The new and returning shows keep on coming – John Byrne looks at some of the latest arrivals, including the much-hyped medical drama, The Knick . . .
The BBC has had a pretty dismal time of it with sitcoms in recent years. Sure, there's been the runaway success of the critically-mauled Mrs Brown's Boys (a co-production between BBC Scotland, RTÉ and Brendan O'Carroll's BOC-PIX), but the amount of either poor, dull, or downright awful comedies that have hit the small screen in recent years is in stark contrast to the UK broadcaster's comic golden age of the 1960s and '70s.
One show that is both a throwback to those times (in a Terry and June kind-of way), while being quite a law unto itself is Not Going Out (Fridays, BBC One), which has returned for a seventh season. Remarkably, it's one of the worst sitcoms I've ever seen, and yet it's very funny.
I've been a fan since the start, but the missus only picked it up in recent years and every time we watch it, we fall around laughing for a half-hour and then agree: that was rubbish.
The plots in most episodes of the Lee Mack vehicle are almost transparently predictable, the characters are like cardboard cut-outs, and some of the acting (Lee Mack's, to be precise) is below par. But. But, but, but and double-but. It's full of jokes. It's a two-gags-a-minute show and it never lets up.
This season opener was typical. With the long-gone Miranda Hart and the more recently departed Tim Vine slimming down the cast, it's basically a two-hander with Lee Mack and Sally Bretton as the feckless northerner who is crazy about his landlady, Lucy. It can't get more threadbare, although Katy Wix does still get the odd cameo as the hopelessly dumb Daisy.
While out and about, Lucy's bag is stolen and Lee is left feeling useless and emasculated. He decides to attend a boxing gym, while the bag-snatcher turns out to be terrorised by his granny, and everything ends up back to normal in the end. Tired, formulaic, lazy – all those adjectives apply. But it's a barrel of laughs and that's good enough for me.
In stark contrast to Lee Mack's trad gag-fest, House of Lies (Friday, Sky Atlantic) comes deep-fried in a vat of toxic cynicism, which is also mighty fine by me. Starring Don Cheadle as Marty Kaan, a duplicitous management consultant, the show is in its third season, even though it hasn't really delivered on its early promise and did well to even get a second run. It's almost the exact opposite of Not Going Out, and in every possible way.
Starting off with a vigorous run through the main points of last season, season three sees Marty Kaan now running his own management consulting firm. He's got Kristen Bell's Jeannie haunting his dreams, but she's still working at Galweather & Stearn with Doug (Josh Lawson). Elsewhere, Clyde (Ben Schwarz) is now working for Monica (Dawn Oliveri), a nasty piece of work even by this show's horrendous standards. Consultants, eh? Are they technically human?
And while House of Lies is slick, well-paced and looks great, it's got one major flaw as a comedy: it's just not funny. Unlikeable characters can work in a sitcom – Seinfeld proved that effortlessly – so I'm at the stage where I'm now convinced I only watch House of Lies because Kristen Bell's in it and I'm still in mourning over Veronica Mars. But looking great and being crap is a modern curse. I call it The Kardashian Effect.
Between the street poster campaign and the constant plugging on Sky TV, there was almost a sense of relief in our gaff when The Knick (Thursday, Sky Atlantic) finally arrived.
Directed by Steven Soderbergh, the pilot looked like it cost a hell of a lot of money to make. Of course, the insanely-expensive US TV pilot reached its apogee in 2004 with the first episode of Lost, which cost a then record of around $10-14 million. Ten years later it's almost to be expected that millions will go into a pilot and that it will be directed by some big Hollywood name.
But as someone who is more favourable towards being entertained than attracted by how much something cost, to me all that's by the by, really. Is The Knick any good? Well, it is, but it's more a solid centre-half than a scintillating striker.
Clive Owen stars as Dr John Thackray, a brilliant (of course) surgeon at a New York hospital who's also a complete failure as a human being (even more of course). Set at the dawn of the 20th Century, it's intriguing to note how far medicine has moved on over the last 100 years or so. But it's also hardly surprising. Sure, they'd no internet back then so everyone had to read books and learn how to do stuff rather than just google 'How to remove a kidney' and go for it.
It may have been a reaction to the hype, but I found the pilot quite dull. There were the promised gory operations, but I'm a bit old-fashioned in that I like a bit of a story and some acting to go with the blood and guts, otherwise you might as well spend your time looking in a butcher's window rather than watching TV.
Other than Thackray's pretty much all-consuming cocaine habit that has him running out of viable veins, the main item on the pilot's agenda was the arrival of a new deputy surgeon, who happens to be black. Back in 1900 the USA was institutionally racist (baseball had its own race-related leagues up until the mid-century),so Thackray has a major problem with a dark face about the place, as he thinks it would unsettle the patients. But new man Edwards (played by Andre Holland) ain't going nowhere.
For those of you keen on an Irish angle, Dubliner Eve Hewson is in there as a nurse, but there's going to have to be an awful lot more going on around The Knick to keep me tuned-in after this humdrum start.
Finally, Sleepy Hollow (Wednesdays, Universal). The first season was great fun as a quirky procedural featuring an 18th Century soldier back from the dead and partnered with a present day female cop.
All was fine up until the latter stages of the opening run, when it suddenly went serious and quite gothic, and the season two opener literally put me to sleep with its seemingly endless apocalyptic scenarios.
Considering the great John Noble's in there, that's a very worrying development. The one hope is that the guys behind it also turned Fringe from a bad X-Files xerox into a singular sci-fi adventure. I can only hope they know what they're at here. At this stage I certainly don't.
John Byrne
