QUICK TV REVIEW: The Joy of Sets

Full disclosure: I was a huge fan of Get This, the Triple M program and podcast that originally brought Tony Martin and Ed Kavalee together, along with the much-missed, much-loved Richard Marsland. So I’m a little biased.

Having said that, I got more laughs out of the opening segment of The Joy of Sets than I did out of a whole episode of Good News World. These guys have a natural, easy chemistry that just works, whether it’s on radio or television. That chemistry comes across here, and they mine some fine material out of the weird and wonderful that is the history of television.

 First of all, though, someone needs to get them some better chairs. The whole show was a little bit awkward and a little bit clunky, and I think it will benefit as time goes on, once the guys become more comfortable in their roles and the editing becomes less jarring. It should be less scripted as well, but that might prove too high a degree of difficulty, especially for a first episode.

(I really enjoyed the closing title sequence. That was close to the best thing on the show.)

On top of that, I actually don’t have all that much to say about ‘The Joy of Sets’. It was funny, pretty interesting, a little awkward and charming. Much like the guys themselves, I suppose. I think it would probably benefit from being on a little bit later and have less pressure on it. It strikes me as being more suited to a later timeslot a la the panel or Merrick and Rosso Unplanned. I hope people, and Channel Nine, give it a chance because I thoroughly enjoyed it. Check it out next week!

TV REVIEW - SUITS

When I sat down to watch Suits, I wasn’t particularly enthralled at the idea. Watching two snappily dressed, rich, white guys banter and do legal things isn’t really my idea of a good time unless its very nicely executed. While I wouldn’t go as far as to say that Suits is ‘very nicely’ executed, there’s a degree of competency at work here that just makes this show fly by.

Reading American critics’ reviews had made me think that ‘Suits’ was going to be a slog, and while you should never think too deeply about what’s going on, a slog it is not. Leads Patrick J. Adams and Gabriel Macht have an easy chemistry and natural charm, although it still baffles me how often in the pilot they aren’t in scenes together, as the show really clicks when they are.

Macht (The Spirit) stars as Harvey Specter, a flashy attorney who is ‘the best closer in town’. This seems to be based more on reputation than actual evidence, as he spends most of his time in the pilot screwing up. Through some contrived plotting he meets Mike Ross, (Adams) a pot-smoking screw-up who also happens to be a genius. He hires Ross to join his legal firm despite the fact he’s never been to law school and they begin to close cases together.

And that’s it, really. There are other people who populate the law firm like Gina Torres (Firefly) as their boss and Rick Hoffman as a lawyer so incredibly prissy and annoying he makes Macht’s character look like a self-deprecating, humble street urchin – and that’s probably the idea – but really this show is about whether you like the two leads and want to see them do the legal equivalent of solve crimes together. The writing is unspectacular, the women are smart, attractive and underwritten, and the cases are nothing to write home about. It’s all down to whether you like the characters.

Personally, I started out not liking either of them but begrudgingly accepted they were a watchable duo in the end – and maybe liking them a little bit. Sure, Gabriel Macht may be playing a played-straight version of Barney Stinson and Adams is like a straighter-laced Aaron Paul from Breaking Bad, but they make decent, inoffensive, frothy viewing.

Just don't think too hard about it.

TELEVISION: Crownies Review

(This review covers Episode 1-3)

The ABC took a pretty age-old approach to selling Crownies. Sex sells. ‘Sex, lies and magistrates’ was the tagline.

Sure enough, there’s lots of cleavage. There’s a set of lingerie. There are a lot of pretty people.

Unfortunately, it’s like when an Australian Idol contestant tries to be sexy. The ‘sexiness’ is all so forced – dropped into the plot purely because it should be there, not because it rises organically from proceedings. That’s to begin with, at least. Episode three manages to create some chemistry between two of the five leads – and that’s far sexier than randomly putting girls in their bra.

A couple of those girls are among our leads for this show – the five young Crownies whose trials (Ha!) and tribulations will form the basis of this show going forward. They’re all pretty good and immediately distinguishable from each other. The standouts at this stage are the continually flustered Hamish Michael who brings a real humanity to his role and Indiana Evans for her breezy charm and casual intelligence. This is not to denigrate any of the other five leads – they’re all very good.

Oh man, though. Midway through the first episode the primary prosecutor of the DPP absolutely smashes apart a defense team during a negotiation, and you can’t help but cheer for her as she does it. Despite the young cast being front and centre, it’s Marta Dusseldorp as Janet King that absolutely sprints away with the show. Disappointingly, she’s barely in the second part of the season pilot.

The rest of the adult cast is professional and competent though they don’t stand out like Dusseldorp does. Essentially, though, Crownies has an attractive, competent, charismatic cast. All that’s left is to do something worthwhile with it. On that basis, I think the show succeeds. While the first two episodes try to tackle way too much the third episode contains the focus somewhat and that results in a much, much better show. The cases are contemporary without feeling ripped-from-the-headlines and the issues involved generally have enough shades of grey to keep them interesting.

It takes slightly longer for the personal storylines to have as much impact as the legal ones. The young cast mostly make horrifyingly idiotic mistakes and sleep with people that shouldn’t be anywhere near their social circles if they had a shred of decency. Those forced plot developments that populate the first episode do make way for more complex storylines as the episodes progress and the characters begin to intertwine in ways that are more fun to watch.

Overall, do I want to watch a fourth episode? You bet I do. Once the third episode was over I was actively looking forward to the fourth and seeing how the series would progress. In fact, Crownies might be one of the best Australian-produced TV shows I’ve seen this year. No hysteria, not too much attention seeking, just classy, decent Aussie drama.

TELEVISION: UNDERBELLY RAZOR REVIEW

Set in Sydney in the 1920s, Underbelly: Razor follows the razor gangs of the 1920s and the battle for the underworld between vice queens Tilly Devine and Kate Leigh.

I have an ongoing problem with the Underbelly series – how can I enjoy a program where I hate all the characters?

Every Underbelly series has been almost exclusively populated with the most annoyingly stupid and selfish people known to man. We’ve been asked to sympathise with criminals, prostitutes, crooked cops and so much more. Maybe I’m too straight-laced, but you would need some of the most charming actors on the planet to make me care about what happens to anyone in these shows.

This wasn’t such a problem in the first series, which was genuinely explosive drama and had enough charming actors to see it through – while also being fantastically of the time. It was undeniably Australian television at very close to its finest.

Underbelly: A Tale of Two Cities however, was incredibly skeevy – to the point of unwatchability – and descended into completely mad plotting hell in its later episodes.

Underbelly: The Golden Mile was just solid and unspectacular – not as bad as series two but nowhere near as good as series one.

So that brings us to the fourth series of a show with stagnating, if not diminishing returns – Underbelly: Razor. Here we have what is basically the Australian sibling of Boardwalk Empire – a crime series set in the twenties and invoking all the social mores and visual signifiers of that age – flappers, pinstripe suits, hats. So many hats. More importantly, though, this was a chance for a Brand New Underbelly. A chance for the reinvention of the series. A chance to really achieve something.

So what did we get?

We got the same old Underbelly. Just with more hats.

It is certainly beautifully produced. I saw Underbelly: Razor on a cinema screen and there at least it looked stunning.  The twenties setting is pretty impressively rendered and the cast is uniformly gorgeously shot and made up.

That’s the height of Razor’s competence though as the script and plot just meander through the usual points. Judging by the first two episodes, Razor is once again saying absolutely nothing new. People are flawed, crime is glamorous and violent, prostitution is common…. etc. The only new point Razor seems to make is that it has been this way for a very long time.

This refusal to change or grow is never more aggravating than in the return of Caroline Craig as narrator. When she was narrating the first series, it was as one of the characters in the story – but from Season 2 onwards she’s just become an omniscient narrator. Not only does this not really make any sense (is the narrator still Craig’s original character? If so, has she retired from real police work and is now just reading old case files to children?), but the device has become lazy and stagnant. Rather than adding a personal layer over the story as it did in Season One, it’s now just a way for the writers to continually abuse the golden rule of television – show, don’t tell. Exposition pretty much exclusively falls to Craig and graphics because the writers don’t trust their actors, the audience or themselves to adequately tell this story without holding the viewer’s hand.

The script is also way too into its colloquialisms. I understand that the Australian lexicon is part of our national charm but that doesn’t mean we have to fit an idiom into every single sentence. After two episodes of this, can’t be far away from a ‘flat out like a lizard drinking’. Once I get hold of a DVD, I’m doing a tally. I’m sure Australians in the 1920s used plenty of this sort of slang - I just don’t think they used it exclusively.

That’s language covered, how about violence and sex? Well, this is Underbelly: Razor so there’s going to be plenty of blood and there’s going to be plenty of slicing and dicing. There’s one scene in particular that, while not shown in full, is still pretty sickeningly gory – but at least the characters all react to it as thus. The first two episodes weren’t all that violent, but I suspect it might get worse once the razors become more prevalent.

As for sex, well, Tilly Devine owns a fair few brothels so there’s going to be plenty of sex. Anna McGahan as notorious prostitute Nellie Cameron does most of the heavy lifting in this area and she brings a coquettish curiosity and sense of fun to her many, many sex scenes. Plenty of people do weird things, but none of it really leads anywhere apart from Nellie realising she likes being a prostitute.

The performances are all pretty solid. Danielle Cormack is a battleaxe as Kate Leigh – there ain’t no feminine grace here whatsoever and fair enough. Chelsie Preston Campbell plays Tilly Devine, all British accent and shrill shrieking. I suspect Anna McGahan will be the breakout star, all bitten lips and sexy eyes. – but for me Felix Williamson as Phil ‘the Jew’ Jeffs is the real charismatic presence onscreen – the show lifts many degrees when he shows up.

This is Underbelly, so Razor isn’t terrible. It’s a more than competent retelling of a crime story from the 1920s. But that’s all it is – just a very well produced re-enactment.

This is Underbelly – not with anything else inside, just a new coat of paint. The litmus test is whether I want to watch a third episode. At this stage it’s pretty fifty-fifty – but the show will have to improve its plotting and characterisation to hold my interest for more than a few episodes more – because sadly, I’ve seen this show before.

Channel Nine is yet to announce an air date for Underbelly: Razor.

WINNERS AND LOSERS WEEK THREE REVIEW

No real time for a full review tonight – so just a hail of hastily assembled spoiler-related bullets on the fourth episode of Winners and Losers:

·    Upbeat, funky pop song? Check? Women getting dressed in fancy clothes? Check? We’re off to the races!! This could be promising, despite the by-the-numbers intro. The races is a place where ritual humiliation could humanize these characters a bit more.

·      Damien Bodie’s character still might as well have a neon sign saying ‘Homosexual Character’ around his neck, for all the subtlety in the dialogue. Nothing much happening there development wise.

·      One of the things I like about ‘Packed to the Rafters’ doesn’t look too much like Home and Away – it elevates it a little bit. The scene early in the episode with Jenny and her brother (who is a bit funny) could have been inserted into a Home and Away episode without anyone really noticing.

·      Yes – Michala Banas is back. About time, this show desperately needs a villain. Or just, you know, conflict. Unfortunately, that conflict is that Jenny is being sued for making a mean speech at a high school reunion. Good luck with that one.

·      Zoe Tuckwell-Smith is very charming isn’t she? I am warming to the performances now, including Melissa Bergland, though the women are so much better-defined than the men I’m still finding it hard to enjoy any scene with a bloke in it. Sophie is still an incredibly unlikeable character. Can’t work out what the handsome doctor sees in her. He’s a doctor yes?

·      The scene in the toilet was ridiculously sitcom-y. Humour is generally better when it comes out of believable situations. Then when Bec took the inevitable underwear-less tumble on the catwalk (telegraphed much?), that was soon followed with serious drama with her father’s gambling issues. How tonally all over the place.

·      It’s been a while since I’ve watched Packed to the Rafters, but I don’t recall every episode wrapping up quite this neatly for the majority of characters. Feel free to correct me in the comments.

·      Overall? Enjoying the lead performances, hating the writing, production and the storylines. The one saving grace was the last scene, with Michala Banas’ Tiffany crying in her living room. It gave her a bit of depth and I may have not paid enough attention, but I didn’t really know exactly WHY she was crying. Guilt or desperation? Both? It was a shades-of-grey moment, and there have been zero like it so far. I’ll stick with it for those that would like to read ep-by-ep thoughts and because I’m interested in the ratings and general popularity, but I’m struggling.

WINNERS AND LOSERS EPISODE TWO REVIEW

Spoiler-related thoughts on episode two of Winners and Losers after the jump...

I said in my review of the first episode of Winners and Losers that I had massive qualms over the late-episode plot development where the four friends become lottery winners. The reason for this is that it is incredibly difficult for us to become invested with people who are so rich we will soon have nothing in common with them. Every show I’ve ever seen feature a lottery winner has fallen away soon afterwards (Roseanne comes to mind) because the money that person won came to define them.

What W&L needed to do in its second and third episode was make sure that the problems the characters were having were universal and not solved or created by the money they had come into. Sadly, what we got instead was every single main character using their lottery win to improve their lives – Frances uses her money to advance her business career, Sophie buys an apartment, Bec’s fiancé uses money to set a date, buy a ring and does it all on a boat and Jenny buys herself a car and quits her job. None of this involved actual character development – it was just the use of money to paper over each character’s flaws and also handily erased any conflict the first three episodes had set up. It was a little bit galling towards the end – maybe I’m just bitter but I have flaws and problems I can’t fix through a Lotto win. It's a happy show, for the most part, but Parks and Recreation is one of the happiest shows I've ever seen, but it has more wit, charm and character development in five minutes than I've seen so far here - and the characters on that show aren't rich. If the characters here are going to be wealthy without actually earning it, they have to earn their emotional wealth instead. They don’t even go close here.

The lottery win also had me cringing at the beginning of the episode where Jenny whines constantly about how unfair it is she isn’t getting any money. Maybe I just fall in the category of if you don’t invest, you don’t get the rewards, but it seemed incredibly selfish that she would even think about asking for some. Her persistence proceeded to make me dislike all the characters bar Bec as they tussled over a problem only 0.00001% of us will ever have to deal with, especially on that scale.

Enough of my ranting about the plot – the performances are coming through from the four main girls with Virginia Gay still being the standout and Melanie Vallejo still being the weakest link – mainly thanks to having the weakest character. On the flipside, the periphery characters are getting worse. The one I have the biggest issue with is Frances’ gay best friend Jonathan. Damien Bodie’s line readings aren’t great but worse is the character plays into every single stereotype you would expect. Why does the show’s primary gay character have to play into every single stereotype we would expect? I’m sure every gay man on the planet isn’t like this. It’s like every straight young male character on the show has an aversion to shirts, drinks beer and looks like he stepped out of a GQ cata-…oh.

You may have guessed by now that I’m losing interest in Winners and Losers, so if you’re out there, I would love to hear from people that are enjoying it. What am I missing? Is there more to this show than Rafters meets Sex and the City (meets last season Roseanne). Help?

I actually wanted Michala Banas back.

TV REVIEW - WINNERS AND LOSERS

Winners and Losers is a show for women.

That’s not to say it’s a bad show, or an unworthy show – but it’s just not a guy’s show.

This is Sex and the City (there’s even two blondes, a brunette and a redhead) meets Packed to the Rafters – and it’s Channel Seven’s attempt to double down on the Rafters audience, whisking that incredibly popular program off the air to make way for this – and in the process they’ll be hoping that they get two massive dramedy franchises off the ground.

Of course, they might risk alienating the Rafters audience, a casually diehard fan base that has forged a deep connection over the last four years to this particular family.

My question is simply this - by aiming the show squarely at half the country are they not giving it a chance to get out of the blocks?

The show itself tells the story of four friends – Bec (Zoe Tuckwell-Smith), Frances (Virginia Gay), Sophie (Melanie Vallejo) and Jenny (Melissa Bergland). They are, to unfairly reduce each character to a single adjective, the nice girl, the career woman, the party girl and the homely girl. One by one, they are invited to their 10-year high school reunion by Tiffany Turner (Michala Banas), the girl who tormented them in high school.

But that’s not really what the show is about. Like Rafters, which began life as a show about what happens when adult children move back into their family home and eventually became a show that told stories about family, this is a show that will eventually tell stories about friendship. The most crucial part of any of this is whether the characters themselves are worth hanging out with.

On that score, Winners and Losers had a 50% strike rate with me. Virginia Gay is always a welcome presence on my TV screen, never overplaying her clichéd ‘career woman’ role and always charming even without decent material. Zoe Tuckwell-Smith is equally luminous – playing a nice girl with enough depth behind her eyes to keep her interesting, rather than vacuous.

Melissa Bergland as Jenny and Melanie Vallejo as Sophie fare less well for varying reasons. Both characters are clichéd ‘types’, just like their friends, but neither the actresses nor the writers give me any hope that they’ll add depth and become more likeable as the series progresses. Having said that, this is a character drama – so time must be allowed for the characters to flourish – but having watched the second episode and liking those two characters even less, I’m rapidly losing confidence.

The supporting characters are tracksuit-pants comfortable – familiar enough to never threaten to overtake the driving force of the show in our main four characters. We have the doting but commitment-shy fiancé, the adoring gay best friend, the adoring straight best friend, the comforting, quirky family – and they are all serviceable.  The weakest link is Damien Bodie, who gets one note and one note only to play as the gay best friend. I know there must be some low-key gay men out there somewhere, but you wouldn’t know it from watching TV…

I’ve seen two episodes so far and the pilot was far superior to the episode that follows it. Unfortunately, the pilot ends on a plot development that I have never seen end well for any show I’ve ever watched. I won’t spoil it for you, but I think it is extremely difficult to have a show about characters that go through this particular situation. On top of that, this particular plot development is clumsily inserted and painfully telegraphed.

In the end, though, I will not be the harbinger of doom and glory for this particular show. That will be the female audience, who will either take to this with Sex and the City-like abandon, or shun it like they did the Cashmere Mafia.

In the end, the deciding factor will be how much we want to hang out with these four friends. I don’t, but you might.

All in all, a nil-all draw.

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So weigh in, if you like! Did you like the characters? Do you think this show plays as strongly to gender roles as I do? Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments.