TV
Barry
I hadn’t heard much about the new HBO series Barry other than it’s been in the works for a few years now which sometimes spells trouble — though this has also happened with other HBO shows like Westworld and that show turned out pretty good. And, luckily enough Barry is pretty good too. In fact I’d go as far to say the first episode was great.
Bill Hader stars as the title character, an ex-Marine turned hit-man for a family friend named Fuches (Stephen Root). Barry isn’t happy and is suffering from depression, not quite knowing how his life got off the rails going from serving our country in the military one year to murdering people for money the next. On an assignment in L.A. Barry is following a target and winds up accidentally attending an acting class with him. And after doing a scene on stage to their teacher (Henry Winkler) the “acting bug” bites Barry and he knows he wants to spend the rest of his life acting. Even if that’s contrary to his profession as a hit-man that demands anonymity.
I was surprised just how much I enjoyed the first episode of Barry. It’s a show that’s got a lot of heart, Barry comes across as a realistic, damaged person who made a hugely wrong choice in becoming a hit-man. But the show is also very funny too. I went from laughing out loud to cringing at times from the tension on-screen, sometimes in the same scene which I can’t remember doing in the last sitcom I’ve watched.
We live in an era where many TV comedies and dramas are so saccharine they’re totally unreliable. So, for a show like Barry to come along that’s so full of pathos and comedy with characters who don’t feel like they’ve been mass-manufactured at the sitcom factory is a breath of fresh air.
The Crossing
I hate to say this since I don’t want to curse the new ABC series The Crossing which premieres this Monday, but it’s the series that reminds me the most of the classic show Lost in its early days. And I mean that in a good way. At least I think so.
Steve Zahn stars as Sheriff Ellis who moved to a small Oregon coastal town to try and get away from big-city problems. Ellis is a modern man who’s called away from his yoga class by deputy Rosario (Rick Gomez) to investigate a body washed up on a beach outside of town. What starts off as a simple drowning turns into a massive tragedy when hundreds of bodies all begin washing up simultaneously. A few are alive but most have drowned. These survivors tell a story of coming from several hundred years in our future where there’s a great holocaust of which the only escape from is to slip into the past. Department of Homeland Security official Emma Rea (Sandrine Holt) doesn’t know what to believe. The people didn’t arrive by boat and there was no plane crash but the survivor’s stories are too incredible to believe.
As the government tries keeping a lid on the situation and Sheriff Ellis is cut out of the investigation things turn when one of the refugees reveals something that might bring the threat from the future to our present.
The Crossing reminds me of Lost in that there’s some mystery as to what’s going on. However, that mystery isn’t where the refugees come from or why they’re here. That’s pretty much spelled out in the first 15 minutes of the first episode which I appreciated a lot. I think if The Crossing had been made ten years ago the entire first season would’ve been, “WHY ARE THE REFUGEES HERE?” The mystery in The Crossing is what exactly is going on in the future, can we stop it from happening and do some of the people from the future want to stop us from trying to stop it. Now that I think of it, The Crossing has a lot of the time travel elements from the 2012 film Looper but not the same plot.
In a lot of ways The Crossing is a stranded sci-fi family series like Lost in Space or Terra Nova. They’re kind’a like colonists or settlers hoping for a better life and have decided our time is the best place for them to land, so to say. I also dug the little sci-fi references hidden in the show. One of the main characters is named “Reece” and another “Leah” — Kyle Reese and Princess Leah anyone?
I really enjoyed The Crossing but it wasn’t perfect, and these little imperfections bothered me in the fact that they might indicate a greater problem with the show that might not be evident one episode in. The biggest problem I had with The Crossing was there’s a big, bad villain in the show who’s obviously the big, bad villain the moment they step on screen. There was no mystery here whatsoever and when something happens at the end of the episode there was no mystery as to what its outcome was going to be either.
Problems like these can add up as the season goes along, but it’s too early to tell if The Crossing is going to be great, good or bad. But still, I’m hoping The Crossing is more Legion than Inhumans.
The Terror
The new ten episode AMC series The Terror debuted last week with the first two episodes. The network has been promoting this show about the real-life 1845 arctic expedition led by Captain John Franklin (Ciarán Hinds) as a horror series. While I liked The Terror, two hours in there wasn’t much to be terrified about in it, though there was loads and loads of atmosphere.
Word of warning — The Terror stars British actors using a wide-variety of accents and 19th century naval slang. Usually accents don’t bother me but I think it was the wide variety as well as the slang that made it so I could only understand every third or fourth word the characters were speaking. Things got so bad I finally gave up on lip-reading and turned on my TV’s closed-caption feature. I think if you’re going to enjoy The Terror you should consider doing this too.
In The Terror, Captain Franklin commands two ships, the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, and is trying to find the fabled Northwest Passage that would connect the UK directly to the Pacific Ocean. Franklin’s second in command Captain Crozier (Jared Harris) has been to the arctic before and knows its dangers. So when the ships get stuck in the ice and have to spend a freezing winter in the middle of nowhere, he knows their situation is more dire that anyone else suspects. But there’s something else going on here too, a crew member unexpectedly dies and another falls off the mast and disappears into the ocean before the freeze. When one crewman is trying to service the ship he sees a ghostly figure in the water beckoning to him and another is attacked and carried off by a bear… thing, it becomes obvious that things are more dire than even Captain Crozier knows.
The Terror is a bit of H.P. Lovecraft mixed with something along the lines of Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World but it moves at so slow a pace it wouldn’t surprise me that if those with short attention spans don’t bail out of the show after the first episode. Most movies tell a complete story in two hours, in two hours of The Terror I only felt as if the story had just started.
But like I said I liked The Terror and will stick with it until the end. Even if since it’s all based on facts it’s easy to find out what really happened to the crews of the Terror and Erebus, minus, I suspect, what’s up with the bear thing.
Roseanne
More and more classic series like The X-Files and Will and Grace are getting new season orders sometimes decades after the shows originally ended. The latest of which is the ABC show Roseanne which picks up 21 years after the original run of the series ended back in 1997.
The only difference between this new and the classic Rosanne is that in the original series it’s revealed that husband Dan (John Goodman) had died at the end of the series. But now and a bit of retcon later Dan’s alive and well — and Roseanne is a better show for it. In the 2018 Roseanne, Darlene’s (Sara Gilbert) back living at home with her two kids, D.J. (Michael Fishman) is a soldier back from the war with a daughter of his own and Becky (Alicia Goranson) is widower working as a waitress.
Times are still tough in the Conner household but now even more so as Roseanne and sister Jackie (Laurie Metcalf) are fighting over politics, Becky is considering taking $50,000 to be a surrogate for another couple’s baby (a hilarious return for Becky #2 Sarah Chalke) and grandson Mark (Ames McNamara) has to deal with bullying in school for how he dresses.
I didn’t expect to like the return of Roseanne as much as I did but I really liked this new/continuation of the series. When so many other ABC sitcoms all follow the same mold these days of having families that feel fabricated where each and every episode ends on a “ahhhhhh, they really love each other” happy ending, Roseanne isn’t afraid to go to the dark places sitcoms used to go to and mine that place for laughs.
I think as long as you’re able to separate out the character of Roseanne Conner from the real-life caustic personality of Roseanne Barr you’ll enjoy this new/old Roseanne as much as I did.
Westworld season 2 TV spot
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjVqDg32_8s
Comics
Global Frequency: The Deluxe Edtion
DC is set to release a new collected edition of this now, ULP!, 16 year old series. There’s been talk on and off for years about turning Global Frequency into a TV series, there was even a pilot made a few years ago that never went to series. Maybe this collected edition will light the fire so to say under some producers butt to get a series on the air?
Global Frequency is a worldwide rescue organization that offers a last shred of hope when all other options have failed. Manned by 1,001 operatives, the Frequency is made up of experts in fields as diverse as bio-weapon engineering and parkour. Each agent is specifically chosen by Miranda Zero based on proximity, expertise and, in some cases, sheer desperation! Collects the entire 12-issue series!
The Reading & Watch List
Cool Movie Poster of the Week
Today, Alien 3 is considered by the fans to be a noble failure. That movie was directed by David Fincher before he was David Fincher, so it’s got all the visual stylings we would come to expect from the director, but something about the movie is off. Alien 3 kind’a tries to return the Alien franchise to its roots — an alien vs a bunch of people sans any real weapons — yet the story is so uneven in places that it never ever is able to “get going” and never takes the audience for the ride we were expecting to go on after Aliens.
Now that I think about it, the craziest choice in Alien 3 is that you’ve got at the time one of the most beautiful and famous actresses on the planet with Weaver who in this film has a shaved head and looks more like one of the ragged male prisoners than one of the most recognizable actors on the planet which is a bold chose to say the least.
