The One About Television

This will have to be a quick (for me) round-up, since has to cover shows spread over several months now, and I can't remember much about some of the telly I was watching before Christmas...

Sherlock: I've had mixed feelings about Gatiss & Moffat's interpretation of Doyle's consulting detective since the beginning and the third (and possibly final, despite the cliffhanger ending) series pretty much resolved any doubts I had. In and of itself, it's a decent series, but Cumberbatch's performance is largely unsympathetic, the show's definition of "high functioning sociopath" is quite wide of the mark, and Martin Freeman's Watson continued to fail to come across as former military until the very last episode, at which point he almost pulled it off. The show takes Doyle's creation and asks the question "who would Sherlock Holmes be if he existed in the present day?" then answers it by presenting him as an arrogant dickhead. Granted, it's entirely possible that someone like Holmes, existing in the world today, would become the abomination portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch... but that ain't Sherlock Holmes anymore. The very premise of the show is it's central flaw. Another flaw was its internal inconsistency, exemplified by the revelation, in the final episode, of Holmes' alleged history of substance abuse when, back when the series made its debut, they weren't allowed to have him smoking, let along shooting up with cocaine, and had to make do with covering him with nicotine patches.

The Musketeers: I loved the book, by Alexandre Dumas, so I'm constantly baffled by the way each adaptation plays so fast and loose with the story. Cardinal Richelieu is never so obvious in his scheming in the book. In fact, it's Richelieu who eventually signs D'Artagnan's commission into the Musketeers. The BBC's adaptation follows the pattern of their take on Robin Hood and Merlin. It's flashy, stylish, has a reasonable cast... but, ultimately, it's genre television in period costume. The Musketeers is little more than a police procedural in a leather doublet and, like most adaptations of Dumas' most famous work, there's rarely a musket in sight. Even so, the cast actually makes it fairly watchable, even though the characters' clichéd backstories are easily predictable. Most criminally, they haven't brought Rochefort into the series.

The Bridge II: the continuing adventures of Martin Rohde and Saga Norén were every bit as complex, intriguing, touching and occasionally outright funny as the first series. It's a damning indictment of British and American television that such series get remade (see The Killing and The Tunnel) more often than they are used as a template for original drama. Duplicating the dynamic with new characters and a barely altered storyline highlights how rare it is to find writers of the quality of those who created The Bridge. Again it was a grand, multi-layered story with a comparatively small, personal, almost mundane core... and, again, it ended with Saga doing her interpretation of 'the right thing', at Martin's expense. I'm sure they'll make another... but I'm worried Martin will end up killing Saga.

Salamander: started out quite intriguing, with a very targetted robbery in a bank vault... however, by the end of the second or third episode, I started thinking that it was all rather far-fetched and, frankly, not very interesting. The main character and the situation he found himself in just didn't grab me the way other European series have. I confess that, despite recording the remainder of the series, I didn't feel like catching up and deleted them all this morning.

Falling Skies: sci-fi tends not to get a good deal out of episodic television, with low budgets making everything look a bit cheap and rubbish. There's also the habit for it to focus more on the human element and descend quickly into cliché, than it does on the sci-fi, leading to such travesties as Star Trek: Enterprise and it's weekly adolescent whining and arguing which frequently proved the Vulcans' point that Humanity wasn't ready to explore the universe. Granted, the best science fiction tends to say a lot about the human race in the here-and-now... but when you're telling a story about humanity fighting back in the wake of a successful alien invasion, you need to do more than rehash old US Civil War storylines and reuse the 'warring bands of survivors' schtick that's been used in almost every season of The Walking Dead. There's also the matter of scale. This is the aftermath of an alien invasion of the planet Earth, yet we're stuck in a small American backwater with the most unlikely band of survivors one can imagine. I've been told the series improves as it continues, so I'm sticking with it for the moment... but it's not even throwing in any especially new or interesting philosophical arguments (and, yes, I've got past the 'revelation' about the harnesses and the Skitters), and the all-too-frequent historical quotations in season one are quite grating. Edutainment it ain't.

Helix: this appears to be what happens when someone thinks "Hey, The Thing was an awesome movie... and there was that 'prequel' recently... I wonder if it could be made into a TV series...". Thusfar, it's been very compelling, marred only by a couple of slightly wooden supporting actors and a couple of clichés... which is why it's very strange that it suffered an early mid-season break and will be returning to UK screens on a different channel. One of my favourite aspects of the show is the jarring incongruity of the burst of elevator musak in the title sequence - it's so ridiculously upbeat compared to the rest of the show. This is one I plan to stick with, since it's a very different slice of television sci-fi. Shame they killed off the mouthy and cynical Dr. Doreen Boyle - her dialogue in particular was a real highlight of the show...

The Tomorrow People: take a teen drama, then add 'paranormal' powers (because you're not allowed to call them 'mutants') and you've an adolescent rehash of Mutant X and Alphas that owes an enormous debt to popular 'Young Adult' fiction, particularly Jumper. Like far too many teen series that have been broadcast in the wake of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it's full of mid-20-something actors playing teen rage/angst and just looking silly. I guess I'm a little fatigued with the 'Chosen One' plot device and 'teenagers' with the awesome power to mope constantly and the staggering inability to emote unless it's writ large and loud. Gave up on it after two episodes.

Hostages: the concept - top surgeon's family held hostage to force her to kill the US President in the operating theatre - sounded perfectly interesting... for a movie or a 2-part mini-series. Spreading it over ten episodes could only have been accomplished by padding it out, and some of that seemed predictable enough. The first episode was padded out with hints at the dodgy goings-on of every other member of the family, and the moment Dylan McDermott growls "don't get involved", you know that they're going to 'reluctantly' solve the family's problems as the series progresses, and they'll all be better people by the end. Sadly, the first episode was filled with so much melodrama, I didn't bother with the rest.

Now, of course, Agents of SHIELD is back from its mid-season break... and I'm still enjoying it. It's not perfect, but it makes better use of its genre television budget than almost any of the above and, while it's not Marvel's Avengers - The TV Series, it does a very good job of presenting a side-story to the larger-than-live antics on the big screen. That, and Clark Gregg is awesome. Seriously, his presence in almost anything makes it that little bit better.

Also returning, we have Suits (which suffers from as much adolescent bickering as many other US TV shows, but dresses it up with far snappier dialogue and features the consistently brilliant Sarah Rafferty as the consistently brilliant Donna, as well as the truly stunning Gina Torres as the power-dressing head of a legal firm, which - individually - more than make up for any shortcomings) and The Mentalist. I stopped watching that about halfway through the second season because it just got so samey, but when they announced that this latest season would conclude the Red John arc, I got back into it... Sadly, after its mid-season break, it's slipping back into its old routine, even in the new setting of the FBI... but it's occasionally diverting.

Of course, no round up of Christmas period television would be complete without some mention of the Doctor Who special. I found it adequate... not quite so epic as the 50th Anniversary episode, and the way they keep shoehorning Christmas into the story is becoming a little tiresome (this year setting it on the planet Christmas), but it was a good final episode for Matt Smith. My only concerns were the offhand way they slipped through about 300 years of alien invasion, and the extended regeneration sequence. Still nothing like as mawkish as David Tennant's positively emetic farewell 'epic', but it really would have been more interesting to have the actual changeover between Smith and Capaldi happen within the story, rather than as the 'cliffhanger' ending... and do we really have a new Doctor who's so disoriented, he doesn't know how to pilot the TARDIS?

Well... we still have a few months to go before we find out...