NEW TV SHOW ROUND UP

Lots of new US shows have been popping up on UK TV lately, and I’ve been trying to watch them all!

DEXTER
This is one about serial killers chasing each other round Miami. One of the serial killers is actually our protagonist and works as a forensics officer with the cops, but he was trained by his dad to only torture and dismember people, who “deserve it”, like other murderers, so that’s alright then. Also he is played by Michael C Hall (aka gay David from Six Feet Under) who is a great actor and can make himself look as creepy as hell just be lowering his eyebrows slightly, which is more than alright.

After a few weeks of perseverance, my doubts about this program (slow start, over explanatory voice over, boring subplots re other cops, over-used post Silence of the Lambs nonsense about serial killers who do incredibly complicated and contrived murders without leaving any forensic evidence to “send a message” to cops on their trail, etc etc) have been dispelled – the cat and mouse plot about Dexter and a rival serial killer is really beginning to grip, and we are frequently reminded how evil and brutal Dexter is, so we don’t get too cosy about him. As well as Hall, there are good performances from Darla-from-Angel, as his wimpy girlfriend; the nice doctor lady from Oz as a bitchy police Lieutenant; and whoever it is plays Dexter’s coltish sister.

They definitely need to cut back on the voiceover though (yes, I can tell what’s happening, thanks, I am actually watching the TV program), and also reduce the number of scenes where Dexter looks at a corpse and says “He’s sending us a message”. Gah!

DIRTY SEXY MONEY
This features the other Six Feet Under brother, sexy Peter Kraus, as a lawyer who starts work for NYC’s richestest ever family. Donald Sutherland camps it up as the patriach, and Jill Clayburgh battles botox to move her face as the matriarch. They have lots of kids too:

1)A Baldwin plays one son who wants to be a senator, but is having a secret affair with a transsexual. Props to the producers for getting what looks like an actual tranny to play the girlfriend!
2)Some other dude plays another son who is a priest with an illegitimate child. The priest is hilariously callous and evil, more of him please!
3)There is a daughter who keeps getting divorced. She used to fancy/poss slept with Peter Kraus, and who can blame her? She is quite boring though
4)There is another daughter played by Anna off the OC, who is basically a watered down version of Paris Hilton
5)There is a young son who is a party animal and wants to be a pop star. He looks a bit like a TV actor version of Jack White Stripes White. Also quite boring.

All the family have hilarious wealth related shenanigans every week, which Peter must solve, whilst also trying to work out which one of them murdered his father! Gasp! It is OK so far. Not really camp and Dynasty-esque enough yet for my liking. They need a scheming bitch character, but Jill Clayburgh is playing more of a Krystal Karrington type and the callous priest does not quite cut it. Also they need to cut cut cut the scenes with Peter’s perky 50’s housewife type wife, who has nothing to do but wrinkle her nose at Peter’s amusing ways and ask him to explain the plot to her.

MAD MEN
This one has an excuse to have vacuous 50’s housewives, as it’s set in the 50’s (Ok, 1960, which is basically the 50s anyway) and they all have inner lives and secret angst etc. It’s set in an advertising office where heavy drinking and smoking, and hair-raising racism, sexism and anti-Semitism are the order of the day. Our anti hero Don Draper is one of the ad execs, (played by Jon Hamm) but he is very repressed and secretive, never talks to his wife, and apparently faked his own death and took on a new identity at some point in his life. He doesn’t even get a voice over or scenes with a shrink a la the Sopranos, to explain himself, and it rather odd watching a series with a black hole of an unknowable character at the centre of it. (Hamm does the best he can with his acting skillz though, to let us know what he’s thinking)

Other main characters include his frustrated wife, his secretary Peggy, and Pete Campbell, the smarmy young rival for his job. All the period detail is fantastic and the characters spend a lot of time drinking mixed drinks in glamorous bars that I wish existed in real life so I could go to them. It is very much character driven rather than plot driven, and some episodes work better than others, I liked the ones about Peggy, Don, the arrival of the divorcee, and Pete Campbell, not so much the one with Don’s wife – I can’t wait til they get round to the bitchy red headed office manager and the art director who just HAS to be gay.

GOSSIP GIRL
I watched the first episode and am not yet sure whether to continue. It’s also about uber rich New Yorkers, but this time they all go to high school and like totally hate each other. There is a blonde one who used to be a drunken party girl and is now reformed, there is an evil brunette who has an excellent bitch face and used to be the blonde one’s best friend, there is her pretty boy boyfriend, who is the reason the two main ones hate each other, his rapey sarcastic friend, then there are two boring ones who go to the same school that we are probably supposed to identify with. Again, it is not as much fun as something like this ought to be, but I was amused that one girl could compose two detailed txt messages whilst simultaneously fighting off the rapey one. A la Dexter, this also has an overly intrusive voice over (supposedly from the Gossip Girl website which sends out live txt alerts about the two main girl’s sex lives and what they wear etc – oh, as if), by a girl so smug and treacly that she makes Mary Alice off Desperate Housewives sound like Moira Stewart in comparison.

TERMINATOR: THE SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES
More tosh! Hurrah! This one features Claire-bear’s non-gay friend from Heroes as John Connor, the slightly sulky pretty boy last hope for mankind; Lena Heady as a kinder, gentler, less stringy version of Linda Hamilton; and a cute girl with a nice line in expresionless fighting and ambivalent side long glances as their pet terminator. They have cunningly forgotten about the rubbish 3rd film and carried on straight from the second one, only now someone else is going to invent Skynet so they have to search for all these computer boffins (who all live conveniently in southern California) and kill them. Meanwhile, both the goodies and baddies have been going crazy sending troops back in time to lay plans for the war, so there are terminators and freedom fighters running round all over the place. One of them turns out to be Kyle Reese’s brother, and therefore John’s uncle – he is played by the annoying one with the earring off 90210, so I hope it is only a matter of time before Shannen Doherty and Tori Spelling appear as evil killer fembots.