nixsight

Running late with everything this week – been a pretty busy one, so far. Here’s an update on the TV I’ve been watching since last I… uh… updated you on what TV I’ve been watching.

As always, I’d love to know what you think in the comments. And I’d love to know whether there’s anything that you’re watching that you think I should keep an eye out for!

Criminal Minds 0122 – 0203

After a mostly strong first season, I was wondering whether this sharp procedural/investigative show was going to be able to sustain that level of quality.

Thus far, it’s been patchy, which is a shame, but we’re still early in the season, so it’s hard to know how it’s going to turn out.

0122/0201 – The Fisher King Parts 1 & 2: The “end of season” cliffhanger story is a tough one to pull off, especially in shows like this one. You have to make the season finale strong enough and high-stakes enough that it will keep your current viewers excited about the show during it’s hiatus, but your second part comes at the beginning of a new season, and conventional wisdom states that, while it doesn’t have to completely explain everything about the show for new viewers, it has to accomodate them a little, or at least not exclude them.

Over the last few years, we’ve seen a few examples of how this can go wrong – “CSI NY” fluffed it’s cliffhanger last season by having the second part almost immediately drop the tense situation of the first. “CSI” set themselves up for a year of conspiracy and betrayal at the tail of the last season, but forced a resolution – albeit it a tragic one – for the current season, too.

I’ve also spoken before about how quickly drama shows seem to forget their unique selling point, and descend into soap-opera or lazily written investigation – it’s that weird point in entertainment where “formulaic” is actually a positive thing, because it’s the formula that makes a show stand out. Grissom’s insistence that the team follow the evidence and trust in science was the coda by which CSI Prime lived for around the first six seasons, and it managed to keep the show locked into the cases without getting too distracted by it’s characters lives while it remained in full effect. Brennan and Booth used to apply their very different skillsets to the processes of scientific interpretation of human remains and interrogation, eventually solving each case in a way that couldn’t have happened without each of them in “Bones”, though in more recent series they have relied a lot more on questioning suspects and having perpetrators fall out of the episode plot at their feet.

The story that unfolds across these two episodes of “Criminal Minds” falls foul of a lot of these problems from the start, but it doesn’t really become a problem till the second part. It starts with all of the team members finally grabbing some vacation time. After a cute bit of set-up, in which we get to spend a bit of time with each character in repose, suddenly, in their disparate – and in some cases secret – locations, they find themselves being dragged into an elaborate plot, involving murder, planted clues, and a kidnapped girl.

The problem at this point, if it exists, is that this show isn’t first and foremost about the team-members, so much as it’s about them being brought in to different locations to help profile criminals. And generally, the criminals are relatively realistic and convincing criminals – even when they are extremely intelligent lunatics – not moustache-twiddling nefarious villains. The particular bad-guy plotting against them in this episode is more like Anthony Hopkin’s Hannibal Lecter than would normally fit in this show.

This isn’t too much of a problem in the first episode, because it all unfolds with enough mystery and intrigue that the viewer is taken along with it quite happily. Even when Elle is left alone in her home and apparently shot, due to a bizarre piece of careless decision-making by Hotchner, you buy into it, because you kind of accepted that if this was going to be a cliffhanger episode, then something truly bad had to happen to close it out.

But unfortunately, the second part of the story carries none of the sharp-thinking and nice scripting of the first, and feels almost as if it was written on the fly, with a desperate urge to get the story over with – as if the idea of a two-parter had seemed like a good one, while everyone was looking forward to completing the first season and heading out to wherever TV production crews go when a show is on hiatus. After going to so much trouble to set up some nice character moments for most of the team at season’s close, and making such an effort with the locked-room mysteryness of it, most of the second half of the story is given over to a frankly cringeworthy operation-table hallucination, and relegates the actual solving of the mystery itself to a sequence of coincidences and discoveries that are more about Reed’s connection to the case than they were about particularly well-applied investigative or profiling skills.

Which is a bit daft for a few reasons. First, in a show whose success rests on convincing it’s audience that this is as close to a representation of real-world profiling and investigations as it’s possible to get, the “character close to death finds themselves in a misty location where a dead loved one helps them decide whether to go on to heaven or fight for life” is a self-indulgent piece of fantasy.

It’s also a painful cliche, that we’ve seen too many times before, and it’s delivered here in such a po-faced and earnest way that it doesn’t feel like it’s come from the same writers as previous episodes at all. It was more “Highway To Heaven” than the almost gritty vibe the show has had so far. This sort of leap in quality on a show screws with my head.

And finally, if you want to build any sort of tension about whether or not a character is going to die at the beginning of a season, giving them any scenes beyond either flashbacks while other characters worry about them, or scenes where they actually look dead, are a major mistake. Audiences are wise to shit like this by now, and know that an actor who is being let go as a new season starts doesn’t get long talkey scenes where we find out more about them. They certainly don’t look happy to be there and invested in the scenes that they’re in. “Lost” is the only show that played convincingly with the idea of you finally getting to know and like a character in the very episode that they die suddenly in, and even they only managed to get away with it a couple of times.

A very weak season-opener.

0202 – P911: And what’s more, it seems that last episode was a bit of a loose-end, because for some reason, the action has time-shifted a few months on from it by this next episode. It’s normal for shows to have an in-show time gap between seasons, but it’s quite odd to have one between the first and second episodes of a new run.

This is a decently tense piece of television, but the team’s presence in the case is largely arbitrary, with them doing very little profiling on a paedophilia case on which there is already an expert team working – so that there are a couple of comedy moments like the point where one of the show’s familiar expositionary psychology info-dumps is only delivered by one of the regular team members when the actual child-slavery specialist gets air sick-ish.

But if I didn’t quite enjoy this show, I might totally lose my rag at some of the moments of typical Hollywood issue-wrangling and hand-wringing that go on in this story. For a normally smart show, there are some truly irresponsible bits of pandering, and Girl One spotted the signs of a Nick outburst quite early on when the FBI expert actually claimed a causal link between the growth of the internet and the growth of child-abuse.

It didn’t spoil my enjoyment of the episode, but after a child-snatching case in the first season had the quite pragmatic suggestion that the hysterical response to child safety of educating children about “stranger danger” had actually done more harm than good, focussing as it did on an area that actually wasn’t the primary risk for kids, this episode was a little sanctimonious and off the point.

(Though to be honest, “Bones” is about the only show that really deals with “issues” in a relatively consistent and almost balanced way, so I should have expected it.)

0203 – The Perfect Storm: A bit more back to normal, this, with a twisting, turning plot that actually involves a little bit of standing and sitting around in a room and throwing profiling ideas around. Which is, after all, one of the things we like this show for, so it’s nice to see that they haven’t completely dropped it for this second season.

The Office 0405 – 0411

Again, too much “The Office” goodness to really break down into episodes, and there hasn’t been a point where the show has gone bad. I know that some people probably decided that the show had jumped sharkward when it finally got Jim and Pam together, but this watch-through has convinced me that my initial thoughts on this were right:

That it was “time” – to drag out their awkward mutual cautious crushes any longer would have stretched it too far, and to let it dwindle away – or go out with a nasty bang – would have devalued all the work done on making it real in the first few seasons.

That this isn’t Ross and Rachel all over again - Far from turning this into the “Jim/Pam Happy Half Hour”, the writers have taken the opportunity to actually take the focus off the adorable couple – or at least, have their romance take up less screen time than it has since they were in two different offices. In fact, it allowed them to shift their focus back onto Michael’s dysfunctional relationship with Jan, and also to devote a little time to Ryan’s change in position, and poor Dwight’s heartbreaking love-triangle with Angela and Andy.

If anything, Jim and Pam have been shown to be anything but perfect at this point. Though they have what seems to be the perfect relationship, the show has taken the refreshing – and pre-emptive – direction of making the rest of the office actually see them as a little too great, and want to take them down a peg or two. In these episodes, we actually see two scenarios where Jim is actually badly at odds with the rest of the office and messes up badly. And in fact, in some brilliant moments, finds that by trying too hard to not be Michael Scott, he is actually turning into the man.

Some highlights:

Michael deposed – as in, at the deposition!
At least two scenes of “That’s what she said” metatextual examination!
Jan’s awesome meltdown!
Jim and Pam are worst couple ever!
Angela necking with Andy – sighing “Oh, D! Oh, D!”
Ryan’s friend with the magic powers!
Jim’s racial faux-pas with Oscar that turns out to be on the nose!
Toby’s wandering hand!

The Survivors 01 – 03

I totally failed to mention that we started watching this last week, which was silly, because so far it’s been great.

From what I’ve been told, the original was pretty much awesome, so once this first run is over, I may have to seek it out, but these few episodes have been impressive, evoking a quiet isolation and seeping paranoia as convincing, but utterly contrasting to, the recent spate of survival horror stories set in England.

At odds with many other pieces of genre TV or film made in the UK in recent years – or ever, I suppose – this tale of a world almost entirely wiped of people in a virulent flu epidemic is handled with a level of restraint and an eye to understatement in which the characters don’t all either talk in RP English or strong regional accents, and it makes for a watching experience that is pretty much free of irritation.

There was a bit of cheeky promotional trickery done by the BBC in the run-up to the first episode, which I haven’t quite recovered from, but it all adds to the general effect, so that’s okay.

Alongside the nicely handled main element of how the survivors deal with their new situation – how they relate to each other, how they cope practically, and how the main group that we are following are different to the various others that they meet, there’s a second thread, about the secret labs where a conspiracy relating to the roots of the sickness seem to be unfolding. This adds a bit of intrigue, but thankfully is left in a very much reduced and secondary position to the more interesting human dilemmas that the show excels at.

Paterson Joseph gives a more nuanced performance than I’ve seen from him in a while – I’m certain that he’s been in straight dramas before where he has impressed me, but I’ve sometimes felt that his performances in genre television have been a little bit heavy on the pantomime. Max Beesley is surprisingly good, and I could happily watch Zoë Tapper do the washing up, so seeing her perform in this is a treat! Even Chahak Patel, who plays the eleven year old Najid, brings a naturalism to the role, so that the kid is never too twee, but never too bratty, either.

There’s only one thing that really niggles with me with the show, and it really just is a pedantic thing. Perhaps deliberately, the geography of the show is kept pretty vague, and there aren’t many indicators of, say, how far someone has driven to get to a particular situation that they’ve ended up stuck in. It gives a strange sense of an England both vast and tiny at the same time, which may be deliberate, and is, I suppose, quite poignant, but when one of the characters stumbles across an amazing or dangerous state of affairs, it’s difficult to get a real handle on how far they are from their base camp, and as such how cut-off they are/how likely a given situation is to directly affect their companions at a later date.

But it seems unreasonable to let that bother me too much, when the show is already giving us so much enjoyment, and the BBC have timed the show perfectly, with that actively horrific first episode going out just as the next wave of indeterminable and ubiquitous bugs go around our workplaces and online social groups. It’s actual honest-to-god viral marketing that they didn’t even have to pay for!