Archive for the ‘ Families ’ Category

Last Tango in Halifax and The Secret of Crickley Hall – Pilots

I’d not had a great day and I retreated to bed with my laptop to catch up on a couple of new BBC series thanks to the power of the almighty iPlayer. Miraculously, this turned out to be the perfect cure for my bad mood!

First up was Last Tango in Halifax. This is an easy going six-part series which is well and truly embedded in the ‘comfortable’ zone of watching. Celia and Alan were almost sweethearts at school, but it didn’t work out. They both lived their lives and raised a family, now 60 years later they reconnect via facebook and rather nervously arrange to have coffee. Each of their daughters are meanwhile having their own problems with their families.

There’s nothing stressful about Last Tango in Halifax, it’s easy going, amiable, sweet, funny and just utterly lovely. Anne Reid and Derek Jacobi are perfect as people who have plenty of experience of life, but are also adorably nervous about a first date. Sarah Lancashire and Nicola Walker are equally great as women living very different lives, but each just trying to make the best of everything. The whole thing is full of an easy going humour and charm that made me completely fall in love with it.

After that success I wasn’t optimistic that my luck would hold for the second new series of the evening, The Secret of Crickley Hall. Mother of three, Eve Caleigh, nods off while her son Cam is playing in a park, she wakes up and he’s gone. 11 months later, Cam is still missing and the family relocates to try and escape the pressure of the upcoming anniversary. Unfortunately they pick Crickley Hall, a house with a disturbing history, gradually revealed through flashbacks to 1943 when it was an orphanage with a very strict master. The history carries through to the present and the Caleigh family start experiencing Weird Stuff.

This is a shorter series, just 3 episodes, and is moving along a lot faster, well paced so that the tension is gradually built up, but doesn’t become unbearable. The Caleigh family is extremely likeable and believable, both in how they’re dealing with the grief of their missing son and how they approach the weird events of the house. Suranne Jones (the Tardis!) Eve believes that she has a psychic connection with her son which gets a little wishy-washy, but it’s well balanced by the way the rest of the family treat her – they don’t necessarily believe her, but they are complete supportive. Maisie Williams as the older daughter steals every scene that she’s in, much as she does as Arya in Game of Thrones. It’s impossible not to like this family, they’re smart and funny, tightly knit without being saccharine and they’re really doing their best to get through the terrible uncertainty and grief.

The period elements aren’t quite as strong. Douglas Henshall and Sarah Smart are stuck with some pretty hammy dialogue and they come rather too close to pantomime villains. Similarly Olivia Cooke as Nancy Linnet, the young teacher worried for the safety of the pupils comes across as a rather too perfect rescuer. But balanced by the extremely ‘real’ feeling modern sections, the flashbacks aren’t too bad. The whole thing combines into a sort of easy-going creepiness that might make you jump a couple of times and keeps you paying attention, but isn’t going to keep you up at nights.

Last Tango in Halifax is on Tuesdays and The Secret of Crickley Hall is on Sundays and both are available on iPlayer.

Other Reviews:
The Telegraph on Last Tango in Halifax – The ways in which this story of late love might have gone wrong were numerous, but with the help of beautifully nuanced performances from her cast, Wainwright steered an entertaining course between the Scylla of sentimental regret and the Charybdis of patronising caricature.

The Independent – [Last Tango in Halifax] triumphed because it wasn’t about old people or even elderly romance, but love. This (sentimental) 30-year-old loved every minute.

The Telegraph on The Secret of Crickley Hall – It all clipped along quite watchably, but – unpardonably for the horror genre – with no sickening sense of jeopardy or threat.

Den of Geek – The Secret of Crickley Hall is entertaining and involving stuff. Nancy and the Caleighs are such sympathetic leads that the horrors of Crickley Hall have a satisfying heft of consequence.

2012
11/23
CATEGORY
12-13 Season
Comedy
Drama
Families
Pilot Reviews
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Blue Bloods – Season 2

While you read the following review it’s important to remember that despite the fact that I’m laying into the series, I did watch all 22 episodes. It’s not even that I just caught up on them over the summer when there was nothing better to watch, I actually pretty much stayed on top of the series rarely falling more than an episode behind. But now, I’m going to tell you how the series is rubbish.

First up… nothing happened! Of 22 plots and probably a similar number of sub-plots, I only remember a few moments scattered about; I don’t remember the cases, the victims, the suspects or the twists and turns. I often struggled to remember what was going on in the middle of the episodes, let alone weeks or months later. There was nothing outstanding about any of them, no prominent guest stars and no quirky gimmick cases. And if I can’t remember the cases, you can bet your life that I didn’t actually care about any of them.

That would be fine if the cases were just there as a vehicle to bigger stories or character development, but nothing happened on that front either. There were a couple of attempts at storylines to stretch characters (Jamie’s unlikely undercover adventures, Erin’s weird relationship with an international art thief) but at the end of the day everyone is unchanged; Jamie is still insecure, Danny is still angry all the time, Erin is still uptight. No one has developed, no one’s life is different, they could have gone straight from the pilot to the 44th episode and no one would notice any inconsistencies.

This comes back to something I said in my review of season 1, that the series needs to introduce new characters to generate motion. The relationships with the extended family are the most interesting ones (Danny and his partner Jackie, Jamie and his mentor Renzulli, Frank and his aides Baker and Garrett) but they are isolated from the rest of the group. Frank, Jamie or Erin needs to bring someone home to meet the family, something, anything needs to bring some life into the group because otherwise they’re just having the same arguments over and over again and it’s dull.

So if the series is so mediocre, why do I keep watching? The biggest thing it has in its favour is that it’s a very easy show to watch. I don’t have to pay much attention to keep track (frankly from the pre-title sequence I can map out the rest of the episode with moderate success), so it’s a perfect show to put on while ironing, baking, or even catching up on email. The fact that it isn’t very engaging actually works in its favour.

The second reason is that I keep hoping it will get better, because it has all the ingredients that it could do so. The concept is a solid one and New York is a beautiful and varied city to film in.. The cast is superb, they’re fighting against the awful writing with all their hearts and dragging some depth out of it against stupendous the odds. I like watching these people, I singled out Tom Selleck last season, and he and his moustache are still superb, but I came to appreciate the whole cast this year. Len Cariou is wonderful as the curmudgeonly elder statesman of the family with slightly outdated views, Jennifer Esposito and Amy Carlson are perfect foils for Danny as his partner and wife respectively, they bring a calmness and centre, but are also more than capable of shouting and fighting when necessary. The siblings (Donnie Wahlberg, Bridget Moynahan and Will Estes) all manage to find points of humour and connections that make them genuinely believable as a family. But I always feel that these great performances are despite of, rather than because of the writing.

The series needs to do something, change something, have its characters grow. They chickened out of opportunities this year (Erin’s job in the mayor’s office, Frank’s relationship with the reporter, Jamie’s undercover which didn’t seem to go anywhere), but without doing something interesting, this show is doomed to be an ‘ironing show’, which is a waste of a great concept and a talented ensemble.

2012
05/30
CATEGORY
11-12 Season
Crime Procedural
Families
1 comment

The Big C: Season 2

The Big C is a show that really does defy convention. Each episode is only half an hour long so I automatically tagged it as a comedy, and while it certainly has a good number of laughs in it, there was always far more going on than your average sitcom. A good sitcom will have a layer of humour over a layer of realistic life stuff, usually something work or relationship based. The Big C does that layer of humour and the day to day life layer, but then underneath that is a foundation of terminal cancer. It’s no easy thing to make all three of those levels work and interact, never losing sight of either the humour or the seriousness, but The Big C manages it admirably.

Season 1 was about Cathy herself dealing with her diagnosis, no one else knew and she focussed on trying to cram as much life as possible into her remaining time. But in season 2 everyone knows about her cancer and reacts in a different way, Cathy’s forced to deal with all those reactions rather than just focussing on herself. That in itself makes season 2 a lot less fun than the 1st, Cathy can no longer act selfishly, saying and doing absolutely anything she wants to do.

In my season 1 review I said “The show isn’t about death, it’s about life. It sounds very trite, but it is really, really true. Cathy has accepted her diagnosis and taken it as a kick in the arse to her seemingly unremarkable life”. This season however really is more about death, and the practicalities like how to pay for treatment and discrimination at work. To be honest, it’s vastly more depressing than the first season. There’s still plenty of humour from the dialogue and performances, but somehow the topic of fighting cancer and living day-to-day life is more depressing than just accepting a terminal diagnosis.

This refocusing somewhat unbalances the show. When it was more clearly a comedy it was easy to overlook the unrealistic elements such as the fact that all the characters around Cathy are ridiculously over-the-top caricatures, albeit very well acted ones, but the most useless bunch of people you’d ever meet. More frustrating is that Cathy’s cancer is one of those magic TV diseases that while extremely serious has no notable symptoms beyond those that can occasionally drive a plot. The prime example of that being the occasional hallucinations of dead people, a tried and tested cheat that is only forgiveable here because of the absolutely sublime way it plays out in the final episode of the season.

I saved the series up and watched the thirteen episodes over just a couple of weeks. By the end of the season I felt rather like I’d been hit by a truck. The last few episodes are intense and actually pretty devastating. They are also superbly put together and absolutely brilliant television. The fact that it’s difficult to understand whether it’s a comedy or a drama, that it bounces between surreal and brutal realism, actually is a positive. It’s a show that defies convention or label and that in itself makes it fascinating.

2012
04/28
CATEGORY
11-12 Season
Comedy
Drama
Families
1 comment

Brothers & Sisters: Season 5

Five seasons of sappiness was apparently all that the world wanted from Brothers & Sisters. The accountants just didn’t like the balance between the large, expensive cast and the falling ratings, so the plug was pulled. I can’t help but think that it’s no coincidence the show was cancelled the same year its parent network cancelled All My Children and One Life to Live, two of the biggest soap operas in US history. I can’t be bothered to go find the in depth reasons behind the cancellations, but is it possible that people (well Nielson homes in the US, who control the only ratings anyone cares about) just aren’t interested in soaps any more?

This year, even Brothers & Sisters was even more soap opera-ish than ever, complete with staple soap plots like car crashes, amnesia, long-lost loves, paternity issues and stolen babies. There was a death, a wedding, a divorce, an affair, an adoption, an unplanned pregnancy… it was like they were playing bingo and desperately trying to get everything ticked off. It just about all hung together, but it really was getting pretty ridiculous!

Although I think they pushed the melodramatic plots a bit too far, I still found it incredibly watchable. It’s the kind of thing that you throw in when you just can’t quite take the stress of Grey’s Anatomy. It’s something I watch while sick or miserable and just enjoy the relationships, humour and mild angst without having to pop a Prozac afterwards. It’s not that I’m not invested in the characters, it’s just not quite the same level as something like Grey’s Anatomy or Friday Night Lights. Brothers & Sisters is more escapist, the characters and situations aren’t quite real, it’s all got a shiny California, Hollywood feel to it.

I will miss the Walkers and all their extended family, the way that individually they’re so utterly dysfunctional, yet as a group they’re fearsome. I always adored the fact that although at first sight the title refers to the five siblings, when you look closer, and as the family grows and changes, it becomes clear that it’s about Nora and Saul’s relationship too, and all the brothers and sisters-in-law, and half siblings.

The show’s success and its downfall were its large cast – it enabled the show to feel more realistic about the number of relationships that real people juggle, depicting them in all their wonderful and difficult varieties. But at the end of the day, that just became too expensive to maintain. I for one am actually glad that the show was cancelled rather than trying to run it with a reduced cast. This last season with Tommy, Rebecca and Holly gone almost completely and Kitty in a reduced number of episodes already felt reduced, too small. I’d rather leave the Walkers drinking and dancing at a wedding and say goodbye properly than watch the mighty Walkers waste away.

2011
07/27
CATEGORY
10-11 Season
Drama
Families
1 comment

Pilot Review: No Ordinary Family

A ‘regular’ family have grown apart so take a holiday to try to reconnect with each other. Then their plane crashes and they end up in a sparkly lake. They return home and gradually each begin to demonstrate exciting new super powers. Will what makes them different from everyone else now bring them all together?

Straight off the bat – the whole superheroes thing – kinda done to death. Family of superheroes? Not exactly original either. Just about every aspect of the plot of this has been done before. Even the superpowers themselves aren’t new or exciting, ooo superspeed, where haven’t we seen that before?

Then there’s the family angles. Mum is working too hard and has no time for her family, dad is feeling left behind, daughter has boyfriend troubles and spends her life texting and little brother is… well bottom of the pecking order. Yup, still more of the same. Then there’s some hints of evil corporations, a couple of spunky sidekicks and some hand-wavy science. It’s really kind of eye-rollingly standard.

Bits of it though is actually pretty entertaining. Michael Chiklis (The Shield) and Julie Benz (Dexter and Angel) are really likeable actors, and while their chemistry didn’t blow me away, it was certainly convincing as two people who aren’t connecting quite right at the moment, but really want to. The sidekicks are pretty entertaining, stealing some of the best lines of the show largely thanks to the fact that they can just have FUN and not have to deal with the soap opera ‘issues’ that the family are lumbered with.

The dialogue in the above trailer is representative and pretty awful, but some of the throwaway dialogue is actually a lot stronger, when they’re not laying on the angst with a shovel there’s some funny lines and banter going on. When they’re not desperately trying to connect, there’s some nice little quiet moments of family-ness. It’s also relatively well directed, although clearly with some budget issues when it comes to faking the special effects. It’s bright and colourful, makes good use of locations (my scientist house-mate was particularly impressed with the real looking labs and I for one liked the rooftops). It was surprisingly light, airy and spacious.

I wanted to like this, I wanted it to have all the fun of the superpowers without the angst of destinies and having to save the world (or a cheerleader). When the pilot was focusing on the exploration of the superpowers, that was fun, but as soon as it actually worked stuff out, or switched to the angsty family stuff, I lost interest and found myself laughing at the cheesy dialogue for all the wrong reasons. The problem is that No Ordinary Family is actually very Ordinary, superpowers may be exceptional to them, but to us this just comes across as The Incredibles mushed together with Heroes.

The pilot suffered a bit from ‘trying too hard’ syndrome, everyone seemed very tense. I think it just needs to lighten up a bit and it could be an entertaining, though largely disposable show that’s fun to sit and watch over dinner. I’ll give it a few more episodes to see where it goes.

Reviews
TV Squad – Still, the biggest problem with ‘No Ordinary Family’ isn’t necessarily its plodding plot or its by-the-book characters, it’s that the show doesn’t allow viewers to discover anything for themselves. Every theme is telegraphed, if not communicated in capital letters.

CliqueClack – I found No Ordinary Family refreshing, like taking a hit of oxygen in the smoggiest part of the day… No Ordinary Family may be “family-friendly” fare and a “feel-good” dramedy, but I ask you, what’s so wrong with that?

Links: Official site, Wikipedia, imdb, tv.com

2010
10/18
CATEGORY
10-11 Season
Families
Pilot Reviews
1 comment

Brothers & Sisters: Season 4

I’ve been quite harsh on a number of shows this year, so it makes a nice change to sit down to review a show and realise that it’s managed to entertain me without fail for 24 episodes and leave me desperately waiting for its return.

On paper, Brothers & Sisters doesn’t look like the most ambitious of shows – the trials and tribulations of the Walker family – five siblings, their mother and her brother, their partners and their assorted hangers on. It’s the televisual equivalent of comfort food, not quite as overdone as Gossip Girl or Desperate Housewives (although I haven’t seen that for a few years), but more cheesy than Grey’s Anatomy.

The magic thing about Brothers & Sisters is the people. There can be up to fourteen people sitting round a dinner table shouting at each other, and every single one is an interesting character with complex relationships with almost everyone else at the table. Each of the siblings has their own life, career and family, but they all mesh together like cogs in a giant machine. A gossiping, drinking, sniping, shouting, crying, sarcastic machine, but somehow a pretty functional one.

The joy of the show isn’t in the day-to-day plots that get pushed into the machine, or about the generally predictable resolutions that eventually emerge. It’s about watching the machine in action – the drunken dinners, the shouting in the kitchen, the gossiping conference calls. I could go into great details of the plots and the characters, what worked well this season and what didn’t, but you know what, I don’t actually want to. I love this show, shamelessly and hopelessly. It makes me laugh, it makes me cry and it makes me feel part of the family.

2010
07/01
CATEGORY
09-10 Season
Families
1 comment

Pilot Review: Parenthood

The Brief: Based on the Steve Martin film of the same name, it’s an ensemble drama featuring the extended Braverman family.

I found it impossible to watch this show without at every step comparing it not only to the film of the same name, but more importantly the well established show Brothers and Sisters. Each show has a large ensemble cast based around three generations of the family. The shows have very similar tones, falling into that middle ground between comedy and drama (or occasional melodrama).

There’s some good talent in the cast. Peter Krause and Lauren Graham are enough to make me check a show out all by themselves and make sense as siblings,Monica Potter as Krause’s wife is also a name and face I recognise and she is great in this. The two younger siblings are also okay, and there’s some talented young actors playing the various children. Each character and actor works, but they don’t feel like a family, they don’t have the instant chemistry which I saw from the pilot of Brothers and Sisters. This is a real shame, but may be due to the fact that a lot of the pilot was reshot, when Lauren Graham replaced Maura Tierney who had to withdraw due to illness.

Maybe the issue with the overall chemistry stems from the fact the family dynamic didn’t really work, the parents didn’t feel like strong enough characters. The oldest son (Krause) is the de-facto leader of the family, his father is treated more as a problem to be dealt with rather than a strong foundation and the mother was almost non-existent as a character. I hope that the family dynamics will become more settled as the show continues, working out the different connections, strengths and weaknesses, but I worry that by focussing on ‘parenthood’ instead of ‘siblinghood’ the relationships are all vertical and not as easily interconnected.

I think if I wasn’t such a fan of Brothers and Sisters I would have liked this show a lot more, as it was it felt a bit like a cheap imitation. So many things that happened in the pilot I could look at comparable scenes in Brothers and Sisters and see that they’d done it better. It didn’t have the energy or the extremes, an episode of Brothers and Sisters will make me laugh, cry, cringe and cheer; it wasn’t that I thought Parenthood was bad, it was just that it didn’t really evoke much of a response from me at all.

Links – Official website, TV.com, imdb, wikipedia

Reviews – CliqueClack (I spotted the running thing too!), TVSquad (“uncomfortably familiar”), TV Addict (“What grand irony: a show with family issues”).

2010
03/10
CATEGORY
Families
Pilot Reviews
2 comments

Pilot Review: Life Unexpected

The Brief: Fifteen year old Lux is trying to escape the foster care system and go it alone as soon as she hits her birthday in a couple of days. But to do that she needs the signatures of her birth parents, who had a one night stand when they were sixteen and never really looked back. Inevitably they find they need each other and end up forming a very strange extended family group.

The CW is an odd network, it’s targeting the pretty specific female 18-34 demographic and has a collection of shows that are completely unashamed about what they. While there’s a lot of stuff I don’t care for (America’s Next Top Model, Melrose Place) and there’ve been some real clunkers (The Beautiful Life, about New York models only lasted two episodes), there’s also some real gems like Gossip Girl, Supernatural and Smallville. It also used to broadcast Veronica Mars and Gilmore Girls, and Life Unexpected clearly owes a debt to both of those shows.

Sixteen years and nine months ago Cate and Nate (ugh) had a one night stand after a prom, she got pregnant and put the baby up for adoption, Nate thought she had an abortion. Now she’s a breakfast host on the local radio station and he owns and lives in a bar. Lux was never actually adopted and has been bouncing around foster homes and is petitioning to be granted emancipation on her sixteenth birthday, but for contrived reasons needs her parent’s signatures. Hijinks ensue and they all end up reconnecting and needing each other. It’d be a pretty short show if they didn’t.

The themes are all pretty clear and simple, the ‘parents’ generally have less of a clue about life than the child does, but she in turn isn’t nearly as grown up as she thinks she is. They’re all busy proclaiming too loudly that they’re fine and happy with their lives – Cate’s whole on-air persona is about being bitter and lonely, Nate is a 32 year old living like he’s in a fraternity and Lux screams that she’s self-sufficient and doesn’t need anyone. It’s cheesy and obvious, but it makes sense and forms a good foundation.

The characters are all really nicely crafted and introduced. When Cate is asked if she even thought about keeping her baby, she answers ‘no’ with complete honesty. She wants to do the right thing by her daughter, but she doesn’t spontaneously become an all knowing mother figure, you can see her thinking things out and just trying really hard. The relationship between Nate and Lux is a little different, he doesn’t have the same feelings of guilt, but he sees the opportunity to embrace the responsibility for a change.

The pilot is enjoyable and touching without being too smaltzy. There’s a lot of spirit in the characters and the gang of supporting side-kicks adds a lot of humour. I liked the look of the show as well, set in Portland, Oregon and has a sort of grungy lived in feel to it. I doubt it’s going to be a surprising show, I suspect I could predict the plots of half a dozen episodes based on the pilot alone, but the show has a spark to it that made me want to watch more.

Links
imdb, tv.com, wikipedia

TVSquad review

I can’t find any info about a UK channel showing this.

2010
01/28
CATEGORY
Families
Pilot Reviews
1 comment

Big Love: Season 1

Another superb series from HBO, in a similar spirit to Six Feet Under, focussing on a family with an ‘odd’ situation but basically just telling the stories of their day to day lives. The family here is made up of three households – three wives, seven children and one husband. There are larger issues to deal with involving past family connections and a religious compound and cult. However to me what was most interesting and enjoyable about the show were the day to day issues and logistics associated with having three households and three wives, watching everyone try to balance their own needs and the greater needs of the family.

The diverse personalities involved are beautifully performed by the cast. The three wives are all so different and yet very believable as ‘sister wives’. The two eldest children also have an interesting story – to what extent they agree with the illegal polygamy and how they have to keep their lives secret. As with Six Feet Under it’s the humour of the show and the sense of family that hold the whole thing together and make it a real joy to watch.

2009
06/25
CATEGORY
Families
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Gilmore Girls: Season 1

Cheesy and charming in roughly equal measures. It feels a little dated already which is a shame as it was only made in 2000. It’s all peppy and perky, not a vast amount of substance to be honest. It’s fun to watch, but it doesn’t really do a vast amount more than background noise and distraction. The characters are all charming, with good chemistry between them. I particularly liked the quirky best friends Suki and Lane, non-standard characters with interesting backgrounds and issues of their own. It didn’t make me want to run out and buy the next season, but I’d pick it up if I saw it on special offer sometime.

2009
02/22
CATEGORY
Families
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