All Change

Some major changes on the site today – it’s moved! The new home of Transmission is www.tv-blog.co.uk where it will shortly be joined by a couple of other blogs.

There’s been more views of posts about E4’s Misfits over the years than posts about any other show and all of those posts will be moving over to a separate new blog of their own. There’ll also soon be a new blog devoted to Homeland, the exciting new series that starts tonight.

This will mean a few changes for those of you who are currently following the blog by email or RSS feeds. If you’re following on email, you’ll need to resubscribe on the new site, while those who are following on RSS will need to use http://transmission.tv-blog.co.uk/feed/

Noel Fielding’s Luxury Comedy

Noel Fielding’s Luxury Comedy made its first appearance on E4 tonight. Also featuring Noel’s brother Mike and Rich Fulcher, both of whom will be familiar to fans of the Mighty Boosh, it was a sketch show featuring a mix of live-action, animation and puppetry, usually involving a huge amount of face paint. Dazzlingly imaginative and full of Fielding’s distinctive psychedelic artwork, it’s surely the most inventive comedy show of the year, but sadly not the funniest.

Sketch characters included Dondelion, who paces his zoo cage while having some rather dark mood swings, and Roy Circles, a talking chocolate finger war veteran widower and PE teacher. These were all linked by Fielding in his treehouse base, eating cereal and drawing pictures of Pele holding a cup while kicking a ball (or is it a saucer?). Whether or not the last couple of sentences raised a smile will show how much you’d enjoy this series. Perhaps the best of these characters was a bright yellow New York City cop named Sergeant Raymond Boombox who solves crimes with the help of his talking wounds, while the definite lowlight of the episode was Renny and Gaviskon, two characters who just crash around a kitchen for a bit. There was also a “guest” appearance from the Boosh’s Moon character, which only made me miss the BBC Three series more.

Luxury Comedy seems to highlight what Julian Barrett brought to the Mighty Boosh. His musical talents have been replaced here by those of Serge Pizzorno from Kasabian, but Barrett’s writing appears to be missed. In particular, it feels like the corduroy and jazz-flavoured balance he brought to the Boosh was missing. Without this balance, Fielding’s flights of fancy had nothing to keep them tied down and while this can be fantastic in small doses, half an hour’s worth left me feeling like I’d gorged on too many sweets.

It’s a shame that it wasn’t anywhere near as funny as it was colourful. Giving Fielding free rein to be utterly self-indulgent without any quality control could have been an interesting experiment as a one-off special, but I have doubts about it having much mileage as a series.

2012 Preview: Bad Sugar & A Touch of Cloth

So far this week I’ve been looking at some series that will be appearing on our screens in the coming months. Today, a very brief look at two one-off British comedy specials I’m looking forward to seeing this year.

First up, Bad Sugar, a 30-minute pilot starring some of the country’s best comic actresses – Olivia Colman, Julia Davis and Sharon Horgan. It’s written by Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong, creators of Peep Show and Fresh Meat, both of which will return later this year. Bad Sugar is described as “a peculiarly British take on telenovela style melodramas” focusing on a dysfunctional, wealthy mining dynasty, with an ailing patriarch and some greedy siblings. Directed by Ben Palmer, fresh from helming the hugely successful Inbetweeners Movie, the pilot will guest star Reece Shearsmith, Peter Serafinowicz and David Bradley. With these talents in front of and behind the camera, this looks like it’ll be worth waiting for.

Sky 1’s line-up of home-grown comedies continues to grow, with one of the latest being A Touch of Cloth, a feature-length spoof of British crime dramas written by Charlie Brooker and Daniel Maier. Starring John Hannah as maverick, boozing DCI Jack Cloth, Suranne Jones as his plucky partner DC Anne Oldman and Julian Rhind-Tutt as their boss, A.C.C. Tom Boss, it follows an investigation into a series of increasingly grisly murders while taking in all of the regular locations seen in detective shows, from the leafy forests and luxury homes of Sunday afternoon fare to the sinister lock-ups and cold forensic labs of the more gritty dramas. It sounds like it’s taking a more silly route than most of Brooker’s scripts, which would be ideal for this sort of thing – as Maier says, “It’s like Airplane! for a detective series except for not being Police Squad”.

No air dates for either of these shows yet, but as soon as I find out I’ll let you know.

Bad Sugar will be on later this year on Channel Four
A Touch of Cloth will be on later this year on Sky 1 HD

2012 Preview: Alcatraz

This week in the US saw the premiere of Alcatraz, a new series from some of the team behind Lost which will be coming to Watch later this year. And it’s not just the credits for executive producer J.J. Abrams, director Jack Bender and writer Elizabeth Sarnoff that link the series. In the first episode, as Jorge “Hurley” Garcia talks about “the island” while Michael Giacchino’s soaring score plays in the background, you could be forgiven for thinking we’d flashed back in time a couple of years.

Incidentally, time travel of some form plays an important part in this show. We start by being told that while we think the prisoners and guards of Alcatraz moved elsewhere when it shut down in the 1960s, some of them disappeared. Garcia plays Dr. Diego Soto, a comic book writer and expert on the infamous prison who is basically the same character as Hurley – loveable, geeky and the only person able to see the absurdities of what’s going on from the audience’s point of view. He’s recruited by Rebecca Madsen (Sarah Jones), a San Francisco cop investigating a murder by an ex-inmate and they both stumble across a secret FBI operation being run by Emerson Hauser (Sam Neill, yes, from off of Jurassic Park) and Lucy Banerjee (ER’s Parminder Nagra). It seems that the prisoners are starting to reappear fifty years after they were last seen, looking no older than they did then, and Hauser is attempting to round them up before they start getting up to their old criminal ways.

The format has been very carefully constructed so that fans of Lost’s mysteries have a puzzle that will slowly unravel throughout the series, while those people who prefer to jump in and out of the show will have a self-contained story in each episode, as every week the team go after a different prisoner. So, one week you have a sniper on the loose, the next it’s a child abductor who needs to be tracked down. Throughout each episode are flashbacks to the 1960s, as we discover from their time on the Rock what motivates the criminal-of-the-week as well as sometimes getting a step closer to discovering who brought them to the present day, how and why.

Now, it certainly isn’t a bad show and it’s a joy to see Jorge Garcia back on the screen (who doesn’t love Hurley?) but the first couple of episodes didn’t grab me as being particularly outstanding. There are a few things that especially bugged me, such as the way the prisoners seem utterly unperturbed by the changes in technology over the last half century (although this admittedly might be partially explained at some point) and the fact that Rebecca and her team seem to be able to turn up at a crime scene and be sure that it must be the work of another Alcatraz prisoner, as if there are no present-day criminals around.

It also remains to be seen how well the balance between the series-long arcs and stand-alone stories will work. There’s still a chance that people who infrequently dip in and out of the show could get confused by the ongoing time travel plots while, speaking as someone who is more intrigued by watching the overall mythology of the show unfold, I can imagine that the focus on the hunt for a different criminal each week might soon get tiresome for someone like me. Besides, if I wanted to see a Lost-related police procedural, I’d have preferred a spin-off featuring Saywer and Miles as a good cop/bad cop, or Locke and Ben setting up some sort of paranormal detective agency.

It’s still worth a look, though, and as a lighter mix of action, sleuthing and sci-fi mystery it’s better than a lot of other shows out there.

Alcatraz starts in March on Watch

Tomorrow: Bad Sugar & A Touch of Cloth

2012 Preview: Being Human

Toby Whithouse’s supernatural drama Being Human returns to BBC Three early this year, and as fans of the show will know, there are some major cast changes for series four. Aidan Turner has left to film The Hobbit by way of a wolf-shaped bullet, and Sinead Keenan decided to leave the show at the end of the last series. What’s more, Russell Tovey has decided that this eight-episode series will be his last as George, leaving Lenora Crichlow’s ghostly Annie as the only remaining original cast member for series five.

Lenora promises that fans of the show need not be disappointed, “I missed Aidan and Sinead a lot, but the essence of Being Human, the love, enthusiasm and integrity of the show, is still there. We still have the same crew and production team behind it, but a different dynamic now we have had some changes in cast. Episode one is high, high drama. Think huge tears, and huge shocks, but it is also very exciting. It will have you on the edge of your seat!”

It looks like there is plenty to look forward to in this series, including new type of supernatural creature and the introduction of baby Eve into the household. Guest appearances this series include Mark Gatiss, Ellie Kendrick, Mark Williams and most excitingly of all, Craig Roberts (star of Submarine, one of my favourite films of the last year) returns as Adam, the middle-aged vampire stuck in a teenage body seen in an episode last series and the online spin-off Becoming Human.

Michael Socha’s werewolf Tom gets a deserved upgrade from guest character to a part of the main cast. He gets a job at a local cafe and slowly fits into the “family” with Annie taking on a motherly role as he adjusts to living in a house, a very different lifestyle to his travelling days. As Michael says, we’ll see Tom going through something akin to an adolescence, “He’s experiencing things probably a 13 or 14 year old would. He tries to adjust to these changes while at the same time is having a hard time coping with different emotions that he has never experienced before. You will discover Tom is quite an emotional character. Tom lost his dad in the last series so now he has to grow up. He copies McNair in a lot of ways, there are a lot of similarities, a lot of things Tom has taken with him, but I think Tom now is his own man.”

And, of course, there has to be a new vampire to fill Mitchell’s shoes. Irish actor Damien Molony, in his first television role, plays Hal, a rather posh legendary vampire of old who has managed to keep away from blood for decades but is coming perilously close to falling off the wagon when he arrives on Barry Island. Damien says he was conscious of not being a clone of his Aiden’s character, “Mitchell was such an iconic vampire, so it was nerve-racking joining a show to replace this fantastic actor and fantastic character. But the more and more I read the scripts and the more I realised where Hal was coming from, I realised they are so different, so the pressure was taken off slightly. I spoke to the directors and writers in length about it, and it was great to be given the freedom to pursue an entirely different character.”

Just like Misfits, Being Human is having to go through some major cast changes that are making some fans worry about the show’s best days being in the past, but with the same creative team being behind the show and some well-chosen replacements in the cast, it looks like it can continue to be one of the most exciting and original British dramas on television.

Need more to whet your appetite? Here’s a prequel introducing you to Hal, the new vampire…

Being Human returns to BBC Three soon

Tomorrow: Alcatraz

2012 Preview: Homeland

After a prolonged break for Christmas, New Year and general procrastination, the blog is back every day this week with some short previews of what’s coming up later this year, starting with Homeland, a thriller starring Claire Danes which (as I type this) has just picked up the Golden Globe for best drama. Broadly based on the acclaimed Israeli series Hatufim and shown on the Showtime channel in the US (also home to Dexter), it begins next month on Channel Four.

Danes stars as CIA officer Carrie Mathison, who we first see in Iraq bribing her way into a jail to try to get some information about a possible attack from a bomb maker who is due to be executed. He whispers in her ear that an American prisoner of war has been turned, something she immediately discredits because there are no Americans being held. Ten months later, Sergeant Nicholas Brody, a US Marine who went missing in Iraq eight years ago and has long been presumed dead, is rescued in a Special Forces raid. Carrie immediately puts two and two together, suspecting Brody of being the convert to al-Qaeda she was told about. Because she has little evidence and Brody is being greeted by America as a returning war hero, she knows the CIA will not support any investigation. Instead, she carries out her own unauthorized surveillance work in an attempt to see if her suspicions are correct and prevent a terrorist attack.

In a few ways, this feels like a more grown-up version of 24, and not just because being made by a cable channel rather than a network means it can have nudity and swearing. As much as I absolutely loved 24, it did often help to switch your brain off while watching, while Homeland seems a lot more intelligent and based in reality. It’s also got a tremendously interesting lead character in Carrie Mathison, who takes anti-psychotic medication and is only interested in men who want one-night stands, a stand-out performance from Danes. Damian Lewis is also excellent as Brody, a man who, whether a terrorist mole or not, clearly has gone through hell for the past eight years. There are no shoot-outs or explosions (in the opening episode, at least) but there are a few things that would be familiar for fans of 24 – the sense of a ticking clock towards a terrorist attack, the surveillance operation with cameras and microphones around the suspect’s house, and our hero having to secretly do their own investigations because their superiors won’t listen to their instincts.

The first episode is one of the best debuts I’ve seen for a while, it drew me in very quickly and introduced the characters in some depth early on. As Brody arrives home to a hero’s welcome, we meet his wife Jess (V’s Morena Baccarin) who, despite tying a yellow ribbon, telling the world she won’t give up hope and even shunning the wife of another missing Marine for remarrying, has been finding solace in the arms of (of course) her husband’s best friend. We’re also introduced to his rebellious teenage daughter Dana and sweet-natured son Chris, who grew up without really knowing his dad. There’s something about this family that made me hope things go well for them and at times I started to doubt Carrie’s suspicions and wonder if Brody really is just a traumatized kidnap victim, before being sent back in the other direction again. I’m sure I’ll be sent back and forth some more as the series goes on.

There are twelve episodes in this first season, meaning it’s not the 20-plus week commitment some American series are, and a second has already been ordered. I’d say Homeland definitely goes in the “don’t miss” category.

Homeland starts in February on Channel Four

Tomorrow’s preview: Being Human

Misfits: Series 3, Episode 8

Last night’s epic finale to the third series of Misfits took us right back to the very beginning and through the story of the last three years. As loose ends were tied up, old faces returned and our very first meeting with the gang was reflected upon, it felt like this could have been a deservedly exhilarating and emotional ending to the programme as a whole. However, series four has just been confirmed, meaning we’ll be returning to the orange jumpsuits in late 2012.

Misfits: Series 3, Episode 7

So far, despite still being one of the best things on TV all year, this third series of Misfits hasn’t quite hit the heights of the first two. But that all changed last night, with an episode that finally stands up alongside the very best of series one and two.

Black Mirror clip: 15 Million Merits

Black Mirror continues this Sunday with 15 Million Merits, a satire on reality television co-written by Charlie Brooker and his wife, Konnie Huq. Brooker says it’s set in “a world in which every surface is an interactive distraction and people are condemned to a life of drudgery where the only escape is fame.” It stars The Fades’ Daniel Kaluuya (or Tealeaf from Psychoville) and Downton Abbey’s Jessica Brown Findlay, along with Rupert Everett, Julia Davis and Ashley Thomas. Here’s a clip:

Black Mirror: 15 Million Merits airs Sunday at 9.30pm on Channel 4

Misfits: Series 3, Episode 6

Tonight’s Misfits was back on form, definitely the funniest episode of the third series so far. The second of the two episodes to be written by Jon Brown, it featured some great lines and the mix between joyously irreverent comedy and thrillingly absorbing drama that makes Misfits so good.