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Tuesday, April 10th, 2007 03:13 pm
As I've been recuperating from my latest round of surgery, I've been watching copious amounts of *achem*'d TV. To whit:

The Good - You Could Do Worse Than Watching These

  • Torchwood Series One - wonderfully good Brit sf with a dash of Queer As Folk mixed in. It's nice to see Russell T. Davies, the man behind QaF and Bob and Rose, let loose on the 'after the watershed' crowd after two seasons of doing Doctor Who for the strictly PG crowd. I've always loved Captain Jack Harkness and John Barrowman's take on the character and Gwen Cooper is a fast favourite.


  • Doctor Who, "The Runaway Bride" and Series Three, "Smith and Jones" and "The Shakespeare Code" - all brilliant but I still miss Rose. Nicely, though, so does the Doctor.


  • ITV's Mansfield Park - a bit spotty in places but a generally lovely adaptation that understands that the genuine goodness at the core of Fanny Price is the hub around which the story turns. It also answers the question of what Rose's been up to lately: Billie Piper's quite winning in the role. The potential for Doctor Who/Jane Austen crossover fic is a charming bonus.


  • The Bad - What I Meant By Worse

  • Blood Ties, episodes five and six - I want to like this series because I adored the series of Vicky Nelson novels by Tanya Huff. Alas, the writing on each successive episode seems to get just that little bit worse. The actors are fine enough in their roles and, after a while, I got past the weird of seeing Vancouver stand in for Toronto but the "straights and supernatural" story has been done and done before and far better. Blood Ties suffers in comparison not only to Buffy and Angel but Torchwood, every companion's first look inside the Tardis, Veronica Mars and just about every police procedural on the tube. It has a prefab, Harlequine Romance Presents: The Supernatural Romance of the Month Club feel to it that I'm having a hard time getting past and the 'every week Vicky gets a new supernatural case' plots feel hackneyed - something the novels never did. Not recommended.


  • The Sopranos, whatever the latest episode was called - Tony gets arrested, Tony doesn't get along with his sister, Tony broods, yadda, yadda, yadda. To be honest, I've never warmed up to The Sopranos - some episodes were very, very good but I've often felt that the hype exceeded what was actually shown onscreen and this was one of those episodes. It's been more than a year since the last new episode of The Sopranos and was anyone waiting breathlessly for the show to return with an episode that centers around Tony and his sister spending a tense, passive-agressive weekend together at a lake somewhere in Vermont? Fuggedaboudit.


  • The Ugly - Just Say No

  • The Tudors, episode one - Dummer. Than. Dirt. Excellent performances and generous views of Henry Cavill's naked ass do not make up for the fact that The Tudors is stupid even by the standards of those old Big Three Network American miniseries us kids of the 70s remember from Sundays nights throughout childhood. The writing is sloppy, anachronistic and inaccurate to the extent that The Tudors doesn't merely take dramatic liberty with the historical record but instead makes up details wholesale because apparently the life of Henry VIII was insufficiently dramatic already. Showcase desperately wants The Tudors to be their Rome and the latter's influence is clearly seen the in the liberal amount of raunch splashed throughout the first hour. But where Rome fiddled and reinterpreted the historical events leading to the rise of Augustus Ceasar, the action of the series was nevertheless based on solid historical research and painstaking attention to detail. In comparison, The Tudors settles for stock locations and costumes that belong more to the Elizabethan Renaissance than Henry's reign. I was particularly distracted by the tournament scenes which featured the actors jousting with throats and legs left bare, chests and shoulders virtually unarmoured while riding thoroughbreds - not, generally speaking the way a Renaissance Prince like Henry would dress for a joust. More attention to such details would have made it easier to overlook the clunky writing. Instead The Tudors, for all its pomp and velvet doublets has the look, feel and sound of a bog-standard 'historical' soaper. Recommended only for fans of Henry Cavill's naked ass.
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