In the US: Fridays, 10/9c, Sci-Fi
In the UK: Tuesdays, 9pm, Sky One. Starts 15th April

It's easy to have a love-hate relationship with Battlestar Galactica. On the one hand, if you ever need to cite an example of well executed adult science-fiction, all you have to do is say "Battlestar Galactica" and you're sorted. Space-faring humanity lives on 12 colony planets, fearing only the return of their own robotic creations, the cylons, who've been quiet for the 40 years since their war of independence. The robots come back – looking like humans and convinced they're God's new favourites, endowed with souls – and nuke the hell out of the colonies, leaving just a few tens of thousands of survivors who manage to escape, protected by the one surviving military vessel of note, Galactica. 

So far, so bleak. And indeed, much of the first season is unrelentingly bleak, as humanity tries to work out how to get food, water and other necessary supplies, all the while chased by the unresting, unrelenting legions of cylons trying to exterminate them once and for all as they try to find the missing 13th colony – Earth.

But if there's one watchword that defines the series, it's change. Everything changes. Relationships between people change. Characters die. New characters appear. The whole format changes, with another Battlestar appearing, the humans finding a new world to live on. and characters suddenly finding out that they are in fact cylons themselves.

And not all of these changes have been for the good. In particular, BSG began to suffer from "up its own arse" syndrome. Weighed down by its own mythos and intricacies, it stopped being an accessible metaphor for war and terrorism and became more than a little daft at times. When it was good, it was very, very good, but when it was bad, it was horrid.

So what's season four – the final season, even though it's been cut in half – going to be like?

Continue reading "Review: Battlestar Galactica 4x1-4x2"

Read other posts about: Battlestar Galactica

In the US: Thursdays, 8/7c, ABC
In the UK: Not yet acquired

A third-episode verdict without a first-episode review? What's going on here? 

Well, if certain US networks want to air their new comedy shows so quickly that I haven't even finished watching the first episodes before the third episodes have come and gone (and the show's been cancelled in the case of The Return of Jezebel James), what do they expect?

It saves a bit of time, mind.

Anyway: Miss Guided.

Did you like school? Yes?

You jock douchebag. School sucked. Everyone knows that.

Of course, if you knew then what you know now, it would have been so much easier for you to survive its many trials, wouldn't it? So here's a question: would you go back to your old High School as a teacher and conquer those demons? And have you really changed as much as you think you have?

Continue reading "Review: Miss Guided 1x1-1x3"

Time for a third-episode verdict on old mopey guts, then. 

So far, it's what you'd called "intelligent drama" – thoughtful, occasionally clever, but not desperately interesting. It's the everyday story of a Dutch settler who, three hundred years ago, saved a Native American and got rewarded with eternal life until he meets his one true love. Over that time, he's lived a little – taught history at university, served in the marines, army and navy, been a lawyer and so on – and now has a wealth of experience to inform his regular work as a police detective.

Each week, we get a new case that reminds our hero of a particular time of his life, much as his fellow immortal, Duncan Macleod of Highlander, always got reminded of something that required lengthy flashbacks. However, the flashbacks are more like a potted Mad Men, used more as history and culture lessons than simply illustrations of the hero's life. Want to know what battlefield medicine was like in 1862 or society's attitudes to black-white relationships during the Second World War? Tune in to New Amsterdam then.

The cases themselves are a touch more interesting than the average cop show's, with Amsterdam using his expert knowledge of knots or psychiatry to finger the guilty suspect, typically with minimal input from his constantly irritable and irritating generic female Latina partner (cf Life, Lost), who doesn't really get to do much apart from wonder if Amsterdam is a congenital liar or a loon.

Also unlike Highlander is John Amsterdam's family life. This is more in line with Simone de Beauvoir's All Men Are Mortal, with our hero having spawned children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, et al over the years and outlived virtually all of them. Naturally, this adds a touch more depth, particularly since some of them are still around and a lot older looking than he is.

As of yet, the fated love sub-plot/show's raison d'être has yet to really do much, although rather than the inevitable coming together of the two souls you might have suspected, the show is clearly instead going to dwell on the thorny question that many a geek will be able to empathise with: how do you make a woman you think is really hot dump her current partner and fall in love with you?

I suspect they're going to spin out the answer longer than they did in Moonlight though. 

It's thoughtful, well put together and clever. It's got some nice mandolin music. But bar John Amsterdam and his history, there's nothing really interesting about the show: the supporting characters lack well rounded personalities or charisma and there's so much talk and so little action, you wonder if perhaps you haven't started watching Dutch TV by accident. It could be intriguing further down the line, but as of yet, it's not yet found itself a true hook to get us watching.

Time for final arguments on Eli Stone, Jonny Lee Miller's US entry into religion and Ally McBeal territory. 

Who knew, following its first decidedly agnostic first episode, that it was possible for the show to be any less committed to the concept of God giving a lawyer divine inspiration and guidance? Because it's backed away even further.

Yes, Eli Stone does have an odd knack of hallucinating the right names and visions to be able to win the case for the little guy at the last minute. But, for the most part, His guidance seems to be less incontrovertible than it was in the first episode. 

Eli's fiancée has also become less of an evil Blonde Bitch (there's a job description for that) and is becoming more supportive, etc. Nothing is absolute it seems.

Rather than sticking to its guns, then, Eli Stone has simply become the officially sanctioned show of quirkiness. It's about lawyers who see things and do nice things. That's it really.

Okay, slightly unfair. There is the growing realisation on Eli's part that his Dad maybe not have been a complete arse after all, given that he had the same brain aneuryism that Eli has. Yes, Eli's turning into his Dad, which is something many a male fears as he simultaneously realises his Dad wasn't all bad after all and there was method to his madness. That's moderately interesting.

There's also a perky new incompetent, do-gooder newbie lawyer. And we don't have to put up with the dodgy medicine of the first episode.

But it's all infinitely forgettable really. Good for anyone who likes Jonny Lee Miller and a bit of unchallenging dramedy. Missable for everyone else.

Well, after holding off for a couple of episodes, it's time for The Carusometer to pass a verdict on the clumsily titled Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

It's definitely had ups and downs so far. An appalling start, with most of the episodes crushed under the weight of pretentious narration, dramatic clichés, run of the mill action plots, by the numbers direction and some appalling acting, has yielded up a few good moments, most of them the sorts of revelations that fanboys will love, but everyone else won't care about.

It's also a bit slackly written: even the voiceover makes a major boo-boo (or is a major plot point?) when it says that Skynet sent Terminators back in time to attack Sarah and her family and that it also sent one back to protect her. Really? That seems a little unlikely.

Probably the worst thing about it is that it reduces the threat of the Terminators from being unstoppable killing machines that "absolutely will not stop ever, until you're dead" – basically, things you need to keep running away from at all costs – into things that can be stopped inside 40 minutes after a bit of slapping around.

Still, that's not to say the producers haven't been fixing some of the worst problems. While nothing can be done about Lena Headey's inability to act, she is at least being beefed up - maybe they're feeding her cheese nibbles at lunchtime - and the character is no longer a whiny misery guts instead of female action icon.

Summer Glau is an interesting dilemma. She can clearly act. We've seen her able to act in many other things. It's just here, she's chosen to go for vacant instead of neutral. The result is that she acts like someone being told to act like a robot. I could write whole essays on Arnie Schwarzenegger's and Robert Patrick's portrayals of Terminators in the movies but I summarise my thoughts thus: you could believe that people might think they were human - cold, but human – which is what you'd need in something that's supposed to be able to infiltrate human society. 

It's odd, because Glau, when she's doing impressions of other characters, is very good. So I think she could be nudged in the right direction over time. I just wish they'd stop trying to make her into an über-Terminator, able to kick the arse of even the T-888s they've introduced that tower over her, all with minimal damage. She's a tiny little thing – I've heard the phrase "pixibot" bandied around – and when it comes to robots with the same programming and speed, a good couple of feet extra height and weight go a long way (I suspect).

They've also wisely replaced, through one of the most elaborate re-casting regimes imaginable, the original bad Terminator that was going to chase after the Connors. It's now being played by Garret Dillahunt, whose has more acting talent in his little finger than the rest of the cast have between them. Cool. Unlike the other Terminators, he doesn't look like he's lived his life down the gym, either, which is a nice touch.

All in all though, while it's a zillion times better than Terminator 3, it doesn't hit you with the imagination or skill of the first two movies, from which it derives considerably. If you're not a Terminator fanboy or girl, don't bother giving this a shot because there's nothing here that you won't be able to see done better elsewhere. But if you're a lover of the Terminator millieu, you might fancy watching what is essentially some televised fan fic with the occasional glimmer of originality and thought.

Lost is coming back to Sky One soon. As well as a standard trailer, Sky has also been showing these 'ad bumpers' - short ads that appear at the beginning and end of ad breaks. They're done up in the style of in-flight safety cards. Pay close attention to the passengers since they'll look familiar.

Read other posts about: Lost

In the US: Sundays, AMC, 10pm/9c
In the UK: Not yet acquired

Brace yourself. In just five paragraphs' time, I'm going to be using the word Chekovian.

Okay, science geeks. Who here among us has never considered using their terrible knowledge for evil instead of good? Come on, fess up. You know you want to.

Only me, hey? Oh well... Woo ha ha.

Nevertheless, as you can probably tell from films like Revenge of the Nerds and Falling Down, there's a whole lot of rage pent up in the nerdlier parts of the US population. And here's comes a TV show from Vince Gilligan, former producer of The X-Files, about a high school chemistry teacher who decides to get rich by making crystal meth.

At this point, you might be tempted to switch off the show or not even tune in. But I think that would be a mistake.

For one thing, while it's by no means an easy show - in many ways it could be described as Chekovian - it is darkly comic in multiple joyous ways.

But secondly, it's from AMC. This is the channel's second scripted drama series, the first being Mad Men and you know how good that is.*

Continue reading "Review: Breaking Bad 1x1"

Read other posts about: Mad Men

Normally, I'd be putting in my third-episode verdict on Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. However, I've just finished watching the third episode and it was sufficiently better than the first two to make me want to hold off until episode five.

The first episode was awful, even more awful than the pilot since the producers chose to wimpify Sarah Connor (spoilers) down from her already wimpy, anorexic state in the pilot. With actors with less acting talent than vacuum cleaners and a plot that was just daft and overly complicated, it left a lot to be desired, bar a nifty little twist towards the end.

Episode two was dull. The less said about it the better, other than it was trying to establish the post-twist set-up for the rest of the series.

Episode three, apart from the same pretension exhibited by the first two episodes as well as a fatal misunderstanding of history, was actually pretty smart and interesting. The show is obviously put together by fanboys who revere the first two Terminator movies and are at least willing to make an acknowledging nod in the direction of the inferior third, even while they massively undermine it (and the proposed sequel).

Terminator 2's underlying theme for Sarah Connor was that she had made herself into a human Terminator; the show continues this.

As you probably know, the original idea of James Cameron's for the Terminator was that it was an “infiltration unit”. This was back when it was going to be played by Lance Henricksen rather than Arnold Schwarzenegger - Arnie couldn't infiltrate a morgue. It was the scary idea of a random, unstoppable stranger whom you could pass unknowingly in a crowd and wouldn't stop chasing you until it killed you.

The theme for the Sarah Connor Chronicles is that Sarah is now making herself into this original vision and becoming an infiltration unit in an effort to stop the rise of Skynet.

There is of course more to the show than this, and it is managing to exhibit more of those nifty twists - as well as some plain daft ones. Exactly how the Terminators work, what the resistance is like and more is all being slowly constructed. But Lena Headey is still just plain awful, as is Summer Glau, I'm afraid. Nevertheless, it's sufficiently improved from that first episode that I'm going to stick with it for another couple at least.

PS It's finally using some of the music from Terminator 2. Hooray! It's using it incorrectly, but hey ho, you can't have everything.

In the US: Tuesdays, 10pm ET/PT, CBS. Returns February 12th
In the UK: Hallmark, etc, when the time is right

Cast your mind back a while. Jericho was, for a while, one of the big hits of Fall 2006. An odd mix of right-wing lunacy and left-wing lunacy, it asked what would happen if nuclear bombs went off in almost every city in the US. Soap opera for survivalists, it turned out, with our noble survivors planning farming patterns, how to avoid nuclear fallout and how to shoot at anyone from a neighbouring town who moved – while deciding whether to leave their wives for the pregnant mistresses. All this was married with the tale of a cool black undercover CIA guy who knew that wacky people who thought the US should have attacked the USSR in 1962 were behind the bombs.

As I said - you get lunacy from both ends of the political spectrum in Jericho. But it was more entertaining than it sounds. Honest.

Then oops. After running non-stop all Fall, after the Christmas break, ratings fell off because everyone forgot it was on, and the show got cancelled at the end of the first season.

But you know what? If you send truckloads of peanuts to CBS TV executives, it turns out that they'll revive a show – for seven episodes at least. And in the vacuum left by the writers' strike, maybe it could get those stellar ratings back again when it airs next month.

Continue reading "Preview: Jericho 2x1-2x3"

Read other posts about: Jericho

In the US: Wednesdays, 10/9c, ABC
In the UK: Not yet acquired

Trying to get that vital 'female' demographic to watch television is tricky. The answer apparently is Sex and the City. You know, a show about women, by women and starring women that women actually wanted to watch. That's got to be a fluke. A one-off. There's no way any other plot or situation would work, is there?

Thus we've had Women's Murder Club, Lipstick Jungle and now Cashmere Mafia, all variations on Sex and the City in which varying numbers of women unite together to advance their careers, fend off the evil oppression of men and discuss relationships and stuff.

Continue reading "Review: Cashmere Mafia 1x1"

Read other posts about: Mad Men, Sex and the City