Yeah, yeah, so I rag on The Walking Dead a lot. Get over it, fangirl/boy. This is it: my Magnum Opus, the article I’ve had brewing in me (and no doubt written over the course of many drunken rants round at my friend Ellie’s house, sorry Ellie) since halfway through season four of this godforsaken show: why, and how, The Walking Dead became one of the biggest and most disappointing shows on television.
Yes, this question, the very same one I address Twitter after every episode of everyone’s favourite zombie-exterminating TV show, carries a particular relevance after the last episode of season six. And, for no particular reason other than the fact I was reason a hilarious article about what NBC originally wanted The Walking Dead to be, I think it’s time to talk about the cliffhanger that I liked and everyone else wanted to feed to the Governor’s zombie daughter- who Negan killed at the end of season six.
Critics are arseholes. I know, because I am one. We’re impossible to please, even when you think you’ve come up with something infallible. Christ, there’s even been a backlash against the nigh-on flawless Stranger Things. If that isn’t untouchable, we might as well all give up now. Just cancel TV and save us all the trouble.
After season one, I was totally enamoured with UnREAL. It was an odd little show, a meta-drama set behind-the-scenes of a reality dating so that certainly was not The Bachelor, no siree bob, not a chance in hell, and it just…worked. Packed with feminist commentary, phenomenal performances (Constance Zimmer, deservedly, got nominated for her Emmy earlier this year), and some real attempts to depict the racism, sexism, and all-round awfulness that goes into making shows like Not the Bachelor, it was just a solid, engrossing ten episodes of TV. Yeah, it had some missteps, but what first season doesn’t? Their eagerly-awaited second season would surely solidify their good points and do away with their excess baggage.
As I foolishly do once every few months or so, this week, I dug out some old episodes of Scrubs. Now, to be clear, this review will be dealing with “golden age” Scrubs, ie, seasons one through seven, because I either haven’t seen the other two seasons or have actually forgotten everything about them, I legitimately don’t recall.
Last week, I wrote yet another bitter review about the new horror show Outcast, and how it never really sold the “horror” side of itself. And that’s not to mention the scores of other horror shows that have dissapointed me with their non-existent “horror” in the last few years- the latest season of Sleepy Hollow, The Walking Dead, Scream Queens. Bah, humbug. A few notable exceptions aside, horror just wasn’t living up to my lofty standards, which is no-one’s problem but mine, but still. Huff. Meh. Blergh. And then, swinging out of left field, comes Netflix’ s newest addition to the horror canon, Stranger Things, to stab me through the neck and yell “SHUT UP LOU NO-ONE CARES WHAT YOU THINK!” into my gurgling visage. And I couldn’t be happier!
As a hundred reviewers have already noted by now, Stranger Things is a salute to all things seventies/eighties and horror related- posters for Evil Dead and Jaws dangle on the walls on the main characters, while The Thing crops up on TV screens. The soundtrack might as well be someone sitting with their knee in your chest yelling “HAVE YOU HEARD OF THIS BAND CALLED THE GOBLINS?”. The direction evokes John Carpenter, Dario Argento, and Wes Craven by turns- and all that is excellent, turning the show into a must-watch for fans of that era of horror. The Duffer Brothers, who created Stranger Things, also worked on Wayward Pines, which, now that their magnum opus has been released, looks like a practice run for this (much better) show.
And, of course, the technical aspects are all outstanding- Winona Ryder headlines, and her performance as the brittle but compassionate Joyce is fantastic. Fellow adult David Harbour steals the show right out from under her nose with a devastatingly brilliant and understated performance as the cop who’s got more investment in this case than he perhaps should have. But this is inherently, a show about kids- and the four child actors the show revolves around are phenomenal. Finding one decent child actor is one thing, but four, plus a handful of teenagers I don’t want to throw into an industrial wood burner? Miraculous. The writing has, if you’ll excuse the oxymoron, a fuckton of nuance, and the direction is consistently solid. Even the title sequence is bloody excellent. But that’s been well covered already, and I want to talk about something else.
Winona Ryder, at one point, has a cluster of fairy lights as a screen partner and still KILLS IT
Stranger Things is, for my money, simply the best horror TV show I’ve seen in years. And it didn’t strike me how much the horror shows I do watch hadn’t been living up to the standard of pure horror like this. Most horror shows (like Supernatural and The Walking Dead) now run for years instead of telling one story, and that requires them to pull in new themes, arcs, characters, new “The monster was humanity ALL ALONG” cop-out endings. I don’t blame them for this- those shows have long seasons and giant arcs to contend with, and that’s their bag and they do it with a modicum of success. But God, did I miss having a show that just set out to tell a straight horror story, a little self-contained tale that doesn’t sprawl out over years and years and seasons and seasons.
I don’t want to give too much away about Stranger Things, because the glory of the show is watching this (perfectly paced, might I add) story unfold over the course of eight near-perfect episodes. It does touch on some themes, like loss and parenthood, but it is, at it’s heart, driven by the horror. It’s fucking scary in places, forcing you to squint into shadows and examine the background of every shot to see what’s waiting for you in the shadows. Mixing human horror with the supernatural, and filtering this through the eyes of the four leading children, it’s a fucking chilling piece of TV, one that isn’t trying to do anything more than tell a damn good scary story. They have left it vaguely open for a sequel series, but what I want to see is Stranger Things turning into an anthology banner series- because I want to see what other brilliantly unsettling stuff The Duffer Brothers have under their hats.
And for me, right now, that’s more than enough. I honestly cannot recommend Stranger Things enough, especially if you’re a fan of horror- and if you’re not used to scary TV, I suggest putting away a few extra quid for the energy bill this month because you’ll be sleeping with the (hopefully not flickering) lights on for a week.
I’ve never really written about Sherlock on this blog before, which is kind of odd when you consider the fact that it’s a) a proper pop-cultural pantheon that has earned it’s place amongst the most critically revered and passionately fandomed shows of the decade and b) co-created by the man behind one of my favourite shows of all time, Steven Moffat. Truth be told, Sherlock has never really interested me on the same rabid level that other shows have-I appreciate it as a bit of clever fun (and the Hound of the Baskervilles adaptation is something extremely special) but it generally leaves me a little bit cold for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on. Maybe it’s the ostentatious style, maybe it’s the general air of smugness that wafts off it in waves, maybe it’s the fact that it has made Benedict Cumberbatch an inescapable presence even to those who are pretty ambivalent towards him (guilty as charged). But I get it; it’s slick, clever, and mind-bending, with a few great performances sprinkled in there to boot. If you love it, more power to you, even if I can’t quite get on board with that bandwagon myself.
Nonetheless, I finally caught up on the 2013 series a few weeks ago, and it made sense to tune in to the period-piece festive special The Abominable Bride because-well, because it seemed like a rollicking bunch of historical festive fun, which is something I can never in good conscience turn down. And hey, Steven Moffat pulled off one decent Christmas special– why not another?
And hey, the show did entertain me- quite a bit, in fact- for the first hour or so. Dumping us back in Victorian England as a period-appropriate Sherlock and Watson try to figure out how a woman who apparently shot herself in the head has returned to commit a series of bloody murders, the show had a lot of fun recalibrating it’s modern-day cast to the 19th-century setting. The story had a good ghostly edge that fit well with the Christmas broadcast (look, ghost stories and Christmas just make sense to me, alright?), and it even manage to cart out Blackadder stalwart Tim McInnery for a guest spot. This was good! I liked this! Thumbs up and a round on me for everyone involved.
But then the story took a…turn. We jumped back to the present day, and the show quickly revealed that everything in the preceding hour had been happening inside Sherlock’s head as he tried to figure out how Moriarty had returned. And, in the final half-hour of the show, Sherlock disappeared firmly up it’s own mind palace.
Look, I get that a lot of the appeal of this show is that it’s fiendishly clever, dancing between reality and the inside of Sherlock’s head even in the straightest of episodes. But here, every scene seemed to run into the next one like so much wet paint; we were in the modern day, where Sherlock was certain that if he could solve the case of the ghostly killer he could figure out what happened to Moriarty, but no! That was him tripping on drugs! And now we’re acting out the last scene of the Reichenbach Falls- not the show’s adaptation of it, you see, but the original Conan Doyle story! And now we’re back in Victorian London solving the original mystery! Andrew Scott’s in a dress! Back to modern day! DO YOU SEE HOW CLEVER THEY’RE BEING? DO YOU SEE IT? DO YOU?! The episode seemed so desperate to please hardcore fans that I swore at some points I could hear it trying to claw it’s way out from behind the screen to fellate the audience.
And, before I carry on, let’s take a small moment to consider the resolution to the Victorian plot. I’ve touched on women and feminism in Sherlock before, but the events of the Abominable Bride really take the cake. The episode peppered in a few references to the women’s suffrage movement- which wasn’t exactly around then under those terms, but alright- one of which included a character announcing “VOTES FOR WOMEN” with literally no further context or apparent relevancy to the plot. And it was with this level of sledgehammer subtlety that they dealt with the rest of that story. Sherlock tracks the perpetrators of the murders down to a church, where they are revealed to be feminists fighting for women to be treated with more grace by their male counterparts. And how are they doing this, you might ask? Maybe through the letter-writing campaigns and the peaceful marches that the Suffragists employed (much later in the timeline, but hey, historical accuracy clearly isn’t an issue here)? Or through the ink-bombing of letterboxes and hunger strikes of the Suffragettes? Of COURSE not- they’ve created a murder cult that slaughters men who mistreat their partners. Also, they kick around churches wearing purple KKK hoods.
No, really.
And then Sherlock does a speech about how one half of the population is at war with the other (even though many men supported women’s suffrage and fought alongside their female counterparts) and that this is a war that men must lose (which both puts the onus for gender equality on men instead of the women who are apparently fighting it, and frames women’s suffrage as something that removes power from men as opposed to giving it to women). Forgive me if I’m a little annoyed, but as someone who’s studied gender history for a long time now, framing the early Suffrage movement as a bunch of spurned women who commit murder every time a man displeases them fucking infuriates me. Depicting the vital early stages of Britain’s feminist movement as a man-murdering cult, while not even bothering to name-check any of the brilliant historical figures who helped define it (Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Astell, et al) is some bullshit. I’ll admit that this did colour my attitude towards the episode in a big way, but even without it, the third act of The Abominable Bride was a fanservicey, confused mess.
Basically, for me, a casual fan with no deep emotional investment in the series, this episode pretty much severed ties to the last vestiges of goodwill I had towards it. From an overly clever-clever third act that seemed to rely much more of fanservice that actually moving the plot along or telling us things we didn’t know, to a resolution to a plot that popped early feminists in KKK hoods, the whole thing felt like it was striving for something bigger and better than anything it could really achieve. Tuning back in to the series, I was hoping for either a jump forward in the Morairty plot of the previous season or simply an entertaining romp through Victorian London. What I got was an ugly mish-mash of both, an episode that seemed to give a half-hearted hand-wave to both plots without properly throwing itself into either. What resulted was a flabby, self-indulgent mess whose plot could have been summed up in a webisode,
Ah, well, at least I get another year off before I have to deal with it again.
So, I’ve been interested in How to Get Away with Murder ever since Viola Davis scooped an Emmy for her performance in it earlier this year. I’m not particularly into police/crime procedural shows, so I wasn’t exactly coming to the show from a place of wild enthusiasm or any beyond “huh, this is on Netflix and I need something to watch while I clean the house”. So, you know, it didn’t have a high level of expectation to live up to. Especially with that knowing, on-the-nose title; how would they, um, get away with that? And then I watched it, and it’s pretty much the best thing I’ve seen all year.
Seriously, trying to write a coherent review of HTGAWM has been nigh-on impossible because I just want to word-vomit every single thing I adore about this show. There’s the fiendishly compelling season-long arcs, the brilliant characterisation, the insane performances, the big issues it tackles, the smart way it takes them on. So, bear with me here while I try and put into words exactly why you should be Clockwork-Oranging yourself down in front of this show right now.
So, How to Get Away with Murder revolves around criminal defence attorney and law professor Annalise Keating (Davis), who chooses five students from her course every year to work on her cases. These five students- Wes, an ambitious nice guy with a secretive past, Connor, a callous, sharp-tongued narcissistic, Asher, a privileged upper-class douchebro, Laurel, an insecure idealist, and Michaela, who aspires to be like Annalise- end up embroiled in a murder case whose impact on their lives in further-reaching than any of them could have imagined. Yeah, I know it sounds like you’ve seen it all before, but trust me, you haven’t.
ATTENTION GILMORE GIRLS FANS: The woman second from left is Paris, and now she’s all grown up and insanely excellent!
First off, I’d say that the main strength of this show lies in it’s characterisation. All the characters in this show have fully-formed arcs of their own, developing them beyond the tropey nature of their origin, and considering that the main cast numbers eight in total (all of the above, plus two employees at Annalise’s law office, plus a recurring character in the form of Annalise’s boyfriend whose body is very possibly literally hewn from oak), that’s pretty impressive. Half of what makes the show so damn compelling is the way they break these characters down into something fresh and different, exploiting their pasts and the occasionally ruthless nature of their work in order to create fully-formed people to populate the show.
And of course, I can’t ignore the performances. There’s not one dud in this show, and everyone steps up to the plate when they’re given something chunky to get their teeth into. This, in part, has to be down to the fact that you have to bring your a-game when you’re acting opposite Viola Davis, who, within forty seconds of walking on-screen in the first episode, turns into the most compelling woman on TV at the moment (save for maybe Jessica Jones, but that’s another review for another time). The question isn’t how she got the Emmy after only one season, but rather how anyone else can expect to win it as long as she’s inhabiting this character. The show throws a lot of potentially tricky or controversial subjects at Davis-such as race, gender, class and abuse- and she knocks them all out of the park without seeming like she’s even trying. She’s a flawed, sometimes outrightly cruel, character, and I would watch a thousand seasons of her swaggering about a court shouting at people before I got bored of it (and even then, I’d still be admiring her wardrobe).
While the show doesn’t necessarily push the boat out in terms of plotting-a season-long arc, with flashforwards to a murder committed at the half-way point of the season, dotted with case-of-the-week dramas- I can’t fault the writing, either. It’s sharp, witty, and on the ball, taking on a bunch of hotly-debated topics (like rape culture, terrorism, and sexual abuse) and asking sometimes uncomfortable questions about how they fit into the world of the show. The whole thing has a kind of trashy feel to it, while making sure that the plot is never anything less than compelling, smart and decadently entertaining.
Basically, what I’m saying is watch it. Even if, like me, this show doesn’t look like it’s your thing, give it a go, because it’s fucking excellent. Smart, boundary-pushing television doesn’t exactly come around all that often, and if you love TV as much as I do, it’s almost intoxicatingly exciting when it does. I’ll hear no excuses: the first season is on Netflix, and we’re currently half-way through the (nigh-on perfect) second, so you’ve got plenty of time to catch up before it comes back in February. Which is, ironically, a murderous amount of time to make us wait.
So, I have a somewhat scandalous admission to make: I’m not that huge a fan of the Evil Dead series. I know, I know, I can hear you yelling at me now- “I thought you said you were a fan of horror!”. And I am. It’s just that, for whatever reason, Sam Raimi’s seminal video nasties never quite smashed their way to the same level of obsession that, say Friday the 13th or Nightmare on Elm Street or, um, Final Destination (look, I’m SORRY) did in my head. Which is not to say that I don’t get it- I do. They’re great, and Raimi revolutionised indie horror with his innovative gore and balls-to-the-wall sense of fun. But I was coming to the reboot of this series without too much preciousness about the original movies on my mind, is what I’m saying.
That all said, I was pretty pumped for the premiere of Ash vs Evil Dead this Halloween (which I spent dressed as a genderswapped Beetlejuice or Wednesday Addams, depending what day you found me, so everyone else needs to up their constume game). After the catastrophic TV “re-imagining” of classic horrors like Rosemary’s Baby, this one seemed to have something that set it apart from the pack-namely, the involvement of the original directors and and the always-welcome presence of Bruce Campbell.
And I mean always welcome in the most literal sense possible. If he was to walk through my front door right now, I’d be like “hey, Bruce, let me pour you a glass of brandy and we can talk about setting the wedding date”. Did I mention that I love Bruce Campbell? Because I LOVE Bruce Campbell. He’s the greatest bad actor there ever was, and he’s probably the most iconic part of the original Evil Dead franchise, mainly because he looks like he’s having more fun than perhaps anyone else has ever had in front of camera (except me in my sex tape, but that’s another matter).
I’ll be honest, I’d probably let him finger me even with the chainsaw hand. Is that awful? That’s awful, I’m sorry.
And that’s the one thing that stands out above all else in the season premiere of Ash vs Evil Dead- just how much FUN everyone seems to be having. Utilising as many of the same visual tricks as the original movies (as well as keeping the Deadites looking the same as they always did, thankfully), there’s no part of this episode that didn’t make me grin. From the superbly executed horror sequences (the one in the haunted house that was lit by a spinning torch was legitimately inspired, and really worked) to the dumb humour to the batshit crazy action scenes, this show knows how to balance it’s horror and comedy perfectly. I wrote about Scream Queens a few weeks back, a show which pretty much failed to strike a comfortable balance between the two, and I was struggling to think of a TV show that actually did- until this came along.
COOL
I guess what I like most about it is that it isn’t attempting to come up with gritty new takes on old-school horror. It’s just having fun bringing the goofy, funny, scary, super-violent feel of the original movies to the small screen, with a bit more space to develop characters and plot. While we’ve certainly seen some great horror over the last few years- from Cabin in the Woods to The Babadook to The Visit– it’s been a long time since something with such an obvious B-movie quality has broken through to the mainstream. I’ve missed seeing someone having genuine outright fun with the genre, and in that respect alone, Ash vs Evil Dead has me on board as a viewer, just to see where they can take this next.
Well, that’s it: they’ve fucked it. They’ve gone too far. There’s only one way to describe the premier of American Horror Story’s fifth season, Hotel, and that’s indefensible.
The show had always threatened jumping the shark, but here they’ve less jumped it than nonconsensually sodomized it in a seedy motel room. Series one and two balanced so carefully outrageous camp (Jessica Lange feeding the corpse of her husband to her dogs, a possesed Lily Rabe delightedly choosing a cane with which to beat her asylum-bound charges) and genuine emotional stakes (ugh, the “Never trust a drunk” scene between Jessica Lange and Francis Conroy in season two, basically), but series three and four seemed to throw any kind of semblance of over-arching plot to the wind in favour of…witches? The sentient head of Kathy Bates? Denis O’Hare getting Freaks-ed?
Suddenly, they weren’t dedicated to creating interesting, thematically coherent stories with plenty of dark horror elements; they wanted to make hyper-camp, unbelievably bad taste exploitation flicks that yeah, did occasionally hit some televisual sweet spot and remain kind of entertaining. Every season, there seemed less and less that was compelling about the show. Sure, there were a few great performances, some good scenes, some great lines, but none of it hung together as anything other than a series of halfway connected vignettes. With a big overhaul in place for their fifth year, I was hoping that they might reclaim some of the decent stuff that had made the first two seasons so compelling. But with the first episode of season five, Checking In, out this week, I think I may have lost the last vestiges of goodwill I had towards American Horror Story.
I recall when Denis O’Hare got actual acting to do!
Right, let’s get this out of the way. Here are the things I liked about that episode: Kathy Bates’ acting, Sarah Paulson having a legitimately sassy role, the tantalising promise of Evan Peters. There. That’s it. I’m done. Wes Bentley’s performance as the tragic cop who winds up living at the hotel is good, but everything about his crime-scene investigations comes off as cut-price Hannibal (mainly because he reminds me of Chilton a little bit) with elaborate and violent mutliations that serve no actual plot purpose beyond having a guy’s penis glued inside a dead girl’s vagina. And hey, that starts us off on my first major gripe with this episode: the outrageous amounts of sexualised violence.
Look, I have a pretty strong stomach for almost any kind of violence. I watched The Human Centipede 3, for Christ’s sakes. I can appreciate violence when it’s either done well or adds something to the plot; outside of that, I’m not really going to enjoy it, and it’s going to take a lot of convincing for me to believe that it’s necessary. And this episode…yeesh. There were hot blonde teenagers being force-fed in their skivvies, there was a shockingly unsexy soft-porn sequence where a vampiric Lady Gaga (more on her later) and her partner hump then murder an unsuspecting young couple, and there was, of course, the scene where a dope fiend got violently sodomized with a spike.
Honestly, my rule for these kinds of things is that if Se7en wouldn’t do it, there was probably a good fucking reason for that. And that reason is that showing, in pretty graphic detail, a man getting raped with a giant spike only enlightens the viewers as to what a man getting sodomized with a fucking spike looks like. The scene genuinely upset me, and also made me really angry, because Ryan Murphy and his team have been throwing around sexualised violence a lot in their shows recently, often to no real conclusion. This was just an extension of that in the worst possibe way: we learnt nothing, we were told nothing, and it all seemed like an excuse to show us something “shocking” and “edgy”, trivialising the pretty grotesque act. Do you remember the rape scene in series two, where the camera slowly pans in on Sarah Paulson’s traumatised face, and how impactful that was? Compare it to this scene: vile, exploitative, and simply there to feed the dumb gross-out violence of a certain subset of horror fans (note: this is the second time someone has been bummed to death in this show. Just so we’re keeping count). I hated it. I HATED it.
But let’s focus on some other elements of the show. Firstly, Lady Gaga: if there’s one thing I could say for certain that Lady Gaga has, it’s presence, but for some reason it just didn’t translate on screen. Her line readings veered between terrible and just bearable, but she was a nothing of a character beyond the outrageous outfits and dirty, kinky sex, neither of which she really carries off. Her partner, Matt Bomer, is playing a nineties boyband star- not literally, but take a look at these photos and tell me I’m wrong:
-and he was fine, but in a completely forgettable way. The two of them had a kind of Spike-and-Drusilla vibe, if Joss Whedon had had the bad sense to show the audience the two of them constantly boning. It’s their relationship that makes it interesting, not the constant soft-porny shots of Matt Bomer’s ass. AHS has a long and proud history of showing copious amounts of man-ass, but this was too much, even for me (have you seeeeeen the pictures of Finn Wittrock this season though? Can’t handle that hotness, because at least 30% of my attraction towards this show is the unbelievably gorgeous men).
UGH BRB DYING
More than anything, the show felt like a series of disconnected vignettes. If you’ve had the misfortune of watching Kanye West’s godawful Runaway, then that’s the best point of reference I can find for Checking In. It was dumb, all over the place, with apparently no real urge to go anywhere or do anything or explain any of the reasoning behind it’s often tasteless choices. American Horror Story has always been trashy TV, but this went beyond that and into the realm of exploitation for the sake of exploitation. The whole thing reads like Gaga’s own Bad Romance video: occasionally cool, wierdly headwormy, but ultimately signifying nothing.
The Cutprice Guignol 