Dinosaurs on a Spaceship (Review)

Posted in British Shows on American TV, Reviews with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 15, 2012 by Tom Steward

In the spirit of writing posts that have little or nothing to do with the theme of this blog we submit for your disapproval a review of a pleasingly throwaway episode of Doctor Who which despite its self-conscious tone of inconsequential fun-a take-it-or-leave-it proposition made abundantly clear by the Ronseal title ‘Dinosaurs on a Spaceship’-has been lambasted by fans as infantile. Labelled an unfunny, tonally confused mess, the second episode of the new season of Doctor Who is in fact a refreshingly straightforward piece of storytelling with a number of fine performances from a top-notch cast and some spot-on characterisation.

It does exactly what it says on the tin!

For the record, when it comes to family entertainment I’m far fonder of efforts that package heavyweight ideas and adult themes with fun and simplicity than those which adopt a portentous and ambiguous style and tone which ignores the majority of its audience base. This is why family movies The Wizard of Oz and Babe are such enduring classics. They have profound things to say about adolescence and animal rights (respectively, although you shouldn’t glue wings to a monkey) but deliver them with a lightness of touch. It’s also why their self-consciously darkened sequels Return to Oz and Babe: Pig in the City are artistic failures. Disturbing and inappropriate for children, these movies address the serious issues of adult life head-on without regard for how young viewers react to or understand them. As an institutional mongrel straddling the BBC’s drama, children’s and light entertainment departments, Doctor Who has often struggled to know where to draw the line on adult content.

Looks fun, doesn’t it?

Doctor Who has always been the scourge of conservative parents and campaigners who claim that it broadcasts material unsuitable for children. Generally, though, the programme has been pretty responsible on this count, erring on the thrilling and exciting side of horror without any of the lingering mental scars. What’s more, when it blundered in the 1970s and 1980s with unacceptable levels of physical violence, producers had the good sense to revert to stories that played up the light-hearted and comedic side of the programme for a while. That said, the first time I’ve ever thought that the show had gone too far was last year’s ‘The Almost People’ in a scene showing Amy giving birth while imprisoned in a coffin-like capsule. The sheer visceral horror could only alarm young women about what would happen to their bodies in adulthood. It irresponsibility pursued shock value without giving children guidance on how to interpret what was happening.

Adult body horror in a children’s TV show

It’s no surprise then that an episode which makes good on Doctor Who’s commitment to its younger viewers has been added to this year’s run, or that it works so well. Chris Chibnall’s ‘Dinosaurs on a Spaceship’ opens with a time-shifting montage familiar from Steven Moffat’s episodes but while the latter writer uses this technique to convolute the storyline, the former’s intentions are to suggest whirlwind adventure. It also glosses over what is a satisfyingly linear narrative structure, an episode purposefully striding to its conclusion that makes the best of its simple story by gradually unfolding mysteries like a detective novel and maintaining the breakneck pace of the fixed timeframe. Manichean character contrasts abound: macho chauvinist/female supremacist, righteous hero/amoral villain, emotionally reserved father/compassionate son. This superficiality allow the characters to be quickly absorbed into the action-packed storyline and does a good job of orienting younger viewers in what to feel about the characters. But in working through these stark oppositions, a thoughtful message emerges that extreme viewpoints should be eschewed in favour of tolerance and compromise.

The gang

The gang

The comedy of his episode succeeds more than in previous attempts as humour derives effortlessly from character rather than being pasted in as anomalous gags and set-pieces. It lies in Brian (Mark) Williams’ passive-aggressive chastising of his son’s lack of DIY masculinity and relatable rendition of fathers’ eccentric habits. It is in the oblivious taboo-breaking misogyny of Rupert Graves’ big game hunter and our unnerving attraction to the politically incorrect male heroes of old. Even the incompetent robot double act (voiced by David Mitchell and Robert Webb) which smacks of extraneous vaudeville makes shtick out of their incongruous personalities not just their funny voices. Making characters’ actions easier to understand conversely makes them more authentic rather than one-dimensional. Rather than inject forced notes of pacifism and make him apologise for causing suffering, The Doctor here is allowed to destroy an evil enemy at the cost of life (an animal’s at that!) without the usual dismay and remorse that writers think makes him seem more complex but in fact insults viewers’ intelligence. And villain Solomon (David Bradley) oddly seems more genuinely menacing the more of a caricature of unrestrained capitalism he becomes.

Better than the Empire State Building

But there’s no doubt that what truly makes this episode excel is the performances. Mark Williams‘ deadpan yet emotionally resonant portrayal of Rory’s father is hilarious, observant and poignant, simultaneously so in the penultimate image of Brian enjoying a flask coffee and lunchbox sandwich from Earth’s orbit. David Bradley’s classically styled posturing and vocal intonations held all the gravitas of a great theatrical villain but with the nuance and naturalism to make it credible for the small screen. Solomon’s material and sexual avarice, which struck a discordant note with many viewers, gave a welcome clarity to what should constitute pure evil in the world of Doctor Who. And crucially it did so without spoiling a rollicking good time.

 

 

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Reviewing The Situations

Posted in American TV (General), American TV Shows, Americans watching British TV, BiogTV, British Shows on American TV with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 10, 2012 by Tom Steward

Sitcoms were the first American TV shows I watched and they’re still the pasta and cheese (the middle-class vegetarian equivalent of ‘meat and potatoes’) of my viewing when I’m here. On this visit, the sitcoms I’ve been watching are concentrated around a handful of TV networks, each of which serves vastly different demographics and ends of the schedule. They mix old and new, let the new take care of the old, and make the old look new. They run the gamut from classic to forgettable, from bad to radical, and from breaking ground to shovelling shit. Here’s a quick rundown:

FX:


Though lacking the cache of original series shown on subscription channels HBO and Showtime, cable network FX has been home to many highly sophisticated, niche-taste TV dramas over the past decade such as The Shield and Sons of Anarchy. Recently there’s been an attempt to put their comedy in the same league. Carrying the banner is Louie, comedian Louie C.K.’s auteur sitcom, a show so completely devoid of story it makes Seinfeld look like a murder mystery. Opening with the most remarkably unremarkable title sequence in the history of television, each episode is a Venn diagram interlocking a seemingly aimless pair of vignettes which unfold at a quotidian pace and usually defy closure or resolution. I hit it on a brilliantly gag-heavy episode (the one with ‘palp’ for those in the know) but I can imagine it being extremely tough to get into on one of those occasions that it decides not to have a joke in it or turns the table and makes the joke that there isn’t a joke. But what is truly revolutionary about Louie is the visual imagination it brings to sitcom-a way of putting forward observation and emotion in the form of images and letting direction carry the comedy. While Louie attracts a hipster crowd by virtue of it sometimes paralleling a Richard Linklater movie and its brushing against (though also routinely mocking) urban cool, Elijah Wood star vehicle Wilfred is a cynical pander for an indie movie audience. It’s one of those sitcoms that is all concept-a man lives with a dog played by a man in a dog costume-without regards to how it flows week-to-week. To me, the difference betweenthis and a show-that-writes-itself like ALF is purely cosmetic. Just because stylistically it seems like something that would be in a Wes Anderson or Michel Gondry film doesn’t mean it’s interesting, just that it knows its demographic.

 

Remember when I used to star in movies with CGI?

PBS:

Launched in the late 1960s as a publicly-funded alternative to the network system, PBS frequently looks to the public service broadcasting in Britain-represented by the flagship British Broadcasting Corporation– as a mentor but also as a reliable source of programming. A number of US sitcoms like The Simpsons and King of the Hill have derived humour from the gap between the classy image of British television and the lowbrow British sitcoms shown on PBS which seem to tell a different story. This seems borne out by the popularity of Keeping up Appearances in the US, a farce about a working-class woman who effaces her past by moving to the suburbs but then repeatedly gets dragged back to her former life. As a window on British culture for Americans, it says a great deal about how class-obsessed we (still) are as a nation. It also presents a more rounded image of British life than most Americans know, one that includes the working classes and the poor, and with characters that resemble trailer trash and welfare slob stereotypes in the US. Despite this it’s a monotonous, catchphrasey affair where the jokes usually involve a woman falling over showing her bloomers. And thus it doesn’t say much for the nation’s tastes. Another favourite of PBS Sundays is As Time Goes By, a gentle and solid middle-aged love story distinguished by the calibre of its stars; British character actor extraordinaire Geoffrey Palmer and international film star Judy Dench. In contrast to Keeping up Appearances, it actually suggests that we’re rather good at crafting sitcoms and that the quality of British acting (even in a middle-of-the-road sitcom) is as good as the Americans would myth it. But it’s detrimental to the image of our country in the way it reinforces the idea that we’re a land that time forgot composed entirely of the upper middle-classes and the gentry (with an underclass of poachers who live in the woods). G and I were watching an episode from about 1992 and it was difficult to convince her that it was twenty years old. With sitcoms like this to go on, I imagine many Americans think we’re Brigadoon.

 

Timeless comedy…literally!

TV Land:

 

Where sitcoms go to die

TV Land is where sitcoms and their stars go to die. It’s a place where elderly sitcoms live out their days in back-to-back re-runs and a retirement community for ex-sitcom stars who are given original shows (which I am still convinced only exist as fake trailers and video pop-ups) to ease them into obscurity. Given the number of commercials which advertise emergency whistles and come with free gifts of large-print playing cards, the audience is not too far behind them. I’m prepared to put up with this morbid graveyard feel for the sake of one sitcom: The Dick Van Dyke Show. The best writing and acting ever witnessed in a sitcom (most TV for that matter) and an absolute revelation for those who only know Van Dyke as the world’s worst Londoner, a roller-skating geriatric nosey parker or a seal-rescue fantasist. Rob Petrie is the greatest sitcom character of all time, worth 50 Frasiers and 100 George Costanzas, and the inspiration for both. This snatch of dialogue says it all about how sublime this show is, even in its off-hand moments:

 

Laura: You’re a good man who makes bad puns.

 

Rob: I do not make bad puns. Now pass me the nutcracker, sweet.

 

Not even the hauntingly videographic commercials about botched vaginal mesh surgery could tear me away from writing that good.

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Asylum of The Daleks (Review)

Posted in British Shows on American TV, Uncategorized with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 8, 2012 by Tom Steward

An advantage of having a themed blog is that it challenges you to find suitable topics to talk about each week. A drawback is that you can’t talk about whatever you like. In some ways that defeats the point of blogging as the form is so conducive to a diary-like outpouring of what you want to say as it comes to you. So readers looking for a connection between my review of ‘Asylum of the Daleks’, the opener to the new season of Doctor Who, and this blog will have to be content with the knowledge that I watched it…in America.

The anticipation for ‘Asylum of the Daleks’ couldn’t have been higher. Not only had viewers waited 5 months longer than usual for the new season of Doctor Who to begin but the episode heralded the return (albeit from a bogus publicity-stunt hiatus) of the Daleks, the show’s lynchpin villains and one-time Beatlemania-emulating pop culture phenomena. Also, since the annual run of episodes has been cut in half for 2012, viewers watched the episode in trepidation of it constituting 1/6th of their Doctor Who fix this year. The close-season publicity for the series had also tantalized long-term fans of the show with staged, Abbey Road-style photographs of Dalek models stretching back to the 1960s, luring people into thinking that the episode would be a Dalek retrospective reflecting on how these Dyson sink-unblockers had figured in the series (or even British art and culture) in the past 49 years.

The Fab Four!

It all started very promisingly. Writer-producer Steven Moffat’s scripts for Doctor Who are often deeply flawed but he is adept at cold opens, as seen in the pre-title sequence of the 2011 Christmas Special which would have graced any Bond film. The teaser in which The Doctor and his companions are kidnapped from their times by Daleks and taken to their Parliament with a cryptic agenda was mouth-watering. But it also demonstrated a conspicuous whittling-down of extraneous dialogue (Moffat’s greatest weakness as a writer) in favour of imagistic storytelling, making the first 5 minutes of this effort eminently satisfying. The dialogue that remained was sparse and terrifying, especially in The Doctor’s opening exchange with an emptied-out, human-style Dalek on the mysteriously resurrected home planet Skaro, which effortlessly captured-and yet did not aggrandise-the cynicism and deep-seated resentment at the heart of Matt Smith’s portrayal of the central character.

Tough room!

As soon as the re-vamped credits-which managed in true digital-era BBC style to be simultaneously utilitarian and gaudy-ended, the problems began. Moffat seems to believe that to over-complicate something is to improve it, and the shock introduction of-and premature farewell to-The Doctor’s future companion (Jenna-Louise Coleman) was an ill-advised overegging of the narrative pudding, appropriately for an episode with a dairy-based leitmotif. It also completed unbalanced the episode, like Faustino Asprilla did to Newcastle (Google it, young’ns!). And here lies the problem with all the stories featuring classic villains since Moffat took over in 2010. The Daleks play second fiddle to the characters and their emotional dilemmas and all the potential of the set-up, in this case a planet inhabited by disturbed Daleks, is wasted. Contrary to the promo pictures, the episode had no respect for the Daleks or what they have meant to the show.

Hello new companion-Goodbye new companion!

The spectre hanging over the forthcoming departure of Amy and Rory (Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill) loomed larger after the first look at their replacement. It’s a dispiriting thought, especially as the most compelling moments of this episode revolved around Rory. Darvill has the alchemy to turn Moffat’s entry-level humour into comedy gold, exemplified in this episode as Rory attempts to make peace with a Dalek by returning what he assumes is its egg spawn. Without this kind of performance polish, Moffat’s half-witticisms are going to look pretty pointless in the future. And it’s not long before the terse force of the minimal dialogue gives way to the excruciating baby-talk that Moffat increasingly takes as his signature meter. Moffat even seems to have lost the knack of writing the domestic life of the Ponds, throwing a red-herring divorce in their way reminiscent of the water-treading ‘marriage trouble’ storylines given to couples in soap operas.

Those aren’t chickens!

But worse was to come. Now I’m well aware that Doctor Who has leant heavily on popular culture over the years to inform its storylines. In fact, some of the best stories-like Victorian-lit romp ‘The Talons of Weng-Chiang’-are pure pastiche. I’m also entirely cogniscent of the dearth of new ideas in Moffat’s scripts for the show since his first in 2005. There are, for example, none between ‘Blink’in 2007 and ‘The Wedding of River Song’in 2011. But the Martin Bashir-meets-Johan Hari level of plagiarism in this episode is just inexcusable. Inexcusable because it brazenly lifts the plot twist and visual imagery from Duncan Jones’ Source Code without acknowledgement, adaptation or play. And inexcusable because an intriguing original idea had been abandoned to make way for a wholly derivative one. We saw nothing of the implicitly terrifying concept of a planet ruled by rogue and maddened Daleks. Instead we got a few broken plungers.

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Where Feebles Dare!

Posted in American TV (General), American TV Shows, TV Dreams with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 4, 2012 by Tom Steward

Last week I was in Mexico and then I came back and got a little sick (and then I rode the cups again…). My body only started to resemble a burst gravy dam on Friday, the day after returning, but now I’m starting to think that I was in some sort of hallucinogenic fever state the night before because I could’ve sworn I saw Hollywood actor-director Clint Eastwood hold a conversation with a chair while an audience of magenta elephants cheered him on. This was supposed to be a blog about sitcoms but, hell, Thursday night at the Republic National Convention was supposed to be about Mitt Romney! So as live television scuppers the plans-and we can only hope the dreams-of a national political party, it also forces me to reconsider what to write about this week. The delays of being a human colander and a holiday weekend has meant that I’m getting to Eastwood’s RNC speech long after it passed seamlessly into the zeitgeist and changed our everyday language, so that words like ‘chair’ now have new dictionary definitions such as ‘surrogate for American Presidents who are the subject of a race hate campaign by lying idiots’. So I’m only really going to be adding to what’s already been said.

Firstly, I don’t hold with the rationale espoused by many commentators that the 82-year old Eastwood’s display was a by-product of an emergent senility. This man stars in, produces and directs an average of 3 movies a year, none of which look easy to make or star Adam Sandler. He still has his wits about him. Secondly, I’m not sure the performance was as leftfield or bizarre as some newscasters have made out. In the same way you can detect the John Ford and Sergio Leone influence in his many superb westerns, it’s easy to see what Clint was going for on the night. The delivery was reminiscent of the bashful stutter-shtick of James Stewart-an actor who held a few extreme views of his own-and the one-sided dialogue with the chair a homage to the actor’s performance alongside an imaginary rabbit in the classic comedy Harvey. There’s more than a touch of Bob Newhart’s try-and-guess-the-other-side conversation sketches in the way Clint’s responses to Banquo Obama would imply the absurd statements made by the unheard speaker, and cover for potential obscenities.

‘This is my friend Barack’   

No-one who’d seen any of the coverage from this convention could possibly be surprised at the vindictive and guttural tone of Clint’s personal attacks on Obama or felt any discontinuity between Eastwood’s portrayal of the President as a lowdown despot with the vocabulary of an Exorcist-child and the convention caricature of the Commander-in-Chief as a 21st Century black Capone running America as a racket with all the class of a divebar drunk. So why was Eastwood’s speech so remarkable and unusual? For my money, it’s because the debacle was shown live on TV. The Republicans had engineered their primetime line-up with Stalinesque precision; omitting delegates from the extreme wing of the party, bumping up the limited edition minority speakers to create a smokescreen of Republican diversity, and manufacturing (or more appropriately outsourcing) the image of Romney as a human male…largely by having his wife and five children attest to the existence of his sexual organs.

Mitt Romney: he does it with girls

The real-time collapse of this primetime-machine was a wonder to behold. As Eastwood entered against the video backdrop of a silhouetted still from The Outlaw Josey Wales which made Clint look like he has guns for fingers and what sounded like a Kenny G version of Ghost Riders, you’ll have never seen so many happy racists since the Rodney King tape went mail-order. Vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan appeared to have tears in his eyes like a childhood hero was at his birthday party. Within minutes of Eastwood’s live-TV re-make of Fight Club starting, Ryan looked like he’d stumbled upon Eastwood trying to make out with his mother in the kitchen while Clyde the Orang-utan ate his birthday cake. Only live TV can do that. What’s more, for a party intent on editing and re-writing the history the last 12 years of American politics, this was one event that could not be manipulated, because it was seen by millions all at the same time without stops. Eastwood gave an unspinnable speech and the Republicans just had to grin and bear it. And grin they did, and whoop, and egg. They too cannot now pretend they did not enjoy Clint’s despicable behaviour. We all saw you!

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Olympicks

Posted in American TV (General), American TV Shows, British Shows on American TV with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 20, 2012 by Tom Steward

In the last few weeks I’ve been viewing events in my country through a telescope. I don’t just mean that I’ve been watching from a distance but also that I’ve been seeing them filtered through another nation’s television. I’m speaking of course about NBC’s coverage of the London 2012 Olympics. In some ways it’s been a cultural revelation. It’s evident from how our ethnically mixed population was depicted in the coverage that the majority of Americans don’t recognise us as a land of diversity. This was demonstrated most strikingly when two Asian (our definition not yours, US readers) spectators-who to a native’s eyes were clearly British citizens-were picked out by the camera to signify the lengths people have travelled to get to the games. I never thought Dizzee Rascal’s presence at the opening ceremony needed an explanation but apparently-even in the post-Iris Elba era of US television-it does.

Black people in Britain: who knew?!

But this culturally out-of-touch tone to the coverage was not reserved for Brits alone. W. Kamau Bell’s comedy news show Totally Biased re-played some extraordinary footage of NBC’s Olympic anchorman Bob Costas rhapsodising about African-American gold medalist Gabby Douglas. Costas’ rhetoric made Douglas sound like a student at Little Rock in the 1950s and at a time when the demographic of young African-American girls includes the President’s children! Others in US TV were patently embarrassed about how NBC treated British culture and history. Jon Stewart’s Daily Show reported that an opening ceremony tribute to the victims of the July 7th London bombings was cut to make way for a Ryan Seacrest interview with Goldfinger-of-swimmers Michael Phelps. Insensitive, yes, but with such ceaseless spectacle it would have been difficult to know what to cut. I probably would have lost the 10 minutes of Mr. Bean dicking around to Vangelis, but that’s just me.

A fitting tribute to the dead?

Not that I’ve been particularly sensitive to the country hosting me. G wanted me to high-five every US Gold Medal, and why shouldn’t she? Team USA had some shit-hot performances this time round-well, if that kind of superlative commentary is good enough for NBC it’s good enough for little old me. It’s excruciatingly difficult to congratulate the USA for the same reason that people don’t generally root for the Empire in Star Wars or Man United in anything. It’s also hard to explain this without seeming spiteful, or a Communist. Lending my whooping voice to Team China simply because they threatened to topple the US in the medal stakes probably didn’t help my cause, especially when goading G about China overtaking the US in manufacturing. It might seem like post-imperial bitterness (also known as ‘Britishness’) but good things come out of rejecting the prevailing empire, the United States for one.

Go China!

Seeing the Olympics in America is a timely reminder that over here success is unquestionably a good thing. From what I’ve seen of the British media’s coverage of Olympics, ambivalence about the jingoism of commentary on Team GB’s medal victories began to seep in after a while. Some observers were perturbed about the propaganda uses of such rhetoric at a time of political failure while others, such as TV sports anchor Gary Lineker, vigorously defended the national media’s right to admire their athletes’ achievements. No such dilemma in the US. In fact, NBC coverage was so patriotic it even suggested that the USA helped other countries reach their Olympic glory. In a report on the rise of athletics in Grenada, it was heavily implied that the country couldn’t have won a medal in this sport were it not for the US’s intervention against Communism occupation forces in the 1980s.

Brought to you by the USA

In the same red, white and blue vein, I was struck by how little of the other countries competing I saw in NBC’s coverage, particularly in primetime slots. I realise each nation has to privilege its own participation but I expected an attempt at portraying a rounded view of the games, which never came. Isolationism is an accusation frequently levelled at US newscasting, so I suppose it shouldn’t come as a surprise. It certainly wasn’t surprising that the US won a gold medal in all the segments leading the coverage. Other notable tendencies of NBC Olympicasting included the pointless post-event interview in which reporters tried to brainwash the oxygen-deprived athletes with pre-prepared soundbytes which they were made to repeat,  as if they were victims of a lobotomy. Another was the Olympic-branded franchise of teaser trailers for NBC’s Fall schedule in which every cancellation-fodder sitcom was rendered in slow-motion as though prestige is somehow contagious.

Animal Practice: disqualified from the tournament

 

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