Basically, I Rule!

So, The Beast Below should have been The Moff’s difficult second album. We appear superficially at any rate to be following a familiar formula. Like “Rose”, “End Of The World” and “The Unquiet Dead” at the start of the RTD era, here we get “Eleventh Hour” as the contemporary companion introduction, “The Beast Below” as the trip in to the far future, and next week’s “Victory of the Daleks” as the trip in to the past, this time set in WWII (and, I think coincidentally, penned by Mark Gatiss too). On the principles that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery coupled with the fact that if ain’t broke don’t fix it, I think it’s a perfectly fine path to tread. However, other than a gentle nod to the penultimate scene in The End of the World,

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Tags: Beast Below, Doctor Who, Karen Gillan, Modern Drama, Sophie Okenedo, Starship UK, Steven-Moffat, The-Doctor

What a Tangled Web We Weave

If ever there was ever a case study of “Dysfunctional familes as portrayed in television drama”, you would have to watch an awful lot of television drama before discovering a cast of characters that were more dysfunctional than those portrayed in True Dare Kiss. This six-part, BBC drama was reasonably watchable throughout… well, I didn’t give up after one episode at any rate and, instead, saw it through to its somewhat disappointing conclusion. The puzzling thing was that I was actually

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Tags: BBC, Esther-Hall, Modern Drama, Paul-McGann, Pooky-Quesnel, True-Dare-Kiss, TV-Today

Show Me The Money

The Other Viewer and I have about 4 episodes to catch up on this one so excuse me if I’m a little behind the times in my analysis but, over on C4/E4, the much-hyped, Brothers and Sisters provides a glossy, American drama/comedy tale (are we allowed to use the term “dramedy”?) of a rather large LA family. The cast is pretty enormous and one of the big challenges proves to be trying to remember all of the character’s names but despite this, or may be thanks to

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Tags: Brothers-and-Sisters, Calista-Flockhart, Channel-4, Dallas, LA, Modern Drama, Sally-Field

Keep Smilin’

The awkwardly titled Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip began its first and only season on More4, its UK debut, just before the Other Viewer and I left for our annual vacation.  When we returned on Monday night, we found our Sky+ planner with a meagre 7% free, so we sat down in our jet-lagged state to enjoy this new import and free up some much needed recording space.  Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip is a drama series about the production of a fictional comedy variety show

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Tags: Aaron-Sorkin, Bradley-Whitford, Matthew-Perry, Modern Drama, More4, Network, Studio-60

No-one Said It Would Be Easy … (Retrospective Catch Up #1)

The Other Viewer and I have recently finished watching Talk To Me, the recent Sunday night drama offering from ITV. Told over four weeks, it was a tale of complex and interweaving love stories that were anything other than straighforward.  I always have a bit of a problem with Max Beesley because every time I’ve seen him (in recent outings here, in Hotel Babylon and in the much-acclaimed Bodies) he always seems to be playing exactly the same character, a velvet-voiced Mancunian with some inner turmoil that never, ever

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Tags: Bodies, Emma-Pierson, Hotel-Babylon, ITV, Kate-Ashfield, Laura-Fraser, Max-Beesley, Modern Drama, Talk-To-Me

Vanished… From The Schedules

Amid no fanfare and barely a trailer to be seen, the UK’s fifth terrestrial channel has begun to show another US import. Vanished appears to be a child of the genre that has brought us 24, Prison Break, or Murder One (if you’re a little older) where the action from the entire series revolves around a single story with lots of different threads and characters to provide added intrigue.  I was actually quite impressed.  There was enough mystery and revelation to keep up viewer

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Tags: 24, Five, Five-US, Modern Drama, Prison-Break, Vanished