TELEVISION: LEGION review (2017)

WHERE IS MY MIND?
If pop psychology, safari-suited hipsters and mind-swapping is your thing, Marvel's Legion is the show for you.

We've all felt like this from time to time.
(Image copyright: 26 Keys Productions).

It’s not that often a TV series comes along that you feel compelled to praise very loudly from the rooftops, grab people by the lapels and enthuse wildly to, or go online and clog up social media with superlatives. Legion, the latest offering from the Marvel TV stable, is one such glittering example.

The thing is, you wouldn’t know it was a Marvel series. It’s one of the most stylised, surreal, psychologically playful and insightful, not to mention just plain stylish, series ever to have graced the small screen. That’s because Legion’s visuals are filtered through the unreliable worldview of David Haller (Downton Abbey’s Dan Stevens, playing very convincingly with an American accent and attitude), a schizophrenic we first meet in a mental hospital. He’s been struggling with mental illness all his life, so by the time he reaches his thirties and has been sectioned, he’s not sure if anything that happens to him is, in fact, real. (This uncertainty in his perceptions leads to a corker of a cliffhanger at the end of episode four).

You’d never know Legion is a spin-off from the X-Men comics, in much the same way you be hard pressed to say Patrick McGoohan’s personal tour de force The Prisoner (1967-68) was basically a spy series. Legion’s Wikipedia entry describes the series as ‘psychological thriller/psychological horror/drama/superhero fiction’, which is another way of saying that, like The Prisoner, Legion is a gleeful, freewheeling mixture of, and breaking down of, different genres.

It really is like nothing you’ve ever seen before. The super hero angle – Haller’s schizophrenia is really a major superpower, incorporating telepathy and telekinesis, that a group led by psychiatric therapist Melanie Bird (Jean Smart, oozing authority) wants to develop and a rival, paramilitary group want to destroy – is filtered through David’s attempts to work out who he really is after years of mental illness and drug addiction.

The paranormal talents of Smart’s group complement Haller’s distorted worldview: Ptonomy Wallace (Jeremie Harris), who has “the ability to take people back into their own memories”; Carey Loudermilk (Bill Irwin), a mutant scientist who shares his body with the martial-arts expert Kerry Loudermilk (the improbably named Amber Midthunder), and Sydney ‘Syd’ Barrett (angelic Rachel Keller, and no, the name of her character isn’t a coincidence), who can swap minds with anyone she touches. As well as all these, Dan is plagued by a questioning part of his psyche that appears in the form of his deceased drug and alcohol-addled friend Lenny Busker (Aubrey Plaza), killed in the first episode.

Such an off-kilter array of characters and abilities creates opportunities for fantasy and surrealism such as a kitchen erupting its contents in a slow-motion storm around Dan, a groovy, synchronised dance number performed by assorted mental patients and Oliver Bird, Melanie’s comatose husband (Jemaine Clement, late of Flight of the Conchords) a hipster in a safari suit whose mind now lives inside an ice cube, where he grooves along to avant garde music.

This may all sound like a huge mess, but the narrative through-line is always clear so the series never collapses into self-indulgence. It’s a great achievement, a story told wittily and comprehensibly through dream imagery and multiple versions of reality; apart from that, Legion is just plain cool, the performances are a joy and it makes you laugh out loud more than once.

The series is a testament to how comfortable television networks now are with this kind byzantine storytelling. It’s certainly a long way from the days when, in comparison, a mildly surrealistic experiment like The Prisoner confused everyone.

Recommended.

TELEVISION: 24 - LEGACY (2017)

THE NEXT GENERATION
Can 24 work without Jack Bauer and his crew? Judging by this first spin-off, the answer is a qualified 'yes'.

Something a bit more recent today.

In 2014, the indestructible Counter Terrorist Unit agent Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland), veteran of nine world-threatening and emotionally battering seasons, was last seen in the custody of the FSB being helicoptered to Russia and a very uncertain – and painful – future. Despite this, apparently there was an attempt to lure Sutherland back for an eleventh run at the role. He declined, so the decision was taken to forge ahead without him.

Looking back over the nine seasons of 24, characters in CTU came and went, often from sudden death – it was one of the series’ hallmarks – and the same was true of the compelling ancillary characters who revolved around the elite unit: presidents, their relations, assorted recurring villains and Jack’s nearest and dearest. Conceptually, then, it was a small step from there to replace Jack himself. Would the audience go for it? The first episode of 24: Legacy, screened directly before Super Bowl LI, drew the largest audience in the history of the series, so the answer would seem to be, at least initially, ‘it does’.

Since 24 started the big sea-change in espionage fiction on TV was Homeland, dealing seriously, cynically and messily with the political situation in the Middle East. The new model inherits some of that political zeitgeist, with most men in the Army Ranger unit of the new man Eric Carter (a slow-burning, effective Corey Hawkins), responsible for executing the terrorist leader Ibrahim bin-Khalid, assassinated despite being in a witness protection programme – clearly, there’s (another) traitor at work in the security services. The head of CTU when Carter did the black op was Rebecca Ingram (none cooler under pressure Miranda Otto), now prospective First Lady, handily drawn back into the espionage fray for dialogue between both the command structure of CTU and the corridors of power in the Whitehouse.

The race is on to prevent the terrorists securing a list of sleeper cells that the terrorists have killed their way through the Army Rangers to get. That’s just one of many plot threads; there’s an attack on a school planned by one of the students and her teacher – which, Breaking Bad style, goes spectacularly wrong  – and a terrorist cell planning something in the background. New to the mix, because of Carter’s ethnicity, is his background in a black criminal gang before he became a soldier. It’s not long before he’s in a siege in a police station and the intertwined plotting spins on memorably from there.

So what of the action, one of the things that 24 always managed to do amazingly well, cinematically, on a TV budget? The first episode concludes with an innovative sequence where Carter hides behind a huge steel pipe and rolls it over some bad guys, going on to stab one of them with a steel cable. Not bad, and that was the first of many impressive sequences.

There’s the usual political tension between Capitol Hill and CTU, plus a topical look at how soldiers were abandoned to PTSD and homelessness by the US government; understandably, one veteran is so aggrieved he tries to blackmail them. The shadow of Homeland is again felt in an attempt by a rival party to blacken the reputation of an Islamic presidential aide. She might or might not be radicalised, and of all the running storylines, this is handled sensitively and credibly.

The foreboding, insistent incidental music, split screen visuals and the inevitable interrogation scenes are all present and correct, and while the real-time narrative structure may seem a little old fashioned by now, there’s enough innovation in the formula to suggest that 24: Legacy could be the start of a new lease of life for the franchise. And if you just want the comfort of watching good old 24 as it was, you won’t be disappointed either. The biggest criticism, as in every season before it, is the complete absence of humour. Come on, guys – we know people make jokes under pressure. (See Homeland again).

As for the new man: Carter might not yet have the grizzled ennui of The Bauer, but the new recruit’s girlfriend thinks he enjoys the adrenalized rush of battle far too much, so it could be the beginning of a thread that memorably unravels in his personal life. We shall see.

TELEVISION: PENNY DREADFUL Series 3, 2016

SOMETHING TO GET YOUR TEETH INTO
Gothic melodrama Penny Dreadful mastered its grisly stride in its third 
and final series.

Image copyright Showtime/Sky 2016.

“Life, for all its anguish, is ours, Miss Ives.”

Apologies for being a bit behind on this one, but there’s just so much to watch now you’re almost inevitably going to be a few – or several – months behind with some things.

To business: one of the appealing things about John Logan’s horror melodrama Penny Dreadful – that’s gothic horror in the traditions of Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley and Robert Louis Stevenson, whose characters the series has cheerfully plundered – is that as well as confronting vampires, witches and other spectral creatures, all the main players – as star Timothy Dalton pointed out at the first series' press conference – battle internal monsters of their own.

Vaness Ives (Eva Green) fights a demon for possession of her body, Sir Malcolm Murray (Dalton) grapples with his rampant carnal and violent desires, Victor Frankenstein (Harry Treadaway) is a besotted, hopeless drug addict and Ethan Chandler (Josh Hartnett) conceals a werewolf beneath his gun-slinging American exterior. Frankenstein’s Creature (Rory Kinnear, fantastically nuanced and moving) fights his loathing for himself and humankind in equal measure. At the other end of the moral scale, Dorian Gray (Reeve Carney) and Frankenstein’s creation Lily (Billie Piper) wallow luxuriously in their own depravity. Such a heady brew places Penny Dreadful firmly in the traditions of Stoker, Shelley et. al, while its painterly, heightened gothic hues – a newly industrialised London is coloured drab, industrial grey, while a disreputable Zanzibar is by turns opulent and murky – elevates the series’ visually melodramatic aesthetic.

Adding to the cinematic palette in this final series, there’s some inspired, panoramic filming on a train and (apparently) the plains of New Mexico. The scenes would have made classic Western director John Ford proud, as Scotland Yard’s finest, the wonderfully named, cool as a cucumber Inspector Bartholomew Rusk (Douglas Hodge, immaculate in just about anything), pursues the escaped Chandler, who looked like he’d been rescued by the Wild Bunch.

Adding an interesting twist to the third series is Eva attending treatment sessions by an Alienist, the earliest form of address for a psychiatrist or psychologist, who is developing “a new branch of science.” Intriguingly and with some insight, the Alienist Mrs Clayton tells Eva that her affliction “is a dark root with no name from which grows illness.” That may be true in the majority of cases, but Mrs Clayton is shocked to find out that Vanessa’s demons are in fact real. It’s a clever touch, playing the new rationality of the scientific age off against old superstitions. The writer M.R. James pursued similar themes in his ghost stories, written a few years after the events of Penny Dreadful.

Arguably the stand-out in the ensemble this year is Samuel Barnett’s take on Dracula’s slave Renfield which is every bit as twitchy, obsessive and repressed as you’d expect from the man who nailed a public school take on Dirk Gently. Shazad Latif’s dignified, Anglo-Indian Dr Jekyll runs a close second, with Christian Carmazzo’s two-faced, charismatic Dracula close behind (and I’ll wager it’s the first time the King Vamp has been a fan of Captain Nemo).

There is some truly gruesome stuff this time around that would have scandalised the editors of the original penny dreadfuls. The instance of grand guignol that sticks most in the mind is a very young, very naked woman about to be murdered in front of a circle of paying English gentleman voyeurs.

I’m not a huge fan of horror, but it’s hard to resist this line-up of the gothic greats: Dracula, the werewolf, Frankenstein’s Creature, Dorian Gray and Jekyll, especially when they’re reimagined this well. Penny Dreadful is as far from those cheesy Universal Pictures team-ups House of Frankenstein (1944) House of Dracula (1945) as it’s possible to get (fun though they were). And with quality, predominantly British thesping this good, it’s easy to get lured into a binge watch.

Go for the jugular if you haven't already.

TELEVISION: INSIDE NO. 9

BEHIND CLOSED DOORS
Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith's anthology series hit a peak with its fourth series.

Keeley Hawes and Reece Shearsmith strike a sombre pose
in 'Diddle Diddle Dumpling'. (Image copyright: BBC)

Programmes of the quality of Inside No. 9 don’t come along very often, particularly as part of that increasingly rare breed on TV now, the anthology series. It’s written by two alumni of The League of Gentlemen – Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton – who, in a self-contained story behind the door/inside the train car/restaurant of the title, can flip effortlessly between the genres of comedy, horror, suspense and thriller, often all at the same time. 

A modern-day Tales of the Unexpected but with much more of the unexpected than the 1970s/80s series, it’s not surprising that Inside No. 9’s three series have attracted quality casts that have included such polished acting calibre as Timothy West, Denis Lawson, Helen McCrory, Alison Steadman, Paul Kaye and Jane Horrocks, to name a few, complementing Pemberton and Shearsmith in a variety of guises.

It goes with the nature of beast that some stories work better than others, but, with half an hour rather than an hour (usually) to play with, Inside No. 9 attempts twice the amount of stories as Channel 4/Netflix’s Black Mirror so wins out on ambition and originality (after a while the same kind of story ideas did start cropping up in Black Mirror). Cases in point are Inside No. 9’s first episode ‘Sardines’, which takes place almost entirely inside a wardrobe, and the spectacularly funny and inventive second story ‘A Quiet Night In’, in which two burglars attempt to thieve from a flat while it’s occupied – not a word of dialogue is spoken until the last scene. After these heights, and as well-crafted as they were, the remaining stories in the first series didn’t impress as so original.

In Series 2 the quality was more evenly distributed. Among the consistent delights on offer was the hilarious suburban black farce of ‘Nana’s Party’ and the ‘The 12 Days of Christine’, in which Sheridan Smith’s title character, never more deserving of a decent, happy life, relives significant points in her existence in the same flat. You might guess the ending, but it’s still heart-breaking when the reality of what’s happened to her crashes in.   

The stand outs for me in Series 3 have been and ‘Diddle Diddle Dumpling’ and ‘Empty Orchestra’. In the latter, office politics are played out through the songs chosen in a karaoke bar, with Tamzin Outhwaite is on particularly brilliant and bitchy form as the office vamp Connie, belting out the Human League’s ‘Don’t You Want Me, Baby’, revelling in the knowledge that Fran (Sarah Hadland), the sweet girlfriend of Greg (a weasly Shearsmith), doesn’t know they’ve having an affair. If there’s a theme here it’s seeing through the pretence of people pretending they’re having a good time to get to the truth, a point shown up in some astute lip reading by the deaf Janet (Emily Howlett: the actress herself is profoundly deaf.) The whole thing is awash with backstabbing and false smiles, so it’s nice to see Janet reap a genuine reward.

‘Diddle Diddle Dumpling’ is Inside No.9’s most affecting story, although that doesn’t become apparent until the closing minutes. For most of the running time, it looks like Reece Shearsmith’s David’s obsession with finding the missing counterpart to a man’s leather shoe he discovers in the street – via neighbourhood posters, website, twitter and a bumptious DJ on local radio – is the result of a breakdown. His wife Louise (Keeley Hawes) humours him as much as she can, and much of the story’s impact comes from David’s obsession with something so absurdly trivial. Louise’s increasingly desperate attempts to break David’s fixation nudge the story more and more into black comedy, comedy which becomes darkly tragic when the real reason for David’s obsession with the shoe is revealed. Unlike most of the No.9s, ‘Diddle Diddle Dumpling’ has no gimmickry in the set up and it relies entirely on the nuanced performances of Shearsmith and Hawes. It’s a riveting watch.

I haven’t even mentioned ‘The Devil of Christmas’. For archive TV enthusiasts, it’s screamingly funny because it shows just how well Shearsmith and Pemberton know their TV production history. It’s an additional pleasure on offer from this talented pair of fantasy craftsmen.

Unlock the door and enjoy.