nixsight

Just this once, I have an excuse for not being timely with the TV… My network decided to suffer a catastrophic failure on Saturday, and that’s nudged everything out of place.

Of course, that doesn’t explain why I didn’t post on Friday when I was supposed to… but never mind.

As always, my thoughts after the jump, and your mileage may have varied on these shows – please do tell me how right or wrong you think I am in the comments!

Buffy Season 4: 04-07

The season that I forgot was actually not bad continues on apace, and these three episodes feature some of what are probably the most heartbreaking or funny Buffy moments of the whole show.

0405 – Beer Bad: This is generally considered to be one of the worst Buffy episodes of all time, and while it’s difficult to ignore the fairly petty anti-alcohol moralising that seems to be at the story’s core, it isn’t all that bad.

I didn’t remember the whole Parker story dragging out quite this long, but Willow gets a really cool extended scene with him, in which she totally owns. Which is just as well, because her own subplot in which she feels eclipsed in Oz’s eyes by the suddenly ever-present and smouldering (assertion author’s own) chanteuse, Veruca.

Thinking about it, that really isn’t a good name for such a sexy character. It’s clearly supposed to evoke either Dahl or the band Veruca Salt, but written down, it just makes me think of bad foot hygiene.

Xander gets a few moments to shine, and Seth Green plays both Oz’s funny and thoughtful moments low-key but unmissable as always. Plus, I hadn’t realised that Kal Penn was in this episode, as one of the transformed students. It’s a filler episode, though, drawing a line under the teen angst of Buffy’s lust for Parker quite definitively, in time for the heartbreak of the next episode.

0406 – Wild At Heart: This is the last episode in which Seth Green performs as a full cast member, and that would be sad enough, even without the circumstances under which Oz leaves the show. His preoccupation with Veruca has been building since earlier in the season, and in this episode it bursts to the forefront, when it is revealed that she’s a werewolf too. Green would own this episode, except that, in keeping with their relationship til now, Willow shares the spotlight, with Alyson Hannigan perfectly playing out her character’s journey through concern and betrayal to fear and heartbreak.

This episode was just horrid to watch again, basically, and even knowing how it was going to turn out didn’t stop me being pulled along by the episode – it isn’t just the story’s emotional currency that pays off – the drama and peril are as well-handled as in any other episode of the show that I can remember.

Still, I never quite got over Oz leaving, and watching the scenes with him and Willow again, and seeing how they are played, and how the two feel about each other, I’m remembering my misgivings about some of the particular decisions made later on in the show.

0407 – The Initiative: … And this episode provides the mildest of relief, as Spike returns to town, and is immediately captured, and the secret of the shadowy soldiers on campus is revealed to the audience, if not entirely to the characters.

The Initiative is a fairly cool idea that as I recall never quite gels with the show’s generally less scientific approach to it’s supernatural elements, and often when dealing with the technical aspects of the ways in which the organisation operates, the writers here seem a little at sea.

However, with the benefit of hindsight, knowing that the show still has a lot of high-points to deliver over the next few seasons, I’m finding that I am a little more relaxed about the introduction of Riley and the Initiative as a true foil to Buffy and crew, and it’s actually quite appealing watching them dance around each other’s secret identities.

In the wake of Oz’s departure, Willow gets some lovely scenes – first with Riley, and then later on she gets one of those show-defining scenes that you never forget, with Spike. And there’s some pretty impressive action in the final act of the episode, when Buffy finally comes head-to-head with the Initiative in the darkened halls of her dorm.

Ed Byrne – Pedantic and Whimsical

We’ve seen Ed Byrne on “Mock The Week” a few times recently, and after having such fun with the Dara O Briain gig a couple of weeks ago, we thought we’d try this out.

It’s a very funny show, although it follows a much more traditional stand-up formula then O Briain’s, and so soon after watching that, some of it felt a little ordinary to me. That wasn’t Byrne’s fault, mind – as I said in that earlier review, O Briain’s stand-up is a much more generous and audience centric affair than one has come to expect, and it sticks with you.

Byrne’s material is delivered with verve, and he’s an incredibly likeable presence, although at times toward the beginning of the set, it felt a little like he was trying a little hard – an awkward eagerness to reach for the laughs and the persona that is missing from his much drier appearances on “Mock The Week”.

Subjects that we’ve heard comedians riff on before are given another spin, here, such as travel, girlfriends, drinking and smoking, but even if Byrne’s jokes weren’t funny, I get the feeling you’d still find yourself laughing – his delivery is just grand, and there’s enough novelty and insight to his take on these things that it very rarely feels anything other than fresh and hilarious.

He skips into quite original territory more than once, too – most often when he appears to be reminiscing actual events rather than simply stylising reality for laughs. We liked him before, and nothing about the show made us feel any less affection for him. Very funny indeed!

Fringe Season 1: 02

I’m a bit perplexed that I don’t seem to have bothered mentioning the pilot episode of “Fringe” here – we watched it a few weeks back, and were quite nicely surprised by it – although the premise is a little close to “The X-Files”, the execution was nice, there was some proper Mad Science in play, and the cast – even Joshua Jackson – were very good at what they were doing indeed.

I had high hopes that Abrams had a good enough handle on ideas like this that he wouldn’t ruin things by letting the overarching conspiracy theories and ongoing plots take over, and hobble the show straight out the gate. After all, for most of it’s run, “Lost” has managed to keep it’s focus on the self-contained and character-centric weekly stories, in some cases to the frustration of the audience.

I’m a little perplexed, then, by the second episode.

0102 – The Same Old Story: Second episodes are normally an interesting point in a series. It’s where the tone and tempo of the rest of the show’s run is really visible for the first time, after the unfortunate necessity of the first episode exposition as the scene is set. It’s the laying of the foundation, if you like – the pilot is the pitch to the audience, the design and architecture and first few artist’s impressions, but the first episode proper is when the physical shape of the thing starts to show itself. The characters have all met each other, and found out what their job description is, but this is when they start to interact, and find their way.

And if that’s the case, this episode is a hell of a misfire. It starts promisingly enough, with some quite grotesque body-horror and the suggestion of some real intrigue as to what has caused it.

But then, huge chunks of the episode, really early on, are taken up with Anna Torv’s Agent Dunham already embroiled in what is either political or corporate maneuvering in which she may or may not be being used as a pawn. To give you some idea of how disorienting this is, so early on, I’m talking about a couple of scenes wherein a representative of a corporation that was introduced as a prime mover in the first episode offers her a job working for them – before she has even completed her first proper mission in her new role.

Realistically, this isn’t out of the question, but narratively, it’s a little too much potential disruption to throw at the viewer so soon, and it has the effect of both weakening the impact of the job offer, and distracting us from building up an idea of how important the job she already has – that after all we are reasonably expecting to be following week on week – is.

Worse, because of all this dry fleshing out of what should be b-story right about now, the main plot of the episode goes awry, and ultimately sputters out instead of climaxing the way you’d hope it might.

It’s still nicely filmed and acted, and Anna Torv really is pretty easy to watch. John Noble continues to be wonderful as the lunatic Dr Walter Bishop. I’m just concerned that there’s been too much intrigue too early on.

No Heroics Pilot

I’ve heard a lot of negative responses to this show, but I have to say – in a small audience of three, two of whom aren’t even remotely into superheroes, the response to this first episode was pretty positive.

I guess it may be down to the fact that we’re in the show’s target demographic. Although a look at the website gives you insight into the impressive amount of effort that’s gone into the details and dressing of the show’s key locations, and there are clearly a few comic geeks in the creative team and the crew, the focus here doesn’t seem to be superhero-specific humour. The superhero element of the show is being treated as the setting, rather than the core reason for the show’s existence.

In fact, comedy series like “Spaced” and “The IT Crowd” are much more geared towards the geek lifestyle than this show, because they aren’t going from the point of view that superheroes really exist. “No Heroics”, at this point, is about people who happen to be superheroes.

Actually, that isn’t even the whole of it. It’s not just about people who happen to be superheroes, it’s about the sort of people who would be superheroes, in a world like ours. And it’s viewed through a fairly misanthropic view of our species, so it comes to the same sort of conclusions that I would – the sort of people that might put on shiny outfits and go out in public to fight crime are more than likely going to be either arrogant and attention-seeking, needy and neurotic, apathetic but too powerful to sit on their arse, or desperately broken

This is kind of a flawed concept for a TV show which you’d hope might appeal mainly to comic fans, because there’s only a very specific sort of person who wants to see superheroes as such flawed and petty individuals. The whole point of the superhero is that they stand above us.

And the jokes are… well, not really jokes. They tend to come out of the flaws of the characters, rather than be based around comedic situations. It reminds me a little of “Red Dwarf” in that regard – although early series of that programme had some very inventive science fiction flourishes to them, at the beginning the show was much more about applying a magnifying glass on the very human protagonists.

So “No Heroics” is going to struggle to find an audience from the off. Comic fans are going to want something that feels more like what they’d hope for from a superhero comedy, and casual viewers are probably going to be a little disoriented by the setting – ironically perplexed by the unusualness of the superpowers which I’ve heard called cliched and unoriginal in a few places.

(An assertion I don’t agree with, by the way. Of the four key characters, one is an amoral debutante who has the power to speak to machines, and the other is a depressed homosexual who can see into the future – but only sixty seconds. As superheroes go, these aren’t the most common archetypes. Although the way that the former’s power is portrayed niggles with me a little, and I can see the latter’s power being used for some pretty cheap jokes. As well as some pretty awesome ones…)

So once you get past all of that other mullarkey, the question becomes whether or not the show is actually funny. Personally, the three of us thought yes, but again, we’re geared up to like this stuff already. There’s a similar observational tone to the delivery of the dialogue and the jokes to a show like “Big Train” or “Man Stroke Woman”, and the cast are really very good – with the standout for me being James Lance as Timebomb.

For an ITV2 comedy, “No Heroics” is both remarkably profane and exceptionally risque, as well – and maybe it just found it’s audience with us.

Certainly, we’ll be watching more.