Cult TV: The Death of Ross and Rachel.

Ross RachelRepost: The American chatshow host Conan O’Brien remarked last year that he had noticed a significant change in audiences who attended the recording of his show on TBS. He pointed out that in the 1990s a guest who was the star of a successful show could assume that the great majority of the studio audience not only knew who he/she actually was, but would get references to their character and the plotline of their show. Everybody knew who Ross and Rachel were.

O’Brien pointed out that now, going by audience reaction, it is now possible to be the star of what is deemed a successful show and yet still have a large proportion of the audience have only a vague if any knowledge of the actor or their show.

Consider two numbers: “Game of Thrones”, arguably the most popular TV show on the planet, gets around 7m viewers in the US for new episodes. Now consider that “Only Fools and Horses” used to get up to 14m viewers in the UK alone. Sure, don’t go all mad: I know, I’m not comparing like-with-like. GoT appears on a cable network, OFaH was free to view. But the fact is, the huge choice we have now has completely fragmented TV viewing. There are exceptions: in the US the Superbowl gets over 100m viewers, but even that has to be taken in the context of the time. Why? Well, here’s another wild figure. The finale of “MASH” in 1983 got nearly 106m viewers, in a country with nearly 100m less people than the Superbowl broadcasts to now.

The media lock onto shows like “The West Wing” or “The Sopranos” or “Madmen” or “The Wire” but the reality is that relatively small numbers of people actually watch these shows, in whatever format they watch (Cable, download, etc). The finale of “Friends” 10 years ago got stateside 52m viewers. Seinfeld got 76m. Today, the biggest drama show on American TV (both cable and terrestrial) is “NCIS”, which gets, in a country of 320m people, an audience of between 16 and 20 million. True, they were finale shows, with huge amounts of publicity surrounding them, but the figures are still stark.

So what’s my point? I suppose it’s that we now live in a “television” (I use the word loosely, given the impact of Netflix and downloads) age where a huge increase in quality and choice has almost shattered the shared experience. It’s true that people now watch “Doctor Who” or “Downton Abbey” with one eye on Twitter, and that is a shared community, but the reality is that most people are not watching the show you are watching. Is that a bad thing? Not necessarily. But we all (of a certain vintage) remember Ross and Rachel’s first kiss. On the other hand, I’m afraid to write about Ned Stark out of fear that some of my readers don’t know who he is, or his destiny, because they haven’t experienced it yet.

A possible Xmas stocking filler: Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.

I was in New York just before “Studio 60” debuted in 2006, and it was a big deal. The major US TV networks had gotten into a major bidding war to secure Aaron Sorkin’s new show, based around a late night “Saturday Night Live” comedy show, and when NBC won the rights, they pumped huge money into advertising it, with billboards, magazines and bus stop ads. This was to be the biggest show on TV that season.

It bombed. In fact, it bombed so badly that hardly anybody saw the final few episodes as its viewing numbers dropped from 14 million to 4 million, and it was quietly cancelled after 22 episodes.

When I first saw it, I was quite underwhelmed. It had all the Sorkin stuff, and was jammers full of ex-West Wing alumni like Bradley Whitford, Matthew Perry and Timothy Busfield, but overall, it was all a bit, well, “meh”.

Yet, watching it now, having bought it cheap on DVD, I ask myself: would I watch a second season? Surprisingly, the answer is Yes I would. With the benefit of hindsight I think I know what went wrong with the show. Firstly, it came after “The West Wing”, which reinvented political drama. There were huge expectations on this extremely expensive ($3m an episode cost to NBC) to produce show, which could never be met. After all, people discovered “The West Wing”, whereas they were waiting for this.

Secondly, it’s about a subject (effectively SNL) which is revered by comedians, writers and The New Yorker crowd but is just a funny TV show to everybody else. It is hard to make drama out of something that people do not regard as important. It’s like setting a show in the competitive world of show jumping. A big deal to some people, but…

Funnily enough, I could see it working as an HBO show now, especially with it’s angle about the politics of television. Wait, isn’t there a show on HBO about a TV show written by Aaron Sorkin? Oh well.

Give it a go, all the same. Whitford and Perry have genuine onscreen chemistry, and I’d like to see them in something together again. It’s also set during the paranoid days of the Bush administration, before that nice well-spoken young man from Hawaii rescued us all, and you can notice it.

One other thing: it was this show that finally made me try to write stuff professionally, and watching it reminded me of the very first cheque I ever got for writing, and thinking “Really, people are going to pay me for this?”

Is TV getting too gruesome?

I recently finished the final episode of  “Sons of Anarchy”, FX’s violent motorcycle gang as criminals drama starring Charlie Hunnam and Ron Perlman. It’s excellent drama, and I’ve constantly been almost recommending it to people as one of the most political TV shows on in recent years. I don’t mean in terms of political systems, sons of anarchybut in terms of how relationships between many competing interests are managed. SOA was not as much about motor bikes as relationships between people and groups.

I say almost, because I have to be careful who I’d suggest it to. Sons of Anarchy is exceptionally and unnecessarily violent, to the point of being literally eye-poppingly gruesome, and it’s indicative of a problem faced by modern television drama.

I’m old enough to remember when some people complained that “The Professionals” or “The A Team” were encouraging young people to be violent with the casual amount of gunplay in each episode. As one of those young people  I thought, and still think, that those complaints were just plain silly. But today’s level of violence, on the other hand, is reaching a stage where one has to question is it just becoming gratuitous? Even non-cable network shows which are much more restricted in what they can show on camera, like “Criminal Minds”, up the ante by featuring scenarios where families and children are regularly menaced or tortured in disturbing psychological ways.

I’m not calling for any form of censorship, of course. People can make and watch whatever they want. But surely the real challenge for creative TV writers now is to create shows that can create suspense without the easy fall back of horror?

 

Review: The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

UNCLE2Guy Ritchie’s “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” is “based” on the 1964-68 TV series. Based is a very loose word, especially when writing as a huge fan of the original TV series. Having said that, the movie deserves a review from the perspective of a non-UNCLE fan too, and in that context it’s very entertaining. The look and feel of the movie is very 1960s spy movie, more The Ipcress File than James Bond, and the soundtrack by Daniel Pemberton plays homage to the soundtracks of the period.

The cast carry the movie well, with Alicia Vikander in particular shining in a role that could easily have become the McGuffin object to be ferried around, rescued etc. It moves at a fair pace, the plot is pretty thin (who the baddies who want the atomic bomb are, and why is never really explained, although they seem pretty well resourced given they own a submarine). There are some quite funny moments, including a scene with an electric chair in the background, or Cavill sitting in a truck during a gun battle. Cavill and Hammer struggle to get past the slightly clunky tension of their respective CIA/KGB backgrounds but when they do, and they do, you do start to root for them as a team. Hugh Grant plays Hugh Grant, which is fine, because I happen to like Hugh Grant. Elizabeth Debicki has a nice screen presence, and could really have been given more to do other than waft in and out of scenes.

One criticism I’d have is that the set piece James Bond attack on the enemy base is almost wasted in a curious montage. It looks great, but you feel like you’d like to have seen more of it. On top of that, the movie ends curiously abruptly.  The end credits, showing UNCLE files, contain a few interesting nuggets, and the movie sets up nicely for a sequel.

The usual Ritchie stuff, split screens, flashbacks to what REALLY happened, etc, are all there, and add to the entertainment. It’s not a classic. It’s no Snatch. But very enjoyable.

________

The UNCLE fan review. Warning: includes spoilers.

I’m not one of those fans who believes the original material is untouchable. There are people who have never forgiven JJ Abrahms for the Spock/Uhura thing, or refuse to watch Elementary because it’s set in the US and Dr. Watson is a woman. I’m happy to let each interpretation stand on its own feet. Having said that, I’m not sure if I were a huge fan of the Mission Impossible TV series I’d see much connection with the Cruise movies, as they miss the crucial self-sabotaging aspect of the original show. But that’s another story.

This movie was an interpretation of The Man from UNCLE, or rather, a view of UNCLE from such a distance that you can just about recognise a few familiar shapes. It’s an enjoyable movie, but could just as easily have been called “The Rome Caper”. Certainly, if it hadn’t been called The Man from UNCLE I’m not sure UNCLE fans would have recognised it.

Of course, you could argue that it is a prequel, and so obviously misses a lot of the original features of the TV show, and that would be a fair point. In addition, the UNCLE of the movie, a small team with east/west tensions is actually far more realistic than the TV show’s huge vaguely utopian organisation.

The one glaring difference between the show and the movie is Cavill and Hammer. Both physically impressive, (Hammer especially looks huge onscreen) are far removed from the Talk First, Then Fight approach of the original characters of Solo and Kuryakin. Also, making Kuryakin out to be borderline psychotic just isn’t the same character played by David McCallum.

It’s a different UNCLE, and I’d like to see a sequel to see where they take it. But I have serious doubts that there’ll be one.

Would a real U.N.C.L.E. actually work?

man-from-uncle_poster_nws51Guy Richie’s “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” is based on the 1964-68 TV series about agents working for an international crime fighting organisation. One of the key attributes of the TV series was that the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement, even at the height of the Cold War, had Americans and Russians working together for the common good. The TV series, although not a spoof as lazy latter day TV critics would claim was nevertheless set in a world where the ideology of the US and USSR were not really alluded to. It was, in short, fantasy.

As a concept, certainly to this then teenager watching repeats in the 1980s, it was a fascinating internationalist concept, that there was far more that united us as a race than divided us. Could it have worked?

One would have to say no. There’s a telling line in the series when Robert Vaughn’s Napoleon Solo, the titular Man from U.N.C.L.E., describes THRUSH, a nasty group of international renegades that acts as the anti-U.N.C.L.E. of the series, as an organisation that “believes in the two party system: the masters and the slaves” Solo could easily be describing the Soviet government (and funder of U.N.C.L.E.) of his fellow agent Ilya Kuryakin. But more on THRUSH in a minute.

Indeed, given that U.N.C.L.E. by its own admission (via voiceover in the series) is dedicated to the maintaining of legal order anywhere in the world, that logically meant that behind the Iron Curtain U.N.C.L.E. was battling democrats and opponents of the Communist one party state. Not something one would wish to see on their TV, scenes of Solo and Kuyakin valiantly shooting people trying to hop the Berlin wall to freedom. On the flipside, what were THRUSH doing behind the Iron Curtain? Surely the United States would be quite happy with any disruption they could cause? Would it be that hard to imagine THRUSH selling its services to both sides occasionally?

If one looks at so much of the things U.N.C.L.E. could logically be expected to combat, one comes into problems. In the 1970s and 1980s the KGB funded many terrorist groups in Europe and elsewhere. They’d hardly support U.N.C.L.E. trying to undermine their efforts. Would Henry Kissinger have been pleased if U.N.C.L.E. had intervened to stop the overthrow of the (democratically elected) Communist president of Chile in 1973 as per the mandate about preserving legal order? Chances are, U.N.C.L.E. agents would have spent most of their time sitting around whilst their bosses negotiated over what they could actually investigate. They probably spend most of their time fighting copyright fraud.

We do get a glimmer in the real world of what happens when an international law enforcement organisation does operate,  and it’s not always pretty. Interpol, for example, was headquartered in Vienna in the 1930s, and was seized by the Nazis, at one stage being headed by Gestapo head Reinhard Heydrich. He was head of Interpol at the time of the notorious Wannsee conference that planned the “final solution”. There have been complaints in recent years of Interpol warrants being used by Putin’s Russia to harass political opponents of his regime. Yet there are unusual glimmers of international security cooperation. Germany, France and seven other European countries, for example, have a eurocorpscombined military unit called Eurocorps (See symbol left).

Curiously enough, the central plot of the new movie, which focusses on the US and USSR working together to stop weapons of mass destruction falling into the wrong hands is quite believable, even today. It is easy to imagine the US, Europe, Russia or China all working together to stop nuclear or biological weapons being developed by rogue nations or indeed groups, as they are with Iran. United Nuclear Control, Logistics and Enforcement, anyone?

And that’s the key to something like U.N.C.L.E. It only works if there is a common THRUSH-like enemy that the great powers feel is a threat to global stability.

As fantasy however, it makes for great TV.

Good TV: Boss

boss_poster

You’d be hard pressed to find a more cynical show about American politics than the two seasons and then cancelled series “Boss”, starring Kelsey Grammar. Grammar plays a Richard Daley style mayor of Chicago, and plays it very convincingly. Many say they struggle to watch Grammar without seeing Frasier Crane, but I find him a very watchable dramatic actor, and he certainly puts his acting chops on display here. He manages to be charming, impressive, cold, neurotic and terrifying in the role of Mayor Tom Kane.

I’m not surprised that it was cancelled as a show, because it lacks charm. if there is one word to describe it, it’s bleak. The style’s similar to Glenn Close’s “Damage”, which was another great drama but was just so full of morally bankrupt or compromised people and completely devoid of humour. This is the problem with “Boss”. Having known as many politicians as I have known in my life, I just can’t believe that everyone in public office is an amoral, self-serving, unsmiling prick. Is US politics, and Chicago politics in particular different? Possibly, but I doubt it. The show lacked a genuine human angle.

Like “House of Cards” that came after it, “Boss” works on the assumption that almost everybody in politics is on the make, including Kane’s icy wife played by Connie Nielsen in a proto-Claire Underwood. It also assumes that voters are very easily manipulated by pretty speeches and handsome candidates and soundbites. Indeed, it’s a very fashionable view in media circles (outside of political correspondents, who actually know better)  and indeed with growing numbers of voters, but it just ain’t true.

Kane as a mayor is convincing as the corrupt bastard who makes the buses run on time and keeps the streets clean, and I can buy voters holding their noses and voting for that. But the other candidates seem like stuffed shirts talking in soundbites, doing that thing non-politicians think is possible: moving votes by really subtle actions. You know the sort of thing: “Don’t forget to mention that your cousin was Polish. That’ll get the Polish vote on board.”

“Boss” is a watchable show, but does nothing to dispel the feeling that democracy is warping into something very very ugly.

Great TV Shows you should see: 30 Rock.

30 rock“30 Rock” is like one of those tiny, cheap little neighbourhood restaurants you accidentally stumble across that turn out to be magnificent, and leaves you wondering why everybody isn’t raving about it. It was an NBC comedy show which ran for seven seasons about the comings and goings on a Saturday Night Live style comedy show filmed in the NBC New York studio at 30 Rockefeller Centre (Geddit?). As it ran, it got progressively more surreal but always funny.

The show got a much deserved boost thanks to its writer, creator and star Tina Fey’s very funny performance as Sarah Palin during the 2008 campaign, but the fact is, the show can stand on its own. Fey is, in my opinion, quite possibly the funniest female comedian around, and went on after the show to write create Netflix’s equally whacky “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt”.

Aside from Fey’s superbly self-mocking performance, the show boasted a brilliant ensemble cast including Alec  Baldwin’s career-defining performance as the slightly mad conservative Republican Jack Donaghey, head of NBC’s television and microwave division. It’s up there with William Shatner in Boston Legal. Jack McBrayer as the mysterious page Kenneth, and extraordinarily versatile singing, dancing Jane Krakowski (Elaine in Ally McBeal) also steal scenes, as does Tracy Morgan as the unhinged star of the show.

The show was never a huge hit. It opened in the same season as Aaron Sorkin’s criminally underrated “Studio 60” which covered very similar territory, and many pundits assumed that there was only room for one SNL-inspired show. They were right, although most of them guessed the wrong one.

“30 Rock” is one of those shows that people either love and rewatch, or turn off after 15 minutes. Me? I put it up there with “Frasier”, and that’s saying something. Netflix UK and Ireland: pay attention!

 

Great TV: The Trip.

The trip“The Trip”, and its sequel “The Trip to Italy”, is almost certainly a very Marmite-y TV series, in that you either loved it or it just left you cold. I have to admit to loving it, but I suspect that’s more to do with the fact that I’m in my early 40s and recognise the bitter-sweet nature of both series.

The concept is simple, Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, playing fictionalised versions of themselves, are commissioned to travel for a week through rural northern England visiting high class restaurants for The Observer. Along the way there is much room for celebrity impressions (their Michael Caine face-off is magnificent), banter, arguments and ruminations on two men realising they’re not young anymore. The sequel involves them doing the same in Italy.

The dialogue is both funny and melancholic, with both bringing their very considerable mimicry powers to the table, and willing to challenge public perceptions of themselves, and the scenery is beautiful. The food looks gorgeous.

This is television for grownups. More please.

 

http://youtu.be/Xxq-I_e_KXg

Cult TV: Dark Skies

If there’s one show I will never forgive the TV Gods for cancelling, it’s “Dark Skies”. Broadcast to a single season in 1996 as a challenge to “The X Files”, the show basically took every major conspiracy theory from Roswell onwards and put them into in a single alien conspiracy. Starring Eric Close and Megan Ward , the real star of the show was the legendary scenery chewing character actor J.T. Walsh, who played Captain Frank Bach, the head of the secretive Majestic 12 organisation tasked with fighting the aliens at whatever dubious moral cost it took. Later episodes saw a pre-Voyager Jeri Ryan (Seven of Nine) Play Juliet, their liaison with the Soviet version of Majestic.

What made the show work was the history twisting, and the populating of stories with real historical figures including Bobby Kennedy, George Bush senior, Truman, Kissinger, Hubert Humphrey, Ronald Reagan, Colin Powell, Norman Schwarzkopf, Charles Manson and The Beatles to name a few. Key events in history from the Kennedy assassination (the aliens did it) to Vietnam (started to allow MJ12 access to a huge military budget) to the shooting down of Gary Power’s U2 (he was chasing a UFO) are all touched on.

The show was cancelled as it failed to get significant viewers, which is a terrible pity as the creators of the show Brent V. Friedman and Bryce Zabel had the whole plot sketched out right up to 1999, with takes on everything from Watergate to the moon landing. The show assumed that its viewers knew something about modern American history, and it didn’t have an over abundance of moody pouting teenagers. No wonder it got cancelled.

Definitely one for the sci-fi/history nerds, it’s available on DVD.

Cult TV: The Greatest American Hero

The Greatest American Hero ran for three seasons (1981-1983) and is mostly remembered for its theme tune and special effects which even at the time looked cheap. The concept was of a fairly wimpy do-gooding liberal school teacher (Ralph Hinkley, then Hanley after a guy named Hinkley shot President Reagan) played by William Katt who was given a special suit by aliens which gave him special powers.

He then went and lost the instruction book (Yeah. It even had “Instructions” on the front page in “spacey” writing) and so spent most episodes discovering new things the suit could do, much to the annoyance of his FBI agent mate Bill Maxwell (played by Robert Culp) and that stalwart of 1980s TV, Connie Sellecca. Sellecca, who interestingly was married to that other TV hero of the time, Gil Gerard of Buck Rogers fame, was one of the few women on telly who could give Erin Gray (Wilma in Buck Rogers, she of the shiny lycra) a serious run for her money in the dreams of teenaged boys of the day.

The show was only alright, although one episode set in a hunted house was genuinely creepy. Watching it once again reminds how bad TV actually was in the 1980s, with very dumb formulaic stories and the assumption that the audience couldn’t follow anything too complicated. Hill Street Blues, which debuted at the same time, was about to change all that.

The theme song sung by Joey Scarbury is very catchy though, and apparently Fox are looking to make a new series.

You can find episodes on Youtube.