Yet to try it, but there’s no Star Trek I haven’t loved so I’m looking forward to diving in.
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Just started Hotel Costiera. It´s a nice show (it helps if you haven´t seen anything of the last 40 years, because in my eyes it´s a blatant Magnum copy). But this again makes me wonder: why no Travis McGee series?
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It has its lusciously good cast back with some more stand outs. Toby Jones in particular leaps out.
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Surprisingly, this one gets great reviews. Could it actually be this good? I hope so!
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Loved the first one. This seems to be a fun take on “The Taking of Pelham 1,2,3”.
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It has that highly episodic structure - no doubt also due to the amount of substances King consumed during its writing - that would lend itself to a more serialised adaptation. Many of the best elements - the explosion of the Kitchener ironworks; the fire at the Black Owl; the kid torturing small animals on the scrapyard and finding the clown’s flying leeches; Mike tracing It’s work through the library and interviewing his dying father - were either ignored or massively cut down in the adaptations.
Picking this up in a separate tv series makes sense and could feed a small number of seasons. It probably depends how good this is bracketed with Mike Hanlon’s detective work or what kind of identifying character they have in mind for this. Personally, I’d rather have them not linking this to the films, but that’s probably already a forgone conclusion and the whole point of it.
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The Iris Affair (Sky)
On the surface of it this looks a lot like another iteration of the Killing Eve/Mrs Davis beautiful-woman-in-designer-clothes-adventure-thriller subgenre, making use of vaguely sunny Mediterranean locales and a vaguely AI-themed Macguffin in a not quite espionage-themed show.
The first two episodes have considerable fun lingering on Villanelle/Davis moments, winking at us while we wonder through the exposition where this is going. But the prologue already hints at considerable more gore and less well-defined frontlines. The show is not hyper-violent but has its moments nonetheless…
Iris is a particular kind of genius, a young woman just happy to spend her life solving riddles, codes, mysteries. She’s clever, resourceful, but by no means a superspy or a killing machine. Thankfully. Rich billionaire Cameron Beck lures her into solving the hardest ever code to boot a kind of god-machine quantum device that looks like a warp core with a bad case of psoriasis. Its creator, Jensen Lind, has lost his marbles and the machine ‘sleeps’. Iris’ task is to wake it up - and when she succeeds Jensen kills her team. From that point onwards Iris’ trusting relationship with her employer suffers a setback and she leaves premises with the encrypted wake-up code in a notebook.
Four episodes and 18 months later, Cameron Beck and an assortment of corrupt policemen moonlighting as headhunters have caught up with Iris but fail to get their hands on her or the code. So far - that is, halfway in - it’s been a wild and enjoyable ride. Riddles are still waiting to be solved, twists to be turned. Niamh Algar is excellent in her role as emotionally challenged Iris (who was possibly raised by Vulcans) and Tom Hollander is an oddly likeable villain. Or is he? The fourth episode teases a first look at perhaps the real villain of this piece.
Anyway, so far it’s been a treat. I rarely watch four episodes of anything in one sitting. We’ll see how the second half plays out…
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They’ve done all that they can do with the IT “franchise”. There’s no reason for this series to exist other than to cash in on the unending parade of King “adaptations”.
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Only Murders In The Building season 5 finale
“How much time do you think we’ll serve?” - Renée Zellweger
“It doesn’t matter, I have all the time in the world” - Christolph Waltz
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Doctor Who will return…
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…including concerns over the Ncuti Gatwa show’s failure to break out from its established fan base…
Doctor Who is a show running for 60+ years on its established fanbase growing naturally from one generation to the next. The overall appeal of it is exactly that it isn’t a Marvel or Star Wars behemoth but the small screen Saturday afternoon show bringing together the family. Any perception this was somehow growing in absolute numbers was largely based on the fact the 2005 reboot and subsequent seasons were eagerly followed by adults who grew up with the first eight doctors. And no matter how much money you throw at it, you were always bound to end up catering to essentially that core fanbase that didn’t much overlap with the US market.
A classic misunderstanding between the guys with the money suitcases and the ones selling their product…
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Disney wasn’t going to be a good fit for Doctor Who. The homespun quality has always been part of its charm, Disney was never going to get the Star Wars style franchise they wanted out of it.
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Sometimes I wonder whether „modernizing“ a classic is necessary to adapt - or whether staying the same would be much more effective in difficult changing times.
The anachronistic nature of a piece of art which has proven successful might exactly be its unique selling point, not a mixed up version which seems too desperate to please the zeitgeist.
This goes for DW and Bond, too.
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Nice to see some movement on the Doctor Who front, even if it sounds like Davies and Piper are only back for one special and then things are up in the air again. That might not be a bad thing as the series could probably do with a refresh.
It makes sense to have Davies return for a final hurrah, using the Christmas special to tie off some of the lingering plot threads: Billie Piper’s appearance, the mystery of Susan, and ‘the boss’ (though there’s been speculation that Susan Foreman is the boss).
But looking ahead, Doctor Who really needs to find a new direction. Over the past few years, Davies has leaned heavily on nostalgia, with both finales relying on clips from classic episodes. The next era needs someone willing to build new mythology rather than referencing old stories.
I also think the format could use a rethink. Thirteen-episode mystery arcs worked in 2005; eight-episode ones in 2025, not so much. Maybe a more serialised structure, something like Flux, with each episode set in a different time and place but part of a single story, could be the way forward. Or perhaps a modern spin on the classic format, where one story unfolds across several episodes (though that would practically fill a whole season now!).
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Completely agreed: Doctor Who must reboot.
I would prefer it to become a concise season of stand-alones. Stop the big arcs. This makes it into a homework assignment like the Marvel universe.
Let’s face it: there is too much content out there. I can only invest a small amount of time into long running mysteries. Just offer me something that can be wrapped up in one episode. Tv shows used to be good at that.
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In the late 80s I spent a year in London (and would later spend a bit over a year in Dublin and Killarney as part of a Bruxelles intern program). On both occasions Doctor Who played no part whatsoever in my daily scheme; I was much more interested in the legacy of the Sex Pistols than what I perceived as a quirky kids program that had somehow attained a modest popularity. In the early 80s a German kids publishing house had even translated two DW novels (before the show was ever aired in Germany) that I bought and read. But it was no challenger to my Bond dedication and I dare say they went down mostly unnoticed even with hardcore Brit-sf fans (who preferred Ufo and Space 1999 anyway).
When the reboot with Eccleston came I still hadn’t seen a single original episode and had only the vaguest recollection of those two books I had read 20 years earlier. And the crucial thing was: that reboot made it easy to come on board without intimate knowledge of what came before*. You just watched what happened to Rose and learned with her all you needed to know. The reboot let you dip in and become a fan.
Initially.
Some time during Tennant’s tenure the thing turned increasingly complex. The heartthrob romance with Rose Tyler, the Jack Harkness/Torchwood spinoff, the overarching storylines and constant callbacks to previous adventures and characters, even the changes to characters themselves made following this show a task for hardcore fans. At times the show felt like it was all about its Easter eggs and the specials. For hardcore fans that may not be such a big problem. But I doubt the show made many newcomer fans during the last 10 years or so. It’s simply no longer as accessible as the initial reboot was - back in 2005, 20 years ago.
For a show nominally aimed at a family audience with a predominantly younger viewership that is a problem.
*You could of course also do your homework and research the whole Doctor Who canon online before starting the show. But it’s rarely a good thing if that was required reading. However, if your audience gets hooked by your show and then decides to study the history, that’s fine then. Splendid actually.
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Just finished Reacher 3 and The Terminal List: Dark Wolf which both were pretty good. So if this is Amazons standard for their James Bond film quality - and production wise, I´m o.k. with it…
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Have to confess the setting for Reacher 3, that sprawling manor at the coast, was the first time I didn’t like the production values. It’s cleverly made no doubt, but all the scenes shot inside that perimeter feel like soundstage. Mind you, it doesn’t look bad and deploys some artfully used camera/CGI amalgamation. Plus, it’s a lot cheaper to have this done in a studio environment than on an actual location. But I wouldn’t want to see that on the big screen; the result might not be up to the visuals one would expect from a Bond film.
Otherwise, Reacher was okay again. I particularly enjoy how they introduce some black humour into the series that few of the books ever delve into.
That said, I suspect they’ve now used some of the better entries in the series. A lot of what remains is not terribly gripping chaff that would be a waste of time and effort to adapt. Especially the books where Reacher spends three quarters of the book walking/driving/getting from A to B to C and back again are a chore.
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The production value should be higher for a Bond film of cource…Reachers Without Fail, Echo Burning, Tripwire, Die Trying and especially The Visitor should all be equally good if not better than what they gave us already
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