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The Gloaming–Starz imports Tasmanian supernatural police drama with a Wicker Man vibe

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March 23, 2021

Review by C.J. Bunce

Something wicked this way comes–or at least is coming by way of Tasmania, an island off the southern coast of Australia. The stark beauty of Tasmania is the best feature of the first episode of the new Starz original series The Gloaming (which means twilight or dusk), from mountain tops to rolling weather changes to waterfalls. But that’s where the beauty ends as a detective from Melbourne is called in to join a woman from his past who is also a cop, both to investigate a murder tied to the death of his girlfriend long ago. It all takes place in a part of the world most Westerners will find entirely curious and new. Written and directed by Victoria Madden (The Kettering Incident), The Gloaming begins this week with a slow-paced introduction that explains little and throws a lot at the viewer. This isn’t a travelogue for Tasmania, as each image seems connected to some kind of evil lurking around the next corner, like a new take on The Wicker Man.

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The Salisbury Poisonings–New British drama on AMC a riveting account of Russian spy event

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January 26, 2021

Review by C.J. Bunce

British television series that make their way to America tend to be refreshing in that each new show is incredibly different from the last. No matter how many times Americans catch the latest Brit/Irish/Scot police procedural, it’s nearly impossible to follow how each level of government polices, and manages the policing, of its citizenry. That quirk doesn’t get more pronounced than in the opener to The Salisbury Poisonings, a four-part series airing Monday evenings on AMC. The series will likely mean less to those on this side of the pond, although the real-life attempt on the lives of a Russian spy and his daughter living in Salisbury was international news in March 2018, victims of Vladimir Putin’s spy network. But the first episode has the kind of TV writing that should bring the show to the attention of anglophiles.

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Roadkill–Politician rises up the British political ladder in new Hugh Laurie drama

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January 9, 2021

Review by C.J. Bunce

We’re always on the lookout for the next great British/Irish/Scottish/UK police procedural or mystery, and the new Hugh Laurie four-part star vehicle Roadkill may not be the Life on Mars or Ashes to Ashes, Hinterland or Shetland, Marchlands or Lightfields, Derry Girls, The Woman in White, Mr. Selfridge, Zen, Quirke, or Sherlock, but it’s better than most of the UK series that have made it to the small screen in the past few years. Airing in the UK on BBC One this past Fall and first in the U.S. as part of PBS’s Masterpiece series, it is now available on Amazon and DVD (still the PBS choice platform for British productions). A lucky show that finished production before the pandemic kicked into full force, Roadkill will be a must-see for Laurie fans, and its angle on politics and telling a politician’s personal story should be enough to keep other anglophiles interested.

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A Confession–Martin Freeman stars in true crime series on Amazon

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August 3, 2020

Review by C.J. Bunce

We’re always on the lookout for the next great British/Irish/Scottish/UK police procedural or mystery series like Life on Mars or Ashes to Ashes, Hinterland or Shetland, Marchlands or Lightfields, Zen or Quirke, or, of course, Sherlock. The 2019 British series A Confession is streaming on BritBox in the U.S. via Amazon, and it may not be as good as any of these, but it does eclipse recent series like Dublin Murders, The Silence, The Five, The Missing, Thirteen, Broadchurch, and Collateral. It is based on the real-life story of the murders of two women in 2003 and 2011, so the drama is dark and real. And it offers up a cast of familiar genre actors that will make you want to take a look.

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Hallie Rubenhold’s The Five–A long overdue portrait of the victims of Jack the Ripper

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March 23, 2020

The Five cover

Review by Elizabeth C. Bunce

I don’t know how old I was when I first heard of Jack the Ripper. I do remember being quite young when the sensationalizing and romanticizing of the serial killer started to bother me. “What’s wrong with you?” I would growl at the TV, comics, Halloween costumes, and centuries-spanning obsession about the murderer. Where was the attention on his victims, on the real women who lost their lives? No one seemed to care—in 1888, or now. They existed only to fuel the fascination surrounding the murderer. I stumbled across Hallie Rubenhold’s The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper while doing unrelated research for my Myrtle Hardcastle Mysteries series. I knew immediately I had to get my hands on this book. Here, at last, was someone else who felt exactly as I did and set about to rectify the situation. The premise alone makes the book worthwhile, and Rubenhold’s research and writing makes it a must-read.

Rubenhold’s The Five is long overdue, and definitely a welcome addition to the field of Victorian social history. It’s a tough but fascinating read, handled with an equal mix of sympathy and outrage. What this book is not: It’s not true crime. It’s not a whodunit. It makes no fruitless speculation about the identity of the murderer, and it does not linger over the salacious details of the crimes. It is a gripping story of characters who are every bit as fascinating, vivid, and richly drawn as their notorious killer is imagined to be. And it is a stunning social history that spans the mid-late Victorian era and the life and times of working class women. Rubenhold unearths known, previously unknown, and totally ignored details from each woman’s life, and skillfully fills in the gaps with information drawn from other historical records—what life was like for workhouse inmates, laws that targeted and disproportionately disadvantaged working-class women, contemporary commentary from social reformers, and more.

In five sections, arranged chronologically by the dates of their deaths, Rubenhold examines the family backgrounds, childhoods, young adulthoods, and last years of Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elisabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and the woman who called herself Mary Jane Kelly. She takes readers on a journey across England, overseas to Scandinavia, from the tinworks of Birmingham to the barracks of Queen Victoria’s guard, to ambitious charity schools and factories and homes, the open road of ballad-sellers, the terrifying spectre of white slavery, and the sad backstreets of London’s poorest neighborhoods. In telling the stories of these five individual women, Rubenhold also tells the story of all Victorian women, exploring the ruthless social rules that crippled poor women and condemned them to a downward spiral of poverty and violence. Rubenhold corrects nearly a century and a half of misconceptions and assumptions about these five women (spoiler alert: they weren’t all prostitutes), and restores the truth of their real lives.

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Tags: Elizabeth C. Bunce, Hallie Rubenhold, Jack the Ripper, Real Science, The Five, The Five book review, The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper, The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper book review, Victorian criminology, Victorian non-fiction, Victorian women

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Dublin Murders–The look of a great UK mystery without the follow through

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February 2, 2020

Review by C.J. Bunce

We’re always on the lookout for the next great British/Irish/Scottish/UK police procedural or mystery, after the next Life on Mars or Ashes to Ashes, Hinterland or Shetland, Marchlands or Lightfields, Zen or Quirke, or, of course, Sherlock. So the pay-channel Starz releasing a late-year mystery series called Dublin Murders was going to get our attention. Filmed in Belfast and Dublin, with a noir sensibility–dark places, mysterious characters, and murder–the series has the potential to be a good detective series. Billed as an “eight-part mystery series with a taproot that drops deep down into Ireland’s past, foreshadows the present and brings insight to its future,” the story follows Sarah Greene as Cassie Maddox and Killian Scott as Rob Reilly, homicide detectives on the trail of the murderer of a school girl. The murder was similar–too similar–to a murder in the city’s past.

Maddox and Reilly appear appealing enough at first. They share a secret of the past that would get them fired had anyone found out: Reilly isn’t really Reilly, but the alter ego of the sole survivor of the crime years ago that resulted in two missing friends, never to be found. Unfortunately he’s a witness who can’t remember, and by all accounts he shouldn’t be involved with this investigation because of his clear conflict of interest. Merged with his pursuit of the person behind the missing kids and the recent murder is a story of Maddox’s history catching up with her. As a child her parents were killed in an auto accident, and to deal with it mentally she invented an imaginary friend she named Lexie. As an undercover cop, she took on the name Lexie as her alter ego. Now she and one of her former colleagues stumble upon another murder, a woman who looks just like Cassie. And surprise: her name is Lexie. Always waiting for the possibility that we’ve stumbled into an unreliable narrator series, ultimately that’s not the case, the woman was real and not something we’re seeing through Maddox’s imagination. But the series stumbles for other reasons.

Based on the first two novels of Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad novels, In the Woods and The Likeness, a key problem is combining the stories from two books to make into one season of television–stories that have little to do with each other. Both cops have these common stories involving dual personas so it’s easy to see how someone thought it might work. But it doesn’t. The first three episodes develop the characters, but suddenly they lose their personalities. The quiet, likeable, and sympathetic Reilly becomes a jerk, a supremely angry and mean protagonist pushing away Maddox and everyone else and leaving the audience with little to care about from his plot thread. Maddox has the same collision of character–once admirable and mostly by-the-book, she turns into a nasty character, bitter and horrible to those who care about her. As Reilly becomes trapped in a development of his own making, Maddox agrees to a job with her former colleague, a preposterous undercover operation impersonating the deceased Lexie in order to discover her murderer.

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borg’s Best of 2018–The Best on TV

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December 28, 2018

Our borg Best of 2018 list continues today with the best in television. If you missed it, check out our review of the Best Movies of 2018 here and the Kick-Ass Heroines of 2018 here.

Without further ado, this year’s Best in Television:

Best Borg TV Series, Best TV Borg – Humans (AMC). No other series touches on the ramifications of technology, specifically the perils of an onslaught of real-world cyborg technology, like AMC’s Humans. This year three characters stood out, including Gemma Chan’s Mia, the cyborg Synth from past seasons, who sacrificed everything for the liberty of cyborgs in the UK. Then there was Ruth Bradley’s Karen Voss, a Synth who refused to live segregated from the humans, opting instead for a normal life for the cyborg son she assumed care for. And Katherine Parkinson’s Laura Hawkins, a human lawyer who fought so hard for the cause of the Synths all year, only to throw away all the good she had done, failing the first real challenge that was presented to her. This year’s best TV borg is shared by Synths Mia and Karen, as each showed the uphill battle any future outsider must overcome when faced with humans.

Best Sci-fi TV Series – The Man in the High Castle (Amazon). What had been a two-season build-up all came together in the series’ third season with the audacity of killing off key characters, wisely adhering to the framework of the source Philip K. Dick novel. The use of science fiction to tell an often gut-wrenching array of subplots and unique characters has set up a fourth season with plenty to address. Exciting, smart, scary, and even fun, it is an unusual science fiction show that isn’t merely trigger-happy sci-fi. Honorable mention: Humans (AMC), Counterpart (Starz).

Best New TV Series, Best Reboot, Best Ensemble Cast – Magnum PI (CBS). If you would have told us a year ago our favorite show this year would be a reboot of Magnum, p.i. starring Suicide Squad’s Jay Hernandez and an actress in the iconic role of John Hillerman’s Higgins, we wouldn’t have believed it. And yet, even as diehard fans of the original, we had to acknowledge that many elements of the reboot series were even better in the new series. With the dangerous risk of taking on a beloved property, the production maintained loyalty to the original while making it fresh, scoring Magnum PI high marks on all counts. Every character was smartly written–suave and confident Magnum, energetic Rick and TC, and a savvy Higgins–every actor was perfectly cast, and each show was another round of nostalgic fun for fans of the original. Best New TV Series Honorable mention for Best New TV Series: Counterpart (Starz), Lodge 49 (AMC).

Best Series, Best Drama, Best Comedy – Lodge 49 (AMC). Lodge 49 told two stories: a darkly serious drama of real people dealing with real-life 2018 adversity, and the other a comedy farce like no other. Hanging over our heads was the idea that this was going to be a fantasy show, complete with secret codes, hidden rooms, and psychic visions. If you’re looking for all the elements of great fantasy the hint of it all could be found throughout this series. And yet it wasn’t fantasy at all. An oddball Cheers? A southern Twin Peaks without the Lynchian weirdness? Star Wyatt Russell’s hero Dud could be dismissed as a typical young man with no vision, or maybe he’s that idealist that everyone needs to strive to be. Maybe we’ll learn more about that next season. Honorable mention for Best Drama: Counterpart (Starz). Honorable mention for Best Comedy: Baskets (FX).
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Tags: Alexa Davalos, Alfre Woodard, AMC, Anthony Michael Hall, BBC, Bella Heathcote, Best of 2018, borg, borg.com Best of 2018, Bradley Walsh, Bruce Campbell, Chelah Horsdal, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, Cindy Sampson, Collateral, Corbin Bernsen, Counterpart, CW Network, Death in Paradise, Doctor Who, Douglas Henshall, Father Brown, History Channel, Humans AMC, Ion Network, Jason Priestley, JK Simmons, Jodie Whittaker, Lodge 49, Magnum PI, Marvel's Luke Cage, Marvel's Luke Cage episode The Basement, Michael Douglas, Michelle Gomez, Mustafa Shakir, Netflix, Private Eyes, Requiem, Riverdale, Riverdale episode The Midnight Club, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, Rufus Sewell, Sara Serraiocco, Scooby Doo, ScoobyNatural, Shetland, Sonya Cassidy, Stephen Walters, Supernatural, The Five, The Kominsky Method, The Man in the High Castle, The Man in the High Castle episode The New Colossus, The Toys That Made Us, Theo Rossi, Vikings

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Harlan Coben’s The Five finally gets that uniquely British genre mystery right

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July 29, 2018

Review by C.J. Bunce

It’s such a strange thing to see over and over. Whether it’s Broadchurch, Marchlands, Lightfields, Thirteen, The Missing, or Requiem, the British television studios can’t stop making series based on the story of a missing child. And it’s not just the Brits that can’t get over the genre. Americans tend to do it with a supernatural bent, in shows like Twin Peaks, Stranger Things, or Riverdale. But finally they may have got one right, compelling characters, a solid mystery with twists, turns, and surprises, and the missing factor of most series in the genre, a satisfying ending. That’s Harlan Coben’s ten-part series now streaming on Netflix called The Five.

Smartly directed by Mark Tonderai, who has directed episodes of TV series including Doctor Who, Black Lightning, Gotham, Time After Time, and Twelve Monkeys, The Five takes the story of a five-year-old who disappeared on an outing with his older brother and his three friends, and turns it into something completely fresh and compelling. Twenty years later in modern day England, the DNA of the missing boy is found at the crime scene of a murder of a local woman. The news upends the lives of the missing boy’s brother, a lawyer and part time P.I. played by Tom Cullen (Orphan Black, Downton Abbey), his separated parents played by Geraldine James (Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Alice in Wonderland) and Michael Maloney (Mr. Selfridge, Henry V), and his three friends: a cop who is the son of the detective on the original case played by O-T Fagbenle (Doctor Who, The Handmaid’s Tale), a doctor who has returned after years in the States played by Sarah Solemani (Bridget Jones’s Baby), and a protector of street kids at a local shelter, played by Lee Ingleby (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World).

Every player in this tale is a mess. The cop can’t balance work and life and must care for a father with Alzheimer’s, the doctor is figuring her way through a failed marriage and early stages of addiction, the shelter manager cares a bit too much about protecting kids on the streets, and the brother of the missing boy runs the route where he lost his brother every day, unable to get past his loss. As a police procedural, Fagbenle and detective Caine, played by Hannah Arterton (Doc Martin, Midsomer Murders), make for a solid policing duo, while Cullen and Ingleby are a great sleuthing team of private investigators.

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