DC's Legends Of Tomorrow: Timey Wimey Times Nine

DC's Legends Of Tomorrow (CW, Thursdays 8 pm)

Greg Berlanti invested quite a bit of screentime on his two CW superhero shows, Arrow and The Flash, to introduce the cast of his new faux-Justice League mashup, DC's Legends of Tomorrow - perhaps to the detriment of those established shows.  For fans of Marvel's Avengers, or DC fans thirsting for the upcoming Justice League film, Legends Of Tomorrow promises lots of action and plenty of characters, including former League of Assassins killer-turned-Black Canary Sara Lance (Caity Lotz,) reincarnated winged avengers Hawkman and Hawkgirl (Falk Hentschel and Ciara Renee,) former Superman Brandon Routh as The Atom,  and Victor Garber and Franz Drameh as the two very different men (one an eminent scientist, the other a 20-something athlete) who combine their powers into Firestorm (DC's ripoff of the Human Torch.)  Just to keep things interesting, the team also includes two supervillains, Dominic Purcell as the brutish Heat Wave and Wentworth Miller as the calculating Captain Cold.  Even the series' bad guy, immortal villain Vandal Savage (Casper Crump) was introduced on a Flash/Arrow crossover arc.

This unlikely team has been recruited by Rip Hunter (Arthur Darvill,), a "Time Master" who's stolen a time machine to try and stop Vandal Savage from conquering the earth.  It's hard to watch this and not think of Doctor Who (especially since Darvill's best known to American audiences primarily as Rory, companion to Matt Smith's 12th Doctor.) In fact, Rip Hunter was introduced in DC Comics several years before the Doctor's debut on the BBC, but most fans won't know that (or be familiar with the Rip Hunter character.) And Berlanti has done nothing to blunt the obvious comparisons:  Rip Hunter's time machine is more Millennium Falcon than TARDIS, but for a show that's all about the future, the basic premise leans creakily on the familiar.

Hunter rounds up his league of heroes and bad guys and explains that they've left no mark on history; future generations remember none of them.  By banding together to defeat Savage, they'll become.... legends.  That prospect has obvious appeal to Sara Lance, Ray "Atom" Palmer, and Dr. Martin Stein, the 60-ish half of Firestorm.  Firestorm's younger half needs more convincing, although he's eventually won over when the team selflessly bands together to defeat a time-traveling bounty hunter.  And Hawkman and Hawkgirl have been murdered by Vandal Savage hundreds of time through history, through umpteen reincarnations, so they're naturally eager to end him.  The bad guys have much murkier motives; Capt. Cold envisions using Rip's time machine to pillage history, stealing everything from the Mona Lisa to the Hope diamond, and Heat Wave is just along for the ride.  So there's your chance for conflict within the team.

Of course, none of this holds up to logic, and as superheroes go, this bunch isn't all that super: The Atom has a super-suit, and Firestorm has real superpowers, while Hawkman and Hawkgirl can sprout wings and fly. But otherwise, their biggest "power" is clobbering people with a mace. Sara Lance doesn't have any powers at all, and Capt. Cold and Heat Wave are just hoodlums with fancy guns. (Why would you even want to get in bed with an unpredictable sociopath with a glorified flamethrower when you've already got Firestorm on the team? Seems a bit redundant.)

Another problem is that Arthur Darvill looks more like a guy named Rory than Rip; he was a terrific companion but you'd never cast him as the Doctor.  Will he be believable keeping this volatile team on point and following orders?   

And finally, there's simply the size of the cast.  The closest comparison is probably Gotham, which tries to juggle a gallery of heroes and villains with mixed results.  There's no successful template for a show about a team of superheroes; think of all the failed attempts to bring the Fantastic Four successfully to the screen, or the mixed results with the X-Men.  Keeping all of Legend's characters involved  will be challenging if not impossible.  In the pilot, it often feels as if someone stood offscreen with a stopwatch and allowed every actor two minutes for character development before moving on to something else.

The premise of time travel - and setting each episode in another era, as the team tracks clues through time to find Savage's weaknesses - does have potential. In the pilot, there's a fight scene set in 1975 where "Love Will Keep Us Together" played on a jukebox that proved to be the liveliest and most entertaining set piece in the episode.  If Berlanti and his writers can keep finding inventive ways to plop these characters in amusing situations, DC's Legends Of Tomorrow might find its footing.

And besides, we just learned there won't be a new episode of Doctor Who until the 2016 Christmas special.  That's a long wait, so maybe fans will take their timey-wimey where they can get it.

Jessica Jones: A Marvel hero for grown ups

You've heard the hype: Marvel's Jessica Jones, streaming now on Netflix, is the best Marvel adaptation ever to come to television.   The bar hasn't been set all that high, of course, and I've only watched half the series, but I have to agree. 

Krysten Ritter as Jessica perfectly embodies the mood of the series, which unspools as an old-fashioned film noir detective flick.  It just so happens that this private eye has super strength, her on-again, off-again boyfriend is invulnerable, and she's up against a villain who can control minds.  The cast features mostly unknown actors who all make strong first impressions: Mike Colter makes for a dark, deeply wounded Luke Cage, Rachel Taylor perks up the show as Jessica's mentor and best friend, radio host Trish Walker, and Eka Darville brings vulnerability and hidden resolve to the role of Jessica's sidekick Malcom.

If there's a weak spot here, it's the former Doctor, David Tennant, as Jessica's arch-enemy Kilgrave. He's been written not so much as a supervillain but as an obsessed stalker, serial killer, and psychopath.  Kilgrave is very clever, and seemingly always one step ahead of Jessica, but what's his agenda?  He seems content with using his mind-control powers to make Jessica's life miserable, when he could easily just kill her and move on with conquering the world.

Jessica Jones the character debuted in 2001 in Alias Comics, long after I had stopped reading comic books, so I'm going into this series with only a bare bones idea of her (considerable) backstory.  And that's fine; Jessica Jones has been written so you don't have to know anything about the comics. Instead of ham-handedly giving us an origin episode (like seemingly every other comic book franchise to date,) Jessica's story unspools slowly in flashbacks and dialogue.  There are "cookies" embedded in the stories that will give comic book nerds goosebumps, but you don't have to get all the in-jokes to enjoy the series.

What we do learn is that a freak accident gave Jessica powers, including super strength and a limited ability to fly (although Jessica says it's more like "controlled falling.")   She set out to use those powers as a superhero, only to fall under Kilgrave's control and forced to commit horrible acts.  So Jessica decided to hide her powers and took up a new career as a private eye, albeit one with an edge who can snap open the strongest locks  and perch atop rooftops like Spiderman.

Like Netflix's Daredevil and ABC's  Agents Of SHIELD,  this series takes place in the familiar Marvel universe, a world with costumed super heroes and alien invasions.  We don't see them, though, they're just casually mentioned in throwaway dialogue, often jokes. The Avengers and the attack on New York depicted in the first Avengers film get mentioned and even figure in a sub-plot, although it would be more believable if Jessica's New York City showed some of that devastation.    (Apparently all those skyscrapers destroyed in the film have been rebuilt overnight; compare that to how long it took NYC to just clean up the WTC site at Ground Zero.)

If Jessica Jones reminds me of anything, its Watchmen, the film that convinced critics that  super hero movies could be "art."  With its gritty New York streets, jazzy score, and film noir voiceover narration, Jessica Jones deserves to be taken seriously; but don't worry.  It's also engrossing entertainment.

Into The Badlands: Steampunk Kung Fu With A Side of X-Men (Hold The Zombies)

AMC's  Into The Badlands (following Walking Dead on Sunday nights at 10 pm) was created by the same team  (Alfred Gough and Michael Millar) that gave us Smallville. But this time,k instead of reimagining a classic superhero story, Gough and Millar borrow from a half a dozen different genres, mixing kung fu with King Arthur,  Mad Max, and Heroes (or, if you prefer, X-Men.)

In a post-apocalyptic future, we're told, guns have been banned and seven rival baronies keep an uneasy peace through the use of Clippers, highly trained martial arts assassins.  We know this because in the first scene, an unarmed Clipper named Sunny (Daniel Wu) kills about a dozen "nomads" who scavenge the Badlands for sustenance.

If you're lucky in this world, you live on an estate protected by one of the Barons.  Serfs - or Cogs, as they're called here - till the fields (each Barony is responsible for one vital resource, like oil or food; Sunny's Baron Quinn grows poppies for opium.)  A select few get to live inside feudal castles, lit by candles and filled with young cadets hoping to be trained as Clippers.  Despite this being an apparently agrarian society, somehow someone somewhere still manufactures automobiles and motorcycles, as well as refining gasoline and producing rubber tires.  (It's a fantasy, people; you're not supposed to think about those things.)

After quickly disposing of those aforementioned nomads, Sunny pops open the trunk they were transporting and discovers a kidnapped teenager named M.K. (Aramis Knight.)  It seems a rival Baron (well, Baroness) named The Widow had hired the nomads to bring the boy to her.  Sunny brings M.K.  back to the Baron and lets him compete with the others in the training arena, but soon learns the kid has a secret:  Any time he bleeds, his eyes glow bright white and he develops the strength, speed, and martial arts skills of a super-ninja.

Back at the castle, it turns out the Baron's latest wife is shagging his grown son, and the Baron is having some serious migraine issues.  (Poison, maybe?) M.K., for his part, is on a quest to find his mother and return to his birthplace, a city called Azra that supposedly lies outside the badlands and is depicted on a medallion he wears around his neck. 

But the Baron's son ends up with the medallion, and M.K. is captured trying to get it back.  Rather than let the boy be executed, Sunny helps him escape, perhaps thinking Azra may be where he's from too (even though the Baron assures him there's nothing beyond the Badlands.)

So that's where we are.  Who is M.K. and where do his powers come from?  Why is The Widow plotting against Baron Quinn, and will it erupt into warfare?  And will Sunny be satisfied with his life as an assassin, or will he rebel and try to live a normal life with the woman he secretly loves?

As an accompaniment to The Walking Dead,  Into The Badlands should easily tap into the same audience - it's got plenty of thrills, violence, gore, and fantasy - without actually dragging zombies into the conversation (like the awful Fear The Walking Dead.) There hasn't been a good kung fu show on television in ages, so expect the body count to stay high, the fight scenes to be epic, and the plots to remain just clever enough to keep fans tuning in from week to week.  No, it's not Game Of Thrones, but it looks like it'll be a fun hour of escapist TV.

Miss Fisher's Muder Mysteries: Roll over, Hercule, and tell Miss Marple the news

PBS has just started airing Season 3 of Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries, providing the perfect excuse for me to bring this perfectly delightful period series to your attention.  (All of Season 3 is  available on Netflix, if you feel like binging. And you should.)
 
Based on a series of novels by Kerry Greenwood, Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries  whisks us back to Melbourne, Australia in the late 1920's, where the terribly modern Miss Phryne Fisher has taken up the occupation of female private detective, much to the chagrin of unflappable Detective Inspector Jack Robinson (Nathan Page) and his industrious constable, Hugh Collins (Hugo Johnstone-Burt.)

But the gem here is Essie Davis as Phryne Fisher, a woman raised in poverty but risen to great wealth and title. She looks like a Betty Boop cartoon come to life in her chic Twenties couture, stylish hats, and racy autombobile. But those who underestimate her will soon learn that there's a razor sharp mind under those bangs, (as well as a gold-plated pistol under those sheer nylons.). 

In fact, everything and everyone on this show captures the Twenties as convincingly as the BBC's great Poirot and Miss Marple mysteries bring back the Thirties and Forties.  The show is filmed in blushed pastels, looking for all the world like an old black-and-white film that's been colorized for modern audiences.

The mysteries are consistently well written and will keep you guessing, but the real fun is watching Miss Fisher slowly win over Detective Jack Robinson, just as Miss Fisher's companion Dot (the winning Ashleigh Cummings) wins the heart of Constable Hugh. Other standouts in the cast include the ineffable Richard Bligh as Miss Fisher's butler, Mr. Butler, and Miriam Margoyles as Phryne's empirious Aunt Prudence, who's always looking down her nose at her flapper niece's latest goings-on.

Although it's mostly light entertainment,  Miss Fisher doesn't shy away from some of the serious issues of the day - especially the very British concerns of class and religion - as well as introducing us to the birth of innovations like racing cars and aviation.  The shadow of World War I (in which Miss Fisher served on the front lines as a nurse) hangs heavy over many episodes as well.

Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries airs several times a week on different PBS channels; check local listings, or just dive headfirst into the show on Netflix.

AGENT X: 007 Should Be Licensed To Kill This Turkey

[SPOILER ALERT]
What were they smoking at TNT when someone decided to greenlight this laughably implausible yet creakily old-fashioned secret agent series?   Created by The Bourne Identity director W. Blake Herron, Agent X posits that a secret codicil in the Constitution empowers the Vice-President (played by Sharon Stone!!) to employ a covert agent to protect the nation, removed from  oversight by Congress or any other federal agency.  If you can believe that, then get ready to swallow a Batcave-like headquarters buried beneath the vice-presidential residence, Gerald McRaney as the Veep's Alfred The Butler-like major domo, and 40-year old journeyman actor Jeff Hephner as the dashing, two-fisted superspy John Case.

Let's not even think about what Spiro Agnew would have done with this kind of power, let's just look at  the series; can it rise above its patchwork mishmash of Batman and Bond with good storytelling, compelling characters, and well-directed action scenes?  Not based on the two-part pilot, which starts with Case rescuing the FBI chief's daughter from terrorists and then defusing stolen atomic missiles stolen by Chechen rebels.

Sharon Stone plays the widowed vice-president (a storyline about her husband's death can't be too far off) like a combination of Hilary Clinton and sexy Cinnamon Carter from the original Mission: Impossible, who jumps at the idea of carrying on deep espionage behind the back of fictional President Eckhart (the usually reliable John Shea,) the CIA, and the FBI.  McRaney comes across as stiff and phony as her butler and accomplice-in-espionage, while Hephner as Case lacks James Bond's gadgets, elan, and  sense of humor.  Hephner looks like a waiter in a tuxedo,  and is barely more believable as an action hero.  

The action scenes include the usual nonsense, with heavily armed terrorists spraying machine gun fire and hitting nothing while our heroes take out bad guys with a single shot. The big plot twist in the episode about the stolen missiles - it turns out the kidnapped scientist who can unlock the nuclear codes has doublecrossed the Chechen warlord and wants to auction the missiles to the highest bidder - is delivered so clumsily that it delivers no real surprise.  Case and the beautiful Russian mercenary he's recruited infiltrate the auction and kick major terrorist butt so effortlessly, it makes The Man From UNCLE seem sophisticated in comparison.  And when the evil warlord nobly sacrifices himself to save Case and help blow up the missiles, whatever small credibility the story might have had goes out the window.

Send Agent X to the shredder and look for thrills almost anywhere else.

American Horror Story: Hotel - Check Out Any Time You Like, But You Can Never Leave

"Checking In," the 90-minute season debut of American Horror Story: Hotel, marks the fifth season of Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk's anthology spookathon. It delivers exactly the kind of shock horror that viewers have come to expect:  Half a dozen grisly murders, kidnapped children, vampirism, ghosts, blood and gore, gratuitous male nudity, unexpected superstar casting, and just for good measure, a graphic  homosexual rape scene.  With series matriarch Jessica Lange gone, the series compensates by casting Lady Gaga as chic lady vampire Countess Elizabeth and Matt Bomer (White Collar, Magic Mike) as her boy-toy.  Several members of the series' repertory company return, including Sarah Paulson as Hypodermic Sally, a wraith trapped in Courtney Love's old grunge wardrobe, Denis O'Hare as an aging drag queen named Liz Taylor, Kathy Bates as the hotel's concierge, and (the as yet unseen) Evan Peters and Angela Bassett.

New cast members include Wes Bentley as damaged L.A. detective John Lowe, who's investigation of a series of gruesome serial murders leads him to the Cortez Hotel as  Lowe and his wife (Chloe Sevigny) try to get over the loss of their young son, who vanished mysteriously at a carnival several years earlier.  Cheyenne Jackson plays Will Drake, a millionaire New York businessman who's bought the hotel sight unseen and plans moving in along with his pre-pubescent son.  Not surprisingly, Lowe's missing son (along with several other very spooky children)  live in the hotel, in a secret room filled with vintage video games. 

The Cortez is a gauche art-deco hotel located somewhere on the outskirts of Los Angeles, and like the L.A. haunted house in the  first season of AHS, it's peopled by ghosts seemingly fated to haunt the premises forever. We learn quickly that his is no ordinary hotel:  When two Swedish girls check into the hote, they're  first terrorized by a creepy apparition that crawls out of their bed, and then wind up chained up in a neon torture chamber, being force fed offal to "cleanse their bodies." When one escapes, Countess Elizabeth slashes her throat.

When a seedy rock star type (Max Greenfield) checks into the hotel to shoot up, his heroin stupor is interrupted by a creature who rips off his pants and graphically rapes him.  We later learn that Bomer's character Donovan first came to the hotel 20 years ago to score heroin with Sally; when his mother (Kathy Bates) discovered his OD'd body, she pushed Sally out a window.  And now they're all still at the hotel, unaged after two decades.  When the soundtrack hamhandedly plays the Eagles' "Hotel California," it's pretty clear that you can check out but  never leave.

In another particularly graphic scene, the Countess and Donovan (Gaga and Bomer) pick up an attractive young couple at an outdoor screening of the silent Nosferatu (credited as the first vampire movie) and bring them home for an orgy. That leads to shots of entwined naked bodies until Bomer and Gaga slit the twentysomethings' throats and start drinking their blood.  "And you didn't want to go out," says Countess Elizabeth coyly.  "It's not the party, it's the clean up," deadpans Donovan.

Meanwhile, the serial killer that Det. Lowe is chasing lures him to a murder scene by texting from his wife's phone number, resulting in the Lowes' young daughter seeing two disemboweled corpses.  Fearing for his family's safety, Lowe moves out - and  into the Hotel Cortez.

Ryan Murphy directed the debut episode and leans heavily on Stanley Kubrick's The Shining for his photography, shooting the hotel through fish-eye lenses to make the corridors seem like an endless maze and giving everything a disorienting, skewed look.   At times the homage verges on plagiarism, but Murphy's never been shy about "borrowing"  ideas from idols like Hitchcock or DePalma.

In other seasons, American Horror Story has managed to imbue both its villains and its victims with enough humanity that their stories held your attention; with AHS: Hotel, viewers will have to identify with Det. Lowe and his family, because every other character comes across as so loathsome, vapid, or evil that we don't  care about their fate.  "Checking In" definitely has potential but I'm not convinced yet that Murphy and Falchuk have it in them to top earlier seasons, especially season two's crazy but engrossing Asylum.  There's a big difference between depicting horrible things (like the Hostel movie franchise) and creating true horror.  You can always count on American Horror Story to gross you out, but it remains to be seen if it can still scare us.  

Heroes Reborn: Will The Second Time Be The Charm?

You have to give NBC credit for even considering that a reboot of Heroes - the 2006 series that helped launch the superhero craze sweeping through television today - might be a good idea.   Heroes debuted to rave reviews and excellent ratings but crashed and burned in its second season, with confusing and often irrelevent sub-plots, boring scripts, and a storyline so twisted that it made the final seasons of Lost seem like Oliver Twist in comparison.

Heroes ended with Claire (Hayden Panettiere) revealing her super powers to the world; Heroes Reborn (Thursdays, 8 pm Eastern on NBC) begins with the super-powered now public knowledge and called "evos" (presumably because "mutants" was already taken.)  And much like the X-Men, the "evos" are welcomed by some and feared and discriminated against by others.  When the  PrimaTech Corporation holds an international fair to welcome evos into society, we see a large shadow hover the festivities and then watch in horror as  the entire town of Odessa, Texas is blown to smithereens.  Among the survivors: Claire's father Noah Bennet (Jack Coleman,) one of the holdovers from the original series.  Apparently Claire, despite her invulnerability, died in the blast.  We see Noah call her hopefully, only to hear her voicemail.  (Of course if he really wanted to find her, he'd only have to go to Nashville.)

An evo named Mohinder Suresh (Sendhil Ramamurthy) is blamed for the disaster, which is dubbed "June 13," a date as historically catastrophic as  "9/11."   Noah, perhaps due to the blast trauma, returns to a very ordinary life as a car salesman named Ted, until things start to happen...

And that brings us to Heroes Reborn's tangled and twisted  multiple storylines. Like the first series, you almost need a program to follow along:  There's the callow high school kid (Robby Clarke) who can teleport people, the Japanese girl who can enter a video game and fight with ninja powers to save her kidnapped father and the video gamer who's sucked into her alternative universe, the war hero with a dark secret who picks up his dead brother's mantle as a costumed vigilante, and the "June 13 truther" (Henry Zebrowski) who's enlisted to help Noah find out what's happening.   And there are two psychopathic vigilantes (Rya Kihlstedt and Zachary Levi) who are murdering evos to avenge their dead child.  There's also the mysterious stranger (there's always a mysterious stranger) whose agenda we don't know yet, who pops up from  city to city to save the evos.

I won't give more away, except to say that the pilot suffers from the same problems that doomed Heroes:  Too many characters, too many storylines, and uneven plotting.  The action scenes when Miko and Ren discover the video game world provide thrills and excitement, but there are just as many moments when nothing happens except some force exposition to connect all of the show's disparate parts.   What we learn in the first two-hour episode is that there's an apocalypse coming, and the evos (or heroes) have been sent to stop it.

Give it a try and maybe you'll get sucked into the narrative.  But it's not a show you can just watch once in a while for some action or humor.   You'll just wind up shouting at your screen wondering what the fuck is going on.