fantastic job here, and for him alone, I would love to predict renewal.

But any show that puts a child in danger to move their plot along is way too sketchy and desperate for me. I’m going to go with CANCELLATION, although I liked the first episode. Not enough for me to watch, but I liked it.

Series premiere: Deadly Class

The PolyBlog
April 23 2019

Okay then. Well. I watched the premiere episode of Deadly Class. And well. Hmm.

How do you review a show that is a cross between Deadpool and The Breakfast Club, with no preppies or jocks, just the rebels and the assassins?

Ostensibly, the show is about a school for kids to become assassins. I don’t know why I expected a slightly lighter touch, maybe like Kingsman or Deadpool, or a Hogwarts rip-off where everyone’s a Slytherin. Nope, it’s dark, it’s moody, it’s all the problems of being a new kid in a tough high school except everyone’s in a gang capable of killing you if it wasn’t against the rules. Although some of the rules are more like guidelines.

Enter the main character, Marcus, who is rumoured to have burned down an orphanage with 12 people inside. On the run from the police, with nowhere to go, he is offered a place to stay at a secret school. Master Lin, head of the school for the Deadly Arts, wants to give him a home and a purpose, or at least train him not to be prey. The opening scene shows a history class talking about WWI starting with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and when someone passes a note in class to the new boy (Marcus), Master Lin breaks her nose with his walking stick and continues on with the lesson. This is not your typical high school, obviously. The rest of the episode is him hooking up with the unaffiliated students, trying to find his way through the hierarchy without getting killed his first day, and working on his first assignment — to kill someone who should be killed, hide the evidence, and provide proof.

Marcus is played by Benjamin Wadsworth and he’s a bit uneven in the episode, ranging from wide-eyed scared kid to tough guy who will stand up to anyone. Decent but hardly great acting. Master Lin is played by Benedict Wong, and if he ever leaves behind the role of being the Inscrutable Asian, I’ll find out if he can act. Adequate but not earth-shattering.

Other students pop up to keep life interesting — Saya, a Yakuza kid; Petra, unaligned goth chick; Maria, a gangbanger’s girlfriend; Willie, a pacifist hiding in the school; and Billy, a weird possibly gay kid, who is willing to align with anyone who would take him. All of them are decent actors, none of them are given much to do.

Again, I have no idea how to rate the show. I liked it, but it is pretty dark and confused. I would not want to bet on renewal though, so I’ll go with the original prediction of CANCELLATION.

Series premiere: The Kominsky Method

The PolyBlog
April 22 2019

When I saw that there was a new show about an acting coach, my first reaction was “meh”. Then I saw it had Alan Arkin and Michael Douglas and I thought, “Hmm, now there’s some casting.” I predicted RENEWAL on pedigree, and I watched the first episode tonight. It premiered back in November, and so my revised prediction after watching is a bit biased. I already knew that critics loved it. I have no idea the actual ratings, but it has some really good buzz.

It’s awesome, and I say that with only one caveat that I’ll come to at the end. Michael Douglas does a fabulous job looking like a broken-down actor more than a few years past his prime, and Alan Arkin is his agent. Both do an amazing job just “living” in the character. It’s quiet, it’s subtle, it’s amazing to watch two pros together.

The agent, Norman, loses his wife in the episode and it seems to be setting up as a buddy relationship between the two, while the acting coach, Sandy, tries to teach a bunch of would-be actors how to improve. Sandy has a daughter who helps run the acting school, and there are a bunch of students serving as fodder for the episodes.

Yet it is the interactions between Sandy and Norman that sing all the way through the episode. Like I said, two pros just talking. They could be reading the phone book and it would be awesome.

So what’s my caveat? I didn’t care about the show. I admired the acting, great writing, but it didn’t resonate with me at all. I don’t know if it is the fact that just about everyone in the show is a Debbie Downer, or it was just this episode, but I felt like I was having energy sucked out of me. It was nice to see Douglas open up, grow as a character, but not enough to make me want to tune in again. Still, I’m going with RENEWAL. I just won’t be watching.

Series premiere: Boomerang

The PolyBlog
April 22 2019

I didn’t know much about Boomerang other than it was about someone working in advertising, and when it started, I noticed it was only sitcom length. And the opening scene was a REALLY bad commercial for some stupid soda, with ridiculous characters and ridiculous lines. I thought it must be a really unfunny comedy.

Nope, it’s a semi-drama about two young up and coming black advertising types who want to find their own way, even though both work for a big ad company that their parents built. I only say that because I watched the first episode, had almost no clue what the premise of the show was or where it was going, and had to read the IMDB description to figure it out. The dialogue was obvious, the show was short, and there was about as much content as a sitcom without the jokes.

They couldn’t even hold my interest at sitcom length. I’m not even going to bother reviewing it in more detail — my pick was originally CANCELLATION, and I see no reason to change it.