Category Archives: television

Johnny Worricker

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Bill Nighy, Worricker

Bill Nighy as Worricker (photo: ichef.bbci.co.uk)

If you saw the two Masterpiece Contemporary thrillers starring Bill Nighy (perfect, as ever), chances are we agree they were terrific. If you missed them, Nighy plays MI5 agent Johnny Worricker, on the outs with his bosses and trying to bring attention to the shady dealings of Prime Minister Alec Beasley (Ralph Fiennes without much hair).

Needless to say, the Powers That Be don’t approve of Worricker’s activities and are seriously looking for him. In the first of the two dramas shown this month, “Turks and Caicos,” he’s chilling out on the islands when he’s spotted by a CIA agent played by Christopher Walken, with his typical opaque style, and you’re never quite sure who’s who and what’s what. Except that Worricker’s former girlfriend, Margo Tyrell (Helena Bonham Carter), wastes no time realigning her priorities and jetting down to the Caribbean when he needs her. In the second, “Salting the Battlefield,” Worricker and Tyrell are on the run, and doing a pretty good job of it, too, until family ties threaten to flush them out into the open.

These two productions are followups to 2011’s film with the same characters, “Page Eight,” which lacked only Bonham Carter’s Margo Tyrell. Somehow I missed that program when it was broadcast three years ago. Thanks, Neflix! What makes these dramas so good are the scripts. The screenplays and the direction are by British playwright, theater and film director, and two-time Academy Award nominee David Hare. Says Grantland reviewer Chris Ryan, “If it’s adult contemporary, it’s as good as adult contemporary gets.”

Olive Kitteridge: on TV

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Olive Kitteridge, HBO, Elizabeth StroutI hope you  spared yourself the awful Death Comes to Pemberley on Masterpiece Theater last Sunday and watched HBO’s Olive Kitteridge instead. I’d read the Pemberley book, by P.D. James, and it should have been great. Huge disappointment. So I wasn’t optimistic about the television version. Talented Anna Maxwell Martin should have stuck with The Bletchley Circle, where she had an innovative, meaty role.

Olive Kitteridge will be playing on HBO (2 parts) numerous times in coming weeks, so if you missed it the first time, try to catch it. Just for the acting alone, it’s terrific, with Frances McDormand playing Olive and Richard Jenkins as Henry, her long-suffering husband. I’d read the book, so was prepared for Olive’s prickly personality. She’s likely not someone you’d want to spend a lifetime with, but Henry hung in there, and NPR reviewer Eric Deggans calls the production “maybe the best depiction of marriage on TV.”

For me, the television version posed much the same question as did the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Elizabeth Strout. Why was Olive so unyielding, so unmoved by others’ feelings, even as she registers them? She is that rare creature—someone who truly won’t bother to be likeable. “Olive had a way about her that was absolutely without apology,” a character in the book says. Her father’s suicide is talked about on several occasions, and did that cause the big disconnect? It doesn’t seem so. And just when you’re about to give up on her, she’ll do something remarkable.

The Blacklist: Under Covers

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TV, NBC, Blacklist, James Spader, magazine cover

(photo: AP/NBC)

Since the ads on network television drive me crazy, it’s ironic that ads have persuaded me to watch the second-season premiere of The Blacklist, Monday, September 22 on NBC. If you’ve watched the show, you know it’s an American crime drama starring James Spader, Megan Boone, Ryan Eggold, and Harry Lennix. The premise is that Spader, a high-profile fugitive—Raymond “Red” Reddington—emerges from the shadows to make a deal with the FBI. He’ll help them capture a series of hard-to-nab global criminals, but only if they let him use a young profiler (Megan Boone) “fresh out of Quantico” to help.

The show last season received pretty strong positive reviews from the critics, and in a recent Chicago Tribune interview about the upcoming twists, Spader said, “once you start taking all those backroads, the backroads become much more interesting than the destination.” Spader pursues those intriguing backroads with his characteristic intensity—which led Rolling Stone to call him “the strangest man on TV.”

But what about those ads? The first one I noticed was the inside back cover of this month’s Wired, which showed Spader in a typical neon-drenched Wired explosion, with mock-cover headlines like “Get with the Program: Red’s Shocking Next Move” and “On the List, Off the Grid: Tracking the Criminals Still at Large.” Clever. Then I spotted a fake cover in the 9/8 issue of The New Yorker, drawn by popular cover artist Mark Ulriksen (who drew the recent Derek Jeter cover), and you may have seen similar cover spoofs in GQ, Rolling Stone, Time and six other magazines. Spader’s undercover under covers. Ok, I’ll watch once, anyway. (Did. Not an immediate fan.)

HBO Steps in It

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Jonah from Tonga

Jonah from Tonga cast (photo: bbc.co)

HBO this month is demonstrating that political correctness has not yet smothered bad judgment. Instead, it’s showing why those acute sensitivities developed in the first place, by airing the unbelievably tone-deaf Australian Broadcasting Corporation program, Jonah from Tonga. Created by Australian actor Chris Lilley, the program is styled as a comedic mockumentary about a group of trouble-prone Tongan teens. Lilley—39 and white—plays 14-year-old schoolboy Jonah, by wearing a wig and “brownface.”

“All such attempts at making travesties of who we really are, perpetuate long-held and faulty assumptions of our values, self-worth, beliefs, culture and our tangible contributions to American life, Australian life, and Tongan life,” said the National Tongan American Society. According to organizers of a petition asking HBO to pull the show from its schedule, “All of the teenage ‘Tongan’ boys in the show are low achievers, gang members or in jail. Much of the ‘comedy’ is derived from Jonah’s acts of violence, sexual aggression, ignorance and profanity.”

The Japanese American Citizens League (representing another group of Americans affected by racist prejudices) weighed in, noting that satire can be “a powerful weapon for revealing and skewering the irrationality and absurdity of the racist ideas,” but pointing out that “the juvenile and crude characterizations in ‘Jonah from Tonga’ only reveal Lilley’s deep ignorance and disrespect for the Tongan people.”

In describing the show, HBO says “Jonah tries to leave his naughty ways behind and be a ‘good boy,’ but with Jonah, things never quite go as planned.” Let’s hope this fate applies to the series, as well. While it aired earlier this year in Australia and on BBC Three in the UK, it was a ratings “disaster” for these networks. The Australian producers’ defense, reported here, is weak.

Huh? In 2014? Who is HBO trying to entertain with this crude racism? You can sign the petition here. I did.

The Honourable Woman

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Maggie Gyllenhall, Middle East, The Honourable Woman

Maggie Gyllenhall in “The Honourable Woman” (photo: bbc.co.uk)

Saw the first of eight episode of this new BBC production—“both mystery and spy thriller” says Willa Paskin in Slate (clip)—on the Sundance Channel last night (Thursdays, 10 pm). Reviews have been smokin, and certainly the first hour:fifteen was exceptionally strong, laying down a lot of tantalizing clues about what’s to come, with the backdrop “the incredible complexity, raw emotion, and intractability of the Israel-Palestine conflict,” Paskin says.

Maggie Gyllenhaal plays the head of a U.K.-based arms company and has recently been made a baroness, so is Lady Nessa Stein. She and her brother were orphaned young when their father, a major seller of arms to Israel, was assassinated in front of them. Now she runs the company, and her brother the company’s foundation. They are determined use their money for good, so are in the midst of a project to bring communications technology—cables for phone and internet access—to the Palestinians, including, she says at one point, “to the schools and hospitals we have built.”

The episode begins and ends with violence, including an early quick-cut of an event Viewer thinks might have been another violent act. In the middle, various people are trying to figure that one out, including Stephen Rea, as an over-the-hill MI6 agent assigned temporarily to the Middle East desk, as punishment it seems (I missed some muttered dialog, but I can read the script here). He and Gyllenhaal independently elude their handlers for frank conversation with what I suspect is a short list of people they can trust.

Lots of clues, lots of intrigue. Very promising. Says Paskin, “The Honorable Woman is in many ways, most of them cerebral, an extremely impressive piece of work” that “oversimplifies very little.” Cerebral? Reason enough to watch.

Converted_file_4913e22dDo you think the publicists tried–perhaps unconsciously–to replicate National Geographic’s most famous photo in that picture of Maggie Gyllenhaal above? There’s something odd about the eyes there.

 

 

AMC’s “Turn”

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George Washington

General George Washington at Trenton by John Trumbull

AMC’s espionage series Turn (review) is based on the exploits of the Culper Ring, a loose network of Revolutionary War spies–including one woman–from whom George Washington learned of the movements and plans of the British in and around New York, then in the redcoats’ hands. It was the era of the martyr Nathan Hale,  the dashing British spy, Major Andre, and the dastardly Benedict Arnold. And this quiet group of brave patriots. Episodes will air  numerous times over the next month, and if the series succeeds, may continue next season. It’s based on the book Washington’s Spies by historian Alexander Rose. A book on the same topic, George Washington’s Secret Six was  recently reviewed here.

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The Bletchley Circle

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Bletchley Park, Bletchley CircleFans of the PBS program The Bletchley Circle—I’m one!—who have been waiting for the return of the series, mark your calendars! The second season (which will consist of two, two-episode stories) begins Sunday night, April 13, after Masterpiece Theater. This smart series, harnesses the brain power of a group of women who worked as codebreakers at fabled Bletchley Park during World War II.

In Season 1, the patronizing attitude of the males (husbands, police, etc.) toward these women who were thinking rings around them was delightful. Their skills in pattern recognition, especially, to analyze massive amounts of seemingly random data stood them in good stead. And, the show apparently, despite minor quibbles, reaches standards of factual correctness about Bletchley Park itself. (One can only imagine how Hollywood’s funhouse mirrors would have distorted reality.) Can’t wait.

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Cosmos: A Space-Time Odyssey

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cosmos, science
Star formation in the cosmos (photo: NASA)

I really want to like this program, though I thought the opening episode of the 13-part series was too conceptual. Perhaps the producers believed that a generation of kids raised on Star Wars and CGI special effects wouldn’t warm to it otherwise, and perhaps that was just the result of getting some basics out of the way, but I’ll be looking for future episodes to have less sweep and more deep. Reviewers liked it.

In a tribute to counter-programming acumen, the Sunday night Fox broadcast is smack up against Masterpiece Theatre, probably cutting the audience for both. Thankfully, Cosmos reruns on Mondays on the National Geographic channel. Anything that would help Americans take science more seriously has to be appreciated. Said Cosmos host Neil deGrasse Tyson in a Wired interview, “The idea that science is just some luxury that you’ll get around to if you can afford it is regressive to any future a country might dream for itself.” Dream on, my fellow Americans.

End-Game for Downton?

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Downton Abbey, Julian Fellowes

Highclere Castle, filmic home of Downton Abbey (photo: farm9.staticflicker)

In an interview with the New York Times, Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes allowed as how the show isn’t like a soap opera that can go on for decades. Seems it’s like a soap opera that can go on for no more than 10 years, he thinks. Next season will be season five, so he’s thinking about an end-game. Last night’s season finale—if not the whole season—left some critics cold.  “What happened to the formerly addictive, splendid, elegant costume drama?” asks Daily Beast reviewer Kevin Fallon. Not enough, in his opinion. Not enough change. Especially last night, when Charles Blake was revealed as an aristocrat himself, which relives Mary of one terrible choice. The mention of Brown Shirts as the possible attackers of Edith’s lover was a dark bit of foreshadowing that change may finally come to Downton.

So you think you know Washington, DC?

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U.S. Capitol, Washington

(photo: farm4.staticflickr)

Take the House of Cards opening credits quiz and find out just how well you know our capital city.  I got 46 points out of 100.  House of Cards (the Netflix-produced show starring political shenanigans and Kevin Spacey) returned recently with 12 new episodes released on the Netflix website.

And enabling the binge-viewing popular among friends who’d watch a season of 24 over a weekend.

The most important way in which Congressman-now-Veep Underwood’s fictional Washington differs from the real thing? Spacey said it: “Our Congress gets s— done.”