Category / Television

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Monk: Season 7

  Videovista have my review of season seven on Monk.

Given that Monk (in the UK at least) is a daytime TV detective series that appeals mostly to old people, I think it is fair enough to say that it is somewhat off the beaten path in terms of stuff I normally think and write about.  Hell… it’s not the type of thing I normally watch let alone review!  However, despite it being quite formulaic, quite repetitive and really not particularly intelligent, I rapidly found myself warming to the way in which the writers were able to take a small number of ideas and themes and keep returning to them again and again without those ideas ever coming across as in anyway tired.  Given that most of my genre-related reading and watching tends to focus upon works that transcend and question genre boundaries, I found it fascinating to watch a TV series that is quite content to play within the boundaries of the genre:

While Murder, She Wrote, The Father Dowling Mysteries and Diagnosis Murder may all feature crime-fighting pensioners; only Monk tells the story of a character whose life genuinely resembles that of an older person. Weighed down by fears, doubts and a variety of weird mental compulsions that make it difficult for him to deal with the realities of 21st Century life, Monk lives the sort of awkward and fragile existence common to older people.  He even has a carer and struggles with ‘new-fangled’ technology such as the Internet. While Monk may ultimately be little more than lightweight fluff that shamelessly panders to a demographic of which I am not a part, I cannot deny that I enjoyed watching it.  You simply have to marvel at a series that does so much with so little!

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – The Dark Angel (1987)

Videovista have my review of The Dark Angel, a British TV miniseries based upon J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas (1864):

If judged as a thriller then The Dark Angel suffers for the fact that Uncle Silas is very much a book that is ‘of its time’.

While the TV series is, in and of itself, perfectly watchable, I could not quite get over the extent to which a) the plot reminded me of Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White (1859) and b) quite how superior The Woman in White is to the content of this series.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Marchlands (2011)

Videovista have my review of ITV’s recent miniseries Marchlands:

Those who approach Marchlands expecting a traditional Jamesian ghost story are destined for disappointment. Marchlands is not scary, or creepy, or even particularly tense, and the few supernatural set-pieces the series does contain are fiercely derivative and quite poorly implemented by two writers and a director who are clearly incapable of moving beyond the increasingly shop-worn genre ornaments of dead pets and ghostly dripping water.

I then go on to explain that, even if one judges Marchlands not as a ghost story but as a drama, it is still a sexist, stupid and boring piece of television.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Sons of Anarchy: Season 1

Videovista has my review of series one of Kurt Sutter’s Sons of Anarchy.

Though nominally a ‘review’, the piece is really more of an essay about the creation of genre expectations through aesthetic framing. In particular, I argue that Mad Men apes the art house aesthetic and narrative styles in order to create an impression of intelligence whereas Sons of Anarchy looks as dumb as a bag of hammers despite being actually quite a clever and involved piece of writing. Dig:

Sons Of Anarchy is about the attempt to recreate a state of nature in the modern world. It examines families, tribes, organisations and states and looks at how distrust, individualism and selfishness have not only rotted out all of these institutions but also made it almost impossible for us to return to a state in which we do work together and trust each other as equal, free individuals. Sons Of Anarchy speaks to the very heart of human politics and it does so not by using long-takes and awkward silences to hint at the deep inner lives of middle-class professionals, it does so by having a load of hairy tattooed men shoot machine-guns at each other.

by Jonathan M

Sherlock’s Little Mistakes 3 – The Great Game

The excellent Gestalt Mash have my third TV Mystery column Sherlock’s Little Mistakes 3 – The Great Game.

This time, the column considers not only Holmes’ Christ-like desire to impose order upon the world but also what might happen if God’s motives were not Lovecraftian in their impenetrable Otherness.

by Jonathan M

Sherlock’s Little Mistakes 2 – The Blind Banker

Gestalt Mash have just put up my second column providing alternative solutions to the mysteries in the BBC’s Holmes-inspired TV series Sherlock.

The column considers the possibility that dear old Sherlock may have fallen into the trap of Sinomania: Assuming that Chinese people possess super-human levels of competence.  The concept of Sinomania draws upon this excellent article from the London Review of Books.

by Jonathan M

Sherlock’s Little Mistakes 1 – A Study in Pink

New website Gestalt Mash have just put up the first in a series of pieces I shall be writing for them entitled Sherlock’s Little Mistakes.

The piece is a commentary on the BBC’s recent Sherlock TV series and the idea behind it is to speculate ways in which Holmes might have been mistaken.  In looking at the first episode in the series ‘A Study in Pink’ I considered the possibility that sometimes a suicide is just a suicide.

by Jonathan M

The Cloning of Joanna May

Videovista has my review of this mini-series based upon a novel by Fay Weldon.

I’ve read better examples of Feminist SF.  Hell, I’ve seen better examples of Feminist SF but I think The Cloning of Joanna May demonstrates one of the more interesting historical quirks in the way that Feminist ideas permeated into mainstream culture.

One of my problems with with a lot of Feminist SF – certainly at the level of the classics of the sub-genre such as Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and Joanna Russ’ The Female Man (1970) – is that many of its central concepts have never seemed that revolutionary or alien to me.  I was born in 1976 and growing up, I was well aware of parents who would keep their little boys away from war toys whilst encouraging their little girls to play football.  So when it came time for me to read about some of these ideas, I always felt that the battle had been won and that the ideas of a lot of Feminist SF were old hat, mainstream or blindingly obvious.

However, while I took one lesson away from these ideas, others took a quite different one.

The Cloning of Joanna May is the product of a profoundly cynical culture trying to have a debate with itself.  Britain has never been overly fond of ‘public intellectuals’ and its public debate is arguably shaped more by comedy than it is by reasoned discourse.  For example, consider the ipact of the idea that John Major tucked his shirt into his underpants or Vince Cable’s parliamentary zinger that Gordon Brown had turned from Stalin to Mr. Bean.  Indeed, the most significant works of political drama in the last 30 years have been comedy in the shape of Yes Minister and The Thick of It.  Both series were far more potent in shaping how we see government than any Guardian editorial or Think Tank press release.

The camp and exploitative production values of The Cloning of Joanna May push it dangerously close to being a black comedy but it is also quite sincere in its desire to deconstruct traditional gender roles.  The same is true of The Two Ronnies’ series The Worm that Turned.

As with The Cloning of Joanna May, The Worm That Turned combines Feminist SF with women in skimpy outfits.  Intellectually, the writers accept the ideas, but their cynicism and resistance to these same ideas comes out through lapses into end-of-the-pier comedic imagery.  As parodies of Feminist thought, both series are utterly toothless so the comedy elements of both series should perhaps not be seen as resistance at all, but rather an adoption of the traditional forms of British public debate.