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Sorry – no time to update the blog at the moment, far too busy! Hopefully will get back to it at some point soon.
Sky have announced that they’ve acquired the rights to Hatufim (Prisoners of War), the original drama upon which the US drama Homeland, currently seen on Sunday nights on Channel Four, is broadly based. The ten-part series, written and directed by Gideon Raff, was voted Israel’s number one drama in 2010 and will be shown for the first time in the UK on Sky Arts 1 HD in May.
Although Homeland only used the Israeli series as a starting point upon which the 24-style espionage thriller was built rather than directly remaking it, it’ll be interesting to see the orignal show which was critically acclaimed at the time of its broadcast.
Starring Edna Blilious, Yaël Abecassis and Mili Avital, it tells the story of three IDF reservists who are captured in Lebanon before returning seventeen years late, two alive, one in a coffin. Going back and forth between three points in time – before the abduction, during their time in captivity and after their release – we see how the survivors attempt to reintegrate into society while slowly discovering more about the secrets of their time as captives.
The acquisition was part of a raft of announcements from the channel, including the return of Michael Parkinson to TV and an original drama series, Playhouse Presents.
The first episode of Homeland was a dense, fast-paced thriller featuring a stand-out performance from Claire Danes as CIA officer Carrie Mathison.
A couple of weeks ago, I was invited to BAFTA’s swanky London headquarters for a screening of the first episode followed by a Q&A with it’s British stars Damian Lewis and David Harewood MBE. The drama about an American Marine’s homecoming after years in captivity and the CIA officer who believes he may have been turned by the enemy and poses a terrorist threat has won critical praise and 2011 Golden Globe for best television drama series. The pilot episode is one of the best debuts I’ve seen for a while, it drew me in very quickly and introduced the characters in some depth early on.
At the screening, Lewis explained how he was excited by the script because of how dense it was in incident and character, while Harewood said he was attracted by the kind of strong black role that is not often found in the UK. When asked why we do not often have similarly strong series over ten-plus episodes here in Britain, Harewood suggested that there is currently a lack of ambition in the industry. Lewis put it down to the difference between British television’s theatrical traditions as opposed to the Hollywood background of American TV, as well as (perhaps more pertinently) the huge gulf in development and pilot budgets.
The episode starts in Iraq, as Carrie bribes her way into a jail to try to get some information about a possible attack from a bomb maker who is due to be executed. He whispers in her ear that an American prisoner of war has been turned, something she immediately discredits because there are no Americans being held. Ten months later, she turns up late for a briefing at the CIA Counterterrorism Center in Washington where Director of Counterterrorism David Estes (David Harewood) announces that Sergeant Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis), a US Marine who went missing in Iraq eight years ago and has long been presumed dead, is rescued in a Special Forces raid. Carrie immediately puts two and two together, telling her mentor Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin) that she suspects Brody of being the convert to al-Qaeda she was told about. Because she has little evidence and Brody is being greeted by America as a returning war hero, Saul tells her to back down, knowing the CIA will not support any investigation.
Another person surprised to hear of Brody’s return is his wife Jess (Morena Baccarin), who we first see in bed with his best friend Mike, a fellow Marine. She’s tied a yellow ribbon around a tree outside the house, told the world she won’t give up hope and even shunned the wife of Tom Walker, the Marine who was captured together with Brody, for remarrying but clearly she is starting to move on, spending lots of time with Mike and preparing to tell her children that he’s about to move in. Sergent Brody calls to deliver the news himself and his shocked wife races home to tell their somewhat stereotypically rebellious teenage daughter Dana and sweet-natured son Chris, who barely remembers his father.
As his family, the Vice President and the world’s press gather at the airport to greet Brody with a hero’s welcome, Carrie breaks into their home to set up an unauthorised surveillance operation, installing hidden cameras and microphones with the help of Virgil, and old friend whose services she’s used in the past, and his brother Max. She returns home to watch their every move, including some unromantic, grunting lovemaking which helps to show that, terrorist mole or not, Brody has gone through a hell of a lot and is not the man he was.
The next day, Saul manages to get Carrie into Brodie’s debriefing where she aggressively questions him on his first days in captivity, asking about terrorist leader Abu Nazir who he says he has never met. We see in flashback that he is lying, he did meet him when he was being held, but David angrily asks her to back down. After leaving the debriefing, Brodie calls his wife to tell her he’s still going to be there for a while, something the eavesdropping Virgil takes as a sign that he’s on his way to meet his terrorist contact. But instead, he meets Helen, Tom Walker’s wife, to help her come to terms with the loss of her husband, answering her questions about how he was beaten to death when he was in another room.
We learn a lot about Carrie in this episode and she’s shaping up to be one of the most fascinating female leads on television. There’s some kind of history between her and David which ended up with his wife leaving him. Max finds a bottle of anti-psychotic drugs in her bathroom, which she says she uses to treat a mood disorder she’s been keeping under control, and keeping secret, for many years. Perhaps the most remarkable moment comes when she returns home to find a disappointed Saul waiting for her, saying that he’ll have to report her surveillance operation to the authorities, and she makes a terribly desperate and unsuccessful attempt to seduce him. That night she goes out, wearing a wedding ring so she can pick up a guy who doesn’t want a relationship, and suddenly comes to a realisation. As she watches the fingers of the jazz band in the bar, she sees that Brody was tapping out a pattern with his fingers every time he was on TV. She takes this to Saul who agrees that this is just enough to buy her a bit more time.
The episode ends with Brody out on an early morning jog, as we see flashbacks that reveal that he was the one who had beaten Thomas Walker to death as Abu Nazir looked on. Menacingly, as he finishes his jog, he looks up and stares at Washington’s Capitol building.
This was a compelling start to the series, utterly absorbing from the start and full of twists and turns that took me from believing Carrie’s suspicions to doubting them and back again. It’ll be interesting to see how many more twists follow in the weeks to come.
Noel Fielding’s Luxury Comedy made its first appearance on E4 tonight. Also featuring Noel’s brother Mike and Rich Fulcher, both of whom will be familiar to fans of the Mighty Boosh, it was a sketch show featuring a mix of live-action, animation and puppetry, usually involving a huge amount of face paint. Dazzlingly imaginative and full of Fielding’s distinctive psychedelic artwork, it’s surely the most inventive comedy show of the year, but sadly not the funniest.
Sketch characters included Dondelion, who paces his zoo cage while having some rather dark mood swings, and Roy Circles, a talking chocolate finger war veteran widower and PE teacher. These were all linked by Fielding in his treehouse base, eating cereal and drawing pictures of Pele holding a cup while kicking a ball (or is it a saucer?). Whether or not the last couple of sentences raised a smile will show how much you’d enjoy this series. Perhaps the best of these characters was a bright yellow New York City cop named Sergeant Raymond Boombox who solves crimes with the help of his talking wounds, while the definite lowlight of the episode was Renny and Gaviskon, two characters who just crash around a kitchen for a bit. There was also a “guest” appearance from the Boosh’s Moon character, which only made me miss the BBC Three series more.
Luxury Comedy seems to highlight what Julian Barrett brought to the Mighty Boosh. His musical talents have been replaced here by those of Serge Pizzorno from Kasabian, but Barrett’s writing appears to be missed. In particular, it feels like the corduroy and jazz-flavoured balance he brought to the Boosh was missing. Without this balance, Fielding’s flights of fancy had nothing to keep them tied down and while this can be fantastic in small doses, half an hour’s worth left me feeling like I’d gorged on too many sweets.
It’s a shame that it wasn’t anywhere near as funny as it was colourful. Giving Fielding free rein to be utterly self-indulgent without any quality control could have been an interesting experiment as a one-off special, but I have doubts about it having much mileage as a series.
So far this week I’ve been looking at some series that will be appearing on our screens in the coming months. Today, a very brief look at two one-off British comedy specials I’m looking forward to seeing this year.
First up, Bad Sugar, a 30-minute pilot starring some of the country’s best comic actresses – Olivia Colman, Julia Davis and Sharon Horgan. It’s written by Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong, creators of Peep Show and Fresh Meat, both of which will return later this year. Bad Sugar is described as “a peculiarly British take on telenovela style melodramas” focusing on a dysfunctional, wealthy mining dynasty, with an ailing patriarch and some greedy siblings. Directed by Ben Palmer, fresh from helming the hugely successful Inbetweeners Movie, the pilot will guest star Reece Shearsmith, Peter Serafinowicz and David Bradley. With these talents in front of and behind the camera, this looks like it’ll be worth waiting for.
Sky 1′s line-up of home-grown comedies continues to grow, with one of the latest being A Touch of Cloth, a feature-length spoof of British crime dramas written by Charlie Brooker and Daniel Maier. Starring John Hannah as maverick, boozing DCI Jack Cloth, Suranne Jones as his plucky partner DC Anne Oldman and Julian Rhind-Tutt as their boss, A.C.C. Tom Boss, it follows an investigation into a series of increasingly grisly murders while taking in all of the regular locations seen in detective shows, from the leafy forests and luxury homes of Sunday afternoon fare to the sinister lock-ups and cold forensic labs of the more gritty dramas. It sounds like it’s taking a more silly route than most of Brooker’s scripts, which would be ideal for this sort of thing – as Maier says, “It’s like Airplane! for a detective series except for not being Police Squad”.
No air dates for either of these shows yet, but as soon as I find out I’ll let you know.
This week in the US saw the premiere of Alcatraz, a new series from some of the team behind Lost which will be coming to Watch later this year. And it’s not just the credits for executive producer J.J. Abrams, director Jack Bender and writer Elizabeth Sarnoff that link the series. In the first episode, as Jorge “Hurley” Garcia talks about “the island” while Michael Giacchino’s soaring score plays in the background, you could be forgiven for thinking we’d flashed back in time a couple of years.
Incidentally, time travel of some form plays an important part in this show. We start by being told that while we think the prisoners and guards of Alcatraz moved elsewhere when it shut down in the 1960s, some of them disappeared. Garcia plays Dr. Diego Soto, a comic book writer and expert on the infamous prison who is basically the same character as Hurley – loveable, geeky and the only person able to see the absurdities of what’s going on from the audience’s point of view. He’s recruited by Rebecca Madsen (Sarah Jones), a San Francisco cop investigating a murder by an ex-inmate and they both stumble across a secret FBI operation being run by Emerson Hauser (Sam Neill, yes, from off of Jurassic Park) and Lucy Banerjee (ER’s Parminder Nagra). It seems that the prisoners are starting to reappear fifty years after they were last seen, looking no older than they did then, and Hauser is attempting to round them up before they start getting up to their old criminal ways.
The format has been very carefully constructed so that fans of Lost’s mysteries have a puzzle that will slowly unravel throughout the series, while those people who prefer to jump in and out of the show will have a self-contained story in each episode, as every week the team go after a different prisoner. So, one week you have a sniper on the loose, the next it’s a child abductor who needs to be tracked down. Throughout each episode are flashbacks to the 1960s, as we discover from their time on the Rock what motivates the criminal-of-the-week as well as sometimes getting a step closer to discovering who brought them to the present day, how and why.
Now, it certainly isn’t a bad show and it’s a joy to see Jorge Garcia back on the screen (who doesn’t love Hurley?) but the first couple of episodes didn’t grab me as being particularly outstanding. There are a few things that especially bugged me, such as the way the prisoners seem utterly unperturbed by the changes in technology over the last half century (although this admittedly might be partially explained at some point) and the fact that Rebecca and her team seem to be able to turn up at a crime scene and be sure that it must be the work of another Alcatraz prisoner, as if there are no present-day criminals around.
It also remains to be seen how well the balance between the series-long arcs and stand-alone stories will work. There’s still a chance that people who infrequently dip in and out of the show could get confused by the ongoing time travel plots while, speaking as someone who is more intrigued by watching the overall mythology of the show unfold, I can imagine that the focus on the hunt for a different criminal each week might soon get tiresome for someone like me. Besides, if I wanted to see a Lost-related police procedural, I’d have preferred a spin-off featuring Saywer and Miles as a good cop/bad cop, or Locke and Ben setting up some sort of paranormal detective agency.
It’s still worth a look, though, and as a lighter mix of action, sleuthing and sci-fi mystery it’s better than a lot of other shows out there.
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