Choices - MacGyver

"So... basically we're doing extraordinary rendition now?"

MacGyver; you have failed this blog.

Yeah, so after three episodes I'm calling time on MacGyver. I might watch a few more episodes if there's nothing else grabbing me, but… It's just not very good, and certainly not sharp enough to contend with the current field. Part of it is the aforementioned attempt to be too much like the original, and part is that I just don't remember the original Mac doing quite so much official government violation of sovereign borders. Most of the time he was just doing his thing and had to help someone out, or stumbled on terrorists while back packing. This new Mac... he's all about the illegal, unethical sanctioned on the QT abduction of foreign nationals from extra-territorial locations.

Choices - Bitten and Powers

Cool, hot werewolf fascists.

Bitten is a series based on part of the 'Women of the Otherworld' novel franchise, which tells the story of the only female werewolf and all the ways in which her werewolf family of killer, fascist casualwear models exempt her from the draconian werewolf law that they enforce, without ever really talking about it. It's been sitting on the box for a while, but despite its promise of a strong, female lead and all, it's really just about another superspecialsnowflake who just wants a normal life, by which I mean that she wants to get away from the communal pack house, a massive, richly appointed mansion in upstate New York, and her super-hot genius tenured ex-fiance to live with her superhot new fiance in his vast loft in Toronto and effortlessly sliding into celebrity photographer status. I would have far more sympathy for this character if she were choosing an actual ordinary life, and this - plus still not having enough hours in the week - is basically why I'm dropping it. That and, seriously, the 'noble pack' are a bunch of idiot fascists, enforcing a law that makes no sense in a modern world and making a crushing rod for their own backs because of it.

Produced by Playstation. For reals.

Powers, on the other hand, is a super low-budget superhero show, set in a world in which superpowers are common, and Powers are celebrities with agents and social media presences. It's not an uninteresting setup, and Eddie Izzard makes a really creepy master villain, but it's hampered hard by its budget whenever it actually wants to use superpowers. This might not be a problem, but none of the characters are really likeable enough, nor the story compelling enough, to get past that. So Powers is off the list as well.

Of course, that's like ten stored episodes, which is 1 or 2 percent of the box storage, but about seven hours of my life saved.

Choices - 'The Blacklist'

Dembe and Red: PIs

So, this is a first for me. I'm choosing to give up on a show that is not merely watchable, but actually good.

The Blacklist had a very strong freshman year, but flagged for me in its sophomore as it got more into the backstory of Elizabeth Keane and her relationship with ex-fake husband Tom; the parts of the equation that I really didn't care about so much. I didn't like Red, but James Spader's charisma was undeniable, and the Keanes didn't have that. Consequently, I didn't care if Elizabeth was a Russian sleeper or a loyal FBI agent or a fugitive or a music teacher from Des Moines, or dead.

And that was it. The big double twist at the end of season 2 left me basically unmoved, and at that point, I'm clearly not invested, so for all the bits that I did like, I've got way too much backed up to watch to carry on with The Blacklist. t's not Hooten & the Lady and it's certainly no Hunters, so I wish it well for the future. In time, I might even come back and catch up.

Choices - Hooten and the Lady and Hunters

Meh.

So, I talked a bit before about the fact that the current golden age of TV drama is actually a glut of product which not only allows, but requires that the viewer make choices. Or if I didn't then I meant to and just got distracted. It happens. Anyway, my latest choices not to watch are Hooten & the Lady and Hunters.

Hooten & the Lady is okay, but it's a show of another era. He's a lovable rogue, she's a posh academic; they fight crime, or at least retrieve antiquities. It's not the central dynamic I object to, not that she is comically inept in an actual fight, nor even the forced and unconvincing sexual tension. It just feels kind of weird to be watching a modern set show that is so... colonial. Our leads, a posh white Brit and a rough and tumble, mercenary Yank, travel to exotic locales, meet locals who mysteriously need a British Museum researcher and a raider of tombs to do what we will generously call archaeology for them, and retrieve priceless cultural artefacts in a quippy and irreverent fashion. Egypt in particular has a very established archaeological community and little need to bring in freewheeling, site-dynamiting dilettantes to do for them.

Yick.

On the other hand, at least it isn't Hunters, which tried to win me over to the side of its unlovable 'heroes' by introducing a heavy who puts women in cages, lures prostitutes into gratuitous threesomes in order to drill holes in their spines and makes out with his alien baby-mamma on the corpse, then murders his own child rather than allow it to be held by the humans. It's just plain nasty, and lacks the weighty substance needed to validate the unpleasantness. And, however vile the villain, our heroes are still jerks.

Sometimes you wonder why a series has been cancelled; not with Hunters. I might watch Hooten & the Lady if I found myself at a loose end; I'd have to be at my wits' end to go back to Hunters.

Choices

"Please forgive him. He only drinks to forget."

I remember a time when I used to watch every even vaguely scifi show going. For the rest of the week I'd read in the evenings.

Babylon 5 was a revolution: TV space opera that wasn't Star Trek! The X-Files spearheaded the rise of 'cult TV' to become a sufficiently broad church as to outnumber all of the non-cult shows and usher in the ingenuous catchall term 'genre programming', as if mainstream programming didn't have a genre at all.

But the world has changed since 1990, and as the percentage of space remaining on my Sky box plunges towards single digits once again and with Amazon Prime's offerings lagging - the excellent Mr Robot and diverting Into the Badland unfinished, and The Man in the High Castle not yet begun - it's time to face the facts: I can't watch everything, and that means that hard choices - well, choices anyway - have to be made.

The main Japanese character in this series is actually called 'Katana Girl'.
There's an aspect of not trying here.

The X-Files revival didn't make it past the first episode for me, and I'll remind you that I'm still watching The Shannara Chronicles. In a similar vein, it seems likely that I won't be going back to Heroes Reborn, although I've not yet deleted it. Much like The X-Files, I think my problem is that I didn't see the last series of Heroes - I basically got fucked off with them killing off characters I liked in order to focus on the amazing Peter, the unsinkable Sylar and the latest incarnation of interchangeable hot blonde - and I simply can't be bothered to go back and catch up on the backstory that I'm missing. Also, despite the removal of my major bugbears from the series, they're still killing off characters I like.

Channel 4's Humans was a tougher call, but it had got to the point that I wasn't going to have anything new to say about it. If I get a chance I may binge it as a box set, but for now it's on the back burner. True Detective season 2 is looking like going the same way - it's as nasty as Season 1, but nowhere near as compelling - although I still hope to get back to Dominion at some point.

I figure if I want American fascists, I'll go to The Man in the High Castle.

More recently, I've decided that I'm still watching Blindspot, but not reviewing it (as with The Blacklist and Elementary I'm not sure I have enough to say, but may do a write up for the season once I finish.) New series Colony failed to grab me; likewise event miniseries 11 22 63, largely because JFK is almost as spent a time travel focus as Hitler, but without the comforting moral absolutism conferred by Nazis. It is my contention that literally everyone in Dallas on that day was a time traveler, probably including JFK who had to be cloned and taken back to replace his original self after he died from temporal wear and tear. 11 22 63 is also based on a Stephen King story, and I've never really been into King's work.

'But wait,' I hear you say. 'Are these things really worse than The Shannara Chronicles or Beowulf: Return to the Shieldlands?' Probably not, but I find them less entertaining, and less fun to write about. I personally feel that this is a sure sign of a golden age of entertainment - that we no longer feel pressured to watch things just because they're good.

I leave you with this thought: In Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End - which I only recently read after the broadcast of the event adaptation - a character bewails the fact that in the Golden Age of Humanity, people are so indolent that they are watching anything up to three hours of television per day.