More miss than hit

Two very different shows began this week that requires people to affect Irish accents. Neither hit the mark but more of that later.

 

Sky Atlantic’s new home-grown effort, Hit and Miss, has had a hell of a build up over the past few weeks on all Sky channels, with leading lady Chloe Sevigny even turning up on Sky News for a plug at one stage. The pitch – Sevigny is pre-op transsexual hitwoman, Mia, living in the not-so-friendly part of Manchester, who has just found out that she fathered a kid with a now dead woman 11 years previously, who has left Mia in charge of said kid plus three others in her will. Convoluted? Absolutely! The storyline of being transgender and having to deal with the kid might well have been enough to explore in this six-parter. I was slightly baffled at the assassin aspect, which just seems to add a layer of unrealism to the whole thing.

As distracting as that is, however, there are bigger issues. First, Chloe Sevigny in no way looks like a man, especially evident when it showed her naked and wearing a prosthetic. Second, the accent. For some reason the assassin is Irish which, as far as I could make out, just gave Sevigny a further obstacle to her acting, one she didn’t quite manage to hurdle.

So Mia ‘The Machine’ hitwoman goes to a remote farm up a hill somewhere to step into the lives of the four kids, who really don’t seem to know what to make of her. The eldest girl has assumed the role of carer and just wants Mia to sign some documents to say she is their guardian and then disappear. But Mia has got a taste of parenthood now and doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, not that I was really bothered by that stage.

This was created by Paul Abbot, who has previously offered us the brilliant Shameless and the best part of the programme centred around the family aspect – Mia’s kid Ryan being bullied by a boy at school, the two eldest trying to manage running a farm while keeping off social services radar and raising the younger ones.

The villain of the piece is the man who owns the farmhouse the children are living in. He has been using the eldest girl for sex and his son is bullying the young Ryan. So it’s up to Mia to beat him up, get son Ryan to beat up the boy and all go on like happy families. Not a very good role model if you ask me.
The biggest riddle of the whole thing is Mia. Forget gender confusion, there is no inkling as to how she became a contract killer or why she is so eager to be a parent to the rag tag bunch of kids living on the fringes. With no reason to empathise with the main character, it’s hard to know what we are supposed to make of her shooting people in cold blood for money or beating up villain landlord. I’m waiting for the next episode before calling it.

If Hit and Miss had plenty of advert attention, then one that may have passed completely under the radar is Hell on Wheels, an AMC production that began here on Sunday on satellite channel TMC.

Set in 1865, the series centres on the settlement that accompanied the construction of the first transcontinental railroad, referred to as “Hell on Wheels” by the company men, surveyors, labourers, prostitutes, mercenaries and others who made the mobile encampment their home.

TV Westerns don’t seem to perform too well in recent years, not with the onset of CGI-laden JJ Abrams-type creations or crime series.  The last western to have a real impact was Deadwood, HBO’s brilliant portrayal of the 1870s frontier town in the Dakota Territories, which ran for three seasons and picked up numerous Emmy awards and even a Golden Globe. Signs are promising with Hell on Wheels given it has been commissioned for a second series. On evidence of the first episode, it’s definitely worth a look.

Anson Mount is Cullen Bohannon, a former Confederate soldier who works as a foreman on the railroad and who has a side job of trying to track down the Union soldiers who murdered his wife and young son. It also stars a bevy of Irish actors including Colm Meany as Thomas “Doc” Durant, a bit of a mad man and investor in the railroad hoping to make his fortune and Dominique McElligott (Raw, The Guard) as widow Lily Bell. There are also ‘Irish’ brothers Sean and Micky McGinnes played by an Australian and a Canadian – the attempts at the accent I won’t even get in to. This aside, there are some interesting political and social transitions at play. Lincoln has just abolished slavery but the black community feel far from free, Indians still claim scalps of those invading their land although one appears to have decided to adopt the ways of the modern world, while a lot of former Confederate and Union soldiers now find themselves working alongside each other. A bubbling pot that’s about to explode I think.

I didn’t think it was possible to out-kitsch Jedward but there they were, Russian grannies making scones on stage in Baku as the first of the semi-finals in Eurovision kicked off on Tuesday night. The upshot, we get to see them all again on Saturday as the grannies and Jedward made it through to the final. It was all a far cry however from Eurovision’s Dirty Secret: Panorama on BBC1 on Monday night.  It was an eye-opener into the world of Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev and his family, the obscene wealth and power they have accumulated and the extent to which they will go to maintain it.

Free speech, tolerance and accountability are non-existent. The election of Ilham’s wife Mehriban to parliament with 94% of the vote is laughed off by the Azerbaijan representative in the London Embassy as ludicrous that she ONLY got 94% and not more.

Journalist Paul Kenyon was visibly having problems not to laugh in his face but it is no laughing matter that a country is showcasing its modernity to Europe this week, while sweeping the population’s poverty and human rights abuses under the rug.