Largely Hit and Miss funny Trigger Happy TV style mimmickry from 3
Women of African origin is the best way to describe this. Partly funny, partly boring is another. (CA).
Sex and the City (10pm, Fridays, C4)
Dear god! It’s back! And it’s more patronising than ever! If you haven’t guessed this isn’t a show I have too much time for these days. When it started it was fairly original, a nice take on women’s views on sex, but now that every single possible situation and or kink has been explored it’s running out of steam and just repeating itself ad nauseum. Men get a pretty bad deal out of it all, too, with every possible relationship any of the girls have ending not just because they’re tiresome shopping obsessed lasses, but because something’s always wrong with the man in question. Carrie’s metaphors are stretched beyond belief with her comparing sex to the most inane of things too, which is indicative of the quality of writing as a whole. Thankfully this is set to be the last series, and by god is it about time too.
Law and Order: Special Victims Unit (9.50pm, Saturdays, Five)
Whilst Law and Order bores me in to an almost catatonic state, SVU is intriguing stuff, with a little less moralising here, and more investigation in to why people commit the rather disturbing crimes which are covered in this series. However, the real masterstroke is the casting of Richard Belzer, who reprises his Homicide Life On The Streets character Munch, and is a refreshingly cynical breeze of fresh air – whenever events seem all too depressing, he’s around to put everything in to context. Whilst not quite as good as The Shield or Boomtown, this is quality drama, and should be caught.
My New Best Friend (11.15pm, Friday, C4)
The opposite of Make My Day, being that they have a day from hell rather than from heaven, MNBF takes members of the general public and makes them pretend a complete lunatic is a friend they’ve known for ages. Always played by comedian Mark Wotton, the various new friends have gone about trying to destroy the contestants life, often hilariously so. The only negative thing I have to say about it all is that they always seem to win the £10,000 prize, despite at times failing to always follow the rules, but well, considering the misery they suffer, I won’t gripe about this too much.
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Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis) is the bad cop with a good heart, head of a strike team which breaks the rules on nearly every case, and when they don’t, well that’s normally only by accident. Mackey will kill someone in the blink of an eye, and sometimes in less time than that, but depending on whether he should of, he’ll sometimes
Were it just about Mackey it would be just a good show, but perhaps nothing that special – but the supporting characters are incredibly well drawn, and their plotlines just as riveting as of Mackey’s. Special mention must go to CCH Pounder who’s Detective Claudette Wyms is the series moral centre, uninterested in the political elements of police work and only in solving the crime. Hugely underused in shows like E.R. and Millennium, here she’s been given a chance to show what a great actress she can be, and boy she hasn’t let it go to waste. Revealing a much warmer side than she’s previously been able too, the show simply wouldn’t be the same without her, and bar Mackey, no other character can this be said about. And what makes her character even more likable is that she’s unafraid of Mackey, and thus she’s the only one who he fails to intimidate. One day hopefully the two characters will square off against each other, and that truly will be unmissable tv.
But just incase you’re concerned that this series is too dark, too twisted, fortunately Wym’s occasionally sharp but all too prone to being taken for an idiot partner "Dutch" Wagenbach (Jay Karnes) provides the light relief, which is much needed, as sometimes proceedings are as dark as they come. Mixed in to all of this is a political edge mostly concerning Captain David Aceveda (Benito Martinez) and his bid to take office, but this is also a series which takes on established racial attitudes and confronts them head on. All of which makes for a truly original cop series, and one which refreshingly doesn’t play by the rules. Characters get shot, screw up big time, and events are never ever predictable.
So whilst it may look a little NYPD Blue-esque with it’s shakey camera work and format in general, whilst that series stutters on with it’s morally upright but oh so boring crime solving, The Shield is truly exciting, original and really the only cop show on the box ever worth watching.
Alex Finch.
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Grass (11pm, Mondays, BBC 3)
After the somewhat mediocre outing of Fast Show spin-off "Swiss Toni", you would have thought the former Fast Show actors would have learned their lessons. But no, one of my favourite characters from those times, Billy Bleach, gets resurrected in this comedy written by Simon Day and Andrew Collins (presumably of Collins and Maconie's Film Club, Hit parade, and 6music's roundtable).
As opening episodes go, it was a bit lukewarm. Well meaing do-gooder and culturally inspired Bleach witnesses a murder whilst attempting to retrieve a 'package' for his younger brother, currently in prison.Following the police's coercion, Billy is forced to go on a witness protection plan, with a new identity, new life, new surroundings. These surroundings turn out to be the middle of nowhere, somewhere in Yorkshire or somewhere. In building up that storyline, the laughs really seem to go astray, apart from a comment made in the prison regarding Tiger Woods, the inverted conversation had between Billy and an Oriental Home Economics teacher, and that's about all I can remember.
I felt a certain empathy to Bleach in the Fast Show, with his 'Mate, 'Old the bells!' or helping out with change, or picking lottery numbers etc. This just seems tame by comparison.
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The Pilot Show (10.30pm, Mondays, E4)
Ever wanted those lazy D-list celebs who took advantage of wasted exposure time after appearing in reality TV shows such as Popstars and Big Brother, as well as and other celebs who really should know better, taken advantage of? Well, this is the show for you.
What seemingly appears to be based on the concept of a Noel's House Party Gotcha (but we won't hold that against it), former 11 O'clock show luminaries such as Robin Ince and Marc Wooton, send up unsuspecting celebrities such as Dean Gaffney, Big Brother's Narinder, Alex, Hearsay's ex-member Danny, Frank Bruno, Toyah Wilcox, Changing Rooms Handy Andy, and Ex-Hollyoaks actor Paul Danan. Not only do these celebs get a much deserved 'send-up', but also several morons with perverted egos applied to be on a game show called "Lapdance Island", which leads to embarrassing challenges, and ultimately self-ridicule.
It ultimately fills a void left by the Gotcha, and Beadle's About, but thankfully continues the joke without giving the game away until airing of the actual show on TV. Not exactly insightful, but pleasing to watch.
Craig Aston.
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And so 've written disappointed reviews, then extremely positive ones, and now it's time for a mixed one of Six Feet Under.
The problem is that it's gotten too soapy. Whilst once episodes revolved around 'the funeral of the week' with character moments mixed in with this, now the funeral's seem to be a minor part, and it's all about the various relationships, Nate and Brenda, David and
Another problem is that the characters too often didn’t develop enough. This wasn’t always the case (David especially has come a long, long way from the beginning of the show), but Ruth, Nate and Claire seem trapped in to repeating the same mistakes over and over again, most of which revolved around there dubious choice of partners. And every time they seem to be taking a step forward, something happens to make them take two steps back. The writer’s clearly didn’t know what to do with Brenda in the second year too, as she seemed to spend most of her screen time either sitting around looking miserable over her complicated relationship with brother Billy and her mother and father, or having random sex with strangers as much as possible, which led to the demise of her relationship with Nate. Once the most interesting character, she was sidelined far too much.
And then, just to prove me all wrong, the season finale came along. Which was the perfect example of why Six Feet Under can be one of the finest television shows ever made. Slowly paced, with lots of scenes only involving two characters talking, it hardly sounds like exciting stuff, but by god it was done well. When Nate and David discussed Nate’s forthcoming operation and possible death, a few tear’s trickled down my face, and trust me, I’m not one to cry in front of the tv. Nate and Brenda discussing their struggling relationship was also powerful stuff, as was Claire’s breaking down in tears at her college interview, and further highlighted that the show doesn’t have to move along at a breakneck pace to be good. Infact it benefits when it takes the time to explore various themes and ideas in depth.
So next year I just hope everything calms down a little, the characters grow and develop a little more, and that there are as few as possible weak episodes. And you never know. It might just happen. But I won’t be counting on it.
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24 (10pm, Sundays, BBC2)
And once again, I keep changing my view of another US show. 24’s first series was smart stuff, innovative, and damn gripping. The second? The second was all over the place. Some episode's were great, tightly scripted and superbly directed. Others...Well, others were a giant mess, lurching from one character to the next at all the wrong moments, seemingly intent on dragging out a plot line for eons (Jack's attempted recovery of the computer chip, and then loss of it, was particularly frustrating), and all of the twists were signposted a mile off - Sherry Palmer turns out to be partly behind the whole mess - my god, what a surprise!
Now like all men I know, I too have a weakness for Elisha Cuthbert (Jack's daughter Kim) but it was so clear that they had no idea what to do with her character that they ended up echoing her role in the first series, where she ran around in a selection of tight tops from various dodgy characters, and about three quarters of the way through the season they must have realised how ridiculous it had all gotten, and thus decided to write her out until the last couple of episodes. Next year bodes well at least – Kim’s due to get a job at CTU - I just pray they don’t have her running about pointlessly yet again.
A couple of other moments frustrated too, Nina's a fantastic uber-villan, but she disappeared half way through the run (and we never did get to find out what Jack whispered to her in the final episode she appeared in), and her presence was much missed. Hopefully she’ll be back in series three, but well, I’m trying to avoid reading spoilers about it at the moment, so I just don’t know. And once she was gone, well, the series lacked a real villain to despise, someone to strongly dislike, and when one of the men behind the bomb was revealed, well, he never really threatened, and distinctly lacked menace. There was the odd dodgy performance this time around too, the most glaring of which being Ex-Neighbour's actor Alan Dale who made for an unconvincing Vice President (with an accent which seemed like a cross of South African and Australian, but no where near American), and was ultimately rather weak.
But it wasn’t all bad by a long shot. George Mason’s decline from radiation poisoning made for emotionally gripping and challenging material, and the writer’s made a once unlikable character incredibly admirable. But once the nuclear bomb had gone off and he was no longer in the series, almost every episode dragged painfully. Jack’s transformation from bedraggled loser to mean lean fighting machine was a lot of fun (especially the scene where he kills and then decapitates a paedophile), it’s just a frustrating hey didn’t delve more in to the psyche of the character before he went in to action mode and did whatever he had to do to save the world. Or his world at the very least.
The highlight of the series though were those scenes featuring Dennis Haybert's David Palmer, a much needed antidote to all the gunfights and shouting that Jack and co. had to endure, and once again he turned in a superb performance. But the pointless cliff-hanger in which an assassination attempt is made against him was an idiotic decision, as the third series is set three years in the future, one in which Palmer is alive and well. Sigh.
So at the end of yet another 24 hour day, there’s a distinct feeling of being cheated, of being shown moments of genius only for these to be snatched away from you. I’ll watch the third series at the start, yes, but unless it pulls out all the stops, I doubt if I’ll be there at the end.
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