Babylon 5 is one of the most excellent and rubbish TV shows ever to air. It walked a fine line between genius and AmDram. It was a product of the 1990s that would, probably, have been a massive hit if it had come out in the 1980s, except technology would have made it far too expensive to make and more than likely it would have suffered a similar fate as it did when it actually came out. It also might have worked in the 2000s, if it hadn't been made before.
To cut to the chase, B5 was originally going to be a FIVE season story. It got cancelled and reprieved so many times, so late in the production calendar, that JM Straczynski - the creator - and his team were forever reshuffling their deck until, in the end, what we ended up with was five series that could probably have been crammed into two. It ended up having a lot of quick endings for long-simmering plots, which would have benefited from guaranteed survival and budgets and illness meant everything from the cast to the stories became far more fluid (in a brown and runny way) and haphazard than it was planned.
I have a soft place in my heart for B5, but watching a bunch of 'key' episodes last year made me realise just how rubbish it looks now. It was way ahead of its time but stuck in a familiar trope. It deserved better and one day, maybe someone, will reboot it and do it some justice (or maybe they won't).
With that aside over, I should point out that the TV series I'm about to talk about had almost as many reprieves as Babylon 5 and probably suffered just as much from having to constantly rewrite and rethink how to go forward. I am, of course, talking about Lucifer...
When it started back in 2016 it was met with a lot of controversy. A TV show about the devil, as the hero of a show. Religious geeks were up in arms; if Christians and Catholics could have held a jihad against the creators of the TV show they would but instead it was just a crap cop procedural with the devil helping an LA police detective solve some of the easiest murders ever to reach the small screen. In fact, halfway through its first series, it became obvious that what we had was a crap cop show with a large helping of ad hoc chaos thrown in; just enough to make those who were hooked think we might be onto something different. The reality was, it wasn't. It was a formula based show that reinvented the Casualty idea of guessing who was going to fall victim by transposing that into 'is the first person they interview always going to be the killer'?
The element of chaos, especially in the first couple of series, was that Tom Ellis - best known as Miranda's boyfriend in the UK sitcom - didn't seem to be working off the same script as everyone else and the comedic element crushed the concerns of the religious geeks. By the end of season two the writing appeared to be on the wall for the show which was building as big a cult following as B5 had in the '90s. Season three was going to be the last and even before its three reprieves, the writers decided to leave it dangling with a cliff hanger ending.
Then Netflix came along, picked the show up and decided to give it another series and this is where the best worst thing on TV started to fuck up...
Lucifer, in many ways, is the 21st century version of Moonlighting, a show that was phenomenal until Bruce Willis and Cybil Shepherd got it on, then it struggled to have the same electricity and drifted into oblivion with only Willis coming out of it with any kind of lasting cinematic longevity. While Shepherd had already been a star for a while, it was Willis who became the superstar. You could sense by the end of the third season of Lucifer that Tom Ellis is going to be a huge star - the new Hugh Jackman; an actor who can sing, dance, do drama, comedy, and is as handsome as the devil. Lauren German, his foil in Chloe Decker of the LAPD, isn't likely to have anything like Shepherd's career, but as the series dragged into later, originally unplanned, series, you could see the writers were going to have a problem with her character.
The big ending to what was the final series was Lucifer revealing his true devil-self while protecting Chloe from the mob. It was a BIG reveal - it was the moment Bruce kissed Cybil in Moonlighting - and because of that the ongoing comedy 'secret' was now no longer a secret. What followed was, in truth, painstakingly dull and awkward and as the cast grew with more celestial characters and the plot became more convoluted, while remaining largely a police procedural. Season four followed a slightly daft plot of Chloe being recruited by a covert wing of the Catholic church to kill Lucifer, while simultaneously Lucifer gets involved with Eve (of Adam fame) [again] and all the while you wondered what the actual point of it all was.
Chloe's origin became celestial and what was going to be the final season five introduced us to God and whether Lucifer would become the new God as the old one wanted to bugger off with his ex-wife into an entirely different universe. Season five wasn't helped by being filmed during the start of the pandemic, which gave it a sparse, half-assed feel and the lack of anything resembling a decent budget made this huge denouement seem a bit crap - much like the reason for originally falling for the series. The introduction of Lucifer's twin - Michael - really didn't help matters and season five finished on a kind of extra-curricular cliff hanger, because Lucifer had just won the eternal throne and was now God.
But the final reprieve had already been granted by the time they finished filming, which meant they had to go, yet again, and try and stretch out stories that probably didn't warrant it. By the time season five concluded, Lucifer had simply become a crap TV show without any of the charm that made it such a hit. There were maybe half a dozen episodes in S5 that were any good and add that the the half dozen or so from S4 and you soon realised that you'd get as much out of watching reruns of early 1970s Colombo episodes.
It was still must see TV though, mainly because you were so invested in Tom Ellis's almost continuously excellent acting [as Lucifer, not as Michael]. His adlibs, distinctly British colloquialisms and ability to make everything seem irreverent and all about him never really grew boring, as you might expect it should have, but by the time Season six came along even that was gone, because we were in completely weird and wacky territory. We went into the final 10 episodes knowing a major character was dead but still in it and that Lucifer was stalling on becoming God, apart from that...
I should mention how Chloe's character and actress German both became dowdy and uninteresting for a large chunk of the reprieves. It almost felt like she didn't enjoy the way the show was going and showed it by putting in half-hearted performances; almost dialling in her performances, as the ending drew close you sometimes wondered just what Lucifer saw in her.
[I've purposefully not talked about the comic this series is very loosely based on because the TV show treated that like a lunatic half wit cousin that no one talked about and short of that brief mention all I'll say is that while some elements of the comic were touched upon it was as relevant as a remake of Alien with Matt Lucas as the monster.]
You would have thought that with just 10 episodes to play with there would have been more urgency to do something truly different in the final FINAL season; they could have had a lot of fun because Lucifer is now a worldwide hit and they could probably have got away with it, as it was there is something oddly low-key about it, like it was still trying to remain what it was but all the characters had moved on. It introduces a time-travel element and essentially ties up all the supporting cast's own stories, leaving Lucifer and Chloe's to the final few. There's a strangely unfulfilling element to all of it and by the time we get half way through the penultimate episode, pretty much everything is resolved. There's a logic to the finale but I, personally, had long stopped caring.
I had an idea in my head how it would all conclude and I can say, quite honestly, that I got one right and one almost right, apart from that the final 53 minute show did enough to inspire me to write this...
I've purposely avoided spoilers because people will come to this show in the future and be charmed by it and enjoy it for what it ultimately became - popcorn TV. However, the final episode might possibly be the perfect way to end a TV show, for good. Once the main story arc is resolved and we know the fates of our lead characters it does something really weird; it montages the next years of Chloe's life until we come full circle to the point where the time travel plotline actually begins; it briefly follows the lives of all the supporting cast and concludes with something that I can only describe as... brilliantly awful - a fitting ending in many ways. Except, the ending is sweet and it makes you smile and it makes you sad and it makes you realise that there will be no reprieves this time. It also has, like many times before, the strangest of choices of music for said montage - an almost perfect choice, but don't ask me why. I don't really know.
I could go into great detail about the show, but that would be pulling wings off of flies. There is an awful lot not to like about it; the superficial nature of it all, but it is ultimately a fantasy series that never really took itself seriously and really failed miserably when it did. It was always best when it was a 'will they won't they' idea and it never seemed to want to dwell on the whys and the hows and the craziness of God and angels being real. It was always paced in that unique TV way that suggests life on TV shows can be ponderous and lackadaisical about pressing issues to whatever character it was happening to, unlike real life. It really was a case of "I know who the killer is, but I'll wait until we're back in the precinct or walking to your car before making the big reveal."
But that final episode was both crap and perfect and it has stuck with me much longer than I would have expected.
***
After rambling far too long on that, let's zip through a few...
Midnight Mass is a seven-part mini-series by Mike Flanagan, who directed the Haunting of Hill House series and the Stephen King book Dr Sleep. He's quite well respected and he does make relatively good TV. I don't want to give anything away in this series because almost any spoiler will give away some nice tricks, but it was unrelentingly wordy, religious and grim. You have to take everything about it out of context because it is set on a sparsely habited island 30 miles from an undisclosed US mainland coast.
It was all right. The continuity freak in me struggled to understand how some of the island can be in autumn, some in summer and some in winter all at the same time and why the acting was either really excellent or painfully grating. Hamish Linklater deserves to go on to be the next Tom Hanks, but by the end I was glad it was over.
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Rewind a couple of years and read me waxing lyrically about Doom Patrol. It was unique TV and while it had 'issues' it was a fun and utterly bonkers ride. They seemed to lose that edge in season 2 and it became more character and story driven without really giving anything away and when the pandemic struck it ended on a cliff-hanger that all seemed a little meh.
The characters who made the show - Larry Trainer, Rita Farr and to some extent Cliff Steele (although Brendan Frazer's voice gets on your tits sometimes) were bizarre and crazy and unpredictable; the bizarre, mad and unpredictable one was Crazy Jane, who seemed both not that crazy or often Jane and while her character's actor is the lead the mystery behind her was far more interesting than the consequences of it. However the focus seemed to centre on elements of these characters that seemed superficial or stupid during season 2 and there was far too much navel-gazing, probably because of COVID restrictions.
Season three has tried to go in positive directions but seems to have completely lost it. Removing The Chief's daughter - an irritating character you should really all want to hate - seemed like a great idea, but introducing Michelle Gomez to fill the void is... Let's put it this way, Gomez in West Wing was brilliant. Gomez in Dr Who was essentially Gomez in Green Wing with added madness and power. Gomez in Doom Patrol is a scattier, hair-brained version of those two combined and I'm now wondering if Gomez can actually do anything else?
The Chief is dead, but you kind of know he isn't, even if all vestiges of his body have been destroyed and we're left with an increasing annoying Robotman - Cliff's story is weak; a very out of character Rita - now doing stuff in a most unRita way; Larry's journey seems to have wandered round a maze for two seasons and Jane's multi-personality 'underground' is just boring. I want to know how it was built not why there's a power struggle, yet again, with her many personalities. Oh and Cyborg... He's always been the lamest character, but now he's a whiny annoying twat. Maybe this is on purpose, but the trend is for this over the last season and a half and I think that's the route the writers are going rather than stay weird and surreal. Don't get me wrong; they're trying to be that now, but it simply isn't working.
I stopped the most recent episode with 15 minutes to go and went and did a load of stuff before watching it about three hours later. I'd forgotten I was watching it. I'm having serious doubts about my staying power with it. That's a shame, there was once an endearing cheapness about it that is now just looking cheap.
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I'm counting down the days to the end of The Walking Dead. Part of my life I'll never get back...
However, while that flops its way out of existence, the second and concluding season of The World Beyond has just restarted and despite it really being a dreadful pile of shite, there's finally a proper villain in this post-apocalyptic world that you can get your head around. Juliet Binoche as the 'Operations manager' of a division of an independent post-apocalyptic state called the Civic Republic, who, it appears are actually worse than Nazis and have most of the US military's equipment and nutters to back them up. If you think The Commonwealth is 'dodgy' if you're watching TWD, the CRM make jokes of every independent survivor left roaming the earth. In the opening episode they literally killed off 100,000 survivors because they didn't want the competition.
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Free Guy didn't cost me anything so I watched it and it was free. It was a film. It was called Free Guy. It had Ryan Reynolds in it. I bet he wasn't free.
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The Green Knight was pretty to look at and pretty bloody boring.
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I gave up on What If? after one episode. Why did it have to be so dull, pointless and ugly? [See, that was better than the 3000 word bollocks you didn't publish about it!]
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RTD is back on DW. Well, it can't be worse than the last bloke and his bloody earnest and dull fables.
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Invincible? Gave up on it as it wasn't very good. I read the comic, briefly, in the early 00s and this didn't resemble it in my addled memory. Why does Western animation have to look so... fake and faux anime now? I expect it's because it's cheap, but it's also really lacking in all the key areas.
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And then I started to realise that I've seen a lot of things since the last one of these (in June) and most of it has simply washed over me, or left such an impression that even bleach couldn't remove it. Take Werewolves Within for starters. The Guardian rated it FIVE stars, calling it a 'riotous comedy' with lots of twists and turns. It was not very funny at all, I LOLed once in the 93 minutes. Every single twist and turn was as predictable as the next scene and it was fucking awful.
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We watched Clarkson's Farm. It was going to be me watching Clarkson's Farm but the wife gave the first episode a watch and deemed to want to watch all 8 over the space of four days. It was that good. It was post-modern Dadaist Clarkson surrounded by people - professional people - who didn't suffer fools gladly and before long it turned into an interesting series on the struggles of modern farming presented by a pillock who had to learn fast. However derided Clarkson might be, this was excellent TV.
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I forgot to mention in previous blogs that we had also watched James May's cooking programme, which was a) a waste of James May and b) actually quite erudite and charming in a strange way. And also the Top Ge... I mean, Grand Tour of Scotland was disappointing on a number of levels, but probably the strangest was 90 minutes spent in a country and they didn't speak to one single Scotsman. I also think the new team doing Top Gear are, at least, making the show fun to watch again.
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Have I said anything about Black Widow? I must have... Did I say that since I saw it I have OT Fagbenle's name ear worming me at times?
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We have Foundation waiting for us to watch and probably a few returning series to hit over the coming dark and gloomy months, as we huddle round a candle for warmth and fight over the last carrot...
Loved Clarkson's farm
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