All That Is Old Is New Again: On the Current State of Doctor Who

Peter Capaldi as the Doctor, on BBC's Doctor Who

This past winter, my wife knit a Tom Baker-era Doctor Who scarf as a birthday gift for a friend. It turned out my friend has been wanting one since he was a kid, and could not have been more thrilled with the gift. He proudly wore the 12-foot scarf, its colourful tassels dragging along the streets of Washington, D.C., for the remaining cold days of the year, and even beyond them. Recently he told me a story: while walking to work on one such day, he crossed paths with a young boy (perhaps nine-years-old) and his mother. The boy, on seeing my friend, began jumping up and down and pulling at his mom's coat, yelling with delight: ""Doctor Who Scarf! Doctor Who Scarf!!!"

I tell this story, not only because of the profound pleasure the incident provoked in my friend, but because it reveals something I've long believed about Doctor Who as a televisual and cultural phenomenon. Even after 50 years and over 34 seasons, the show appeals across cultures, continents, and generations. (Tom Baker stopped wearing that scarf more than three decades before that young American boy was even born!) I loved the show as a child, when episodes of Peter Davison's Doctor aired on my local PBS channel, and as an adult the relaunched BBC series has topped my list of favourite shows since the show appeared in 2005.

Big Screen Tales of Big Business Targeting Little People: Local Hero and Promised Land

Frances McDormand and Matt Damon in Promised Land

A lone red telephone booth on the outskirts of a Scottish fishing village. Skype in a Pennsylvania farming town. Those diverse means of communication for the protagonists are among the distinctions between, respectively, 1983’s offbeat Local Hero and the more formulaic Promised Land now in theaters. But the two films have quite a lot in common. In both, corporate America descends on small, insular communities in hopes of reaping the riches that lie within the good earth. Some folks are seduced by the promise of easy money, especially in hardscrabble times; others want to protect the land and their homegrown traditions.

Three decades ago, writer-director Bill Forsyth set Local Hero the west coast of his native Scotland and hired the great cinematographer Chris Menges to do it justice. In the fictitious hamlet of Ferness, life goes on much as it ever has until the arrival of Macintyre or “Mac” (Peter Riegert) and Danny (Peter Capaldi), advance men for a Texas oil company called Knox. Their boss (Burt Lancaster) has instructed them to buy up all the real estate so he can build a refinery. Although many people are happy to sell, an old coot (Fulton Mackay) who owns the valuable beachfront property refuses to budge. Promised Land – coauthored by two of its stars, Matt Damon and John Krasinski – had Gus Van Sant at the helm. In rural McKinley, the advance team for a natural gas conglomerate called Global is comprised of Steve (Damon) and Sue (Frances McDormand). Their boss (Terry Kinney) has instructed them to buy up all the real estate so he can begin to drill, using a controversial process known as fracking. Although many citizens are happy to sell, an old coot (Hal Holbrook) makes a persuasive case against the takeover.

Television Goes Global, and Other Reflections on TV in 2013

The final episode of AMC's Breaking Bad aired this past September.

The past twelve months have brought an embarrassment of riches to the dedicated television viewer. Not only a number of promising new series, but technological and industry developments have made television viewing richer, more diverse, and more convenient than it's ever been. But even on wholly traditional terms, TV has had a good year. AMC's Breaking Bad came to a powerful and satisfying conclusion. FX's Justified had another strong year, and its fifth season is set to air early in January. After some uneven early episodes, CBS's Americanized Sherlock Holmes procedural Elementary went from strength to strength, culminating in a powerful first season, and this fall has proven itself to be much more than the pale shadow of BBC's incomparable Sherlock it threatened to be on paper. In November, TBS premiered The Ground Floor, a new laugh track rom-com/office comedy from Bill Lawrence (Scrubs, Cougar Town) that has grown more charming and likeable with every passing episode. And a year ago, long before Fox's Brooklyn Nine-Nine hit the airwaves in September, who could have guessed that the best comedy team-up on television would be Homicide: Life on the Street's Andre Braugher and Saturday Night Live alum Andy Samberg? All in all, we have a lot to be thankful for this year. Below I review some of the more interesting developments in television in 2013.

After A.A. Milne: Christopher Robin

Pooh (Jim Cummings) and Christopher Robin (Ewan McGregor). (Photo: IMDB)

I’m not much of a fan of the director Marc Forster (Monsters' Ball, Stranger Than Fiction, The Kite Runner), and except for Johnny Depp’s intimate, impassioned pressed-violet portrayal of James M. Barrie I find his 2004 Finding Neverland, about Barrie’s relationship with the widow Sylvia Llewelyn-Davies and her four sons (one of whom inspired the creation of Peter Pan), fudged and sentimentalized. So I was caught off guard by his new movie, Christopher Robin, which is also linked to a children’s literary classic. It imagines a grown-up version of A.A. Milne’s Christopher Robin (Ewan McGregor), returned from the Second World War and so focused on his banal office life – a life of drudgery and enslavement to a lazy, tyrannical boss (Mark Gatiss) who takes credit for Christopher’s ideas – that he has no time for his wife Evelyn (a quietly affecting Hayley Atwell) or their somber, intent little girl Madeline (played by a talented young actress with a marvelous name, Bronte Carmichael). Christopher is in dire trouble but doesn’t realize it, so he gets a visit from his childhood companion Winnie the Pooh (voiced by Jim Cummings) and finds himself back in the woods with Eeyore (Brad Garrett), Piglet (Nick Mohammed), Rabbit (Peter Capaldi), Owl (Toby Jones), Kanga (Sophie Okonedo) and Baby Roo (Sara Sheen). I know; it sounds awful. In fact, it sounds like Steven Spielberg’s disastrous 1991 Hook, where it’s the adult Peter Pan (Robin Williams) has turned into a corporate type who needs to be rescued from a values-blind, dead-ended existence. Yet somehow Christopher Robin turns out to be lovely – sweet, not treacly, and understated.

Love Thy Neighbour: Paddington 2

I haven’t seen the first Paddington film from 2014, but after sitting through its sequel, that feels like a mistake I should rectify – not because I feel like I missed some crucial backstory, but simply because I need more films like this in my life. Paddington 2 is a sweet and charming piece of family entertainment, never stooping to the treacly in its celebration of kindness, friendliness, and tolerance. It treks into some dark places in its effort to brighten up the world, while staying lively, fun, truthful. . . and full of marmalade. I loved it.

The Gloriously Flawed Jane Tennison: Prime Suspect 1-7

Helen Mirren as Inspector Jane Tennison, in Prime Suspect 2 (1992).

It was with great sadness that I watched the last few minutes of Prime Suspect: The Final Act in 2007 because it meant that I would never again see any new material featuring the character of Jane Tennison – one of the finest character ever created for television. Now that the entire series has just been released as a DVD box set, it's a perfect time to look back at this landmark program. Over the course of 15 years (1992-2007), in seven miniseries, Helen Mirren played Tennison as a work-driven woman who pushed back societal barriers of sexism, misogyny and finally ageism to become a Detective Chief Inspector at a London police division. Later in the series, she became Deputy Superintendent in Manchester and finally ended up back in London. Unlike most shows that would be happy just dealing with the uplift of an independent woman proving her chops amongst the men, Tennison was a deeply flawed woman who paid an expensive price for her ambitions. Prime Suspect never condemned her for her drive, but rather looked compassionately at the high cost of it: failed relationships, alcoholism, unwanted pregnancies, ridicule, petty jealousy and loneliness.

Who's Next: BBC's Class

Sophie Hopkins, Jordan Renzo, Fady Elsayed, Vivian Oparah, and Greg Austin in Class.

This review contains some general spoilers for the first season of Class.  

For the past eight weeks, Doctor Who's tenth season has had a new companion on Saturday evenings over at BBC America: Class, a teen-centred spin-off of the BBC's flagship science-fiction series that was broadcast on BBC3 in the UK in late 2016. Last night, alongside the gut-wrenching conclusion of Doctor Who's midseason three-parter, the eighth and final episode of Class's first season also aired – and so it seems a perfect time to reflect on the latest entry into the still-expanding Doctor Who universe.

Storybook Movies: Paddington and Cinderella

The English filmmaker Paul King, who wrote and directed Paddington, seems to have come out of nowhere. (His résumé includes only one previous feature – something called Bunny and the Bull, which never opened in the U.S. – and a handful of obscure TV credits.) And he comes fully formed, with style, sensibility and a level of inventiveness and filmmaking expertise that ought to make other novice directors green with envy – or inspire them to go and do likewise. Paddington, based on the Michael Bond children’s books about a Peruvian bear who’s adopted by a family of Londoners (King and Hamish McColl worked up the screen story), is so accomplished visually, so funny and enchanting, that watching it makes you feel a bit delirious.

World War Zzzzz: More of the Same

Brad Pitt in World War Z

I've never been a big fan of zombies, whether in books or films. While they’re inherently scary, these ravenous creatures who lurch out of the shadows to feed on humanity, they also quickly become boring. (I always found vampires, the often elegant undead who can feel attracted to or alienated from humans, or The Frankenstein / Golem, a supposedly mindless creation that actually may contain a soul, to be far more compelling.) Nevertheless, I've liked a few zombie movies, such as George A. Romero’s seminal Night of the Living Dead (1968) and his sequel Dawn of the Dead (1978), Danny Boyle’s formulaic but well done and effective 28 Days Later (2002) and Dan O’Bannon’s witty underrated The Return of the Living Dead (1985). Others, such as Fido (2006), Zombieland (2009) and most of the sequels to Romero’s zombie movies, weren't so hot. But I've never bothered checking out most of the numerous novels on the subject, more of them than ever being published, it seems, because they appear to be too much of the same old, same old, though I really appreciated Jonathan Maberry’s moving short story "Family Business," from the anthology Zombie: An Anthology of the Undead (2012), It was a touching reminder that zombies were once human like us. On the other hand, I found Isaac Marion’s novel Warm Bodies (2010), wherein a zombie falls in live with a human girl and eventually changes to become well human, to be utterly far-fetched, even within the parameters of zombie stories, and silly, too. (For that reason, I never bothered checking out the film version of the book when it came out earlier this year.) And finally, I found AMC’s The Walking Dead, the hit de jour, to be a supremely dull TV show, bailing out on it after a season and a half.

One novel, however, Max Brooks’ World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (2006), stood out from all the other zombie apocalypse stories, filmed or written, because it went further in analyzing how a human – zombie war would change our society, solve, sometimes inadvertently, pressing political disputes and make heroes out of some of the most unlikely people. Brooks labelled World War Z an oral history, deliberately patterned on The Good War (1984), the late Studs Terkel’s oral history of World War Two, and it’s apt. World War Z possesses the wide ranging intellectual interests, smarts and empathy of Terkel’s best work. Not surprisingly, the new film version of World War Z does not.