TV 2014 : Some 2014 TV
Nov. 29th, 2014 03:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gervase_fenIt's not all retro-TV all the time here in Fen Towers. Mrs Fen and I been enjoying the third seasons of Ripper Street and The Newsroom. The Amazon Prime version is slightly supersized, so each episode we play the game of picking which five minutes or so we reckon won't make it to primetime BBC-1. Captain Jackson's fruity Arthurian analogy (and its circumstances) might not get terrestrial exposure, for instance. The Newsroom, now confirmed in its final stretch, sees Aaron Sorkin firing at least 75% of the time on all cylinders. Alison Pill's Maggie Jordan is finally getting some excellent material to work with, Olivia Munn is fantastic, and even Emily Mortimer is less annoying than I found in the past two seasons. And doesn't Grace Gummer look more and more like her mother?
Even more intriguing has been the first three episodes of BBC America's "The Game", Toby Whithouse's 1970s-set spy drama, which we've seen courtesy of our good friend Pip*. It's "Spooks" remade with the aesthetics and pacing of "The Hour" and the recent film version of Tinker Tailor. There are a couple of on-the-nose moments (there's a curious TV broadcast following the Two Ronnies in one scene) but, like "The Hour", this sets out to create a world and a team of characters that is wholly immersive. There's a stellar guest turn by Rachael Sterling in episode three, who gets to chastise our heroes with the immortal line "You do realise you're meant to be a covert service?"
*Pip Torrents
Even more intriguing has been the first three episodes of BBC America's "The Game", Toby Whithouse's 1970s-set spy drama, which we've seen courtesy of our good friend Pip*. It's "Spooks" remade with the aesthetics and pacing of "The Hour" and the recent film version of Tinker Tailor. There are a couple of on-the-nose moments (there's a curious TV broadcast following the Two Ronnies in one scene) but, like "The Hour", this sets out to create a world and a team of characters that is wholly immersive. There's a stellar guest turn by Rachael Sterling in episode three, who gets to chastise our heroes with the immortal line "You do realise you're meant to be a covert service?"
*Pip Torrents
