Tag: TV

Sheena

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We recently wrote about the movie version of the Sheena story, Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, but that was not the most recent adaptation. For Sheena would eventually return in form of another TV-series that ran for two seasons and 35 episodes from 2000-2002. It’s quite likely that producers Douglas Schwartz and Steven L. Sears hoped to cash in on the trend of action-adventure TV-shows that were then popular thanks to series like “Hercules” and “Xena”. Sears himself was enjoying quite some success with “Xena – Warrior Princess” which he wrote several scripts of and partly co-produced.

Unfortunately, the “Sheena” show was nowhere near as captivating as “Xena” was. Sheena (Nolin) is far from the “cute but a bit naive” version that Tanya Roberts played. Here, Sheena is more a kind of eco-terrorist, fiercely protecting “her” jungle of Maltaka – so you’d better behave if you go there! Along comes Matt Cutter (Nelson) with his constantly ironically snarky companion Mendelson (Quigley). Cutter is out for the quick buck, leading tourists in the jungle, trying to forget his former career as a CIA-agent (!). But after clashing with Sheena in the beginning they quickly establish a working relationship – usually meaning Sheena will draw the poor man into another harrowing adventure of hers.

Obviously, there are plenty of terrible things that can happen in the jungle, be it big game hunters, terrorists, military coups or tribal wars that have to be prevented. While the show quite obviously had a very limited budget – I couldn’t escape the fact after some time that they always filmed at the same five locations – I give the film makers credit. They tried to make their show as diverting as possible as they could, with the time and money they had at their disposal.

Sheena has changed quite a bit from her previous version; she is no dumb blonde in the jungle, she reads Tom Clancy and romantic novels, has her own cave, is trained in the mystical art of transforming into any animal with whom she has eye-contact (I immediately had to think of the old TV-show “A case for Professor Chase” when seeing this) by Shaman Kali (Moorer) and has absolutely no qualms about killing off evil-doers in the jungle – and there are plenty over the course of the show).

Usually she transforms into what she calls the “Darakna” – which essentially means she puts black mud on her body and gloves, with bone claws on to slash her enemies to death. Don’t worry: it’s neither bloody nor (after the first time they show it to us) very exciting. I just wonder if, by doing that, she also immediately became super-powered. though she already is a strong fighter. Or if it just made the killing easier for her, as she then wasn’t “quite herself” (to quote Norman Bates!).

It seems the producers were going for some kind of developing love story – differently to “Xena”, there are no overlapping story-arcs, just stand-alone episodes. But if so, they blew it. It seems all the efforts of Cutter were in vain, after early in the second season, Sheena has sex with a random stranger after a couple of unsubtle compliments from him. A couple of episodes later, we are asked to believe that Cutter gets together with an Asian women he once met in a training unit at the CIA. Oh, and we have to suffer through the usual episode where Sheena meets her “first love,” or the one where a special-mission leads Cutter’s ex-wife into the jungle.

Nolin and Nelson never have much chemistry with each other, that would let them appear as anything more than good friends. There’s no Xena-Gabrielle spark here, if that’s what you were hoping for! So if you thought we were getting the Sheena-Cutter-happy ending no one was asking for, you’d be wrong. Cutter says good-bye to another beautiful blonde at the beginning of the last episode, who thanks him for “showing him the world”, and the rest deals with a tribe mistaking constantly monotonously babbling wanna-be-snark Mendelson for a wise, old leader with the same name. The series ends as unspectacularly as it began.

That said, while the show (like most shows of its ilk at the time) is underwhelming compared to “Hercules” and “Xena”, I do think the screenwriters really tried to come up with as inventive stories as possible, given the fact that the “adventures in the jungle” was already a genre as dead as a door-nail. There are some good ideas here: plants that raise certain hormones in your blood, making you love-struck as well as murderous (therefore having Cutter and Sheena try to kill each other); a female black Rocky in the jungle, faced with countless attacks by her opponents; a kind of “X-files”-episode, with the audacity to play that show’s musical theme a couple of times in the episode; or the dangerous giant ants that eat anything. setting Cutter and Sheena in quite a distressing position.

There are also some “guest stars” though you shouldn’t expect the A-class of actors here. I noticed Grand L. Bush (whom I know from a minor role in the James Bond-movie Licence to Kill some 11 years earlier), make-up specialist and occasional actor Tom Savini (From Dusk till Dawn) and the Tarzan of the 60s, Ron Ely in a villain role. At least the team tried, though you hardly ever can speak of three-dimensional villains here. You also have to forgive the typical 90s CGI-morphing and masks that were terrible, even in better and more prestigious TV shows of the time than this one.

All in all, “Sheena” is not a great show but given its limitations I would say the people in charge tried to do their very best. Though while I could still binge-watch “Xena” today, “Sheena” is something that I would probably only watch again if I woke up at 2 a.m. and regular TV didn’t offer anything better at that time.

Creators: Douglas Schwartz and Steven L. Sears
Star: Gena Lee Nolin, John Allen Nelson, Kevin Quigley, Margo Moorer

La querida del Centauro

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★★★
“This land is Yolanda…”

A sold enough entry, this benefits from a well-written script, but gets marks taken off for having a heroine who is rather too passive. Yolanda Acosta (Paleta) is sent to a higher security facility when she is recaptured, following an escape from her previous prison. It’s a mixed-gender facility (common in Mexico), and she comes to the attention of Benedictino Suárez (Zurita), a.k.a. “Centaur”, a  local crime boss who is also incarcerated. He falls hard for Yolanda – the title translates as “Centaur’s Woman” – and when his escape plan comes to fruition, offers to bring her along with him, to the ranch on which he’s hiding out. And that’s where the problems really start for Yolanda.

Firstly, her teenage daughter, Cristina, is on the outside, being taken care of by Yolanda’s sleazy step-mom., who is trying to sell off Cristina’s virginity. Second, is the ensuing power struggle between Centaur and a rival; using Cristina as leverage, Yolanda is coerced into going undercover at a local gym where they operate. Third? Local cop Gerardo Duarte (Brown) who wants to use Yolanda to arrest Centaur. Initially, he offers immunity to her, but eventually their relationship becomes more… personal. Finally, and by no means least: did I forget to mention Centaur is married? And his wife, Julia (de la Mora) does not take kindly to rivals; on her orders, one of Yolanda’s cellmates has an eye gouged out.

You have to feel for the heroine, whose chief concern is simply wanting the best for her daughter. But every time Yolanda tries to do the right thing, circumstances conspire to foil her, and she inevitably ends up mired in deeper trouble. It reaches almost Shakespearean level of tragedy, with death following in her wake, from prison to the ranch. Even Duarte ends up believed by most to be dead, though this is mostly for the benefit of his health. since there’s a mole inside the police department who is funneling information to the cartel. He’s left to carry on his investigation as a “ghost”, with the help of allies on the force, which complicates his efforts to help Yolanda and Cristina extricate themselves.

The performances are solid enough, and the characters here almost all occupy a morally grey middle-area. You may not endorse their actions, yet you can see why they decided there was a need for them. I was particularly impressed by de la Mora, whose portrayal of Julia puts her over as both smart and brutal. She knows her position as Centaur’s “legitimate” woman leads to both power and risk, and wields the former to mitigate the latter. She also keeps incriminating evidence about Centaur elsewhere, with a “dead woman’s switch” of regular text messages, and instructions to release it in the event the messages stop. That’s genius.

I’d like to have seen Yolanda be rather more active. Admittedly, her options are limited, especially once her daughter comes under the control of Centaur as well. However, she is set up in the prison as a character with no qualms about getting tough when necessary. Once she’s back on the outside, that physicality seems almost to evaporate for 30-odd episodes. When she goes undercover in the gym, she ends up having to face Lola, a relation of Centaur’s rival who has taken a dislike to Yolanda, in an unsanctioned match. Otherwise, she seems curiously reluctant to get her hands dirty, even in defense of Cristina, and with no shortage of firearms around, of which she could take advantage.

The rest of the show, however, is quite savage for a TV series; one death in particular is by head-shot of impressive nature, more befitting The Walking Dead. It ticks along quite nicely, though it’s never less than obvious whereabout we’re going to end up, more or less from the point Yolanda arrives on the ranch. We eventually get there, and the table is set for a second season. Not sure the sequel will exactly become a priority, yet I’ll leave this show on my Netflix watch-list for potential viewing.

Created by : Lina Uribe and Darío Vanegas
Star: Ludwika Paleta, Humberto Zurita, Michel Brown, Alexandra de la Mora

Ingobernable: season two

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★★★
“Mexican stand-off”

The second season follows immediately on from the events of the first, with Emilia Urquiza (del Castillo) on the run, after being framed for the death of her husband, the President. It’s not long, however, before she’s brought into custody… at least for a while. Her friends in the resistance, led by Canek (Guerra), are still active however, and soon get her broken out, to continue the fight. It’s a lot less linear of a series, with a multitude of threads being spun, merged and dissolved in the ensuing power struggle for control. The interim president, who is more than slightly sympathetic to Emilia’s situation – even after she has taken him hostage (above) – calls an election to choose a replacement, with two main candidates. Curiously, the more “progressive” is the military officer. On the other hand, the shadowy “X-8” group and its leader Santiago ‘Santi’ Salazar (Franco), is working feverishly behind the scenes to consolidate its hold over the country.

It’s considerably more complex than the previous series, which was a fairly straightforward, “woman on the run” scenario. This time round, while Emilia is still the central character, she is just one of the many pieces which are moving round the chessboard, in a quest for power. It requires paying greater attention than your typical telenovela, and with hindsight, perhaps deserved better than the “viewing while I get in my daily treadmilling” that it received. It probably didn’t help that an entirely different actor took over the role of Emilia’s father in the second season, which confused the hell out of me [the original had health issues which prevented him from returning], or that one episode in the middle was entirely a dream!

I still generally enjoyed the murkiness, however, watching the characters navigate their way through treacherous shoals of shifting loyalties and hidden agendas. A bit of a shame about the ending, though let me remain spoilery vague. While “the act” in question obviously sets things up for a third series, it’s glaringly obvious as it approaches. Probably doesn’t help that I was already wondering why no-one had tried it. “The act” would have solved a lot of problems, for a lot of people, if carried out over the previous 26 episodes.

The main positive is the breadth of interesting and pro-active female characters here, beyond Emilia. The one particularly worthy of note is Ana Vargas-West (Ibarra), Chief of Staff of the President’s Office. She ends up even more deeply embroiled, as she tries to juggle her CIA employers, links to X-8 and an apparently genuine desire to help both Emilia and the country. Ana has really dug herself a hole with her fingers in so many pies, and it’ll take all her political skill to survive. There’s also Zyan Torres (Tamara Mazarrasa), a soldier who ends up working as the lieutenant to Santi, and Kelly Crawford (Isabel Aerenlund), lurking even further back in the shadows than X-8.

In line with its cable-ish location, the show remains a bit edgier than most, for example, depicting Emilia being fire-hosed down in order to extract information out of her while in captivity. While there’s no shortage of gunfire and death either, on the whole this season is closer to a Mexican House of Cards, with political shenanigans coming to the fore. Though I’m not sure how accurate a portrayal of Mexico it is: this isn’t exactly made in conjunction with the local tourist board, shall we say. Season 3 seems inevitable, so stay tuned. Or, I guess, subscribed…

Star: Kate del Castillo, Erendira Ibarra, Alberto Guerra, Luis Ernesto Franco

Queen of the South, season three

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★★★
“Turnabout is fair play”

We arrived here with Teresa Mendoza (Braga) having gunned down Don Epifanio, and made an implacable enemy of his estranged wife, Camila Vargas (Falcon). Epifanio had become the Governor of Sinaloa, a position Camila took over, using it to buttress her position at the top. She formed alliances on both sides to assist her further: notably General Cortez (Arias), who provided military muscle, and with DEA agent Alonzo Loya, to whom she fed intelligence about her rivals. However, Camila’s increasingly strained relationship with her teenage daughter ends up being used against her.

Meanwhile, Teresa is on the run after killing Epifanio, and is holed up in Malta for the first few episodes, before returning to try and set up shop in Arizona. This is a process fraught with difficulty, as she has not only to deal with La Comisión, the narco-committee who currently run things, but also corrupt local sheriff Jed Mayo (an amusingly thinly-disguised version of notorious actual Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio). Further problems ensure when her supplier, El Santo (Steven Bauer) summons her to Colombia in order to find and address a traitor, an encounter which leaves Teresa in need of a new supplier. Then, with the tables turned and the roles reversed, Camila being on the run, she contacts Teresa to make an offer of a replacement product source – in exchange for taking out Camila’s foe.

The first few episodes, when Teresa is faffing around in the Mediterranean are very disappointing. It feels more as if the cast and crew wanted a holiday somewhere pleasant, rather than it fitting into the gritty scenarios which were a strong point over the first two seasons. My other major complaint about this season is the feeble attempt to represent Phoenix and Arizona. As someone who lives there, I can assure you that Phoenix is nowhere near as… arboreal as is depicted here. Trees. Trees everywhere. It looks like the season was mostly filmed in Dallas, as for the first two series, which explains a lot and is rather irritating. Rather than fake it badly, come to sunny Arizona and film here, dammit!

Grumbling aside, it did improve in the second half, after the roles were reversed and it was Camila who was scrambling to find shelter from her enemies. It was a nice switch, and a harsh reminder for those living in the narco-universe, that you can’t trust anyone, no matter how close they may be to you. I was pleased to see a definitive resolution to the love-triangle between Teresa, James (Gadiot) and the boyfriend from her previous life, Guero. We also enjoyed the ongoing quirkiness of King George (Ryan O’Nan), though the final episode showed a VERY dark and vengeful side to his character. On the other hand, the guest appearances by rapper Snow Tha Product and her microbladed eyebrows… Well, we ended up derisively referring to her as “Miss Tha Product”.

It all finishes in a relatively tidy fashion, rather than the semi-cliffhanger which marked the end of series two, and it would be an adequate way to draw the line if that turns out to be the end of the show. The status of a fourth series is uncertain, a notable change from last time, where its renewal was announced before the season finale was broadcast. However, the rating for this series were only fractionally lower than the second set, and in the key 18-49 demographic it was USA Network’s most-watched renewal [as opposed to new programs]. I’d not be at all surprised to see Teresa return once more, and at least the strong nature of the second half bodes better for a fourth season than if it had gone in the other direction.

Star: Alice Braga, Veronica Falcon, Peter Gadiot, Yancey Arias

Strong Girl Bong-soon

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★★★
“A not unpleasant Korean stew.”

The 16-part series proved an unexpected sleeper hit in its native land, more than doubling the audience from debut to finale. This is all over the place in terms of genre, with comedy, thriller, romance and action threads. While they aren’t equally successful, it does a pretty decent job of managing most of them, and is surprisingly accessible for a Western audience. The heroine is Do Bong-soon (Park B-Y), the latest in a matriarchal line of very strong women. She has been brought up to keep her power suppressed, due to the potential issues it can cause; Bong-soon has also been warned that if she misuses them, and hurts an undeserving person, they will go away. [Let’s not worry too much about how this presents an easy solution: slap one innocent, and she would become just like everyone else…]

Additionally hampered by low self-esteem, she has so far largely flown under the radar, but that ends when she stops someone from being bullied by an organized crime gang. The incident is witnessed by Ahn Min-hyuk (Park H-S), head of a game company, who is dealing with a stalker and hires Bong-soon as his bodyguard. She starts to fall for her boss, but is conflicted due to having feelings for long-time friend, In Guk-doo (Ji). He’s now a local cop, investigating a series of kidnappings which have terrorised the local area.

All these threads and more, intermingle and develop over the course of the series. The crime gang, who are trying to redevelop the area, seek revenge on Bong-soon, only to become semi-permanent residents in hospital. A group of young local wannabe gangsters turn to Bong-soon as their leader. Her parents go through relationship difficulties. The psycho kidnapper’s attentions target a victim too close to our heroine for comfort. She tries to leverage her bodyguard position into achieving her ambition, which is to design video games. She has a gay supervisor, who has a crush on their boss. Yeah, there’s a lot going on here: everything from a soppy post-teenage love-triangle to something which borders on Silence of the Lambs.

Credit is due, therefore, that the end result is even watchable, given this scattergun approach, though obviously some elements are not very interesting from my perspective. It’s hard to see quite who might enjoy all the angles; on the other hand, perhaps this is a case of there being something for everyone? Park B-Y is admirably deadpan as Bong-soon, dealing with the bizarre hand life has dealt her, and the action scenes, although less frequent than I’d like, are decently handled: the highlight is probably her duel with the entire crime syndicate in a warehouse. It works better for me in the first half, when the various elements gel into a more coherent whole: later on, it becomes almost entirely about the kidnapper or the love triangle, and the switches in tone feel more jarring. I can’t say I’m eagerly anticipating a second series, yet didn’t mind what’s certainly a different take on the genre of super-powers.

Dir: Lee Hyung-min
Star: Park Bo-young, Park Hyung-sik, Ji Soo, Jang Mi-kwan

GLOW: season two

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★★★½
“Twoooooooo….”

I don’t typically binge-watch shows, being generally content with an episode or two per week. For the second season of GLOW, Netflix’s original series (very) loosely based on 80’s TV show Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling, we made an exception and blitzed through the series in a couple of days. This in itself is a recommendation – with most of the episodes running barely 30 minutes, it was very much a case of “just one more…” Before we knew it, we were done, and left with a vague feeling of emptiness and slight regret at having burned the 10 episodes so quickly.

Is it as freshly original as the first series? I’m inclined to say not quite, mostly because it’s treading in its own footsteps. Some aspects have improved – not least the wrestling, which (under the continued tutelage of Chavo Guerrero, who makes a cameo on the final episode) is now probably better than anything the real Gorgeous Ladies ever managed. But the balance seems to have tilted. It feels more like a soap opera with occasional interludes of sports entertainment, while its predecessor went the other way. This series is also rather more strident and obvious in its morality, not least a ham-handed shoehorning in of a #MeToo narrative that had #MeRollingMyEyes.

If the first season was about the struggle up the mountain to make the show, this one is about the fight to stay on the summit and avoid cancellation, in the face of evaporating sponsors and an unengaged TV station, as well as the ongoing relationship between its top stars: former soap star Debbie, a.k.a. Liberty Belle (Gilpin) and bit-part actress Ruth, a.k.a. Zoya the Destroya (Brie). This comes to a literal crunch when a coked-up Debbie genuinely breaks Ruth’s ankle during a match – an incident inspired by a badly dislocated arm suffered by Susie Spirit in the real GLOW.

Some scenes, and even entire episodes, are great: the GLOW parody of “USA for Africa” is perfect, as is the anti-teen sex PSA Debbie assembles. And the eighth episode is, save for the final few seconds in which life decides to imitate art, an entire TV episode of the supposed show. It’s a faithful recreation of the style – albeit with rather less wrestling than the “real” thing – and is glorious, something I’d happily watch every week. The performances throughout are beautifully nuanced, with the best being Brie, and Maron as the show’s good-hearted bastard director Sam Sylvia.

But there were enough flaws in the writing as well as weaker episodes (especially during the first half); combined with the lack of any much sense of building on the previous season, I have to give it a slightly lower rating. Debbie’s coke use, for example, comes out of nowhere and goes there too. Maybe things like that will become more relevant in any third series: this one ends with the cast and crew heading to Las Vegas [finally catching up with the real GLOW, who were based out of there]. Until then… Well, we’ll just have to watch Lucha Underground instead.

Created by:: Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch
Star: Alison Brie, Betty Gilpin, Marc Maron, Sydelle Noel

Night Swallows

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★★★
“Flying tonight…”

This week, we’ve been focusing on Soviet military heroines of World War II, and as well as Spies, I also found this Russian TV series, about the female biplane pilots, known to the Germans as the “Night Witches”. Here, their name has been changed for the series title – a tad unfortunately, in some regards – and this falls short of Spies in terms of emotional wallop and overall coherence, among other angles. It’s still worth a look though.

The two lead characters are Galya Shevchenko (Nilova) and Zhenya Zvonareva (Arntgolts), members of the 46th Guards Night Bomber Aviation Regiment, founded to take advantage of an untapped resource of women pilots, navigators and engineers. Except, the former has been grounded after going off-book and bombing a German convoy for reasons more personal than military. It takes intervention by legendary flier and regiment founder Marina Raskova for Galya to dodge a court-martial, and that sets the tone, with Galya the wild-card, working with the more restrained Zhenya, under their long-suffering commanding officer.

It seems the makers didn’t think the straightforward bombing missions would generate sufficient drama to propel the series, and I can see how that might be a little limited in scope. They tack on various other plots, such as the efforts by their CO’s assistant to get the women in trouble – it’s a bit more gender mixed than the real 46th. The main thread is their work in support of an undercover team, operating behind German lines, run by Alexander Makeev (Nikiforov). For example, the regiment provide air cover for a raid on a convoy carrying important military documents, or a mission to recover technology from a downed plane – the latter, also used in Spies. [Sidenote: I always thought night vision wasn’t invented until, maybe, Vietnam. But the series has it used by the Germans in WW2, and Wikipedia confirms this]

This approach does make it somewhat fragmented; there’s less flow, and also less sense of character development, than Spies managed. Must say though, it’s all rather too glamorous to be convincing: the four lead actresses all appear to have arrived straight out of Supermodel Flight School. It almost feels as if the Soviet Air Force recruited mostly from Robert Palmer’s backing dancers [Kids! Ask your parents!]; in reality, flying ability was valued over how good you looked doing it, and the regiment covered the full spectrum of attractiveness. The horrors of life during wartime here are largely limited to some cute smudges of grease now and again, rather than the reality of life described by one pilot: “We were filthy, exhausted and hungry. We were just trying to survive.”

If you don’t get much feeling of the women being part of a larger battle – in part because there’s no updates  on the ebb and flow of the war elsewhere – the individual episodes are generally fine. The best is probably one where the regiment and Makeev’s team have to infiltrate a German chemical weapons testing ground, which is using Russian civilians as the subjects. It’s chilling, and reminded me a little of a similar element in Wonder Woman. Speaking of chilly, the bleak, snow-covered landscapes are a fittingly frosty backdrop, against which the cold-hearted conflict of the Eastern front can unfold, and the cinematography is effective, making the most of the landscapes. However, the flight aspects are a bit up and down: some scenes work very well, yet others are obviously composites and/or shaky CGI.

I’d perhaps have been more impressed if I’d seen this before Spies, which set the bar really high in terms of quality. Compared to that, this is a little disappointing, if decent enough. While other attempts to tell the Night Witches story have foundered, I’m simply pleased to see anything that covers the topic, even with room for improvement. The entire 8-episode series is available on YouTube, with English subs, so you can give it a shot easily enough.

Dir: Mikhail Kabanov
Star: Tatyana Arntgolts, Elizaveta Nilova, Denis Nikiforov, Evgeniy Ganelin
a.k.a. Ночные ласточки and Nochnye lastochki

Night Swallows
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Spies

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★★★★
“Red spies delight.”

I stumbled across this Russian TV series on Amazon Prime during our annual freebie month, but not until the final weekend, so wasn’t able to watch it there. Happily, I discovered the entire show has been uploaded to YouTube – embedded below, complete with English subtitles – and it’s well worth a watch. It’s set during World War II, and tells the story of two young women, from diverging backgrounds, both of whom are recruited in 1941, somewhat unwillingly. to act as intelligence operatives, during the early day

The first is Arina Prozorovskaya (Ivanova), a party girl – as in Communist Party, being a true believer whose idealism is tested after her father is accused of activities against the state. Then there’s Zoya Velichko (Ustinova), a criminal who is Nikita‘d out of prison by the spy group’s commander, Major Egorievich Vorotynnikov (Vdovichenkov). Adding to the tension between them: Zoya was involved in a robbery that went wrong, leading to the death of Arina’s mother at the hands of Zoya’s then-boyfriend. The pair end up being the top students in the class, even though training is cut short due to the German invasion. When Vorotynnikov needs two women for a mission, it’s therefore Arina and Zoya who are dispatched to risk everything, on the first of a number of dangerous jobs behind enemy lines.

Once we got past a weirdness about its presentation (we’ll get to this in a moment), both Chris and I thoroughly enjoyed this. The two Svetlanas make their heroines multi-faceted characters, who have fascinating arcs over the dozen 50-minute episodes. Arina becomes far more cynical, largely due to the treatment she and her husband, a member of the Red Army, suffer at the hands of authorities. Conversely, Zoya’s hard exterior, where the only person that matters is her young daughter, gradually softens. She falls for Vorotynnikov’s deputy, Captain Nikolay Petrov (Pronin) – really the first person to have shown genuine affection in her adult life – which helps her become a strong, loyal and fearless agent. Credit is also due to a solid supporting cast:  Vdovichenkov is outstanding as a man forced to navigate between his loyalty to the state and to those under his command, as well as Irina Apeksimova in the role of spy teacher Matilda, a role apparently influenced by Jeanne Moreau’s in Nikita.

It is a little fragmented in the early going, and not initially clear where the focus of the show will lie. However, once it settles on Arina and Zoya, it gets into a very good rhythm. Each mission takes place over a couple of episodes, allowing them to develop without feeling rushed. They’re varied enough to avoid repetition, showcasing different facets of espionage, from reconnaissance and infiltration, through to Arina becoming a “red sparrow”, and having to overcome qualms about being faithful to her husband.  There’s a sense of danger almost every moment (enhanced by my experience of Russian novels, where everyone usually dies tragically!).

This is most apparent in an episode where Zoya helps a badly-injured Petrov through a forest, only for a dramatic reversal at the end, which ranks among the most impactful “bait and switches” in our TV viewing history. This is just one of the memorable moments that will stick in our mind. Another is Arina’s “honey-pot” target, who initially seems decent enough… until he describes to her an incident where his Luftwaffe squadron attacked a civilian target, killing Russian women and children, after he over-rode the objections of his men. The expressions that flicker across Arina’s face as he tells the story, and she is clearly struggling to suppress the urge to stab him repeatedly on her throat, are quite awesome.

In the YouTube version at least (I can’t speak for the Amazon Prime edition), there is an oddity whenever characters speak any language but Russian – mostly German, as in the scene mentioned above. As well as the English subs, that dialogue is also over-dubbed into Russian, and all characters, male or female, get the same male voice. While I believe this is standard practice in that country, it takes a bit of getting used to, especially when it’s two women who are conversing! However, it certainly didn’t significantly interfere with our entertainment.

By the end, Chris and I were completely engrossed and on the edge of our seats as to whether Arina and Zoya would make it out alive. I won’t spoil that, though have to say we felt it was entirely appropriate, and left us emotionally satisfied. If this is in any way typical of Russian television, we’ll have to see what other hidden gems might be out there for us to find.

Dir: Felix Gertskhikov
Star: Svetlana Ivanova, Svetlana Ustinova, Vladimir Vdovichenkov, Evgeny Pronin
a.k.a. Разведчицы

Bancroft: season one

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★★★½
“The thin grey line.”

When young detective Katherine Stevens (Marsay) gets assigned a batch of cold cases by her boss, Clifford Walker (Edmondson), it seems a task of little interest. The batch includes the brutal stabbing murder of a young woman, 27 years previously – coincidentally, the first cop on the scene, Elizabeth Bancroft (Parish), is now a senior officer. Indeed, she’s competing with Walker for the job of soon-to-retire Detective Chief Superintendent, and bringing down local crime boss Athif Kamara would all but guarantee her the job. So, nothing will be allowed to stand in Bancroft’s way. Not Walker, and certainly not a rookie detective, poking her nose into cases which should stay closed. Because three decades of forensic advances mean that the murder Stevens has re-opened may no longer be quite as insoluble as it was…

The fact that the show’s title is Bancroft, and not “Stevens”, tells you where the focus is here, on the villainess – or, you could perhaps argue, anti-heroine. Perhaps the closest comparable show I can think of is Dexter, particularly in that both shows have a central character who hides their true nature in the police force. In Bancroft’s case, the murderous tendencies have also been very deeply buried; however, it comes out again when her position is threatened by Stevens’s investigation. Yet there’s plenty of evidence of her generally “flexible” morality, shall we say. For instance, she brokers an agreement with Athif’s younger brother, letting him take over, in exchange for information on his sibling and a tacit agreement to co-operate with her in future. The logic is pure pragmatism: someone you know, and can control, is better than a wild-card. It makes for fascinating viewing.

Bancroft is also very manipulative, as can be seen in her relationship with the impressionable Stevens. At least initially, the younger police officer looks up to her as a role-model, and that makes it easy for Bancroft to twist Stevens to her ends, such as withholding evidence discovered from Walker. But over the arc of the four 45-minute episodes which form the first series, Stevens shows dogged persistence and determination as well, and gets a crash course in maturity. As well, perhaps, as one in striking a balance between your career and your personal life, something with which Bancroft appears always to have struggled.

The main thing preventing this from getting a higher rating, and likely our seal of approval, is the unsatisfactory final episode, which simply leaves too many loose ends dangling – not least the one resulting from the picture above. The show has been renewed for a second series: fortunate, because if it hadn’t, the inadequate conclusion offered would have caused us to join the large mob with torches, marching on the producers’ building.  To be honest, the four-part arc was likely too short to tell the story they wanted to, and it might be fairer to judge this after the next batch of episodes. But in its title character, there’s plenty to appreciate, offering the kind of woman still rarely seen on television, and is alone enough to ensure we’ll be tuning back in.

Creator: Kate Brooke
Star: Sarah Parish, Faye Marsay, Amara Karan, Adrian Edmondson

Killing Eve: Season One

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★★★★
“You should never call a psychopath a psychopath. It upsets them.”

A genuinely organic hit on BBC America, this generated so much word of mouth that the ratings for this show behaved in an unexpected fashion. Including those who DVR’d the show, viewership increased for each episode over its 8-week run. That’s a rare feat these days, and is testament to the show’s unique qualities. So confident were the station in the show, that is was renewed for a second season before it had even premiered – another unusual achievement. But then, this show is arguably unlike anything else on television.

The heroine is Eve Polastri (Oh), an officer in the British intelligence service, MI-5, who believes there’s a connection between a string of assassinations across Europe. She’s right: they were all carried out be Oksana Astankova (Comer), codename “Villanelle”. Oksana is a pure, undiluted psychopath, working for a shadowy Russian organization known as “The Twelve”, under handler Konstantin Vasiliev (Bodnia). Polastri’s career is apparently ended when a witness to one of Oksana’s hits is killed in her care, and she’s fired from MI-5. However, this allows her to be recruited by Carolyn Martens (Shaw) for a off-book investigation into Villanelle.

Eve is therefore able to continue digging into Oksana’s history and activities, but the target becomes aware of the interest – signalling that knowledge by using “Eve Polastri” for her identity during a job. From here, it’s a spiral of increasingly intense cat-and-mouse, with Eve and her team tracking the assassin, while also being hunted by her. It all grows deeply personal for both Eve and Oksana, the two women developing a perverse long-distance relationship that’s more of a fixation, on both sides. Note: I’m not using “perverse” in relation to the homoerotic elements. It’s just… really bizarre. As in, “Villanelle breaking into Eve’s house, in order to have dinner with her” strange.

The show is defiantly messy in terms of its characters, who manage both to embody the stereotypes of the dogged law-enforcement official and the slick, femme fatale, while also subverting them. From the viewpoint of this site, Oksana is likely the more interesting. As a high concept, imagine a female version of Dexter: charming and affable on the surface, yet extraordinary lethal – and capable of flicking that switch in a moment. The difference is, Villanelle has chosen not to control and direct her “dark passenger” so much as embrace them fully, and is given the chance to do so by the profession into which she is recruited. It also allows her to indulge her fondness for haute couture.

She enjoys her work, to an almost scary degree, disdaining the simplest and most directly effective methods, too. That’d be boring, especially for such a free spirit. Why shoot, when you can kill your target by stabbing them in the eye with a hatpin instead? On the other hand, she is also incredibly manipulative. Oksana may not be able to feel any genuine emotions of her own, yet she’s supremely good at faking them, and will happily say what you want to hear, if she thinks it’ll let her use you for her own advantage. Her handler doesn’t so much control the incredibly self-confident Villanelle as unleash her in the direction of the intended target. Who inevitably ends up dead… just not necessarily quite as he would prefer.

The contrast to Eve could hardly be greater, and that perhaps goes some way to explaining the agent’s obsession: Oksana is everything Eve wants to be. Okay, except for the “psychopathic killer” bit. But that’s just a detail, right? For Eve is stuck in a rather tedious relationship, and works a job where her talents are under-used and even less appreciated. The more she learns about her target, the greater the appeal seems to be, and it works both ways: Villanelle wants “someone to watch movies with”. Or says she does anyway: this could just be another manipulative ploy, it’s impossible to be sure. Espionage, counter-espionage and assassination is a murky world at the best of times. Here? You can’t see the murk for the deceit, and at times the lies become a bit overwhelming.

After a long career expressing earnest concern on medical soap Grey’s Anatomy, Oh’s career has undergone a spectacular sea-change of late. First, there was the awesome Catfight, and now this, little if any less successful, which allows Oh to show her remarkable range of expressive… er, expressions [Seriously: you could spend an entire episode just watching her face, to the exclusion of everything else, and still be entranced]. Comer is nowhere near as well-known, but I doubt we’ll see a more memorable female character on television this year than Oksana, combining childish innocence, girlish glee and savage psychopathy. When it comes to Emmy time, it will be a travesty if at least one of them is not nominated – and ideally both. The supporting cast are no slouches either.

I will confess to being less than whelmed by the final episode which, rather than ramping up, petered out into something approaching a slumber party. Admittedly, it’s a very weird one, befitting the show, and sees Eve violate Oksana’s personal bubble of living space, partly in retaliation for the same thing happening to her earlier. But it offers no sense at all of closure: this may be a side-effect of the show having been pre-renewed. I guess there’s no point making any effort to wrap things up, when you know you’re going to be back.

Still, for 7½ episodes, this was far and away the best thing on American TV at the moment. To get one of these amazing characters in a show would have been more than acceptable. Having both in the same series provides a one-two punch of heroine and anti-heroine that’s almost unsurpassed in television history. Buffy and Faith, or Xena and Callisto, perhaps come close – although they were only story arcs. Here, Eve and Oksana are a pure, undiluted focus, and it’s glorious. The second season can’t get here soon enough.

Creator: Phoebe Waller-Bridge
Star: Sandra Oh, Jodie Comer, Fiona Shaw, Kim Bodnia