Doctor Who

• Lock up your daughters: David Tennant's girlfriend, Sophia Myles, is heading to the US to be the female lead in CBS's Moonlight. She might be gone some time...
• The Master was based slightly on Tony Blair

Film

• Possible Kill Bills 3 and 4
• Steve Martin to remake All of Me, his own movie?
• Samurai Jack, the movie

Books

• Richard Belzer to write mysteries about himself

Music

• The Verve are reforming

Radio

• Smashy and Nicey back for Radio 2's birthday [free registration required]

Theatre

• Bonnie Langford and Sandi Toksvig have a two-woman show

German TV

• Morticians plan a 24-hour 'death channel'

British TV

• Lots of new shows coming to BBC2, including the return of Saxondale and the debut of The Peter Serafinowicz Show
• Parkinson quitting chat shows again [free registration required]
• Five get fined £300,000 for being naughty

US TV

• Oliver Platt gets a part in Frost/Nixon and a recurring role in Nip/Tuck
• Michael Hogan not that okay with being a Cylon

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Just a little art for your delectation: the originals are here and here. Yes, the drunk 10th Doctor is in the first one, as is Captain Jack. No Martha, of course, cos the female one was done a while ago

Time to see if I misjudged a series: let's re-evaluate Standoff. But what's this? Shock, horror! It was a show that started before The Carusometer was even born! Its third-episode verdict was qualitative, without even the slightest hint of the overwhelming quantitative power The Carusometer has to offer.

Now, it can have the rating it deserves.

Anyway, we rejoin Standoff at episode 14, in which our dynamic FBI negotiating couple have to deal with a cult leader with too many wives who wants to get his own back on a church leader. We start with some clumsy interplay between the two about desirable holidays as he (Ron Livingston) says an RV holiday is the best, while she (Rosemarie DeWitt) says it's not. Oh the relationship-depth explored...

We then have another interminable hostage negotiation. Now, the problems with a show about hostage negotiators are

1. there aren't that many different hostage negotiations that are realistic and common yet interesting
2. hostage negotiations drag on for a bit and certainly don't take just 40 minutes

So just about any episode you can come up with is bound to

1. have an unrealistic, TV-friendly scenario
2. be unrealistically plotted so it only lasts 40 minutes (minus couple time)

And episode 14 was no different from episodes one to three. Lots of negotiations handled in a way only an idiot would handle a hostage negotiation. You'd have to have been in an isolation tank from the day you were born, slowly being fed porridge through a tube, to think their tactics were good ways to bond with the hostages/kidnappers.

But guess what. The incredibly well conditioned cult members needed only two minutes of talking to the negotiators to be convinced they were in the wrong and must fight their cult leader. And they don't get killed in the process. How incredibly, incredibly lucky and unlikely.

While there's some reasonably non-stupid plotting, all the characters are essentially ridiculous. It's not believable. It doesn't compensate for this by making anyone interesting enough to make you overlook the flaws. It's action by numbers. You could probably throw every single plot at Criminal Minds and it would morph into that show's plots with just a couple of quick line changes.

So The Medium Is Not Enough has great pleasure in declaring Standoff a “Major Caruso” on The Carusometer quality scale. A Major Caruso corresponds to “a show that David Caruso might exec produce or star in. He will insist on vetting every female cast member before they are cast, to ensure 'He has chemistry with them'. All the auditions will actually consist of is seeing if they can convincingly 'Make goo-goo eyes' at him and not be sick, while being shot at by AK47s before begging to have seven children by him and give up their high-flying, emotionally satisfying jobs since 'he completes them'.”

Film

• Trailer for David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises
• Finally! Robert de Niro and Al Pacino together wasn't enough. What we were really waiting for was 50 Cent to join the cast of Righteous Kill...
• Laurence Fishburne to write and direct a movie based on Paul Coelho's The Alchemist. Anyone read it?
• More Dark Knight casting, including Melina McGraw (Scully's sister in The X-Files)

'Music'

• The Spice Girls to reform?

British TV

• Channel 4 has bought the rights to Back To You, starring Kelsey Grammer
• The BBC's iPlayer will launch on July 27. They're already looking for extra content [free registration]
• ITV1 has pulled both Tycoon and Tough Gig
• One Man and His Dog is making a comeback on digital channel Horse & Country
• Oh no! Chantelle and Preston are splitting up! Did anyone see that coming?
• Ofcom having a good look at BSkyB's pay-per-view on Freeview plans

US TV

• Victoria Beckham to appear in Ugly Betty?
• No bionic ears necessary to help the deaf hear. Just recast The Bionic Woman's sister
• An interview with Michael Hogan and Katee Sackoff from BSG

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In the UK: Tuesdays, 9pm, BBC3. Repeated 11.30pm, 2.25am; Sunday 8pm, 12.30am
In the US: Nowhere yet, but who knows. Maybe Discovery or BBC America

Anyone fancy a game of monkey tennis?

That if, you'll recall, was one of Alan Partridge's last-ditch pitches to a BBC commissioner in an attempt to get his own TV show. It's easy to imagine a similar conversation taking place in Soho House, not so long ago, between a desperate producer, a little the worse for wear from white wine and 17 rejections, and a BBC3 commissioner looking for new shows.

“Anthropology Agro!” suggests the tipsy prod. “We send six buff men around the world. They meet all sorts of tribes and cultures. They learn about their lifestyles and their customs. Then they pick fights with them.”

“Hmm,” muses the somewhat patronising BBC3 commissioner. “We are the BBC. We are supposed to be educational and informative. Except we're BBC3. We're watched by chavs and morons and Torchwood fans – who are both chavs and morons. The only way we're going to get our target demographic of XYZ9s to be interested in another country and its culture is by sticking it in an XBox360 first-person shooter backdrop and making sure there are plenty of naked tribeswomen in it.”

Decided, she exclaims, “Brilliant! You're hired” and Last Man Standing is born.

Except, it's the BBC. It's too liberal to be sending the prime of British youth around the world to beat up the natives. That's too Raj, too Empire. We can't do that anymore.

So they've stuck in a couple of provisos.

1. Three of the six buff young athletes have to be American
2. They all have to be bollocks at fighting

Continue reading "Review: Last Man Standing 1x1"

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Doctor Who

• BBC Worldwide got profits of £111m last year, thanks mainly to Doctor Who (and others)

Film

• Willem Dafoe and Ethan Hawke are duelling vampires in Daybreakers
• Cameron Diaz to star in PG-13 horror film The Box, by Donnie Darko's Richard Kelly

British TV

• ITV2's picked up The Bionic Woman and Gossip Girl
• Get naked because your phone tells you to for BBC3's The Ultimate Female Flashmob
• Green Wing's Stephen Mangan to star in BBC2 sitcom about a recovering alcoholic

US TV

• ABC's version of Footballers Wives may still have life in it
• USA greenlights To Love and Die
• Veronica Mars' Jason Dohring joins Moonlight
• Jason O'Mara is to be Sam Tyler in the US version of Life on Mars
• Rescue Me actor not happy with Dennis Leary
• Flash Gordon appears to have the movie's theme tune. At least, a cover version and in trailers

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