Box Set Blues: iZombie

It's a sad fact that after a bit of a land-grab for US shows coming over the UK a couple of years back, when you could pretty much be assured of seeing everything, we've started to "lose" shows recently, presumably as they just don't pay their way. It's a bit of a vicious circle, of course, as if you wait 6 months to screen a show that would have a small, yet devoted audience, they'll have aquired it by other means by then, reducing it's audience further.  Worse, some channels have bought shows and then handled them badly, burying them late at night before dropping, as fans of Orphan Black, Person of Interest, Once Upon a Time, and Justified have all found to their cost. The metrics for streaming services are different, of course, and so Netflix, Amazon and even Sky have picked up these shows to stick behind their paywalls, in a bid to make those paywalls more attractive. And so it is that iZombie finally reaches the UK, courtesy of Netflix. 

Box Set Blues: Orphan Black, Season 3

I'm starting to wonder if the current vogue for strongly narrative shows is a bit of a double edged sword. For dedicated fans, and those of us on the catch-up/box set lifestyle, it's great, because you see everything in order, and it's allowed shows at the top end - your Breaking Bads, and Fargos - to create strongly constructed and gripping series. But on the other hand, you get shows without strong, clear stories to tell that can chew through narrative at an alarming rate without really going anywhere, a paradox that can be frustrating to watch and one I suspect I'll talk about more when I've finished with The Flash and Arrow this year. It's also a problem that seems to be befall the third season of Orphan Black, which recently dropped onto Netflix just before it's fourth season started to roll out too. It's a good season, but a slightly frustrating one (mild spoilers). 

Box Set Blues: Miss Fishers Murder Mysteries

We like a good procedural cop show in our house, even if they're increasingly all the same. One is a cop, one isn't, but has a wacky side skill! They Fight Crime!. Gruesome murder, red herrings, it's usually the second character you're introduced to, job done. The joy, then, is the casts rapport, the quality of the gimmick and how much you enjoy spending time the company of the show. We've watched quite a few, and generally enjoy them, and they make a nice relaxing hour before bed sort of show for us, so we've usually got one on the go, and keep an eye out for more. Our most recent obsession has, surprisingly, not been set in modern-day America, but rather 1920s Australia, Miss Fishers Murder Mysteries. 

Box Set Blues: Show Me a Hero

One of the nice things about HBO (and my extension, Sky Atlantic, who has all it's content in the UK) is that it's invested in quality television across a wide variety of taste. It's got a juggernaut in Game of Thrones, of course, but it's also got a bunch of other stuff from dumb and loud to social realist, all with solid production values and talent. It's clearly a concious decision to keep on board a diverse platform, and keep on low-viewership creators as prestige signings, so it can point to them as proof of it's upmarket credentials. One of these, I've always felt, is David Simon, most famous for The Wire, the show everyone watched on DVD, but more recently Treme, which no-one really watched at all (despite it being pretty good). His latest show for HBO was a 6-part drama about social housing in Yonkers; Show Me a Hero. 

Box Set Blues: Justified, Season 6

It remains a mystery to me how a show such as Justified has remained such a secret pleasure over the six years it has run. It seems never to have acquired a vocal critical following, nor a substantive fan base, and over the UK it's distributer dropped it entirely after four seasons, leaving Sky to pick it up for it's on-demand "Box Sets" service, where we eagerly snapped it up. It's always been a smart, witty and well acted show, a modern mix of Western and Crime drama, and with it's sixth and final season it looks to pull everything together, and give it's cast of characters the send off they deserve. And in the end, it really does, and not in the way I expected either. 

Box Set Blues: Orphan Black

Our current series of Dissecting Worlds is due to contain a couple of episodes looking at artificial people; ranging from droids and replicants to uplifted successor species, which has been a huge subgenre of Science Fiction since, oh that Frankenstein book that started it all. You may have heard of it. Along the way it's given me the push I needed to start on the often recommended Orphan Black, a Canadian show funded by BBC America, and it seems mostly ignored by the BBC over here, given that they're about to burn off it's third season in the middle of the night on a channel so few people watch they're talking about shutting it down. Seriously, what the hell, BBC? Anyway, thats a rant for another day. For now, the first two series are on Netflix, and here's why you should be watching it. 

Box Set Blues: Justified, Season 5

It's been a while since I talked about Justified, one of the best crime dramas on TV that you're probably not watching. Here in the UK, at least, it's been hard to find, bought by Channel 5 and then buried down on it's cable-only 5USA, and then dropped entirely after a fourth series as part of whatever the hell restructuring Channel 5 are doing these days. Thankfully, Sky ran to the rescue in its role as the only UK broadcaster that seems to want US imports and it's now available on the "Box Sets" service, allowing us to catch up with the fifth season, just as the sixth (and final) one starts in the US. Its definitely worth catching up with. 

First Impressions: Supernatural

I've quite enjoyed writing up "First Impressions" of all the new shows that aired in the autumn, which gives a nice base-line of what you got you watching a show in the first place, especially compared to a review of a full season. Most shows change and grow enormously in their first 10 episodes or so, and few come out of the gate well rounded or confident in what they want to be. Early episodes can be a scattershot blast of ideas as the writers and actors try to get a feel for what works and what doesn't, and that can often be lost as you look back knowing what the show became once it found it feet. This is a long way of saying that I'd like to more of them, especially as we try and catch up on shows that we've missed along the way. So next up is a show that is now hitting it's 10th series, but I've never seen a single episode of: Supernatural. 

Box Set Blues: Breaking Bad

I found myself trying to describe what I loved about Breaking Bad to someone the other day and realised that it probably sounded really horrible. Whenever you wind up watching one a show that is so unrelenting dark, something so determined to keep hurting its audience, it's hard not to focus on the horrible things going on, and how horrible everyone is, and then, suddenly, you realise that you probably sound like one of those people that slow down for car accidents to check if they can see the blood. I'm not sure that that is Breaking Bad's attraction - I think I've got a certain intolerance for media that revels in it's own grimness, hence not watching (for example) The Walking Dead - but its swirling darkness is potent and tangible. So what, then, is it? 

Box Set Blues: Arrow, series 2

Its a sad fact that I was late to the Arrow party, mentally filing it away with the Smallvilles of this world and missing out on its first transmission, and then scrabbling to catchup as everyone kept telling me it was actually rather good. Its first season followed a common "first season" trajectory; a mix of strong setup and then a certain amount of paddling in circles, and a strong finish as the cast and crew all settled in with how everything was going to work. It also helped to have a strong cast with no obvious weak links, even if the show struggled to give everyone something worth-while to do. So its second season was something to look forward to, with the promise of more changes to come and a firmer sense of the shows direction. Thankfully, it gets a lot more right than it gets wrong. 

Box Set Blues: Game of Thrones, Season 4

Of the long, complex and blood-dripping saga that is A Song of Ice and Fire, my favorite section is the back half of A Storm of Swords. Its a piece of writing that manages to show a huge amount of focus and discipline as it brutally dispatches characters, but more importantly storylines, that no longer serve any larger purpose, and carefully positions its surviving players on new trajectories through the narrative. A lot of stories are closed off as new ones open, and questions are answered that hang over from the A Game of Thrones, and the book closes on a promise that the series is really going to go somewhere next. And whilst there is nothing really wrong with the two novels that follow, they do feel somewhat like treading water, with little of that propulsive force. So when the TV adaptation reached this section, and having put out its most brutal moment in Series Three, how does it manage?

Box Set Blues: True Detective

If you had any sort of Social Media presence in the earlier part of the year, you had to have noticed that True Detective became "a thing". Which was annoying in part because we were clearly missing out, and in part because it's a Detective show, and the risk of inadvertent spoilers was reaching epidemic levels. Thankfully we now have Sky, who kindly repeated the whole series late at night so people like us could record it, and we managed to (mostly) avoid spoilers outside that we needed to be looking out for some "King in Yellow" references. So, eight episodes later, was it worth all they hype?

Box Set Blues: Arrow, Series 1

I blame Smallville for missing out on Arrow as it launched. I mean, Smallville was fine, as these things go, but I stopped watching it about it's third series, already worn out on teen-aged superheroics that seemed terrified of moving towards the end point that the series inevitably set for itself. Arrow looked far too much like going back to that sort of setup, coupled with being about Green Arrow, a character I've never liked much and one who has always struggled against the impression of being a sort of budget Batman rip-off. So we just gave it a miss, although it did pick up a decent reputation over its first season run and eventually we got around to renting the DVDs, on the basis that at least Ewan would enjoy it. But it turns out, Arrow is a bit of a Batman knock-off, and wears it pretty well.

Box Set Blues: Archer

Is it still a Box-Set if I'm streaming from Netflix? At the risk of a diversion, we signed up to Netflix over the holidays mainly to watch Breaking Bad, but it's actually a pretty solid service, technically speaking, if a little sparse on the "current shows" front. But that isn't a big problem for us, being perennially behind, and it gives us easy access to the early runs of things like Sons of Anarchy, which we've been meaning to start on for ages. It also has the first 4 series of Justified, so if you've not caught this on it's "down the channel numbers" purgatory, you should get on that right now.  More relevantly, it has three seasons of Archer, which is another show people keep recommending, but we'd yet to catch. Whats that?  now we've seen 3 series in seven weeks? Guess it's OK then!

Box Set Blues; Person of Interest, Series 1

There is a weird transition you go through when you switch between watching US cable shows and US Network shows. They've got different rhythms, and different ways of presenting their stories, because they have different audiences with different needs. Contrast something Game of Thrones or Breaking Bad to a show like House, or Agents of SHIELD, and you'll see less serialization on the network shows, more character short-hand, more repetition of ideas, at least in part because they latter need bigger, broader audiences to justify their existence. The last network show to make a big success out of serialisation on a major network was Lost, and there are forsaken corners of the internet where people are still arguing about how that turned out. But that formula of accessible, digestible TV with serialised mystery elements is still pursued by Commissioning Alchemists, who have recently conjured up Person of Interest.

Box Set Blues: New Girl, Series One

On of the biggest changes in my viewing habits of the last year or so has been my rekindled love of US sitcoms; a form of comedy that we seem to have forgotten in the UK for now. Sure, they can be pretty formulaic, but they also tend to be consistent, character driven and above all, actually funny, so I'm always on the look for new series with decent reputations to pickup. We're still missing a few but one of the big break-out hits in the US of the last year or so has been Zooey Deschanel vehicle New Girl, which we picked up the first series of recently on DVD.

Box Set Blues: Breaking Bad, Series 1

For Fathers Day this year, I got Breaking Bad, a story about a middle-aged family man who, when faced with a life-changing crisis, takes to criminal ways. Hmmm. Anyhow, its a show that comes hugely lauded, one of the TV shows of the age, it seems, and something I've meant to start on for a long time, so I can't really question it as a great choice of present. Sadly, it's only 7 episodes long, so just as it really gets going, we ran of out of episodes. But what episodes!

Box Set Blues: 30 Rock

No "Movie of the Week" this weekend, because we watched Skyfall, which we'd seen (and reviewed) before. This time we let Ewan stay up and watch it, because he's been pestering us to, and he really enjoyed it as well, not least because 12A rated modern action movies are still pretty new to him, so come with that added frisson of excitement from watching a "Grown Up" movie. If you can call Bond "grown up". Anyway, what we have also been watching a lot of, filling our need for the odd, just-before-bed sitcom, is 30 Rock.

Box Set Blues: Community, Series 2

I've come to realise that the key to my enjoyment of a lot of series over the last few years - not just TV, but books, comics, all sorts of things - is a sense that I simply enjoy spending time in the company of the universe that the series creates. It doesn't have to be a fun, unicorns-and-rainbows universe, just a well drawn one with engaging characters whose fates I can care about. I think this is why I bounced off The Walking Dead; I just don't care about its tedious zombie fodder bickering among themselves, but a show like Justified can make it's lowest and least competent villain a rounded individual whose fate I can have an opinion on. This brings me to my ever expanding love of Community, a show that for it's metatextual cleverness is, at it's heart, about a bunch of characters you can put in nearly any situation and just enjoy spending the time with.

Box Set Blues: The Big Bang Theory

Here is a list of 10 episodes of endangered cult show Community I could probably write full length reviews of: 

Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, Modern Warfare, Remedial Chaos Theory, Paradigms of Human Memory, Critical Film Studies, Contemporary American Poultry, Debate 109, Conspiracy Theories and Interior Design, Epidemiology and what the hell, Horror Fiction in Seven Spooky Steps. And I still haven't seen more than half the third series. 

Here is a list of 10 episodes of seemingly unstoppable smash hit comedy series The Big Bang Theory I could write a full length review of: 

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Right then...