2016/17 TV Preview

Feature, TVSeptember 2, 2016August 26, 2016

New series

It’s been a long while since I can remember the last time I was as disinterested in the crop of new TV series that are set to start debuting on network TV this fall. Usually, there’s at least something I can look forward to, some series I can get excited about. But honestly this year looks like it’s going to be mostly a bust on the networks.

All that I’m looking forward to on network TV this fall is the comedy The Good Place on NBC starring Ted Danson and Kristen Bell about a woman that died and accidentally went to “the good place” rather than the hot one and Star Trek: Discovery on CBS. Though this sixth Trek TV series is set to only air once on CBS before it moves to their streaming service.

And there’s a few new shows I’m looking forward to on cable and streaming too, one of which is Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency is on BBC America and is based on the Douglas Adams (The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy) book of the same name. This new TV version of the Adams novel is being written and produced by Max Landis (Chronicle). On Netflix is Marvel’s Luke Cage that’s a sort’a spin-off of the Jessica Jones show about a man, Cage (Mike Colter) who’s super-strong with super-tough skin that brushes aside bullets who decides to clean up the streets of New York.

Unfortunately, there’s a lot more to scoff at on network TV next fall than to look forward to.

If the last few years the networks have been trying to turn as many come books into TV series as they could, then this year it’s all about turning once popular movies into TV series, or rebooting once popular past TV series into modern ones. Which I have no problem with, except that nothing I’ve seen from any of these new shows makes me thing that the networks have anything other than a bunch of creative duds on their hands.

Based on the movie of the same name, Time after Time on ABC features author H.G. Wells (Freddie Stroma) building a time machine in 1893 and traveling to present day 2016 New York City to find Jack the Ripper who’s also travelled to New York City in the same time machine. Convenient, ain’t it? If the movie version was a love story between Wells and a modern day woman, then the TV version seems to be setting the two up as a male/female investigative duo ala Castle, Blindspot, The Blacklist, etc., etc., etc.

Emerald City on NBC is the latest attempt at a network to create a TV version of the Wizard of Oz story that various channels have been trying to do since at least 2002. This version of the Oz story has Dorothy being swept off to a totally reimagined and harder version of Oz that seems to be a mashup of Game of Thrones and Once Upon a Time.

Fox has two shows based on movies set to premier this fall; The Exorcist and Lethal Weapon.

The Exorcist looks to be essentially the story of the novel/movie about a girl possessed by a demon — with a little bit of things like The Conjuring thrown in for good measure. My one question about The Exorcist is if the entire season will be about the girl’s possession, or if each episode will be about some other evil forces possessing some other poor souls? It doesn’t help matters that The Exorcist is the second “possession” series on TV with Outcast also about demonic forces already on Starz.

The TV version of Lethal Weapon seems to take the zanier elements of the movie from Martin Riggs (Clayne Crawford) having a death wish which makes him practically fearless and his older, world-weary partner Roger Murtaugh (Damon Wayans Sr.) who has to deal with Riggs and is “too old for this @#$%.” But somehow I’d imagine that if it does take the zanier elements of the Riggs character that it’s not going to use the movie version of him being suicidal and his substance abuse problems. You know, all the stuff that made him seem human and not some cartoon character.

Frequency on The CW, takes the elements of the 2000 movie where someone from the present, here Raimy Sullivan (Peyton List), is able to talk with their father from 20 years in the past via a ham radio. And because she’s able to send information to her father in the past she’s able to change events in her present. But if other time travel movies/TV series have taught us anything, it’s that meddling in the past will being about unintended consequences in the present/future. Time After Time should take note!

On CBS there’s a series based on the movie Training Day and one on the 1980s TV series MacGyver. Much like with the movie, the TV version of Training Day follows a young, idealistic police officer (Drew Van Acker) sent to spy on a seasoned, up to no good, “King Kong ain’t got !@#$ on me” detective (Bill Paxton).

MacGyver (Lucas Till) is a younger take on the character but with the overall concept of the original series — solving crimes/rescuing people/stopping terrorists by making whatever’s needed with what’s on hand to get the job done — intact. I was a huge fan of the original MacGyver as a kid, but somehow I doubt that this middle-aged man is going to be a fan of this new version of the show.

Returning series

If new series this year look crummy at least there’s a slew of great and interesting shows to look forward to.

Out of the gate early this fall are ABC comedies The Goldbergs, black-ish and Fresh off the Boat. While black-ish and Fresh off the Boat get a lot of good press for their diversity and somewhat controversial storylines, I’m more concerned with whether or not the shows are funny or not and these are.

The Goldbergs and black-ish return September 21 and Fresh off the Boat October 11.

I was a huge fan of the Starz series Ash vs Evil Dead right up until the very end of the final episode of the first season when things kind’a fell off the rails. That series deals with sad-sack Ash Williams (Bruce Campbell) who accidentally released evil spirits from the bound in human skin Book of the Dead. And in Ash vs Evil Dead it’s up to Ash and his two friends Pablo (Ray Santiago) and Kelly (Dana DeLorenzo) to figure out a way to undo what he’s done.

The show was everything I’d ever wanted in an Evil Dead TV series with over-the-top action, comedy and lots of gore. But that ending, it was so out of tone with what had come the previous nine episodes that it really frustrated me. That being said, I’m ready for loads more wise-cracking Ash in a second season of Ash vs Evil Dead which starts back up September 23. As long as they do some ‘splaining about that ending I’ll be back for more gore!

Existing alongside the current film franchises, the animated Star Wars Rebels on Disney XD tells the story of what was going on in the galaxy when the evil Empire was consolidating power and trying to wipe a nascent rebellion out. The stories of Rebels can be surprisingly deep and emotional for a series we already know the end to. Hint — none of the characters of Rebels show up in Star Wars Episode IV A New Hope so… Star Wars Rebels returns September 24.

The British series Black Mirror is available on Netflix October 11. This anthology series that originally debuted back in 2001 that’s a bit like The Twilight Zone but updated for modern day originally didn’t have a series run here in the US until Netflix picked it up a few years ago. And boy am I glad they did — this show about what happens when technology and all its uses goes wrong is consistently one of the best things on TV. Black Mirror can be so intense that I’ve yet to be able to go back and watch old episodes again even though I loved them the first time around.

The alterna-history The Man in the High Castle returns to Amazon Prime December 16. I was surprised as to just how interesting a show High Castle was since I’d never really been interested in any of the other original Prime series. Here, it’s an early 1960s where Germany and Japan won the second world war and now occupy most of the planet, the US included. These two superpowers are engaging in a Cold War of sorts with what’s left of the US set to be the battleground for World War III. Except that events in the first season of High Castle reveal that this may just be one reality of many, one where the allies won the war (ours) and others where Germany or the Soviets won it all.

Another sci-fi series The Expanse returns to SyFy this January. Based on the book series Leviathan Wakes, The Expanse takes place in a future where mankind has colonized most of the solar system and has brought along all of the problems we have here on the Earth like racism, war, disease, hunger… But all this pales in comparison to what starts happening when something’s released on an asteroid outpost that threatens to consume all of humanity.

Also sometime in January a fourth season of the PBS series Sherlock is set to return with, I’m assuming, four new episodes. The series has been on since 2011 and has so far aired a paltry 13 episodes of TV. They may be “paltry” but they’re also darn good!

And the show I’m looking forward to most returning next season is Better Call Saul on AMC, the third series about how lawyer Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk) goes from a guy trying to go good to someone who’d have people killed if it would earn him any money which is set to debut sometime early next year.

Direct Beam Comms #20

Comic Books, Direct Beam Comms, Feature, Movies, TVApril 24, 2016April 23, 2016

TV

Vinyl

The season finale of the first season of Vinyl aired on HBO last Sunday. Overall, I enjoyed this show about a New York record label in the early 1970s a lot, but thought this finale episode was a bit weak. Vinyl does suffer from a typical first season issue many dramas suffer from these days — mainly an overstuffed story with too many characters/things going on. Series that have been on the air a few years can be overstuffed, but since the viewer already has a grasp of who is who and what all stories are happening it isn’t an issue. But with series like Vinyl in their first seasons this can lead to confusion.

I felt like in Vinyl maybe 40% of the storylines could be cut in order to let other stories expand. I thought the story of record exec Richie (Bobby Cannavale) and his wife Devon (Olivia Wilde) and what they were going through this season was very interesting. And of Richie’s partners in the company played by J.C MacKenzie and Ray Romano was great too.

But there was so much other “stuff” going on from junior record execs to a murder to the mafia to women in a 1970s workplace to the emergence of rap music … that drew the focus away from these core stories.

And at the start of the season I thought that some of Vinyl would focus on the past, especially with Richie and his first musical discovery Lester (Ato Essandoh), where Lester’s future as a musician was cut short by Richie’s mob ties. But this didn’t seem to be a part of the show other than in an episode or two.

Unfortunately, much of the finale of Vinyl hinged on a murder Richie committed in the first episode and spent the other nine episodes dealing with and whether or not Richie’s musical discovery The Nasty Bits would ever be ready for a big musical showcase opening for The New York Dolls. The whole murder plot line seemed very out of place in a show like Vinyl and only served to bring in Richie’s drug/alcohol abuse and mob-ties into the story. Which could have easily been done by opening the show with Richie being a drug addicted alcoholic with mob ties rather than the addition of the murder storyline.

And as for the whole The Nasty Bits storyline… While I appreciate what they creators of Vinyl were trying to do by showing Richie was onto something with this proto-punk band, this storyline went on so long and was so barely interesting that by the end of Vinyl I didn’t care if The Nasty Bits scored a big hit or fell apart and disbanded at the end of the show.

(I might be in the minority but I did greatly enjoyed actors playing real-life musicians in the show like David Bowie and Elvis and the psychedelic dreamlike segues of other actors as famous musicians miming songs too.)

Overall first season: B Season one final episode “Alibi”: C-

Better Call Saul

If the first season finale of Vinyl was a bit of a letdown, the second season finale of Better Call Saul was quite the opposite — it was wonderful. This prequel to Breaking Bad which has never been too beholden to that progenitor series has cut its own path right from the very first episode.

The second season finds a pre-Saul Goodman Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk) accepting his dream job at a large law firm, and getting everything he’s ever dreamed of or worked for like a huge signing bonus, a fancy car and condo too. Yet even with all this Jimmy’s still not quite able to shake his streak of being one step above a con man. Be it filming and airing a TV commercial without the knowledge of his bosses or grifting people in bars with his girlfriend Kim (Rhea Seehorn) even if it’s all for fun.

Whereas most dramas these days are about high stakes — Stop the zombies before they overrun our settlement! Find the murderer before the end of the episode! — instead, Better Call Saul is the master of the low-stakes. Be it Jimmy trying get his brother Chuck’s (Michael McKean) respect even if Chuck has absolutely no respect for Jimmy, trying to start a fledgling law firm or keep out of hot water with his girlfriend.

The stories of Better Call Saul are barely newsworthy, or if they’re newsworthy at all they’re on the back page of the local paper. Which in an era of dramas that hype the impossible and go bigger and bigger with their plots each season is a breath of fresh air.

The stakes do get a bit high for another Breaking Bad alum Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks) who’s living off a police officer’s pension and is trying to make ends meet as a parking lot attendant. Which is fine except that when his daughter in-law needs money to move to a safer neighborhood, Ehrmantraut starts down the path of a life of crime in order to make some fast cash. Much of Ehrmantraut’s later storyline this season dealt with him finding ways to not kill people yet still be able to pocket extra cash.

I get the sense that when the proverbial crap does hit the fan, when Jimmy does finally “break bad” and becomes Saul Goodman and Mike does finally cross over to the dark-side of murder, that things will change for these characters and the show as a whole.

Which I personally love — I have no interest in shows that stay the same year after year. Give me story change or give me my remote!

Grade: A+

The Last Panthers

Aliens 30th Anniversary: The Original Comics Series

This UK/French series is currently airing on Sundance here in the US. It’s an interesting show about the criminals who pull off a diamond heist that goes wrong and escape across Europe and the police and insurance investigators, the main one played by Samantha Morton, chasing them.

Watching the first episode I was struck as to just how much stuff happens from an intricately planned heist that involved setting cars on fire and parkour jumps from building to building to locations in France and Bulgaria and Serbia.

There was so much stuff going on that what happened in the first episode was almost enough to keep another series in story for an entire season.

Grade: C+

Comics

Aliens 30th Anniversary: The Original Comics Series

Collecting the original 1988 Dark Horse black and white Aliens series is the hardback Aliens 30th Anniversary: The Original Comics Series. I own the original six-issue comics series as well as a softcover collected edition of it too. But you’d better believe when I heard this oversized edition was in the works I placed an order for Aliens 30th Anniversary: The Original Comics Series at my local comics retailer the next day.

My one quibble here is that it’s the 30th anniversary of the movie Aliens, not this comics series which is still a spry 28-something. 😉

Movies

Independence Day: Resurgence trailer

“They like to get the landmarks!”

Cool Sites

Dune – Behind The Scenes

All sorts of info on the classic 1984 movie.

This week in pop-culture history

1951: The Thing from Another World premiers in theaters.
George Takei, Sulu of Star Trek turns 79.

Direct Beam Comms #11

Direct Beam Comms, Feature, TVFebruary 21, 2016February 20, 2016

TV

Vinyl

I thought Vinyl on HBO was pretty good. I have a little knowledge of music in the 1970s, but not a lot — does Almost Famous count? And I liked how the story of a record exec in the ’70s who’s life is slowly unravelling from a few bad business deals and cancerous acquaintances unfolds.

That being said, my big fear for Vinyl is that what worked so well in the first episode — namely a crazy pace that went from 0 to 100 and back to 0 again over and over and the drug fueled mania of the times will be discarded moving forward for a more traditional structure. Not that this will doom the show, just that it might.

The creators of Vinyl, Terence Winter and Martin Scorsese, also did this interesting thing with the story by jumping around in time. We get an opening scene of insanity, then a cut to “five days earlier” like a lot of shows do these days but the creators of Vinyl also do a fair amount of jumping far back to, what I’m assuming is, the early ‘60s when the main character Richie (Bobby Cannavale) was just getting into the business and was learning the ropes on how to rip off the musicians and make loads of money himself. And this isn’t just once, it was over and over again and was an integral part of the show.

I can’t imagine how much the music rights for the songs used in Vinyl cost. There’s a lot of original music from the ‘60s and ‘70s played throughout. And though there is a scene with Jimmy Page and Led Zeppelin’s manager backstage at some show, Zep songs must’ve cost too much since that’s the one scene I noticed they used sound-alike music for.

Now that I think about it, Vinyl is Almost Famous via Martin Scorsese but from the business side “ruining” music. B

The X-Files

As we approach the end of The X-Files mini-series I decided to look back on episodes of the show that I especially liked, new and classic included. I noticed one thing about many of the ones I liked the best; they were all written by the same guy, Darin Morgan:

“Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose”
“Jose Chung’s ’From Outer Space’”
“Quagmire”
“Mulder & Scully Meet the Were-Monster”

It’s weird since all of Morgan’s episodes break the typical The X-Files mold, but I think that by breaking that mold he took the series places it might never have gone otherwise.

As I was researching Morgan I noticed another thing, he wrote my favorite episode of The X-Files spin-off series Millennium too. Now I can’t say I was a fan of Millennium since I only ever watched a handful of episodes at best. But one episode I did watch was entitled, “Somehow, Satan Got Behind Me.” In it, a group of demons, who look like regular people to regular people but demons to each other, sit around a diner and talk about all the mean things they’ve done to humanity since they’ve seen each other last.

It’s the way that Morgan treats these demons, as regular Joes with problems of their own who see what they do as a job, that makes the episode so interesting and more memorable than other episode of the series.

Better Call Saul

The second season of the fabulous Better Call Saul started back up on AMC last week and picked up right where the first season ended with Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk) having to decide whether to do the right or wrong thing after events conspired against him in the first season. A

11.22.63

The novel 11/22/63 is one of my favorite, if not my favorite, books by Stephen King. It’s about a time traveler Jake Epping from our time who goes back to try and stop the Kennedy assassination in order to change the present. But what he’s not prepared for is a past that actively tries to stop anything that might change history and Jake finding his place and love in 1960s Texas which he’d have to leave behind to return to our time if he’s successful in stopping Lee Harvey Oswald.

And now comes the Hulu series 11.22.63 with James Franco in the role of Epping. From the first episode the creators of the show have done their best in condensing King’s 800+ book down into a more manageable story. It’s tough to say what’s been removed from the story after only seeing one, but it seems like all of the major story beats from the novel, from the way time travel works to Jake going back in time and trying to see if he can make small changes to time pushing back against those changes are all still present in 11.22.63. What seems to be gone are some of the little details. Which is probably for the best with an eight episode series like 11.22.63 that only has a limited time in order to tell the story.

My only concern is that what I loved about the novel so much were those little details and I’d hate to see too many of them go.

One thing I was surprised by the first episode was that it had something that I don’t remember being present in the book; the idea that when Jake’s in 1960s Texas and he notices the past starting to push back he might be onto something major that’s going to happen in history even if he’s not aware of what’s about to happen. I thought this was a great idea. B+

The Reading List

Better Call Saul: It’s ‘saul good, man!

Feature, TVFebruary 5, 2016January 23, 2016

I may be one of the only people you’ll ever know who didn’t adore the TV series Breaking Bad, and it’s not like I didn’t try. Every year when a new season would premier on AMC I’d dutifully watch the first few episodes and try to find something about the show that I liked. I even tried watching old seasons of the show whenever AMC would run them before the start of new ones. Even last summer I once again tried watching Breaking Bad, this time starting in the second season and skipping the first altogether since I’d already tried that one several times. But even now after an episode or two I’d get tired of the show and bail.

It’s not like I thought that Breaking Bad was a cruddy show, just that it wasn’t a show that I could get into. So amongst my friends who craved each new episode/season like a drug I was left out.

So how weird is it that I think the Breaking Bad spin-off/prequel series Better Call Saul is one of the best things on TV and it was me who craved each new episode like a drug?

Better Call Saul follows the Breaking Bad mold with the central concept of a seemingly normal person pushed to their limits who escapes into a life of crime as a means to an end. But Better Call Saul differs with Breaking Bad since it’s a series that actively messes with viewer expectations throughout the show.

The character of Saul Goodman (the wonderful Bob Odenkirk) from Breaking Bad doesn’t appear in the first season of the show — instead he’s pre-Goodman Jimmy McGill. If Goodman is a shark lawyer out to make himself rich not caring what side of the law he’s working for other than who pays the most, McGill is a down on his luck sad-sack attorney with a crummy office in the back room of a nail salon who splits his time being a public defender at $700 a case and drafting wills for seniors for $50 a pop.

And this theme of the show going to unexpected places for even fans of Breaking Bad who thought they knew who Goodman was continues throughout Better Call Saul, and I think is what makes it so different than just about anything else on TV today.

Most shows don’t come with much baggage. We might know some of the actors in new roles from previous performances or know that a show is from the same people who created some other popular show. And while we might think we know what a new series is going to be about, odds are that we really don’t. But with Better Call Saul the audience really did know Goodman from Breaking Bad since he appeared in most of those episodes.

As the first season of Better Call Saul progressed we get to see how this guy who started out as Jimmy who only wanted to really work in the same firm alongside his brother becomes disillusioned with “doing the right thing” and slowly becomes the shady character from Breaking Bad.

It’s like when an airliner crashes and we learn that it’s because a whole host of things that went wrong on the flight. That’s what happens to Jimmy — if just a few things had gone differently for him from a having a few different friends to not having a broken support system he might have not gone down the road of crime.

And Saul isn’t the only character who the viewer thinks they know who they are at the start of the first season, but by the end we realize that we didn’t know at all. There’s another lawyer played by Patrick Fabian who starts out as Jimmy’s nemesis but by the end of the season we realize is someone different altogether and Jimmy’s brother played by Michael McKean who’s another character that, to put it mildly, “evolves” throughout the run.

So, by actively messing with viewer expectations and taking their new show down a different story path than the obvious one, series creators Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould took something that in less capable hands would have been a tired retread of what had come before — for examples see the constant spinoffs from CSI, Law and Order, Chicago Fire, NCIS – barf… — and instead created something new and different.

The second season of Better Call Saul premieres Monday, February 15 on AMC.

Better Call Saul season 2 TV spot

TVJanuary 15, 2016

Tag: better call saul