Anyone Else Let Down By The BBC's Lifetime Of Original British Drama Ad?

I'm hardly ever excited enough for a show that I actually plan to sit down and actually watch it live but I was absolutely pumped when I saw the trailer for The Missing last week to that's exactly what a planned to do. If having The Missing on tonight wasn't good enough I spotted this tweet on my feed earlier today:

Tonight we are launching a brand new trailer, led by Benedict Cumberbatch, showcasing the best of BBC Drama. pic.twitter.com/mazaz3pksI
— BBC One (@BBCOne) October 28, 2014

If you hadn't noticed I'm a B-Cumbz fan as well as a fan of the BBC drama so I was ecstatic when seeing that. Instead of one hour of enjoyment I get one hour and two minutes! Unfortunately for me seeing the trailer almost dulled the experience of watching The Missing. I guess my expectations were too high because I've always felt that the BBCs trailers were amazing. Just take a look at their trailer below.

My Watch List: Prey

I do try my best to keep up with television and films but it's damn near impossible unless I learn how to control time and space to watch them. For everything I manage to watch there's about 10 others I miss which I stick on a watch list and promise myself I'll watch them all before my demise. Over the past couple of years I have been adding to the list constantly but have never actually sat down and watched what's on it until now. I picked the shortest show I could find which was Prey and it saddens me that I didn't watch it when it aired. Prey ran for 3 episodes last year and starred John Simm as DC Marcus Farrow who is arrested for murdering his estranged wife and young son, and the series explores his attempts to clear his name. In doing so he unfolds a web of conspiracy involving gangsters and police officers, and he has to come to terms with the fact that some of the people that he works with and trusts are working against him. I only intended to watch the first episode before I went to bed but that wasn't enough, I burned through the whole series without even realising, and at the same time I was texting friends and urging them to watch it. If done well seeing the plight of a grieving and wrongly accused man should be both riveting and heartbreaking to watch, and Prey most certainly delivers.

I never watched Life On Mars (also on my watch list) so I've only known John Simm from films and a few other television dramas that he's acted in so I thought highly of him anyway, but seeing his performance in Prey was absolutely marvellous. There is only 3 episodes and Marcus goes through so much emotionally, he has to deal with his grief, anger, betrayal and a whole host of other things in such a short space of time that Simm could be forgiven if he lost it slightly but he never does. Simm managed to portray the character to perfection and emote so well that the audience sees all the emotions that he is going through throughout the series, while watching the show I felt the pain and betrayal that Marcus felt. The show is very fast paced and a lot of things happen within a single episode so it would be easy to lose track of what is going on but you never forget the reasoning behind it, it's all in Simm's face every time he lights up the screen as Marcus. If awards were actually about people's work rather than hype and campaigning then Simm's portrayal would be award worthy, I say he should be given an Oscar even though Prey isn't a film. He's that good.

A Cinemax Special: The Knick

Everyday for the past couple of months I've seen a poster for The Knick on my way to work. I see a scrubbed up Clive Owen as he's about to perform a surgery with the name Steven Soderbergh hovering over him to tempt me even more. I was intrigued instantly but didn't have the time to watch it when I first saw the poster but I looked it up a little while ago and saw that it was produced by Cinemax. Call me ignorant and naive (a lot of people do) but I thought Cinemax specialised in porn or documentaries about porn or soft porn, basically things that were porn related. I could sort of understand Soderbergh's involvement in the show and Cinemax because even though he panders to the masses with Oceans movies but he is quite experimental and likes to push boundaries but I didn't understand Clive Owen's involvement in a show which I assumed would be like True Blood but set in a twentieth century hospital. This weekend I decided to watch the first episode and again learnt that I shouldn't judge a book by its cover. I really should stop it, I miss out on a lot.

The Knick is set in the early twentieth century in New York and follows the lives of the staff that work there, the main character being Dr. John Thackery (Clive Owen). I tend to love period pieces, and no I don't been the heritage dramas starring Keira Knightly that the UK spits out every year to garner awards and money, but real period pieces. Shows and films that don't centre on aristocrats as they decide who to marry or getting over a stutter, but ones that feature gritty realism which is what the audience gets with The Knick. It is a hospital that is set in a part of New York that isn't affluent so their patients are mainly people that are of lower class and living in poverty. They are the patients that would allow untested methods to survive so the audience gets to see how modern medicine has come to be what it is. In the first episode alone we see Dr. Thackery perform two procedure that would be deemed unorthodox at the time, and hopefully we'll see many more in the episodes to come and people learning from it. We've had hospital dramas like ER and Greys Anatomy but we haven't had anything like this, we haven't seen the experimental side of medicine and it's advancement over the years so it should be interesting to watch.

Marry Me: The Sitcom Of The Year

 I have been searching for an enjoyable new sitcom to watch over the past few weeks and up until this afternoon I had come up empty. First there was A to Z which in the pilot felt like it wasn't quite sure what it was supposed to be and I wasn't willing to put in the time to see how it ended up because I could spend that time watching the comedy classic The Big Bang Theory (I'm joking, don't judge me for that statement). Then there was Selfie that seems promising but I don't think missing an episode or 3 would really matter, I haven't gotten engrossed in the show or characters as much as I would have liked. I decided to dip my toe into sitcom land one more time this year and watched Marry Me earlier today and after one episode I can tell it was the show I was waiting for.

Marry Me comes from the mind of David Caspe who created the much underrated Happy Endings. Whenever I tell a friend that I was a fan of Happy Endings they seem to laugh and want to rescind the TV geek girl card that I gave to myself. Happy Endings may not have had the most brilliant start (or the most brilliant name) but it did manage to develop into a show that is truly funny, with well rounded and loveable characters, and isn't that what we need in a sitcom? Unfortunately the damage was done after the first season and it was unable to gain the audience that it had lost so it was cancelled after the third season, and it still pains me. But I guess Marry Me came out of the shows cancellation so it's not all bad. Marry Me follows Annie and Jake who get engaged after a six year relationship even though the botched proposals are deemed by them as signs that are pointing towards their relationship being doomed, eventually they get it together and presumably we'll watch them on the way to the isle. I take issue with the name of the show again, I mean for some reason sitcoms just tend to be badly titled! What happens when they do get married, the show won't be about their proposal anymore will it? Unless their friends get engaged which is possible, or they could changed the name I guess. I vote for a Cougar Town style intro when it gets to that point, put in the intro that the show is badly named and then I'll take back my initial reservations.

Does The Walking Dead Still Have Its Bite?

I remember waking up early on November 1st 2010 to watch the first episode of The Walking Dead. It was a show that I had been teased with for months that was based on an epic graphic novel (so I've heard, I've only read snippets of it) and featured a lot of blood, gore and zombies, that are referred to as walkers. I still don't understand why they aren't called zombies, unless in the fictional zombie infested worlds they've never had zombie fiction, and if they haven't I pity them as they didn't get the likes of The Walking Dead in The Walking Dead. I'll stop with that now as it feels like im getting a bit Inception-y. Within the first five minutes of the show I was enthralled and tuned in week after week without fail, waking up at the crack of dawn to watch it before anyone could spoil it for me. The Walking Dead is the reason people think I am obsessed with zombies and I tend to get zombie related gifts like Gnombie, who is my zombie gnome. Of course I love these gifts so keep them coming (I'm talking to you Matthew) but it's not the zombies I'm fascinated with, it's the show. I like to feel I have an appropriate level of obsession for zombies, as I do aliens. It's not over the top! The obsession only pops up when The Walking Dead is airing and thats no coincidence!

How Good Was The Supernatural Season 10 Premiere?

If you haven't read past posts on this blog then you won't know that I am an avid watcher of Supernatural. I've been watching it for almost half my life and will be watching it until the day that J2 and Misha decide they've had enough. We all know that theres no way that The CW will be cancelling that show now it's made it ten years and still getting incredible ratings. I may be a fan of the show but I am not a blind one, I can admit when it hasn't been that great and it doesn't make me love the show any less it just makes me honest. The main story arc of seasons 1-5 was brilliant (apart from The CW heavy season 3) as Kripke had thought it out and structured it rather write the storyline week by week. It was very fluid and although there were some things that didn't quite pan out as a whole it was a good storyline. Following Kripke's departure there would obviously be a few teething issues, unfortunately those issues lasted throughout Gambles seasons 6 and 7 which I now refer to as the readjustment period. I feel that it has gotten back on track the past couple of seasons but will never be as good as it was in its peak but the one thing that Supernatural has never held back on is its season premieres. Until now.

Is Forever Another Sherlock?

I've vocalised before about how disappointed I've been with this years television season and one of the shows that I detested before even attempting to watch it was Forever. In Forever we have another Sherlock Holmes type character in Dr. Henry Morgan (Ioan Gruffudd aka Mr Fantastic), only in this iteration the character is unable to die. Well a more accurate description is that he is unable to stay dead as he dies from injuries much like us mere mortals but he ends up being reborn. In water. Naked. I wasn't looking forward to this purely because we already have two Sherlock Holmes series running with CBS' Elementary and the BBC's Sherlock as well as the Robert Downey Jr. movie franchise so do we really need another one airing when we already have three that we're following? My answer was no, of course. Henry never being able to stay dead seems like a thing that would be appealing to me but knowing that straight away took all the suspense out of the show for me and was another reason for me to avoid the show. So I judged a book by it's cover and didn't care to find out whether I was correct or not, but then a friend of mine started discussing it and said he really enjoyed it. At that point I decided to put aside my bias opinion and watch the pilot episode which I'm glad I did as four episodes later I realised I was hooked.

Watching the episodes made me realise that I was pretty much completely wrong in my initial assumptions of the show. The character of Henry Morgan is a Sherlock type character but it seems to make a lot more sense in this show why he is so brilliant, being able to piece together events and personalities of people easily as he has been around for two centuries and spent a large amount of time observing people. In other Sherlock adaptations the character just seems brilliant and there wasn't really much explanation for it which the audience just accepted it. Henry being anti social also makes a lot more sense in the show as he will outlive whomever he forges a relationship with so he feels it's best to avoid it so there is less pain for him in the long run which makes him a lot more human than Sherlock who just thinks he's above everyone else so doesn't dabble with them.

Did Peaky Blinders Come Back With A Bang?

*Spoilers for series 2, episode 1 ahead*

Literally yes, within the first ten minutes there was an explosion that blew up the Shelby's pub. Of course it figuratively came back with a bang as well, that is the only way the Peaky Blinders seem to know how to live. Series two of the show is set some time after the events of series one with Tommy still not quite over the departure of Grace, and the cliffhanger that we were left with at the end of the last series was resolved fairly quickly. I guess I was half wrong about Tommy and aunt Polly's funeral clothing in the clip, it wasn't Grace's funeral that they had come back from. I'm glad that Peaky Blinders wasted no time in resolving the shooting rather than waiting to let us know if Grace lived or not and it was great seeing her get to shot C.I. Campbell after the aggravation he caused her and Shelby. I'm starting to see the law man as more dangerous with less morals than Tommy, the man he is, or at least was, chasing.

Well anyway, back to discussing series two, as I said earlier it wasn't Grace's funeral that Tommy and Polly came back from as I had assumed, it was the funeral of Freddie Thorne. I'm actually more disappointed about that than if it was Grace who had died! I honestly believe that Freddie had a lot to give, he wasn't a part of the Peaky Blinders but could form and alliance with them or go against them if he wished. Tommy wouldn't have killed him, especially after he married Ada, so he was pretty much free to do whatever he liked and he was unpredictable which is always fun to watch. I'm not sure if it was for creative reasons or whether the actor, Iddo Goldberg, wanted to move on but I think it's a bad move either way. Freddie could've been used a lot more throughout the series and I think that giving him an off screen and natural death was a bad move and he deserved more. Why not start the show with blowing him up? It would probably have the same repercussions, if not better as the whole family would be out for vengeance for Ada. What's Ada going to be doing on the show now aside from being the weak female who gets kidnapped and used as leverage?

Yay! Selfie Isn't About Selfies!

You have no idea how annoying it was for me when my phone didn't try to correct the word "selfie". I'm a bit of an old woman mentally and often physically as well so the idea of watching a comedy called Selfie made me feel slightly sick. I've only just got into Instagram and twitterverse under much duress from friends *cough* Lana *cough* and although some people are fine on the site others just seem very obnoxious. Just because you have the mouthpiece to broadcast every part of your life doesn't mean you have to use it, I guarantee that most people that see it don't even care that much. They only follow you because you followed back or they liked one thing that you posted a couple of years ago and were hoping for more like it but you were preoccupied with your ever inflating ego. If you hadn't guessed I'm not exactly social media savvy (I also lack follows which is probably one of the reasons I find it so annoying). If it wasn't for John Cho being one of the leads in the show there is no way I would've ever paid attention to a comedy called Selfie.

I'll step away from the name of the show for a bit and actually discuss the content because you can't really judge a book by its cover. If you judged Spockfull by its cover then you'd think that we were just a Star Trek fan page, and possibly dabbled in slash fiction, which of course we don't. Selfie is a modern day adaptation of Pygmalion or My Fair Lady for musical fans, though I doubt anyone that partakes in the taking of selfies has ever actually heard of them so I'll give you a brief summary. Pygmalion/My Fair Lady centre on a low class flower girl named Eliza Doolittle and the efforts made by high class professor Henry Higgins as he tries to class her up via her speech and dress (probably many other things as well that I don't remember) and make her presentable to his peers. In Selfie we have the character of Eliza Dooley (Karen Gillan) who is self obsessed and her sense of importance is inflated by her followers on twitter, instagram, facebook, tumblr and flickr (ok, I pulled the last couple out of my ass by she probably has them too). After getting sick she realises that none of these followers are actually her friends, she doesn't really have anyone to turn to so she attempts to better herself with the help of Henry Higgs (John Cho).

A to Z: 2014s Answer To How I Met Your Mother? Or 500 Days Of Summer?

Since the atrocious end of How I Met Your Mother (I mention the show a lot so I'll abbreviate it throughout the rest of the post) I guess the networks have been scrambling for a replacement romantic comedy. After the end of HIMYM I really wish they hadn't bothered, it'll take me a few years to get over that ending, I can't even watch the old episodes now! Apart from 'The Best Burger In New York', for some reason I love that episode and have watched it about ten times. After the announcement of A To Z I realised that the networks don't really care about me and what I want, they just want to get in on the action and advertising money. Think back to the end of Lost when they were struggling for a replacement and came up with the V reboot and Flashforward, didn't exactly work out did it? I highly doubt it will for A to Z.

A to Z stars Cristin Milioti, the most underused yet most watchable part of the awful last season of HIMYM, as cynical about love Zelda. It's not surprising that she found a role so quickly after winning over fans in her criminally limited screen time on HIMYM (I think I'll be annoyed for quite some time about that). Ben Feldman stars opposite her as the hopeless romantic Andrew and I can't really say much about him because I've only seen him in Drop Dead Diva and the trailer for that horror movie that YouTube keeps forcing me to watch. The two actors interacted with each other well during the pilot and their chemistry didn't seem forced so I do think that audiences may learn to to enjoy watching their relationship grow. This would seem like a positive but the audience are told straight away that they will not end up together, which kind of puts a damper on the show which is a romantic comedy. I thought the point of a romantic comedy was that it was lighthearted and the characters end up together?

If You're In The US And Under 17 You Can't Watch A Film About Gay Activists. Seriously.

I'd like to start off this post by asking you to watch the trailer for Pride below.

What do you see? I see a lighthearted comedy thats based on Lesbian and Gay activists as they attempt to help a mining community. Its seems like it has likeable characters and will be a barrel of laughs and probably educate me as I had no idea that the LGBT society and the miners formed an alliance during the miners strike and I can't wait to watch the film. The film has been well received at the box office in the UK and generally gotten positive reviews yet the US censors believe that the film isn't appropriate for people under 17 and has rated it R.

Gracepoint Vs. Broadchuch

Broadchurch is a British television show that aired in 2013 and revolved around the murder of a young boy and the efforts to find his murderer. It was set in a small town called Broadchurch and the eight episodes followed the detectives, Alec Hardy (David Tennant) and Ellie Miller (Olivia Coleman) as they chased down leads and also explored the community, their pasts and how they've dealt with the recent events. The show was phenomenal, and garnered much critical acclaim and sky high ratings so naturally there is now a US remake airing on Fox named Gracepoint. 

Broadchuch was such a success and when it was announced that there was to be a remake I am pretty sure there was a widespread sigh around Britain. This always happens, when we have a good show American networks attempt to cash in by remaking it and I'd say nine times out of ten it fails. Remember the Only Fools and Horses remake? I've never really liked remakes, I do understand why they do it like when there has been a long passage of time and people want to update it with new technology and SFX that they have at their disposal but Broadchurch only aired last year and series two is in production so there's not really any update needed. The most annoying remakes I find is the ones of of foreign films and television shows. Seriously? You can't read subtitles? Again, they often fail to live up to the brilliance of the original! Broadchuch was in English and yes there are varying accents but I don't understand why American audiences wouldn't be able to decipher it. There are different types of American accents but you don't see British networks remaking it so we understand it, if I'm honest I find it quite ignorant really. As you can tell I wasn't best please about the reamke but I decided to watch it and give it a fair shot anyway.