TV Review – Hacks, Better Call Saul, Star Trek: Picard, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Halo

Shenanigans

[Can we all pretend I finished this back in May, when I started it, before the various heat waves melted my brain?]

It’s appropriate that Hacks (Amazon Prime) is such a throwback; a half-hour sitcom with no reality show gimmicks, because the subject matter is old skool comedy and whether tried and tested material can survive in the modern era. There is no-one looking down the lens whenever somebody else does something weird. This has really begun to annoy me when they do this on What They Do in the Shadows because everyone is doing something weird on What They Do in the Shadows and the characters should be used to weird things happening by now.

Anyway, Hacks is the story of a double act, although both parties are not aware of this. Jean Smart (perfect casting and a name that has featured regularly in this column passim passim) plays a brash comedian in the Phyllis Diller/Joan Rivers fashion; a “mouthy broad” who is happy to have both a regular show on QVC and to take up a residency in Las Vegas where she can tell the same mildly risqué jokes over and over for a fat cheque.

Once the staleness of her material is brought to her attention she decides to ‘employ’ Gen Z writer (and stand-up comic IRL) Hannah Einbinder, although it’s more to prove to herself that young people are idiots and she’s right to stick with her tried and trusted act.

“Wow,” says Smart after witnessing Einbinder work through the process of coming up with a ‘bit’, to use the American parlance. “It’s like watching Picasso sing.”

“You mean paint?” asks a confused Einbinder.

“No.”

Despite not really doing anything, Einbinder sticks around long enough to convince Smart to become that most dreaded thing in comedy, the confessional comedian.

Still, it’s fair enough as Smart has a lot to confess. The second season leaves Vegas behind and goes on the road to try out this edgier material, understandably, as this was clearly filmed under covid conditions and there’s plenty they can do in the open air away from stuffy sin city.

Russell T. Davies once said, about Doctor Who, that everything that was said between the Doctor and Davros was gold and so easy to write. So it goes here as the best thing about Hacks is the interactions between Smart and Einbinder. Smart just thinks everything young people say and do is stupid, and Einbinder doesn’t really prove her wrong; whilst Einbinder, who’s always scrabbling for pennies, can’t get her head around someone who hasn’t had to worry about money for 50 years. “Holy shit” says Einbinder upon witnessing Smart’s gaudy Vegas pile for the first time. “We need a wealth tax.”

I didn’t have a clue what was going on in the first half of the last season of Better Call Saul (Netflix). Saul and Kim were planning some kind of con against Howard that I couldn’t understand and I almost gave up on the show. Although it did involve Ed Begley Jnr. thus emsuring a member of Spinal Tap is involved, as is traditional. Then Lalo re-appeared and suddenly it got compelling again. God-damn you Vince Gilligan for making me like gangsters, although that plot-line is soon dispensed with.

The last few episodes were mostly in black and white, showing that we were in a post-Breaking Bad world and we discovered the final fate of Jimmy/Saul/Gene, although Breaking Bad has already had a sequel (passim) so I don’t expect this will be last we see of Bob Odenkirk in this role. We’ve certainly not seen the last of Rhea Seehorn, who provides an amazing performance as Kim, especially in THAT scene. You know the one.

Hasn’t Patrick Stewart retired now? Star Trek: The Next Generation finished in 1994 and he handed Professor X over to James McAvoy about 20 years ago. Yet, he still seems to be going, both in the recent Doctor Strange movie and on Star Trek: Picard (Amazon Prime). 

This is the second season of the show and it’s still trying to prove itself. Trying quite hard, as this season involves both the return of John de Lancie’s Q and Whoopi Goldberg’s Guinan but also some quite involved time-travel shenanigans where Picard and his ragtag new crew (including Jeri Ryan’s Seven of Nine) travel back to our time in order to prevent an ancestor of Picard altering their future.

It even features the Borg Queen and Brent Spiner playing the guy who originally built Data, and that’s kinda the problem. There’s nostalgia and then there’s overdosing on the stuff. Despite none of the rest of the original crew appearing (that’s going to happen in season three), Star Trek: Picard is so invested in things that happened years ago that it comes across as rehashing other people’s ideas. 

Far better is Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (Paramount Plus) even though it’s even more of an exercise in nostalgia. Going right to the very beginning, Strange New Worlds is essentially a spin-off of Star Trek: Discovery’s second season, where the crew of Discovery were briefly taken over by the crew from Star Trek’s pilot, before James Tiberius Kirk took over (passim). So Anson Mount (another cameo from the recent Doctor Strange movie) plays Captain Christopher Pike alongside the likes of Ethan Peck’s Spock and Celia Rose Gooding’s Uhura.

The beauty of this series is that, in returning the story to the show’s origins, we also don’t get those ball-aching season-long overarching stories like we had on Picard. Instead, each episode is more or less self-contained, with the crew of the Enterprise arriving at a different location each week. The only bit of plot that goes through the series is Pike knowing his future, which if you’ve seen the original Star Trek episode The Menagerie, you’ll know as well.

Strange New Worlds succeeds despite there being a lot of Star Trek around at the moment. As well as these two shows, there’s also the ongoing Discovery alongside two animated shows called Lower Decks and Prodigy. One show Strange New Worlds is better than is Halo (Paramount Plus), yet another botched adaptation of a video game.

The Wire’s Pablo Schrieber plays the game’s main character Master Chief, although that’s where the resemblance to the game ends. Halo the TV series is a completely different story to any of the many games’ storyline. This sounds like a good idea, as game veterans won’t be impatiently waiting for, say, The Flood to appear.

But the story it opts to tell is still familiar, as the show gives us the old ‘scientists kidnapping children and experimenting on them to make them super soldiers’ storyline. It would probably help if Halo had anything resembling a sense of humour. Strange New Worlds has got plenty of that; seeing as they’re both on the all-new and whizzy Paramount Plus channel, maybe the makers can lend Halo some jokes for season two?

Now enjoy Jean Smart’s cackle:

TV Review – Brookside, The Larry Sanders Show, Star Trek: The Next Generation

What Is Love?

(Originally published in L:Scene magazine, February 1996)

Brookside (C4) continues to be a crucible of sexual intrigue, week after smouldering week. There’s now an Australian present, who’s a) working in a local pantomime (plausible), b) getting into heavy drugs courtesy of Jimmy Corkhill (erm, alright) and c) whose loins are being stirred by Jacqui Dixon (do me a favour). “Ah think ah’ve fallen for yer big toyme,” he states as if he’s still urging the kids to reveal what’s occurring behind him. He’s due to die any day.

Next door, newly arrived Gary and Lindsey Corkhill are getting sexually frustrated: he wants it, she doesn’t. “Why won’t you give me a chance, ay?” says Gary, filtering his volcano of feelings into effortless soap speak. But it turns out Lindsey doesn’t love her husband anymore; she’s fallen for scouse stud Mike Dixon. “I just don’t know what to do about Gary, he’s so nice to me – but I can’t stop thinking about you Mike.”

In a Hitchcockian moment of tension, Lindsey and Mike are passionately snogging in the back of the shop whilst Gary walks slowly along the street. The door opens on the Romeo and Juliet of L12 but it’s only loveable Terry. I unlock my knuckles from the armchair. Loveable Terry can keep a secret and offers the use of his flat for their horizontal jogging in a Jack Lemmon-esque display of lovability.

But loveable Terry has also fallen for Sarah, who was also shagging Mike last time I looked. That man makes JFK look like LBJ. In fact both loveable Terry and slightly less loveable Eddie seem to fancy Sarah, despite the fact that the latter is also her father-in-law. “I’m not sure you should be letting him up here,” shit-stirs a jealous Eddie. “He went off his head a year ago.”

But people tend to go off their head all the time on Brookside. My money’s on Katie being the next purchaser of a Saveaway to loony land; all those heavy handed hints about her being worried about her mother being contractually obliged to go to Japan for a year, her being too tired to have a Chinese meal and the discovery of a spot on her face must add up to something.

The Larry Sanders Show (BBC2) is so classy it makes you vomit. The characters are all so gloriously drawn that the fact that situations seem not so much written as congealed never seem to matter. Line of the week went to Sideshow Hank, who delivered a speech to a camcorder for Larry’s birthday. “If I start crying, just keep running,” he warns, checking his cue cards. Unless you live in Brookside, genuine emotions are like that – not available on cue cards.

In the old episodes of Star Trek, currently being repeated on BBC2, it was invariably the case that Captain Kirk would come across some beautiful Space Girl who would gaze longingly into his eyes and murmur, “Tell me Captain, what is this concept you humans call ‘love’?” Kirk would usually waste no time in having a bit of inter-species other. The chief attraction of Star Trek: The Next Generation (BBC2) is that it usually manages to avoid this sort of rubbish – or at least turn it on its head.

This week a lot of weirdly shaped-skull people were on a diplomatic mission to the Enterprise. Whilst some of them stayed on board and drove the crew nuts, Captain Picard went off with one of them and managed to crash on a barren planet. “Inertial dampers off-line, life support failing.” It’s this ability to make talking in lists so natural that got Patrick Stewart the part.

The downside of having the weird skull pilot dying on you and having broken some ribs is compensated for when he meets a beautiful Space Girl who’s been stranded there for seven years. “Well you’re certainly not a Terallian, unless you’ve lost two of your arms,” smoothes the Captain.

“I’ll do anything you want, just don’t leave me,” she replies, clearly impressed with his chat up lines.

But the Captain is not interested in her charms. “I feel a great sympathy with what you’ve been through…”

Meanwhile on the Enterprise, keen Klingon Lieutenant Worf has chinned a particularly annoying weird skull alien. “Wonderful,” enthuses the alien. “If you’ll excuse me, I’d like to document this experience.” Clearly something is up with these weirdos. Picard, too, is starting to smell a rat as he discovers he hasn’t got broken ribs after all. And rather than a willing mopsy, Space Girl is turning into Kathy Bates. “You should love me by now,” she pouts.

The supposedly dead pilot turns up again after she leaves and, like a Private Eye look-a-like, it turns out that they’re one and the same person. “My mission was to study human intimacy, a concept you call ‘love’,” explains the pilot. Ah. In this case it’s a good job that the Captain didn’t stick his tongue down a strange person’s throat. Cast of Brookside please take note.