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reviews TV

Mid-Flight Engine Maintenance for Dummies

This is not a review. But if it were it would a review of Episode 1 of Series 4 of Being Human[1], “Eve of the War” and you’d be well-advised not to read on if you’ve not seen it.

Consider yourself so advised.

However as I said this is not a review. It’s a musing on how we got from here:

to here:

How, and why the how matters and whether I’ll be watching Episode 2 of Series 4.

Actually let’s first go back to here[2]:

Long long ago, all the way back in 2008 I saw the original pilot of Being Human. It was pretty clear that that’s what it was too – one of those one-offs that they make and show to guage whether it’s worth making a series. It was also clear that it had something. Not just that it was a show with vampires and werewolves when the world was going crazy over Twilight. It had a certain tone.

The original Being Human pilot opens on a shot of a naked man in the woods. He’s George, werewolf just returned to human form, but we don’t know that yet. The voice-over, a smooth, confident, ever so slightly world-weary voice, starts to wax lyrical about the nature of the human condition, how it’s essentially about being alone. It’s at once both modern and dark and has the potential for being creepy. Soon there’ll be jokes but the humour will somehow manage not to undercut the atmosphere. Later still we’ll meet bad guys who give the sense of being disturbing, efficient and most of all, not the same cliches we’ve seen hundreds of times before.[3]

What I’m saying is that it manages to pull off the same trick as Buffy the Vampire Slayer – mix pop culture and comedy and traditional horror tropes and real drama and somehow keep all these apparently contradictory things together. But it’s not Buffy, it has its own distinct tone, and that just makes me like it all the more.

So I wait patiently and sure enough the Beeb commissions a series. The vampire Mitchell is re-cast, as is the ghost Annie. We lose the gorgeous and talented Andrea Riseborough but we gain Aidan Turner also somewhat gorgeous and not lacking in talent. More significantly we lose Adrian Lester as Herrick the local big boss vampire, and gain Jason Watkins. Significant because Lester, who I really like, only gets to play the smooth sophisticated be-suited vampire leader that we have seen so often before.[4] Watkins however gets to play an entirely different character – the same position of leadership in the local night-stalker hierarchy but his cover, his point of contact with the human world, his day job – is as a mid-ranking policeman. He has a sense of charm and danger and purpose but he also feels at home drinking a cup of tea from a styrofoam cup in the hospital cafe – quite a contrast from Lester holding court in what looks like a subterranean wine bar.

As the series progresses there are good episodes and so-so ones. I start to feel that we’re losing some of whatever it was the pilot had. It doesn’t feel quite as unique as it did. One of its strong early themes is monsters trying to live as ‘ordinary’ humans and so it covers a lot of the same ground as Buffy did with the ‘I may be the Slayer but I’m also just a girl’ motif.

Nevertheless it remains a good watch. The thing it’s got, the thing that makes the humour and the horror work and that makes it more than just another supernatural genre show is characters and relationships.

Inevitably plot starts to take the foreground. Once you’ve established the characters and how they interact then they do need to do something. And they need to do supernatural stuff if they’re werewolves, vampires and ghosts otherwise you just have a soap with some odd characters, i.e. you just have a soap. So we not only have to have plot but plot and mythology.

Thus it is that after 3 series and just 22 episodes of a gentle slide from the heights of the pilot we end up here:

The story has reached a crisis point – as it often seems to do around the last episode of series funnily enough – and not only that but a character has been Killed Off. But the other three of our core four remain and we’ve gained an impressive new villain from a new class of super-vampire called the Old Ones. I’m a little nervous about whether this will work but it’s got potential.

That’s about where I was at when I sat down to watch “Eve of the War”.

And it’s… wow. And not really in a good way. Although… no, not really.

Now I know that they were coping with some real-world departures. I knew about Nina. I didn’t know about Wyndham but I get it. I certainly didn’t know about George. I’m guessing when it became apparent who was leaving and where they were now at someone got down on one knee and begged Russell Tovey to do at least one more episode.

What’s really impressive about “Eve” is how hard it works and how much it gets done. It ties up the loose ends from everyone leaving, sets up and executes a big self-sacrificial ending for George, introduces new baddies (new big bad who gets killed off, real new big bad who quips and understands the modern world and who’s clearly going to upload that video of werewolves changing to youtube next week) and new good guys (at least one of whom will become one of the regular gang) and it begins to lay down what looks very like the seasonal arc with lots of stuff about prophecies and a child destined to save humanity and flash-forwards to a future of John Connor style resistance movement against a Big Brother style vampire overlord regime . “Now that I say it all out loud,” I said to M. after watching it (she didn’t), “it sounds like a bit of a mess… which makes me all the more impressed I liked it as much as I did.”

But whereas I was nervous before about the slow move to plot and mythology and away from character and relationship, now I’m actively very worried. Because they had to throw gobs of plot and lashings of mythology[5] to make it work at all. But when you effectively re-cast all the major roles in a show except one in a single episode in series 4 – a point when it should be an established entity – it’s a bit like re-building an engine on your plane in mid-air – it’s hellish impressive it can be done at all but not a little terrifying as to the end result.

Or it would be if I cared more. As it is I will be tuning in next week, but only because I like to see a plane crash as much as the next guy.

But hey it’s got Mark Williams with a tea-towel on his head what more do you need?

[1]I’d say “(UK)” to distinguish it from the US version but since I said “Series” instead of “Season” and “4” instead of “1” or “2” you figured that out didn’t you?
[2]Since it was a pilot there aren’t really any promo stills of this episode floating around the web (or not that I found in 5mins of googling) and it’s very difficult to find a shot with all three characters in frame – which I guess makes sense. So I made this with my rudimentary graphics manipulation skills.
[3]OK with one exception perhaps. I’ll get to that.
[4]Yep he’s the one.
[5]including making up some dodgy new stuff to help the George story along – werewolf blood is poisonous to vampires, the werewolf curse heals what it harms in the transformatio and you can fool the curse with a paper moon.
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reviews TV

A Fairy Tale of TV: Grimm and Once Upon A Time

So two of the new TV shows are based on a similar concept – fairy tale characters in the real world. I’ve watched the first two episodes of both Grimm and Once Upon A Time so here’s my thoughts.

Once Upon A Time

The premise of Once[1] is that Snow White and Prince Charming had a daughter but that during the birth the Wicked Queen cursed the entire kindgom so that they, and all the other characters, were exiled to our world. Not only that but they don’t remember who they are. They now all live in a small town in Maine called StoryBrooke[2] where “time has stopped” meaning that the characters haven’t and don’t age.

Meanwhile they did manage to “save” their new-born daughter by shoving her in a magical wardrobe at the last minute. This sent her through to this world too but since she was on her own and not part of the curse she grew up naturally. (How growing up alone, in a series of foster homes, rather than being in a frankly rather cosy looking little town with the benefit of eternal youth counts as being “saved” looks dubious, never mind).

She herself had a child which she gave up for adoption at the age of 18. Ten years later she’s working as a bail bondsperson and her son turns up on her doorstop. He’s carrying a book of stories and wants her to go back with him to StoryBrooke to break the spell. She plays the hardbitten, cynical city girl but she does at least take him home to his adopted mum who just happens to be the Wicked Queen aka the Mayor of StoryBrooke.

And thus the adventure begins.

I actually did enjoy quite a lot of Once. Jennifer Morrison in particular was good in the Emma Swan (Snow White’s daughter) role. I liked the real world sections most. However they inter-cut these with flashbacks to life in the fairy tale realm. To say these are played straight is an understatement. They are taken so seriously that it undermines any drama in the other sections. They do try to pull off the Buffy trick of playing the weird and wonderful as if it’s perfectly normal for those involved and showing how it feels. However it fails partly because the execution is too on the nose. There’s almost no (deliberate) humour.

Also, by the second episode the main storyline seemed to have developed into a showdown between the Birth Mother and the Adopted Mother (Foretold Breaker-of-Curse and Evil Queen). It suddenly hit me as these two powerful women were squaring off against each other that I was watching Dynasty with fairy tale trimmings and I found it hard to take seriously after that. Certainly not as seriously as they apparently want me to.

Grimm

I watched both Once episodes before watching Grimm and was left with a feeling that whilst intrigued there was something missing. I was also aware that Grimm had received slightly less favourable reviews (going off IMDB and AV Club ratings). So I was pleasantly surprised about 20mins into the pilot how engaged I was.

The set up is much more familiar. Basically the Brother Grimm were actually monster hunters and their stories were written as warnings. They have passed down a legacy of fighting these monsters – who look human most of the time through their descendants and the turn has now come of a young cop in Portland. He’s started seeing weird things when he looks too closely at certain people’s faces and then he gets called out on what looks like an animal attack but becomes clear is a murder. A young woman jogging through the forest in her red hoodie was torn apart by some sort of big bad w… you get the idea.

So in the same way that Angel and a bunch of other shows have done what is basically a police procedural with a supernatural twist, here the twist is fairy tale. But the twist isn’t really that much of a twist so far. Yes our hero has to learn about the various beasties, and he can use his “sight” ability to identify them but so far he’s dispatched them with good old fisticuffs and firearms. And in the first episode the killer happens to be a monster but it’s shot like he is a serial killer of the kind you’d see on Dexter. The fact that he ‘wolfs out’ briefly during the final fight doesn’t add a lot.

I think what I was reacting to in those first minutes of the pilot was how efficiently done the setting up was – following the victim, perky soundtrack, intriguing details, sudden surprise attack. However it soon settled into a familiar groove and whether it actually was clunky or I was just too used to it, it suffered from the fact that I could tick elements off a list. When the “good” wolf character turns up he lightens the mood with some self-aware, self-deprecating humour[3] but I immediately feel like he’s put there to be a source of exposition for our hero to pick up back story. Sure enough in episode two when a new monster appears on the scene, Nick (our lead) pops around to Eddie’s (good wolf) house for some playful banter and an info-dump on the new adversary’s MO.

The nicest thing I can say about Grimm is that it’s very competently done and if you like procedurals this isn’t a bad one.

Which One Wins?

I knew watching these two shows that I really only have time in my life for one of them on an on-going basis, if that, and so part of the process was to decide which was better and which to commit to.

Well despite both being about as good in different ways, the answer is probably neither. I have enough anxiety about all the books, TV shows and movies I haven’t read or watched. I have bookshelves, kindles and hard disks full of the stuff, much of it destined to remain unseen by me. I’m not sure either of these passes the “I just gotta see it” test to make me want to make time for it.

Having said that I’m bailing on Grimm right away (good but too predictable) but I may watch another episode or two of Once to see if it picks up.

[1]I shall be referring to it as “Once” for brevity rather than OUAT which I have seen used elsewhere but is frankly ugly
[2]Yes really!
[3]David Greenwalt, one of the creators of Grimm, worked on both Buffy and Angel and it shows, albeit in a pale reflection kind of way.
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reading TV writing

How to Improve as a Writer

“Just write every day, and read more often than you write”

*sigh*

I haven’t been very good at writing or reading lately. On the writing front I’ve only managed to edit a couple of stories and submit them to the Whittaker. That wasn’t my intent when joining it but at least it keeps me in the competition. If this is a temporary blip then I won’t have forfeit my place, if it isn’t then I’ll withdraw gracefully.

Having set aside The Crow Road I’ve not read any of Rum Doodle for the past couple of weeks. Thing is it’s a short book so I ought to be able to knock it on the head in a couple of hours. Might be an assignment for a rainy Bank Holiday weekend.

It’s not just reading and writing either. I haven’t watched a full length movie in ages. My MythTV box current has 80+ movies waiting to be watched. When I’m looking at the latest upcoming listings I’m choosing movies more often than other types of program to record. True this varies from “I really want to see that” to “might be worth a look” but none of them are getting a look right now.

It’s that whole short attention span thing. Must work on that.

*sigh*

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reviews TV

Dollhouse 1.01 – ‘Ghost’

Dollhouse Dollhouse is the new TV show from Joss Whedon, starring Eliza Dushku. You may not have heard much about it, you certainly haven’t from this blog because I’ve been keeping a low profile. I’ve been deliberately ignoring hype and information for two reasons:

  1. I think I’ll enjoy it more with less pre-conceptions
  2. I think I’ll be less invested in it if it gets cancelled.

However it’s Joss Whedon and it’s the first new TV from him in a long time, virtually the first new anything. So I’d lying if I said I hadn’t been looking forward to it.

Unfortunately it’s not great. I mean it’s not great, not insanely fun and re-defining what you can do with the genre, it’s merely OK. At least that’s true of episode 1 – Ghost. I hope and pray (almost truthfully) that it will get better. All three of Joss’ previous TV series had merely ok eps, Angel and Buffy at least had some not good at all ones. So I’ve been trying to convince myself that it’s ok, that it can have a mediocre start and get better. I’m having a little trouble though because all his previous shows were better than this from ep 1. Even Firefly‘s “The Train Job” which was a re-tooled, and significantly less-good, pilot from the original two-hour Serenity – even that was better.

By now you’re probably thinking I hated it. I didn’t but let me put it this way. If you’d shown me this and I didn’t know it was from Joss I would never have thought he’d been involved. It had none of his humour or flair for dialogue. It pretty much just played it straight all the way through.

Unlike some other fans/reviewers I don’t see the concept – agents or ‘actives’ are programmed with personalities/skills, hired out and then have their minds wiped on return – as inherently a problem. I can see that it could mean there’s no chance for character development, that we’re watching Eliza play a different role each week and so it’s hard to care – but someone as smart as Joss will have thought of that.

I’m more worried that take away the Joss humour and edge and what you’re left with, on the evidence of Ghost, could be a ep of pretty much any lawyer/cop procedural – albeit with a scifi twist.

I’m writing this now, over a week after I watched it because I’m about to watch ep 2, “The Target“. I’ll report back soon as to whether it got any better.

Eliza wakes up

Almost forgot the most important part – 5/10

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reviews

The Mentalist

Imagine Derrin Brown as a detective.

If, like me, you’re enough of a pedant to sigh whenever someone uses “beg the question” when they really mean “prompt the question”, then you may get a slight measure of satisfaction when a word is used properly. So the first thing I noticed about The Mentalist that it’s not about someone with a learning disability. OK, of course if that were really the subject of this show they’d never call it that, but they could have called it “Cop-Psychic”[1] or simply “Jane”, so  I take it as a small indication of the producers sensibility that they got this part right.

The Mentalist is about a John Edward style TV psychic who after a personal tragedy gives it up to become a police officer. As a medium he was a fake, using cold reading techniques to gather enough information to give a convincing performance. He now uses the same techniques to solve crimes. A simple and yet interesting concept.

Being the Smartest Guy in the House

The show reminded me a lot of House, and let’s face it medical shows are just cop shows where the criminal is a disease, the cop is the doctor and the symptoms are the evidence. (In fact I’m pretty sure House used that metaphor explicitly in dialogue early on.) They both feature arrogant central figures who are impossibly brilliant at what they do and know it. At one point Patrick Jane, our psychic-turned-cop, says that he doesn’t like seeing doctors because “they always want to feel like they’re the smartest guy in the room, when obviously that’s me.” They even both share a disdain for belief. When one of his colleagues states she has a cousin who is a real psychic, Jane says “he’s either deluded or dishonest or both.”

I think that where they differ is that Gregory House is a startlingly misanthropic figure where Patrick Jane is merely annoying. Also, it’s really unfair on the evidence of one show but I think Hugh Laurie beats Simon Baker in both acting ability and screen presence generally.

Suspect Device

Anyway, what separates this show from a thousand other cop/medic/lawyer shows is its gimmick, its device, so how well does it use it? Quite well I think. One potential problem is that whilst it’s enough for a TV psychic to get a few details in the right ballpark to let the person feel like they’re having a real contact with the “other side”, the police ultimately have to prove what they think they know. However they tackle this head-on and within the first five minutes one character has shot another on the basis of Jane’s, let’s face it, educated guesses. Later in the episode he uses his techniques to get the murderer to incriminate himself, a pattern I suspect we’ll see again.

It’s also interesting that after the initial scene where we’re shown what little pieces of information he uses to construct his guesses, that after that we only hear his (always correct) insights. And of course they use his talents for comic relief, allowing him to embarrass his colleagues.

I do foresee a trap here, that the writers might just get lazy and have him know things he couldn’t possibly know, simply by establishing a pattern of credibility with the audience. However I hope they don’t do that, or not straight away. The fresh thing this show has to offer is its device and so they should keep it to the fore. Like Derrin Brown, show us the trick and then, at least some of the time, show us how it’s done. The formula works because it includes us the audience in on the “clever” side of the transaction, and so we’re flattered and will love you for it.

A good example is near the end when the criminal says,

“I knew it might be a trick but I had to be sure.”

“Yes. That’s how the trick works.”

And The Trick Worked

I definitely enjoyed The Mentalist and if you enjoy police procedurals then this looks like it will be a good one. I haven’t spoken much about the fact that this is a pilot and therefore needs to set up the concept, establish the characters and introduce an on-going story element. I haven’t done that because it does all that well enough for it not to be distracting.

I have too much TV where I need to keep up week to week so that I’m not sure if I’ll become a regular Mentalist viewer, but it’s enough of a new twist on the genre, with enough intelligence in the writing to be highly enjoyable when I do catch the odd episode.  8/10

[1]Yeah ok, that’s a terrible title but you get my point.

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reviews

Merlin (or “Camelot the Early Years”)

Ok so that’s not original but clearly, the BBC’s new flashy drama Merlin is a Smallville for medieval times. You’ve got the younger versions of the main characters, not necessarily settled in their hero/villain roles (Arthur’s a jerk, Morgana seems ok), nor in their eventual romantic configurations yet (Arthur fancies Morgana, as does our young wizard, though there’s some Guenivere-Merlin banter that must be going somewhere). The formula works (for Smallville, time will tell for Merlin) because you get to play with people’s expectations whilst having a sense of familiarity. Plus you can do all those oh-so-funny wink at the audience jokes such as Guenivere’s “Who on earth would want to marry a king?” line.

I enjoyed it but it felt padded. They really overdid the setting up the fact that a) Merlin and Arthur not getting along and b) Merlin can move things with his mind. Maybe the budget was overstretched by the CGI dragon (not that great to be honest) but some of the later seemed rather minor and once the point had been made (e.g. by saving the falling Gauis) I’d’ve cut the others.

I also can’t quite understand why you’d cast Richard Wilson as the mentor when you’ve got frikkin’ Giles on the payroll! Failing that (and allowing for the fact that possibly Tony Head wanted to do something different) you’ve got John Hurt, although he may have just signed up for the voice work knowing that it would be a lesser commitment.

Having said that I did enjoy enough of it to watch again. Eve Myles did a great job in making the witch creepy and threatening – enough for a saturday teatime audience anyhow – and I enjoyed the ‘spell-singing’ at the end.

Overall – a bit of nonsense with enough about it to keep me watching, for now – 6/10

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reviews

Fringe

I watched the two hour pilot to the new JJ Abrams produced show, Fringe, the other day so here’s a quick review.

I told M that this was coming up and asked her if she was interested (she’s a huge Lost fan). In trying to describe the show based on the brief bit of blurb I’d read, I think I made it sound like a version of Heroes. When I tried to correct that impression after reading more, I told her it sounded a bit like X-Files (I knew she’d liked X-Files when it was on). She still wasn’t feeling any excitement about it. In the end she explained:

“Looking back I think a lot of the appeal of X-Files was David Duchovny.”

which is fair enough. But now having watched the first installment of Fringe,

  • I can see that Fringe is not just “a bit like” X-Files, it really really wants to be X-Files. Fringe wants to marry X-Files and have its cute little alien babies. More importantly,
  • How many people out there are going to watch for the pleasant day-dream inspiring delights of Pacey from Dawson’s Creek? Ok, ok – unfair I know. I’m sure Joshua Jackson has his fans but, and I could be way off but it never struck me that they were the kind to get drawn in to a pseudo-science pseudo-scifi thrillery thing with a, no doubt, soon to be very convoluted back story.

Now all this sounds very negative which is a shame because I don’t think it’s a bad show, I just can’t quite see it finding a huge audience, but what do I know? Anyway I’ve not really started reviewing yet, so let’s do that.

Fringe is about a CIA-FBI liason officer who gets involved in the case of a flight full of people whose flesh literally melted off their bodies. In the course of investigating this her partner (and lover) gets blasted with a dose of the chemical agents responsible, thus setting up a “solve it in 24hours before he dies” scenario. In order to reverse the effects she needs the assistance of a crazy chemist locked away in a mental institution. To get to him she needs his estranged genius drifter of a son i.e. the aforementioned Pacey/Jackson.

Thus the roles are all neatly defined. She needs to solve the crime to find the plane-poisoner and extract vital information for the cure. Mad old Dad assists with forensics and the final cure. Pacey can speak crazy/science to M.o.D and therefore acts as both handler to him and sidekick to her. In fact his role is a little thinly defined right now. There wasn’t much he did – chasing someone down an alley, a bit of particularly harsh interrogation – that someone else couldn’t have down. In a way he played the traditional female sidekick role, seemingly involved but with little to actually do. However since I don’t believe a golden dawn of radical feminism has yet arisen on Hollywood I suspect he’ll have more of a job to do in upcoming episodes.

But back to the neatness. This was a perfectly serviceable piece of television but I think the thing that stopped it being more than that was that I was too aware of the pieces of series setup slotting neatly and smoothly into place. The core team and relationships. The mysterious billionaire who seems destined to be the ongoing bad guy and his apparently benevolent organisation. The hints at what kinds of things we’ll be exploring in future. Mention of shadowy agency-within-an-agency machinations and some vague idea of a connecting threat called “The Pattern” (which I fear will end up as a holdall container for whatever mystery-of-the-week they want to write[1]) It was all efficiently and relatively unobtrusively done. But I was still aware of it. Maybe that’s just a problem with pilots, or a problem with viewers like me who’ve seen too many pilots.

Overall, ok but nothing here to tempt me into regular viewership – 6/10.

[1]As a Buffy fan I can hardly complain. What else is the Hellmouth but a built-in excuse for so many monster stories in one place?

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reviews

Studio 60 – a guilty pleasure that shouldn’t be

Three posts in one night is probably too much (especially if I end up not posting for a month or something) but I thought of this earlier and anyway I’d like to have something a visitor to the blog could relate to.

I’ve just watched an episode of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip – which is what Aaron Sorkin did next after The West Wing. It’s a TV show about a TV show (a Saturday Night Live type sketch show) and it never really found enough of an audience to stay on the air. They let it play out the season meaning that if you watch the whole thing you get a sense of closure but clearly in many ways it was a flop.

I love it. And the title of this post is kind of unfair since there’s a lot there to love. It’s as well written as West Wing, more consistently probably in my view. And I think the reasons it never got the ratings probably aren’t what I would think of as its weaknesses. So why am I calling it a ‘guilty pleasure’ – a term usually used when something’s not great but you like it anyway?

Studio 60 is like The West Wing, very like The West Wing. So much so that it could be the West Wing does a TV show. Obviously the writing has the same tone and humour, given its from the same writer, but its not just that. It tackles many of the same themes – there’s a lot of politics in there, ostensibly because political sketches on the show with the show, but mostly, you feel, because that’s what Sorkin likes to write about. One of the stars is Bradley Whitford, Josh from TWW. It often has a slightly preachy, pompous tone. The episode I watched tonight had one the comedians take his parents on a tour of the theatre they use (the eponymous Studio 60) and tell them the history of place, and the history of broadcast TV in a very tour-guide kind of way. In a word, it’s often a bit too worthy. Which would be fine, except, an overly earnest tone, a sense of “this is real serious and important stuff” is understandable and forgiveable in a show about the government of the USA. That tone in a show about TV comedy is a little over the top.

Not only that but they sometimes re-use ideas and even lines from TWW. In an earlier ep, Whitford’s Danny Trip, Exec Producer, tells a roomful of writers that “This isn’t TV camp, it’s not important to us that everyone gets to play.” Replace “TV camp” with “government camp” and you have a line from a WW ep. Also, in tonight’s show, there’s a rather sentimental sub-plot about a mysterious old man who’s caught trying to steal a photo. Clearly not really a threat, they investigate and find out that he was a blacklisted writer from the 50s who got a single sketch on the show before his career was ended. The episode ends with Matt (current head writer) and Danny magnanimously not only offering him the photo, but allowing him to sit in the writers’ room and tell stories of the past.

Whilst not identical, this bears remarkable similarities to the WW episode where an old French lady “freaks out” on a tour when passing a particular painting in the Whitehouse. Turns out it was painted by her father, stolen by the Nazis and ended up as a gift to the US President. That show ends with the painting being made a gift to the old lady. It may not be precisely the same, but it hits all the same notes.

Add to this that there are a large number of references that parallel stuff in Sorkin’s own life. From the head writer who writes the show virtually single-handed (something he did in the WW’s early years), the relationship Matt has with the conservative evangelical Christian Harriet (again it mirrors a real relationship), drug problems and of course, one assumes, all the politics of the day to day dealings between the TV network and the show.

So, to put all this together, it is incredibly self-indulgent. It’s like he’s sharing his favourite in-jokes and re-writing his favourite parts of the West Wing. So why, after all this, do I still love it?

(Oh and I nearly forgot to mention that the show within the show, is awful. Not funny. It’s just not Sorkin’s type of humour at all, and that really shows.)

I love it because it’s warm-hearted. Everyone, upto and including the scary big network boss and bilionaire tycoon owner, is ultimately a good and decent person. Whilst this should be annoying it’s actually quite pleasant. You enjoy being with these people because you root for them.

I love it because the humour on the show itself (not the show within the show) is great. It’s all that great dialogue that Sorkin does so well.

I love it because the comedic chemistry between Whitford and Matthew Perry, who plays Matt, is just superb. They just work really well together, you totally believe this is a creative partnership responsible for some smart, clever movies and TV shows.

I love it because of Matthew Perry’s acting. I could describe how good it is in a number of ways. The most concise would be that I defy anyone to watch him for more than a couple of minutes and still remember who Chandler Bing is. And yet Matt Albie is just as perfectly formed a comic character.

I love it because the stuff that works, really works and it all gels together into this warm, funny, sometimes slighty too serious, sometimes slightly too sentimental, clever show.