Prole Judgmentally Reviews A Random Selection Of TV Shows

monodrone - it's true! It's all true! And, yes, wildly unexpected!

But that is exactly why you have to watch it!

What's The Show? Grand Designs
What's It All About, Proley? Middle-class tosspots with too much time and/or cash spend vast sums of money self-building houses, either from scratch or restoring old buildings that have fallen to wrack and ruin, while host Kevin McCloud sneers at their attempts until The Big Reveal, when it turns out he liked it all along.  Every. Time.  To describe Grand Designs as repetitive would be something of an understatement, but it would also completely miss the point. In a sense the whole purpose is repetition, watching different people and buildings emerge from similar circumstances and assessing the results.  This could have been made into some ghastly "reality TV competition" type thing, but instead it's one man (McCloud) expressing a genuine passion for all things architectural and his absolute love and joy for what he's doing radiating off the screen all while just letting people who want to undertake these projects get on with it.  The show has been running since 1999 and is still going strong - it's just kicked off its 19^th season at time of writing.
Why Did You Give It A Go? I have a lingering interest in architecture - my best friend from school went on to become one professionally, and his father ended up doing what amounted to a Grand Designs restoration before that was Actually A Thing and it was fascinating to see it all take shape in real life.  Plus, I like good design.  You may fairly deduce from that I am one of the above-described middle-class tosspots.
Is It Any Good? Oh yes.  Obviously there are certain things any potential viewer needs to get past - there's Kevin McCloud's sometimes often overly-effusive metaphors and alliteration for one, the sometimes stifling sense of someone stretching something somewhat.  But Our Kevin is generally a great host, and it's his enthusiasm for what he's doing - presented in an unpretentious and unfussy manner - that allows everyone to appreciate what's happening, from non-experts upwards, while the man himself remains rather charming on screen.  Not every project succeeds - one woman a few years ago tried very hard to build a mock-Tudor mansion and ended up with what amounted to a self-inflicted nervous breakdown and a large muddy hole in the ground - but the vast majority do, and Grand Designs is the rare show where you really do want people to succeed for the most part. The fact there's no artificial "competition" element that dogs and bogs down so many not-dissimilar shows of people showing off their passions for little more than love (any number of cooking shows, for example, but let's single out Bake Off here as the grande dame) means that there's a genuineness that eludes many of those shows.  And there's something to be appreciated about the fact that much of the point of Grand Designs is to make something which has genuine architectural quality and will actually last - unlike someone's fondant fancy (well, unless they've really messed up their ingredients), these buildings should be around for decades and longer.  Every season is usually only around seven or eight episodes long, but there's almost always a focus on eco-building, and not just hippy off-the-grid nonsense, but being able to use green buildings as something sustainable and, more importantly, practical and affordable.  A focus on good, sustainable design, made with passion and commitment. Maybe it is just house porn for the middle-classes, but I think there's something rather admirable about trying to do a show which has the genuine capacity to improve the quality of life of people - not just the self-builders but the ideas that can be taken from projects and applied to the larger world.
How Many Episodes Did You Watch? All of them, and a fair few more than once, if I'm honest.
Would You Recommend It? Very, very much so.  Look, I know the show can sound a bit affected and precious, but the actual experience of watching it is very rarely that, and it's impossible not to get swept along as people struggle to realise their passions.  There tends not to be a focus on people's "narrative" either - we'll usually get a bit of details about who's building, but mostly just so we have some idea of who it is we're looking at rather than some artificially constructed reality-TV life story.  Some guy's from Spain, and that influences his decision when it comes to interior design (or whatever).  Fine, that's clear, we don't need to know about his poverty-stricken childhood. Some woman's spent her life in the countryside and always dreamed of living in a modern house and not some twee country-kitchen affair and now she's going to give it a go. Great. We don't need to hear about her mother's obsession with, I dunno, pine cabinets or something as a motivating factor - she can just get on with the business of making a really great piece of architecture.  The buildings always remain front and centre of Grand Designs, and we have Kevin McCloud on hand to gently guide us through anything else - and that's just how it should be.
Scores On The Doors? 8/10

What's The Show? The Gifted

What's It All About, Proley? The Struckers discover that their children have "special powers" of the type that ought to be immediately identifiable to anyone with a passing knowledge of pop culture over at least the last twenty years or so. They're mutants of the X-Men variety, destined to be hunted by mutant-hating purists who want to "keep the human race from extinction" by persecuting said mutants, which means the family need to go on the run. They're being hunted by Sentinal Services, a government-sanctioned (sort of) mutant control authority who absolutely totally aren't just Nazi stand-ins, honest guv. So - family on the run, secret to hide. There's a line in the last Deadpool movie about how mutants are, "a dated metaphor for racism in the 60's!" Mmm-hmm. Part of the problem faced by The Gifted is that there's been a lot of material covering very similar territory. Even ignoring the plethora of X-Men movies, there's been Misfits, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Legion, The Tomorrow People, Inhumans, Sense8, Legends Of Tomorrow and many more which are all basically doing the same thing - taking the "mutants" aspect and using it as a stand-in for puberty, homosexuality, race, religion or any prejudice you care to name, really. This is, in other words, exceedingly familiar, and it really does look dated now. So The Gifted absolutely needs to do something to distinguish itself from the glut of other material covering the same subject if it's going to stand out in a packed field. Sadly, though, that's not what we get.

Why Did You Give It A Go? After the hilariously awful Inhumans, the very definition of a misjudged show, there was space for a series to come along and try and do something interesting in the "mutants" space. Marvel TV shows can be hit and miss, but there's been enough hits to make at least checking out another one something worth doing.

Is It Any Good? Not especially. The problem with The Gifted is that it has absolutely nothing new to say at all. The family drama is completely boilerplate. The "mutants" angle you've seen a dozen times before. The powers are, for the most part, pretty unremarkable. The bad guys are mostly just bad guys. What's lacking in The Gifted is really any reason for it to exist. It's not as bad as Inhumans - really, how could it be? - but it just never takes flight either. The first season isn't a complete bust and a few early episodes suggest there might be a one or two interesting places to go with the concept of a family on the run. Rather than be-suited superheroes or big-picture sweeping epics of the X-Men series, we'd get a ground-up look at how powers might work for an average family (roughly analogous to the difference in perspective between the Marvel Netflix TV shows and the big-screen Avengers movies) and how it would affect them. That's not really what emerges though, and instead we get a couple of standard rebellious-teens storylines, a few "but they're persecuting us!" moral dilemmas which have no actual dilemma to them, and a bunch of people standing around declaiming things at each other. The moments when the show manages to be interesting are all the ones which break away from those stereotypes, like an early episode where a sick mutant is causing portals which are ripping apart their hiding place and jeopardising everyone. It's inventive and different and given a good indication of what the show might be capable of but this happens far, far too infrequently to maintain interest, so instead for most of the rest of the running time there's lots of wobbly-lower-lip acting going on in the hopes that this might convince you there's some actual stakes here. It doesn't come off.

How Many Episodes Did You Watch? All of the first season, five punishingly dull episodes of the second, and that's more than enough. No more.

Would You Recommend It? No, because it's just not interesting. The best mutant shows find a new angle on familiar material. One of the reason Misfits was so great was that it dealt with actual working class people and the impact mutations had on them, so we got a compelling new approach and an interesting perspective. Sense8 combined intricate plotting, batshit crazy antics, sexuality and a real self-belief into an amazing collage. The Gifted, by contrast, has a couple of moody teenagers, a mild marital crisis and cosily middle-class attitudes to everything. The cast here are also part of the problem. Almost none of them stand out (noble exception: Jamie Chung, working hard to make anything she's given to do seem interesting), and that's a real problem because it's impossible to invest in their personal issues if you just don't care about them. Amy Acker and Stephen Moyer as Caitlin and Reed Stucker as have no screen presence at all, they're just bland mom-and-pop cliches but dealing with mutants rather than catching their kids smoking pot or something. The whole thing isn't so much cast as a United Colours Of Benneton ad given a script and told to get on with it. There's a hunky Native American guy. A cute Asian girl with coloured hair. A blonde femme fatale (actually, three). A token Middle Eastern guy. I'm all in favour of inclusive casting, but nobody here looks like a real human being at all, they all look like models who just stepped off the catwalk rather than, you know, people on the run. They might as well have been created by algorithm. It also becomes obvious very quickly that the budget can't stretch to the kind of show this wants to be (one about a family fleeing persecution) and this has a direct impact on the creativity that can be deployed, because the main family aren't on the run at all, they stand about a couple of static locations and have crises at each other. Season Two attempts to retool this a bit but with very limited success - Andy Strucker, nominally one of the leads, undergoes a personality chance as he rebels, allegedly, but this mostly involves making him look like train-station rent boy (complete with bleach-blonde hair and leather jacket) but changing nothing else about him to make the character more interesting. But he's separated from him parents so the emphasis of the show shifts from running to getting him back, giving them an excuse to stay in one location. It's contrived in the extreme, and that's the heart of this show - contrived, but never in a way that becomes interesting. A real wasted opportunity.

Scores On The Doors? 5/10

What's The Show? The second season of the revived Will & Grace

What's It All About, JG? In line with the trend to see if just one more breath can be sucked from the desiccated corpse of 90's nostalgia, Will & Grace - a sitcom about a gay lawyer and his live-in friend, as if you need to be told - returned to our screens in a season that would be best described as "uneven". It struggled in the early going, but, a few wobbles aside, more or less managed to return to the easy-going, knockabout atmosphere that made the original show so watchable. Since the revival was pretty successful we have this - an attempt to get a second breath out of the aforementioned corpse. So we still have the original cast - Eric McCormack, Debra Messing, Megan Mullally and Sean Hayes - returning once more and the same basic set-up the show's always had. Can lightning strike twice?

Why Did You Give It A Go? The original show is a bit of a strange beast - not exactly boundary-pushing for the end of the 90's / start of the 00's but fairly boundary-pushing for the network and timeslot it appeared in. Mostly the original was held together by the four leads' rather charming performances and a hangout vibe that made it an easy show to drop into. The revived season, as mentioned, wasn't flawless but it eventually found its feet so it made sense to drop in to the second revived series to see if it could continue to recapture that magic.

Is It Any Good? Nope. In fact I'd go so far as to say it's fucking terrible. Whatever it was that made the first season of the revived show just about work has been entirely lost. This is a joyless, pointless slog that seems to have given up on the very idea that the show should be "funny" and instead thinks just having someone say something faintly in line with their character coupled with bad canned laughter is enough. It really, really isn't. To take one example, Jack decides to put on a stage show about a closeted president from the past called Gay-braham Twink-on. That's it. That's the joke. Say a gay thing. Pause for canned laughter. String "gag" out over about four episodes. There's no actual joke behind this, no punchline, no attempt to do anything with it at all, it just sits there. It's insulting, and having Sean Hayes do jazz hands while saying it doesn't make it land it just makes it all look even more desperate. Jack himself has gone from a character who was shallow-on-top-but-heart-underneath to just unpleasantly stupid to watch, and that's true of Karen as well. Megan Mullally does OK when playing Karen as a Trump supporter - a clumsy, half-hearted bit of satire to be sure though hardly uncharacteristic of Karen - but nobody in the world could make the lazy, idiotic material she's given here land. McCormack is still the ironic-straight-guy in all this but isn't trying a leg - he just stands there, recites a line, then mugs. The only person who's even slightly exerting themselves is perpetually under-appreciated Debra Messing - and new semi-regular David Schwimmer, of all people. They make a great pairing, with Messing doing her usual expert blend of Lucille Ball hi-jinks and brittle vulnerability and Schwimmer playing against type as an acerbic New York writer and general asshole. The two are great together and their little burgeoning relationship is the lone highlight of a disheartening, dejected season.

How Many Episodes Did You Watch? I watched all of the first reived season. This season broadcast eight episodes before Christmas, which I watched, with a further four being shown after Christmas (one has already gone to air at time of writing), which I will not be watching. I'm out! *cue waves of misplaced laughter, because that's also a gay thing!*

Would You Recommend It? Obviously not. There's just something so depressing about watching obviously talented people wasting their abilities on incredibly sub-standard material because it looks like the writers can't be bothered to come up with anything funny so instead rely on their cast to make up the difference. But no cast in the world could make up that amount of difference. The wheezing, laboured gay "jokes" given to Jack would have been stale when the show first started twenty years ago, never mind now - Sean Hayes is a good physical comedian and occasionally raises a smile throwing himself around the set, but nobody could spin gold from tone-deaf, lame gags about numbing face cream or whatever. It's all just so punishingly lazy. Megan Mullally? Love her, but she's given nothing even remotely interesting to do, and we have Alec Baldwin making a return visit and turning in a performance identical to Jack on 30Rock (it's also the same performance he gives in Mission Impossible: Fallout, which suggests how much effort he was expending during that film). I mean, he's fine at doing it and all, but again it's just lazy - we've seen all this before, and it's impossible to care about seeing it again. Eric McCormack seems to be keeping all his energy for Travellers, the sci-fi sleeper hit about time-travelling consciousnesses from the future trying to avert catastrophe in the past (sure!), because he's sure as Tinkerbell not expending it here. *more canned laughter* This is a massively dispiriting exercise in futile repetition and if this is the best the show can manage it should be cancelled forthwith and this season sent down to the very depths of TV hell. Dismal.

Scores On The Doors? 2/10, and those two points are for Messing and Schwimmer.

What's The Show? Titans

What's It All About, JG? - Supporting Superhero Characters: The TV Show. Robin off of Batman, Wonder Girl off of Wonder Woman, Superboy off of Superman, a different Robin off of Batman and Gar off of Doom Patrol team up with Rachel Roth - the personification of emo makeup - and Kory Anders/Starfire - the personification of shiny disco outfits - for weirdly schizophrenic adventures in... stuff. Quite a lot of stuff, in fact, as the Netflix series rambles about ten episodes, dropping into random character arcs, plots, background and exposition with little rhyme or reason. Ostensibly we're following Rachel's story, as she tries to wrestle with some kind of inner darkness - inventively portrayed as some kind of outer darkness, usually via the medium of mascara - and tries to figure out who she is and where she comes from. That's also what's going on with Kory/Starfire, who has no memory of her past but does have glowing powers that allow her to burn shit up. The Dick Grayson version of Robin, meanwhile, has resigned from being Robin but is conflicted about not being Robin any more so sometimes he's still Robin, and then another Robin - Jason Todd flavour: younger, cuter and more psychotic - also turns up to do some part-time Robin-ing. Then there's accidentally pulling daddy from another dimension to destroy the world, a mom rescue, a whole "Nuclear Family" sub-plot about a murderous Stepford-Wife-style family on the trail of our heroes, a spaceship hidden in an abandoned warehouse, a Hawk and Dove side-story/whole other series... there's a hell of a lot going here.

Why Did You Give It A Go? The MCU is now a titan of cinema, apparently unkillable, but Marvel's Netflix series' have been hit and miss. Luke Cage and Jessica Jones are broadly great, Daredevil wanders between the two extremes and Iron Fist was outright terrible. But there is, in all those shows, a real commitment to sticking to what might make a TV superhero show work - fealty to source material, stylish and slick direction, great casting, and enough of a budget to realise what they're going for. By contrast to the MCU, DC's "cinematic universe" is mostly trash - the marvellous Wonder Woman aside - so I thought it might be interesting to see if a TV show set in the DC Universe could be any better.

Is It Any Good? - Well, again excepting the Wonder Woman movie, it's better than any of the DCU movies, but that's hardly the highest of high bars to clear. In fact it's a nearly completely incoherent mess. There's way too many characters jostling for attention and the show simply can't pick a tone and stick with it. Half the show is a goofy, fun-times adventure with a bunch of appealing teenagers exploring the fact they've for super-powers. The other half is faux-"dark" grittiness, full of under-lit fight scenes, back alleys and gruesomely unpleasant corners of the world. When the show is focussed on the adventures of Tiger Boy, Emo Girl and Disco Outfit the whole thing comes alive and the cast are incredibly likable (Ryan Potter as Gar and Anna Diop as Starfire are especially great). When it tries to be "grown up" it's an outright catastrophe. The fight sequences are uniformly terrible - every single punch visibly misses by about half a meter yet we still get gouts of unconvincing CGI blood, and the show clearly seems to be trying to capture the visceral thrill of Daredevil's fight sequences with no apparent understanding of why those actually worked. And it badly misjudges some of it's themes - a late-episode decision to wander into Adventures In Paedophilia is especially crass and clumsy and the show simply doesn't have the chops to be able to deal with such a serious issue in a way that does it justice. And as for Robin? Well, Brenton Thwaites is pretty solid as Dick and brings across the conflict between his desire to stick with Bruce Wayne/Batman for the greater good and his own conviction that he's done with it. And Curran Walters as the Jason Todd version of the character captures the glee and borderline-psychopathy of the comic-book Jason version very effectively. But the show doesn't need two Robins - maybe if this were a thirteen-episode run there would be space for all these people but in ten episode? Not even close.

How Many Episodes Did You Watch? - All of the first season. It's a pretty easy show to blow through, when it's not being a show that's incredibly difficult to blow through. If you know what I mean.

Would You Recommend It? I guess? The charming bits are, well, charming, and I hope come Season Two (already announced) that it leans much more into the goofy side of things than the darkness, because the goofy parts really are fun. There's enough emotional and thematic weight there to carry a season easily, and using Dick as the "grown up trying to help" just as Bruce Wayne fulfilled that role for him works well and suggests a degree of thought in terms of character work. But the show wants to have its cake and eat it - to embrace the darkness that made, say, the first season of Daredevil so compelling while at the same time be a bright, primary-coloured piece of fun - Gar in particular looks like an anime character made flesh. But it's just not deft enough to be able to do that, and by failing to pick a side and stick with it, the whole thing becomes dangerously close to being an outright disaster. It's not quite that, though the final episode works hard to convince us it might be, being as it is a completely incoherent piece of nothing - a dream sequence where we spend a punishing 57 minutes exploring Dick Grayson's inner doubts (already dragged over in more than enough details over the course of the series) followed by about three minutes on the actual plot that might matter. It's staggeringly misjudged (and almost completely side-lines the younger cast, to the episode's detriment), as we waste acres of screen-time in a fantasy sequence about what might happen if Batman broke bad. Turns out he kills lots of people. Amazing! Batman himself ought really to be a lurking presence hanging over the episode but he's not really - we see him a few times in silhouette or very quickly falling out of frame lest we spend time on an interesting character - he's just there to pad out the episode in case we get to the climax of meeting Rachels' demon daddy too soon (did I mention her Dad's a demon? He is. Why? *shrugs*). And yet... and yet... there's a decent show lurking in here, like a green tiger-boy-thing in the undergrowth. I really want to see that show emerge, because it's interesting and fun and not just hitting the same notes every other damned sour-faced superhero TV show seems to. If the show can get that going in the second season, I'll be back. If we get more terrible fight scenes, stupid attempts at being "grown up" and "dark", and misjudged plot threads, well, I won't.

Scores On The Doors? 5/10 - even split between the fun parts and the dark parts. You can probably guess by now which side earned the points.

What's The Show? Years And Years

What's It All About, Proley? In one way it's about something absolutely unique in contemporary culture - it's not a bleak dystopian future! In another way, though, it's also exactly that. Years and Years follows the fortunes of a family in the near future as they struggle to deal with what is essentially a worst-case-scenario extrapolation of the existing political situation. So you know how it goes - Trump launches a nuclear missile, racism runs rampant under the auspices of "immigration control", Russia's up to it's old tricks, that sort of thing. Mixed in with this are some vaguely Black Mirror-esque ruminations on the place of technology in society, an attempt to analyse the conflicting feelings people have within families, the collapse of the banking system... Whatever else one can say about Years and Years it's tough to deny that there isn't plenty of stuff going on.

Why Did You Give It A Go? Well most obviously, because it's by Russel T Davies, and while Davies's series' have been up and down he is usually at the least an interesting writer, even if not everything ends up being a stone-cold classic. Also, there's the whole Doctor Who thing - there was simply no way I was going to not watch something by the person who brought it back with such a bang to the 21st century. And there's a really interesting cast as well - it's strikingly unusual to see Emma Thompson playing what amounts to a female version of Nigel Farage so that's intriguing, and many members of the ensemble have done time on Doctor Who as well - Russell Tovey, Jessica Hynes and Anne Reid (in both Original and 21st Century flavours!) are the obvious stand-outs there, but the whole cast are a who's-who (heh) of good acting.

Is It Any Good? Well... it starts strong I guess? The first episode makes the show seem like a rather interesting proposition. Other than the nuclear strike right at the end of the episode (a classic piece of Doctor Who cliffhanger-ing if ever I saw it) there's not actually a lot of plot. But that's to the episode's benefit, because it means we spend time with the characters and actually get to know them and their situation before everything kicks off. Emma Thompson, characteristically great playing a vile character, is the headline news here as Vivienne Rook, but she's mostly off to one side in the first episode and largely glimpsed through TV news reports (another typical Davies way of getting the exposition out of the way with a minimum of fuss) so the focus is on our central family. And in the first episode it's really possible to care about them and the dynamic between the Lyons family. The second episode blows its load spectacularly though. Remember all those bits in Davies's Doctor Who stories where he'd throw in the odd stinging line of satire, like the Doctor criticising Donna for asking why humans need slaves in the future but not wondering where her clothes came from ("Planet of The Ood")? Or having aliens that could "deploy weapons of mass destruction in 45 seconds" ("World War Three")? Well this show is basically those few lines, but a series. Nobody, but nobody, thinks those are the highlights of the Davies era, and thus is proves to be here. Once the show actually gets underway it all becomes a tedious runaround of hackneyed, inelegant, clumsy social and political "satire" that just doesn't work. Everything about the series from the second episode onwards feels incredibly cynical and calculated, taking the worst of what's around us now and pandering to the audience by presenting as entertainment so we can all go, "ohh isn't that terrible" then move on with our lives. It's kind of insulting in fact - a deeply misanthropic show that has nothing to actually say and no way of actually articulating any criticism. By taking the worst examples of everything around us and feeding it back to use as "entertainment" it feel incredibly exploitative as well, and by laying out such a breathlessly bleak yet indulged and revelled in future it feels more like it's providing a roadmap rather than a warning. It is by some distance the worst thing I've ever seen that Russell T Davies has written - and I've seen "Love And Monsters". Also - if trivial - that title sequence? Totally nicked from Timeless. See for yourself.

How Many Episodes Did You Watch? The first two in their entirety and about fifteen minutes of the third before I simply gave up. This is an unpleasant show to watch, and not in the way the show seems to think its unpleasant. Years And Years wants to posit itself it as a "if we're not careful this is what we'll get" but instead lands up with "it's fun wallowing in all this nastiness". It's prurient, taking obvious pleasure from Rook's just-saying-it-like-it-is attitude while also superficially looking like it's condemning it, and throwing in the odd oppressed-gay-people or technology-changes-us sub-plot isn't a big enough fig leaf to cover that up.

Would You Recommend It? No, and I regret having to say that, because I mostly like Davies's writing and he's been on something of a hot streak. Cucumber, his gay drama for middle-aged people rather than the grindingly awful younger cast of Queer As Folk, was terrific. It was a well-written, well-paced character piece that was a million times better than Queen As Folk itself in fact (not hard - Queer As Folk is mostly terrible). And A Very English Scandal was absolutely great as well - actually, probably the best thing he's done - and gave Hugh Grant arguably his best performance as well. So with both of those behind him anticipation for Years and Years was understandably high, which makes its failure that much more disappointing. With a cast this gifted it's not, of course, a complete bust. Emma Thompson is marvellous, Russell Tovey turns up to do That Role Russell Tovey Does but he does it as well as he's done it anywhere. There's a sense that the cast are really giving it 110% in service of a script that isn't worthy of them. Well, maybe that's a little harsh. Some of the family drama stuff works quite well - like the barely-repressed hostility between Anne Reid's Muriel Deacon and her daughter-in-law Celeste, played (excellently) by T'Nia Miller. Those moments - if relatively familiar to anyone who knows Davies's works - land well and it's impossible to shake the feeling that if the show was just set now, and mostly about those family dynamics it would be substantially better. But no, instead we have to get dragged in to half-thought-out, lackluster social and political satire that's neither got anything to say that you haven't heard a thousand times before nor any actual alternative beyond saying "this is bad" (and then enjoying that anyway). Maybe somewhere in episode five or something an alternative might be suggested but if you've already lost your audience by that point then frankly who cares?

Scores On The Doors? 4/10, mostly for the cast.

Why thank you, good human!

Season four of Lucifer was pretty good, and thankfully shorter than the bloated mess that was season three!

What's The Show? Another Life

What's It All About, Proley? In the near future an alien artefact appears on Earth, unexplained and uncommunicative. Yes, just like the movie Arrival! This time the alien ship looks like a sort of metallic mobius strip, except when the thing lands when it becomes a crystal tower. The narrative is split between following Niko, captain of the Salvere, which sets out to find the origins of the alien whatever-it-is, and her husband Erik back on Earth who's investigating from a more terran perspective. The ship and it's crew come across a variety of hurdles to strain credibility in all sorts of peculiar directions, while on Earth Erik fumbles around trying to work out what's going on with the bloody great crystal until he's essentially pushed into using a media "influencer" to help him break the story. Space shenanigans and faintly political/military thriller material ensues, until Niko gets an alien planet blown up and their daughter gets leukaemia. Sounds credible!

Why Did You Give It A Go? The idea of doing Arrival-but-a-TV-show really isn't terrible, and though Arrival the movie is terrific, having more space and scope to stretch out and explore the implications of something like a mysterious artefact just arriving one day is a good idea. Certainly it's fair to say that Netflix have the resources to be able to deliver on what would be a fairly ambitious undertaking. And Niko is played by Katee Sackhoff, who not only was Starbuck in the peerless Battlestar Galactica, but is an actor with a long history of being able to deliver perfectly on strong material and lift substandard material when it's found to be lacking somewhat. Finally, the premise is also faintly reminiscent of long, long forgotten but rather excellent late 90's sci-fi series Invasion: Earth. From the title you can probably guess how that went...

Is It Any Good? It's... well, it's... um. Of the adjectives I could reach for I am not sure that "good" is top of the list, though it's deeply peculiar in a way that makes you both think, "what the hell is this?" and "fine, I'll watch another one" but without ever really approaching the word "compelling". A lot of the problems that the Salvere encounter feel fairly mechanical, obstacles to overcome because the ship can't arrive at the alien planet until near the end of the season because otherwise the show will end too quickly so they need to keep vamping up till that point. A crew member does something stupid! Some arbitrary space thing! Um, I guess there's an alien bug on the ship now? One of the crew have been taken over! And so forth. It's all stuff you've probably seen before arranged in a way you probably haven't seen before (or at least adjacent to things you haven't seen before). Some of it is engaging (mostly Niko's struggle to remain in control and command) and some of it isn't, though none of it is really bad - the cast and direction go a long way to making up for a bunch of scripts that appear to be put together by simply shuffling pages at random. The Earth-based stuff is considerably more rote, with Erik's struggles to understand the alien artefact eliciting groans as much as fascination, and the entirely unnecessary inclusion of their young daughter completely fails to inject any "drama" into "family drama". It's not an easy show to elucidate the good points from the bad points - quite possibly because they're often the same thing - but there's no denying that it maintains a curious fascination, even if it's just to see whether they pull any of this off or if it car-crashes at the end of the season.

How Many Episodes Did You Watch? All of them, which is to say the ten episodes that comprise the first season. Again, it's never a show that come close to compelling, but the sheer oddness of it makes it strangely difficult to put down. I was certainly interested enough to find out how they were planning on ending the season to stick with it, and I most assuredly did not have "strange aliens blow up some rando planet" on my scorecard as how it would all conclude.

Would You Recommend It? Anyone who is even faintly sci-fi literate will know all the core elements here. The "blow up the planet" is what the Borg do at the end of the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Scorpion, Pt 1". The mysterious artefact is, as mentioned, basically the same as Arrival. The attempts at realism on-board the Salvare are very Battlestar Galactica. The "all alien environments are hostile" could come from anything from "Lost In Space" to, well, Lost In Space. William, the hologram that controls the ship, suggests both Star Trek: Voyager, Star Trek: The Next Generation (Data's struggle to becomes human) and Red Dwarf. Yet the cast are so good here they do make this familiar-yet-strangely-arranged melange of stuff worth watching. Sackhoff is straightforwardly brilliant, even when the material she's given very much isn't, but special praise also goes to Samuel Anderson (Doctor Who's Danny Pink) as William who manages to invest his Pinocchio riff with real heart, and Selma Blair, who's rather great as the manipulative Harper Glass, out to get her story no matter what. The show is bracingly unsentimental in disposing of characters who have served their purpose and no longer have any function, so there's a long list of he/she-was-good-oh-they're-dead characters too, but everyone gives it their all (sole exception: Justin Chatwin as Erik - he's Ok, but it's not a very inspired character and he doesn't bring a lot). This is also an exceedingly socially conscious show, which is to its strength as well - it's female-led, there's a trans character (who doesn't just die!), strong female representation throughout the cast, representations of polyamory, a properly international cast so everyone isn't just blandly Caucasian, and so on. These details don't greatly impact the plot but go a long way towards helping the world-building, making this seems like a plausible extension of social trends as they are now without simply battering the audience over the head trying to be performatively woke. It's one of the best handled aspects of the whole show.

Scores On The Doors? Uh. 6 seems harsh, but 7 seems a touch generous. Let's go for 6.5/10. It's not always a great show but the "what the fuck?" elements and the cast did keep me coming back for more.

What's The Show? Wu Assassins

What's It All About, Proley? The very best in televised martial arts meets the very worst in Netflix storytelling instincts. Kai Jin (Iko Uwais) just wants to be a chef in Chinatown, San Francisco but fate has (insert dramatic musical sting) other plans for him! After his food truck - the cutely-named Kung Foodie - is attacked by the Triad he finds a young lady in the street. Turns out she's the first Wu Assassin, and finding Kai to be pure of heart (and slightly dull) she gives him the power to defeat five other Wu Warlords, one of whom he happens to be related to - Uncle Six (a winningly smarmy performance from the ever-excellent Byron Mann). Cue much cobbled-together mythology, one or two amazing fight sequences per episode, and some rote family drama revolving around Kai's friend Jenny and her heroin-addicted brother Tommy. In the end, Kai must defeat The Scotsman, Alex McCullough, a criminal who runs Chinatown and has his own rote family drama to motivate him, and it all ends in a blizzard of special effects that show off the budgetary limitations, a few heartfelt scenes and a Season Two-baiting final scene that tell us the Wu Assassin's job is not done yet. We'll see...

Why Did You Give It A Go? There's not a lot on TV over the summer, and it looked like it could kill a few mindless hours. Iko Uwais's reputation also precedes him, so sure some bog-standard myth building might lead to a few kick-ass fight scenes, so why not?

Is It Any Good? When the fists are flying and the kicks are landing it's phenomenal - some of the best choreographed fight sequences on TV I have ever seen. This constitutes around five minutes an episode though, so there's another forty or fifty minutes to get through in the meantime, and much of it really isn't well written. The mythology - a vague patchwork than encompasses elemental powers of water, fire, earth, air and dodgy scripting, a standard "reluctant hero's journey" narrative, a mystical space between realties etc - never remotely coheres into anything believable and a few cast-off soap opera antics at the human level aren't really enough to invest in. Where Wu Assassins scores is its cast. Iko Uwais is strangely low-key as Kai - conceivably because he's not acting in his native language - which makes the character a little hard to invest in and he never seems all that bothered about what's going on around him. But the rest of the surrounding cast are mostly excellent. Tommy, played by Lawrence Kao, is one of those rather sad-sack losers it's hard not to like, and as mentioned Byron Mann is excellent as Uncle Six. Tommy Flanagan as the season's Big Bad, Alex, turns in an appropriately outsized performance despite a horrendously corny back-story, and towards the end of the season cult TV survivor Summer Glau pops up as the Water Wu, giving us access to a character we really could have stood to spend more time with earlier in the season to give a bit of scale to proceedings. All these characters make the never-beyond-standard scripting go down a little easier, and hey, those fight sequences really are amazing!

How Many Episodes Did You Watch? All of them. You could never quite call Wu Assassins compelling - because it almost never is - but it does gradually get better and better over the season's run from a fairly non-riveting start and the cast work hard to make the material engaging.

Would You Recommend It? Not exactly. I mean, if you like seeing genuinely stunning martial arts choreography then absolutely. The physical work is astounding but the fight scenes are also extremely well directed, with a real resistance to falling into the standard genre traps of playing huge thudding soundtracks to make everything seem exciting. Mostly, in fact, there's no incidental music and the fights are allowed to take centre-stage, which shows real restraint and skill from the directors. In those moments Wu Assassins is genuinely great. But fight scenes apart... eh. It's not even that the non-kicking-and-punching stuff is bad even, it's just so ordinary. An outsized villain like Alex ought to have more interesting motivation than yet another dead family - a plucky wee kiddywink and rough-but-capable lassie - taken from him unfairly. There's hints of some attention to detail in there - when we first meet Alex's family and the Water Wu makes its presence known, his wife Maggie (even her name is a lazy cliché) asks if they are "kelpies", water horses unique to Scottish mythology, and there's an implicit line drawn between the mythologies of two extremely disparate cultures. That's great! The show badly needs more details like that to build a coherent worldview, but instead it ends up being one dropped detail a maelstrom of other dropped details and the mythology never come close to adding up to more than the sum of its parts. The land between worlds just looks like inexpensive CGI on a run-down back-lot and no amount of mystical nonsense can make it convince. Cheap special effects aren't a death-knell to a show like this, but more creative solutions might have been a better approach than standard "sparks fly, things glow hot" effects you've seen a hundred times before. And the show badly fluffs the final episode, which makes it retroactively more frustrating to have put up with a lot of the silliness of the show when it can't nail its conclusion. The episode is badly paced, with a big fight scene near the start, Alex killed off at about the halfway point (the episode also makes the mistake of giving his wife and child the chance to act, and both of them are terrible, a rare casting error), and the rest of the episode just padding to tie up loose ends before that "give us another season!" final ending. At time of writing Wu Assassins hasn't yet been renewed, but sadly the last episode of the season gives Netflix little impetus to do so.

Scores On The Doors? 6/10 The fights are amazing, little else is. If there's a Season Two I'll watch it, but the actual storyline needs to drastically improve to make it worth sticking with, otherwise a half-hour supercut of the fight scenes would be more than enough.

I'll be starting it at some time this week and I'll write it up when I'm done with it.

What's The Show? The K2

What's It All About, Proley? It's a one-season long Korean drama which posits the question "What if 24, but Dynasty?" Which is not, frankly, a question that gets asked often enough. Our hero is Kim Je-ja - played with slightly boyish enthusiasm by Choi Seung-hun - who is framed for the murder of a civilian in Iraq. Returning to Korea as a fugitive he accidentally catches Jang Se-joon, a predistential candidate, in flagrante with a mistress which though a series of what can only be called shenanigans, leads to him to work for Choi Yoo-jin, his wife. She's hiding his illegitimate daughter, Go An-na, from the public eye as a means to control Jang Se-joon and ensure her own elevation to First Lady. Kim agrees to work with her (under the codename K2) to take revenge on another presidential candidate, Park Kwan-soo, the real perpetrator of the Iraq murder for which he has been framed, while he slowly - sometimes very slowly - falls for An-na. Meanwhile Choi Yoo-jin's younger brother, Choi Sung-won, is manoeuvring to take over the family business and treats the life and death situations as little more than a game for his own amusement. It's a strange mix of espionage, family drama (the whole Dallas-esque sub-plot involving the protracted fight for the family business), conspiracy theories, techno-thriller, adventure serial, high-kicking action-adventure and romance all wrapped up in one. Whatever else you can say about The K2 it certainly doesn't lack for content.

Why Did You Give It A Go? Because I've been watching a bunch of generally very good Korean TV shows (the spy-thriller Iris, the noticably-superior-to-the-original Korean remake of Designated Survivor) and movies (Train To Busan, The Good The Bad The Weird, Extreme Job, The Outlaws) and wanted to continue the trend. Seems like a good reason!

Is It Any Good? You know what, it absolutely is! It's sixteen episodes long and though the focus often shifts - loner on the run to presidential campaign to family drama to love affair - it's the characters that anchor it all together even as the ground is constantly shifting. Every character we meet remains compelling, and plenty of them have their own agendas away from the worlds of presidential races or assignations revenge plots which helps build a properly believable world. Particular credit must go to Song Yoon-ha who plays Choi Yoo-jin with a steely, unapologetic ruthlessness but also allows just enough shading for her to retain at least a degree of sympathy - it stops her from becoming an cliché even as she tries, not always successfully, to manipulate everyone around her. Her assistant Kim Dong-mi played by Shin Dong-mi is also a fantastically funny and powerfully unflinching character, devoted to her mistress beyond all sense of reason and loyalty and she undercuts almost every scene she's in with a brutal weariness or eye-roll. She's bad but she's impossible not to love. And so it goes on, everyone remains distinctive and even when the show occasionally wanders into slightly ill-advised territory - the late-in-the-day ta-da! inclusion of a cabal of Evil Cabal People apparently all modelled on The X-Files Cancer Man - the show never loses its own sense of giddy thrills and it barrels towards a wholly earned climax that just about manages to pull all the disparate threads together.

How Many Episodes Did You Watch? All of them, which is to say sixteen. The time passes very quickly and the show is never less than watchable.

Would You Recommend It? Wholeheartedly. It's terrifically fun, especially the opening three episodes which fully commit to the idea of Kim's loner past being slowly stripped away from him via action series tropes - up to and including a car chase done by remote control - before slowing things down and allowing us to catch our breath a bit. Some parts of it are slightly odd to Western sensibilities - especially the tendency to include exceedingly sappy piano ballads every time two people even glance at each other, usually at exceedingly high volume - but none of it detracts from the overall sense of fun and momentum the show builds up. As the two nominal bad guys, Park Kwan-soo and Jang Se-joon are eminently hiss-able villains as they battle for political dominance, and when An-na's twenty-year imprisonment in a Spanish nunnery because as a child she thought she caused her mother to overdose doesn't even remotely register as implausible - or even unusual - you know you have a series which has complete control of the genre. It's true that the slow-motion romance between An-na and our titular hero could have done with one or two more sparks and one or two fewer scenes of them sitting on a roof, but because Ji Chang-wook and Im Yoon-ah are strong enough actors they can easily compensate. Even the nominal "comedy" character, Master Song, ends up having more to him than it initially appears and there's just such a confidence about the show that it's impossible not to just get swept up in it all. Genuinely fantastic.

Availability - Netflix have it in the UK and the US.

Scores On The Doors? 8/10