Category: TV

The sixth season of Underbelly, the Australian true-crime series that drew occasional comparisons to The Sopranos and The Wire, ended on Sunday. And it’s likely gone forever.

Part of it is due to falling ratings. The first series – 2008’s Underbelly, about a gangland war in Melbourne from 1995–2004 – was intended as a one-off mini-series. But the series got massive ratings: each episode averaged 1.26 million viewers, which is especially impressive considering that the series was banned in Victoria, Australia’s second most populous state, because several of the real-life criminals featured in the series still had cases pending in the courts.

Underbelly was such a ratings blockbuster that the Nine Network commissioned Underbelly: A Tale of Two Cities (about the start of the wholesale heroin trade from 1976-1987) in 2009. This time the whole of Australia got to watch, and the series averaged a staggering 2.159 million viewers per episode.

Ratings fell a bit for 2010’s Underbelly: The Golden Mile, about police corruption and organized crime in Sydney’s nightclub district. But viewership generally remained pretty solid at 1.712 million viewers per episode.

The series recovered somewhat with 2011’s Underbelly: Razor, which was set in the 1920s and featured two of Sydney’s most notorious gangsters… who just happened to be women. The premiere episode was the highest-rated drama in Australian history, with 2.79 million viewers (the population of Australia is around 22 million, so well over 10% of the entire country watched that episode). But ratings fell thereafter, averaging 1.546 million per episode. The series was the most critically-acclaimed of the show’s run, but seemed to divide among demographic lines: viewers under 25 really didn’t care for the “old-timey setting”, while older viewers loved it.

The penultimate series, 2012’s Underbelly: Badness (about the 11 year quest to take down drug lord Anthony “Rooster” Perish), was fine in a technical sense, but felt somewhat stale and forced. It was the first Underbelly series to have only 8 episodes instead of 13, and on average only 1.05 million viewers tuned in.

Trying to capture some of Razor’s magic, producers went back to the 1920s for the (presumably final) series, Underbelly: Squizzy, about the life of Melbourne gangster Joseph “Squizzy” Taylor. While the premiere generated a healthy 1.68 million viewers, ratings for subsequent episodes were awful, averaging a mere 737,000 viewers per episode. And for good reason: as great as the first seasons of this series were, Squizzy really felt like it was scraping the bottom of the creative barrel. This season was a commercial and critical failure.

But it’s not just the falling ratings. It’s about taxes, too. Screen Australia, the Australian federal government’s funding body for TV and film, limits the number of episodes it will fund (and\or give tax breaks to) to 65 episodes. Their reasoning is that if a show is popular enough to air 65 episodes, it should be good enough to make money on its own without the help of the Australian taxpayer. Which makes sense. And the final episode of Squizzy put the total number of Underbelly episodes at 68, which is obviously over Screen Australia’s limit. With no more tax breaks, Underbelly – with its massive casts and sets and costumes – simply wasn’t profitable any more. This is also why Sea Patrol was canceled. A popular action show set in the Royal Australian Navy, Sea Patrol was simply too expensive to produce once the subsidies ended. Despite getting really good ratings, the show ended in 2011.

Now, none of this is “officially official” yet, but the ending of Squzzy made it pretty obvious that Underbelly is no more. Actress Caroline Craig, who played Senior Detective Jacqui James in the first Underbelly series and stuck around as the narrator for all subsequent series, appears as herself at the very end of Squizzy to give a few lines about Taylor’s legacy and his impact on Melbourne. That it was a bookend for the show was painfully clear.

But don’t fret: the creators of Underbelly are already at work on a new series: Fat Tony & Co. It’s based on the life of Tony Mokbel, an Australian of Lebanese descent who was featured in the original Underbelly as part of the Carlton Crew. Much of the series will be filmed on location in Greece, and the show will feature the return of many characters from Underbelly, including Gyton Grantley as Carl Williams and Vince Colosimo as Alphonse Gangitano. The series will air some time in 2014.

2013 has been an interesting year in TV so far. American network TV has been a huge disappointment… but there’s plenty of great stuff out there if you know where to look. And this year’s “best of” list contains a few surprises: two shows from New Zealand, and the first ever non-English language show!

So… let’s get it on! As always, you’ll find the list of my favorite new shows, in rough ascending order of preference (keep in mind that the list is only for new shows, so Breaking Bad and Mad Men aren’t on the list). Then there’s a list of shows that tried but failed, a section about miniseries, a tribute to shows that have left the air, and various odds and ends.

THE BEST NEW SHOWS ON TV

The Americans (FX) – This show has the potential to be great: Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell play Philip and Elizabeth Jennings, an all-American couple raising two kids in northern Virginia. However, their real names are Mischa and Nadezhda, and they’re a pair of KGB spies trained to pass as Americans. The “spy stuff” on the show is great, although it doesn’t hold up to close examination: you’ll find yourself asking “Why would they… ” or “How come they don’t…” early and often. In spite of that, it really does keep you on the edge of your seat. But where the show fails is “any time they aren’t doing spy stuff”. Philip and Elizabeth have domestic troubles like any other couple: intimacy and trust issues, trouble with the kids, etc. Others, such as neighbor (and FBI spy hunter) Stan Beeman have similar (boring) problems, too, and it drags the whole show down. Still, the supporting cast is great: Margo Martindale plays “Claudia”, Phil and Elizabeth’s KGB handler, and Richard “John Boy” Thomas plays Stan’s boss at the FBI. One odd thing about the show is the lack of historical detail. The sets and costumes look more like “generic Americana” than the early 1980s specifically. And sometimes the camera seems to focus on one particular object – like an old rotary phone – as if to make up for the lack of a time-specific feel. It’s like the show doesn’t have the budget to do the nice touches Mad Men is known for, and to make up for it they have the camera linger on a Space Invaders arcade game or Kim Carnes cassette as if to scream “SEE! IT REALLY IS 1981!!!”. Most of the suits the FBI agents wear would be perfectly acceptable in 2013 corporate America: not a single polyester jacket, wide lapel or obnoxious tie is seen. In early episodes, rotary pay phones and old cars are really the only hints that it’s 1981 and not 2013. Perhaps it’s a minor quibble, but Mad Men has really raised the bar for details like this.

Way to Go (BBC Three) – For years I’ve believed in something I call the “French Film Fallacy”: a certain type of film buff will only watch French films because they’re “so much better than American films”. Of course, in a good year only the six best French films make it to the US, so the pretentious hipster never sees the 200 crappy French films made that year. The point is, I don’t know if I’m losing my taste for British comedy, or if the easy downloadability of TV shows has “diluted the talent pool” such that I’m seeing a lot more crap comedies these days. This makes Way to Go especially interesting. Although made in the UK with British actors, it’s written by Bob Kushell, an American who has written for The Simpsons, Malcolm in the Middle and 3rd Rock from the Sun, among others. Blake Harrison stars as Scott, a nice guy who has taken a dead-end job as a receptionist at a veterinarian’s office because he can no longer afford medical school. When his gambling addicted half-brother Joey (Ben Heathcote) gets in trouble with the Wrong People, Scott reluctantly agrees to help pay back the bookies by assisting a terminally-ill neighbor’s suicide. Scott steals euthanasia drugs from his vet’s office and asks his friend, Cozzo, who repairs machines at fast food restaurants, to build him a “suicide machine”. When the suicide is successful, Scott, Joey and Cozzo decide to go in to the assisted suicide business… and people are just dying to become customers! (Sorry, that was truly terrible). Although morbid (and more than a little controversial), the show was one of the funniest things I’ve seen on UK TV in a long time. The characters remind me a bit of a more daring Reaper. Blake Harrison (Scott) plays a similar “nice guy” character to Bret Harrison’s Reaper character (they have the same last name, too!), and Marc Wootton (Cozzo) is not only a dead ringer for Tyler Labine, he plays a similar “good friend who is a slacker, and constantly screws up” just as Lebine did in Reaper.

Continue reading “2013 TV at the Half”

I lived in Atlanta from the day I was born until I was 31 years old. I am also a huge fan of NBC’s Parks and Recreation, the comedy with Amy Poehler, Nick Offerman and Rob Lowe. In fact, if Offerman’s “Ron Swanson” character was a real person, in my book he’d be the greatest living American by a long shot.

Anyway, I watched last week’s episode, which opened with a shot of “JJ’s Diner”. It wasn’t until I went online after watching the episode that I found out that not only was the exterior shot filmed in Atlanta, it was filmed at a diner on Cheshire Bridge Road I’ve been in 100 times:

In fact, I even reviewed the diner on my “old” site (read it here). Seriously, folks… I’ve been in that place – when it was the Dunk N’ Dine – at least 50 times, if not more. I’ve got several stories from that place I bore my friends with, like the time I sat next to a table of three older white men in suits… and one 6′ 5″, 275lb. black “woman” in a dress. Or the time my friend Jefferson and I almost had to swap tables because we were laughing so hard at the bitchy drag queens in the corner* that we couldn’t eat. What’s more, as you can see from the picture, I also got a tattoo at a shop next door, bought “smoking accessories” several times at the shop next to that, and gawked at the “toys” at the adult store next to that.

What AWESOME observational skills I have! I’m slipping, folks. I watched a recent episode of Death in Paradise, a UK crime drama filmed in Guadeloupe. The main character is an English cop who is kind of a lesser Sherlock Holmes. He also can’t stand the tropical weather and is anal-retentive to the point of offensiveness. Anyway, the cop was able to figure out who the bad guy was (in this case, the bad girl) because she kept two mobile phones, identical except that one was black and the other white. Aaaaannnnnnddd I totally missed that, too.

* – I feel I should mention that we were laughing at the drag queens because they were being funny, not because they were drag queens. They were arguing amongst themselves, doing some kind of drag queen version of “Yo’ Momma” jokes back and forth. It was really funny.

2011 was a great year for TV. 2012?  Not so much. The first half was pretty decent, but the second half of the year was pretty much a strike-out. So while 2011’s list was a lot of work (because I had to whittle down a huge list to acceptable levels), 2012’s list was also a lot of work (because it was that hard coming up with a list of decent new shows).

And so… the list, keeping in mind that this is all about new shows, not returning ones. There’s also lists of shows that didn’t make it, shows that ended this year, the biggest disappointment of the year, the best news of the year and the best and worst moments of the year. Enjoy!

THE BEST NEW SHOWS OF 2012

Don’t Trust the Bitch in Apartment 23 (ABC) – The premise of this show is simple: June, a naive and trusting Indianan, moves to New York City after graduating college to pursue her dream career. But on her first day the CEO of her mortgage company is arrested for running a Ponzi scheme. Desperate, June becomes the roommate of Chloe McGruff (Krysten Ritter), an amoral scam artist, a swindler and party girl. Chloe is the worst person ever, and is only genuinely nice to her best friend, former Dawson’s Creek actor James Van Der Beek. Unfortunately, the ratings aren’t very good, the writing has taken a turn for the worse in season 2, and ABC is monkeying around with the episode order. I don’t expect it to last much longer.

Line of Duty (BBC) – Every year the BBC puts out a really dark police drama in which the police aren’t necessarily any better than the people they’re chasing. Be it my personal fave Luther or last year’s favorite The Shadow Line, there’s always some show about the dark side of police work. This year’s entry is Line of Duty, in which the young, idealistic Detective Sergeant Steve Arnott (Martin Compston) accidentally causes the death of an innocent man during an anti-terrorist raid. Arnott refuses to participate in a cover-up of the incident, and is ruthlessly ostracized by his colleagues for it. To get away from them he joins an internal affairs division led by Superintendent Ted Hastings (Adrian Dunbar). Hastings’ main target is Detective Chief Inspector Tony Gates (the great Lennie James). Gates’ unit consistently has huge arrest numbers, and Hastings knows that this is partly because Gates only takes on cases he knows he can solve, then piles tons of charges on criminals once caught. But Hastings suspects the corruption is far worse. Although family man Gates might not want to admit it, he has a mistress, and she just might get him in a world of trouble.

Copper (BBC America) – And speaking of dark police dramas, BBC America debuted its first original series, Copper, about Kevin “Corky” Corcoran (Tom Weston-Jones), a rough and tumble Irish cop in 1860s New York City, specifically the notorious, crime and poverty ridden Five Points neighborhood. Like a lot of men at the time, Corky went away to fight the Confederates in the Civil War, and while he was away his wife and daughter were murdered. Much of the series is about his investigation into what happened to them. He’s helped by Robert Morehouse (Kyle Schmid) a wealthy industrialist who was his major in the Union Army, Eva Heissen (Franka Potente), a Prussian madam who knows a lot of secrets, and Dr. Matthew Freeman (Ato Essandoh), a black physician who seems to know more about forensic science than any other doctor in America at the time (one of my small beefs about the show). Many disliked the show, saying it was too slow, and the fact that it was set in a time-frame similar to the slightly more popular Hell On Wheels didn’t help. But if you stick with it, you’ll be rewarded. It’s a well-done series with rich characters and well thought-out stories.

Continue reading “The Year in TV (2012)”

Wow! Where 2011’s “TV at the Half” seemed like an embarrassment of riches, 2012 seems awfully thin. I actually had to put a lot of thought into last year’s list, in order to whittle it down to an appropriate number of “Good” shows. This year I struggled to come up with a measly six “Good” shows. So 2012 hasn’t been a very good year for TV so far. And so… the list, keeping in mind that this is all about new shows, not returning ones:

THE GOOD

Don’t Trust the Bitch in Apartment 23 (ABC) – There aren’t a lot of major network sitcoms that make me laugh out loud. The Office and 30 Rock seem to be on their last legs. Modern Family is good, but always seems to end on a heartfelt note or “message”. Parks and Rec seems to be in a slump. Community is funny, but tries way too hard to be clever. So this season’s Don’t Trust the B came as a surprise. The premise is simple: June, a naive and trusting Indianan, moves to New York City after graduating college to pursue her dream career at a mortgage company. But on her first day of work the CEO is arrested for using the company as a giant Ponzi scheme. The company is shut down by the feds, who also seize the company apartment June was going to live in. Desperate, she becomes the roommate of Chloe McGruff (the lovely and funny Krysten Ritter), who is an amoral scam artist, a swindler and total party girl. Imagine Paris Hilton if Paris Hilton ran check forgery and identity theft scams on the side. Chloe is the worst person ever, and seems to only be genuinely nice to her best friend, former Dawson’s Creek actor James Van Der Beek. The first couple of episodes spend a bit too much time showing June falling for Chloe’s evil tricks and scams, and the preachy June tries to make the amoral Chloe think about her actions. But after that, the show gets it in gear. While June is still “the good one”, her desperate financial situation causes her to look at Chloe in a different light. My favorite part of the show, however, is James Van Der Beek. He plays a fictionalized version of himself who hates any mention of Dawson’s Creek… unless it can get him something free or get a woman in bed. Who knew Van Der Beek had such a sense of humor? There’s a great scene where he talks about his starring role in a Guy Ritchie film… and it’s hilarious!

Line of Duty (BBC) – It seems like every year the BBC has to put out a really dark police drama, in which the police aren’t necessarily any better than the people they’re chasing. Be it my personal fave Luther or last year’s favorite The Shadow Line, there’s always some show about the dark side of police work. This year’s entry is Line of Duty, in which the young, idealistic Detective Sergeant Steve Arnott (Martin Compston) accidentally causes the death of an innocent man during an anti-terrorist raid. Arnott refuses to participate in a later cover-up of the incident. He’s ruthlessly ostracized by his colleagues for this, and to get away from them joins an anti-corruption division led by Superintendent Ted Hastings (Adrian Dunbar). Hastings’ main target is Detective Chief Inspector Tony Gates (the great Lennie James). Gates’ unit consistently has huge arrest numbers, and Hastings knows that this is partly because Gates only takes on cases he knows he can solve, then piles tons of charges on criminals once caught. But Hastings suspects the corruption is far worse then mere padding. Although family man Gates might not want to admit it, he has a mistress, and she just might get him in a world of trouble.

Continue reading “2012 TV at the Half”