FINISHING SCHOOL: Luther Series 1

In which I muse on a wide variety of DVDs from my absurd personal backlog as I complete them.

Once The Wire finally became a critical hit in the UK late in its run, the local TV industry snapping up its British stars Dominic West and Idris Elba for local work was inevitable. West has since starred in several BBC productions including the recent The Hour, and Elba has his own cop show, Luther.

Cop shows need a twist or a distinctive aesthetic to rise above formula after decades of precedent, and Luther opts for the former. Elba plays Detective Chief Inspector John Luther, a livewire, angry police officer willing to bend the rules to get the bad guy. He also has a contentious relationship with his ex-wife (Indira Varma). So far, so Vic Mackey.

The twist comes in the alliance Luther forms with a sociopathic killer whose guilt he knows of but can't prove. He knows he should have nothing to do with her, but keeps returning to her for a weird form of solace. Meanwhile, she makes her power known to his ex-wife and her boyfriend, playing with them out of an unexpected loyalty and devotion to Luther.

Threading through the stand-alone episodes, this storyline gives Luther some thematic meat. His connection to her occasionally feels contrived - he tells her it has to stop one time too many - but this more intimate take on police corruption is more refreshing than yet more evidence-planting and death threats.

Nonetheless, for the first few episodes Elba seems wasted because the material typically doesn't rise to the high standard he sets. The script is also too in love with the Luther character, with the supporting characters seemingly there only to discuss how entrancingly volatile he is. Before long, you get sick of hearing his name. A great cast is also poorly served, with Steven Mackintosh and Saskia Reeves saddled with background detective roles and Paul McGann merely the bland Ex-Wife's New Man.

The last two episodes then subvert that entirely. The characters themselves become the case, and certain members of the cast become crucial and are given much more to play. The preceding episodes could have established their interiority so the shift wasn't so blunt, but the acting is so strong it almost doesn't matter. The events that precipitate this thrilling storyline aren't novel, but the twist discussed earlier again gives it some juice.

Because the show eschewed a distinctive aesthetic, the almost operatic emotions on display in these final episodes can be jarring and may seem woefully overblown. But Luther has gradually revealed itself to be more theatrical than televisual, with Shakespearean flaws and tropes sending characters spiralling as unpicked threads rapidly unravel. If you watch Luther on these terms and don't hold it to account for its lack of 'realism', you'll have a grand time with it.

Like Sherlock, it also sets up a pretty damn good cliffhanger that makes me rue that I just missed the first episode of series 2 on ABC iView. Luther isn't the rich, complex work we might expect for Elba after The Wire, but what could ever live up to the standard set by that show? Also easy to forget is that despite Elba's naturally grand presence, his Wire character Stringer Bell was stoic and contained, not like Luther at all. So Elba is in fact stretching - he just plays an angry, explosive guy exceptionally well, and he makes Luther a pretty absorbing few hours even if it's not revolutionary.

Evaluating Supernatural, a show that could be so much more

SPOILERS for Supernatural up to and including season 5, episode 10, 'Abandon All Hope'

I've just finished episode 10 of the fifth season of Supernatural, and I've rarely felt so conflicted about a show I've been watching long-term. The demon-hunting, Christian mythology-drenched drama exceeded my initial expectations and has occasionally flirted with greatness, egging me on to persevere. But each episode is inescapably littered with missed opportunities, and so the show fails to resonate nearly as much as it could. Plus, the misogyny and macho posturing have become distressingly obnoxious.

So instead of debating an episode's strengths and shortcomings every single time, I've decided to finally get my ideas down and articulate why I like Supernatural enough to stick with it (for now) and why exactly it continues to let me down.

FINISHING SCHOOL: Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law Season 1

In which I muse on a wide variety of DVDs from my absurd personal backlog as I complete them.

This was one of those acquisitions where after watching the first few episodes, I wondered what the hell I was thinking. I had rented this season of Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law years ago, watched some of the episodes and raved about them, then was given my own copy as a gift some time later.

I happily threw in the first disc, but was shocked to discover they felt utterly flat. Was I over-caffeinated when I last saw these or something? My memories were hazy, so I couldn't tell if I'd seen these particular episodes before. But their aimless, witless surrealism turned me off and I put the show on the backburner for a while.

Harvey Birdman was one of Cartoon Network's early Adult Swim shows. Like Space Ghost Coast to Coast, it resurrected some forgotten Hanna Barbera animated superheroes from the 1960s and placed them in a mundane setting ripe for neurosis and absurdity. Space Ghost became a talk show host, and Birdman (of Birdman and the Galaxy Trio!) became Harvey Birdman, a hapless attorney whose one-time villains have become fellow attorneys, judges, or washed-up evildoers trying to reclaim past, inane glories.

The show is a melting pot for legal show satire, energetic surrealism, one-off jokes that don't fit anywhere else (at one point Harvey's sidekick Peanut is jackhammering in the office for no reason, says "we've hit bedrock!" and Barney Rubble pops out of the hole). What I liked about the show when I first saw it was the breakneck pace of the gags, but the pace wasn't to disguise their flatness. Already funny, the jokes became hysterical when thrown at us with such frenzied gusto. Recurring jokes in one episode would reappear in a subsequent one with no warning or explanation, just because it's funny. The passage of time would be vandalised to make a repetitious joke work. Harvey Birdman had a precise rhythm and relentless drive that was surprisingly endearing.

But the early episodes feature less of this. The pace is still there, but much of the humour falls flat. The voice work is solid from the start, with Gary Cole as Harvey and Stephen Colbert as his boss, eyepatch-wearing lothario Phil Ken Sebben. Michael McKean and the perennially amusing John Michael Higgins recur as judges and lawyers, and everyone's clearly having a lot of fun. But the early material they're given has no resonance: it's just people saying weird stuff and doing stupid shit again and again.

I finally gave the show another try, and in the two-parter that closes disc one, which sees Harvey framed for mangling a rival's sidekick dog in a photocopier and sent to prison, the various elements of the show finally click. Pitching that frenetic pace effectively obviously took some practice, and as I started watching disc two I realised I'd seen these episodes. These were the ones that made such an impression. I clearly put the second disc in the player by accident all those years ago...

So although I'd reassessed Harvey Birdman as cut from the same cloth as the other Adult Swim shows whose surrealism does nothing for me (Tim and Eric Awesome Show and Space Ghost), it turned out to be the genuinely funny, batshit crazy show I'd remembered. This is a highwire act of comedy, where the writers pump out as many jokes as they can at great speed before they reach the other side or fall, and the pressure to succeed harmonises the writing with the animation and acting at just the right frequency.

I may just get Volume 2 at some point, but I have way more DVDs in this impractically large and neglected collection to watch first. Look for more Finishing School entries soon.

Prometheus viral marketing begins with an ominous Guy Pearce

In hindsight, it makes a ton of sense that Ridley Scott's quasi-prequel to Alien, Prometheus, would produce viral marketing filling in the world that led us to the doomed voyage of the Nostromo in the 1979 original. But the appearance of a video speech by Guy Pearce yesterday was a lovely surprise because it foreshadows the fleshing-out of the corporate powermongering that led to the events of Alien.

The video ties into the TED conference, an actual annual event that's been held since 1984 bringing together notable figures from fields in Technology, Entertainment, and Design (hence the acronym) to talk about ideas and the future.

The three-minute video, directed by Ridley Scott's son Luke and conceived by Ridley Scott and writer Damon Lindelof, sees Pearce speaking to TED in 2023 in character as Peter Weyland, no doubt the founder of the Weyland-Yutani corporation that plagued Ripley in the Alien films. Sounding awfully British and ominous, Pearce hams it up enormously but in the grand, nuanced way that only the best actors can.

The speech is far more bombastic and hubristic than it ever would be in real-life, but it doesn't matter. It's a fun three-minutes that's shot terrifically well by Luke Scott, and the new Weyland Industries website promises more in a few days.

I won't say any more about what Weyland says and let you enjoy it for yourself at weylandindustries.com.

I'm hugely excited for Prometheus, because Scott is returning to SF for the first time since Blade Runner and he's gathered a superb cast (Pearce, Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Idris Elba - bliss). The story of what led the Nostromo to the crashed ship in Alien always seemed to me like one worth telling, but like many I still have misgivings about yet another prequel and yet more panicked running by studios back to the warm arms of established franchises.

Indeed, what exactly will Scott and Lindelof find to say about the Alien universe that hasn't already been said, even if the xenomorphs themselves don't appear prominently (not that we even know for sure)? Will this just be a disposable SF story that can be slotted neatly before Alien? Or has Scott rediscovered the radical zeal that drove his early work and overcome his competent yet unambitious recent work?

I truly hope so, because a connection to an established franchise doesn't automatically make it reheated leftovers. Ron Moore's Battlestar Galactica proved that beyond measure. Tidbits like today's video suggest that Prometheus will offer some rich world-building, which is so often missing from big-budget SF cinema. Hopefully that translates into a film that resonates even half as well as Alien did and still does.

New Avengers trailer finally offers some resonance

The full and possibly final trailer for The Avengers is now available at Apple, and it promises a lot more than what we've been shown before. The effects footage now available to the editing team has helped a lot, finally giving us glimpses of what's causing all the random explosions. But now the characterisation and emotional stakes are apparent too.

Granted, glimpses of Black Widow and Thor looking distressed doesn't mean we're in for an emotional tour-de-force, but some nice beats coalesce and finally give us evidence that there will be more to The Avengers than a superhero team-up and fight scenes.

I didn't doubt this, because Joss Whedon is a character writer, and Marvel wouldn't have hired him if they just wanted action sequences and macho posturing. Nonetheless, it's nice to get some proof of this, with Steve Rogers feeling lost and he and Bruce Banner looking quite struck by each other (my memories of The Incredible Hulk have suddenly stirred and I realise I might know why, but don't want to blow a surprise). Banner's line "we're not a team, we're a time bomb" also corroborates why Whedon says he took the project: because the Avengers are a bunch of misfits who shouldn't function together at all, yet somehow do. A great deal of his past work has dealt with this theme, and Marvel was smart to recognise this and hire him.

Hopefully he can pull off the aesthetic scope the movie needs though, and that Marvel hasn't cheaped out on him. There's concern brewing online that we keep getting shown the New York battle and the fight between Cap and Thor, and that this may be all the noteworthy spectacle there is. I agree that if this is true, an Avengers movie needs more setpieces than that and an escalation beyond them. If these are indeed alien invaders, going off-planet or at least into orbit in the third act would fit the bill perfectly.

But when it all comes together, the locations may not matter. An epic scope can be achieved on an earthbound weekly television show like Lost, for instance, so surely a big-budget film can do the same within New York. If the emotional and narrative stakes are high enough, and the characters are pushed to their limits, The Avengers may be the take-no-prisoners superhero epic we've been longing for.

What would confirm this is if we had some word that Marvel have been withholding a lot from the trailers so far. We've been told virtually nothing about Loki's army for instance, so what if the third act has similarly been kept entirely under wraps? That would be a refreshing change given movie marketing insists on showing all the major beats before you walk into the cinema, but the ubiquity of that means I shouldn't be so optimistic.

How wonderful though if The Avengers sucker-punched us with a truly epic story that we'd only been given a taste of. If you have enough compelling material for the marketing department in the rest of the film, why not surprise us and get word-of-mouth spreading ravenously about the surprises in store once the movie comes out? But then, that may be too obvious for a marketing team that insists on physically inaccurate photoshopped bodge-jobs like this (Captain America is five storeys tall!).

But no! I must stow my cynicism. It's hard with blockbuster movies these days, but a movie buff with nothing to look forward to is a sad movie buff indeed.