mike_9000

"The Mentalist" was a good show, which rather lost its way and never properly fleshed out its 'big bad', "Red John". The Mentalist was motivated to track down the monster who murdered his family.

In "Deception" an illusionist and stage magician is motivated to work for the FBI in order to find the person who framed his brother and put him into in jail for a crime he didn't commit. He also brings a magic team with him, to provide a greater variety of characters for viewers to to invest in.

Oh... and our illusionist hero works has a woman for his boss, just like the Mentalistt.

The ensemble cast are engaging and, while the set-up was hard to swallow, we can suspend disbelief for a little entertainment. Let's hope that they bear in mind the mistakes made by the show that they are effectively rebooting and think the plot arc through - if they get the chance....

Will it enjoy a long run, or is it too derivative? Also, there are an awful lot of shows out there where a 'consultant' shows the FBI how it's done. I suspect that the crew have their fingers crossed on this one. If the actors can't make it fly, it won't last.

Still... well worth a watch.

A very, very, frustrating show.

It's beautifully photographed, well acted and wonderfully surreal at times. However, when you have worked through all of the obscurity, there just isn't any engaging story at the heart of it.

Yes - I'm still watching it because it's and hoping that the plot starts to make some kind of interesting sense. It's other qualities make it interesting - but let's have some narrative for series two, please?

The original Star Trek dreamed of a world in which equality and tolerance had been achieved. It didn't matter how - the point was that what we do now could get us from here to there. It's idealism was relevant to it's time.

Today, these concepts are generally accepted, but we have a new problem. How do we oppose cultures who not only don't share those ideals but are willing to kill in order to tear them down. How do we fight them, without turning into them.

It's a problem that the various Star Trek series have never faced. Problems in Voyager were almost always eventually negotiated away or solved peacefully by some clever tactic. The Dominion War created some moral dilemmas - but not many, and they were always overcome.

This series takes the question head-on. The Klingons are utterly inimical and perfectly prepared to wipe the Federation out. How does Starfleet face this challenge without becoming like its enemy. Is this even possible?

Some fans who want the same old same old, meeting people with rubber noses and ears, and routinely overcoming initial misunderstandings and all that. That's been done. At length. If the format is to continue, someone has to push the envelope, and this series is a good try.

It's Star Trek Jim, but not as we knew it.

Superhero movies are fun, but they are fundamentally power fantasies. They overlook the fact that power corrupts both those who hold it and their hangers-on. This is more adult take on constumed superheros in a world where good and evil isn't black and white and good intentions can lead to terrible consequences.

It also has something to say about people who uncritically go with the crowd and cheer 'celebrities', politicians and others who profit from them, but are more concenrned with themselves that they are with thier followers. Insinscerity is institutionalised today, and the superhero PR machine satirises that. It also comments on the morality of bow to the system because... well... what's the point of fighting city hall?

The Boys aren't super powered. Their aim is to hold 'heros' with feet of clay to account, despite the fact that they are. That's a hard and unpopular job. It's going to be ineresting to see how they go about it. It's going to be good to resore a little adult moral ambiguity to fantastic stories, too.

The reason CSI and it's various spin-offs were so good and lasted so long was an ensemble cast, held together by a strong central character (e.g. Grusome Grissom).

This version had ingenious plots and an interesting, engaging cast which (despite some stand-out characters) didn't quite gel. Several valiant attempts were made to re-jig the formula but is wasn't to be, and it was cancelled while it still wasn't quite working. .

The introduction was hilariously alarmist and some of the techno-babble missed the mark. However, despite all that, for as long as it lasted, it was worth watching.

One of the problems with superhoero series in general, and DC characters in particular, is how to take them out of the pages of comic books and make them into live-action characters that you can kind-of believe in for a while, not crude power fantasies.

This series does it quite well, taking a long time to set up the characters, give them a backstory and bond them. There are plot twists that resolve well and the second season (I've just seen the first episode at this point) is looking promising.

Give it a little time, and it will grow on you.

Kolchak was a kind of precursor to the X-files. He didn't have a partner, and he was a newspaper reporter, not an FBI agent. Every week, he encounted some creature from ancient or modern myth and usually saved their victim from their fate. Along the way, he unavoidably lost all his the evidence (despite always having a neat little Minox 8mm camera with him). He always chose to do the right thing rather than keep the proof, so there's that.

He had the good fortune to work under the most tolerant newspaper editor who ever was, because he never, ever came back with a story but was never, ever fired. Like Wile E Coyote, the next episode always started with him hoping that this time it would turn out right. :-)

The actor who portrayed Kolchak held the hokum together, though. Cynical but with a good heart, he made it all entertaining, and it's still watchable. It also took itself far less seriously than the X-files, and was all the better for that.

Enterprise was the last gasp of the old Star Trek formula - episodic with not much of an overall arc. With the advent ofonline content providers and their dense plotting and highter production values the old, episodic way of doing things couldn't last much longer for a flagship show. Fan films were getting very nearly as good.

Still, the fact that it was a prequal enabled it to see the Star Trek universe from a slightly different angle and some of the early episodes were very good. The audience figures weren't impressive, though. It has a story arc forced upon it in later seasons, which wasn't actually bad - but stumbled to an end.

For all that, it was very underrated, and some of the characters (I loved the doctor) were genuinely interesting and endearing. The stand-along episodes after the first season, where the ensemble struggled to find its feet, were probably the best.

Some fans will object to this - but if Star Trek was to remain a major franchise, it had up its game - and this is what happened with Discovery. Whatever some people think of it, it's got a budget and has brought the show into the 21st Century.