Nigel Rudyard (NR)

Funny, sharp, well acted, well written, and entertaining. Brooklyn 99 is authentic enough to follow the police elements, yet light enough to provide regular laugh out loud moments. The writing is as consistently good as the acting. While Andy Samberg and Andre Braugher stand out, the whole ensemble are tremendous, particularly Stephanie Beatriz, who plays taciturn tough-guy Rosa Diaz to perfection. The writers have obviously gone to some lengths to capture NYPD procedures convincingly enough to make you suspend disbelief and follow the various cases and villains the 99 detective squad follow, and the characters are quirky enough to keep it all interesting. If you haven't seen the series yet, you're in for a treat!

This is the best thing Netflix have made, IMHO. The Good Place is clever, witty, sometimes wickedly so, irreverently thoughtful, and beautifully written, and it does that thing that only really well conceived shows can do -- it gets great performances from the entire cast. And it's very, very funny. Michael Schur just has a way of coming up with ideas that work as both comedy and thought-provoking drama, without ever being preachy. And it has genuine pathos. The principal characters (Eleanor, Tahani, Jason and Chidi) all start from different places, and go through long story arcs, from being misfits on Earth, judged unworthy of entering the real Heaven (The Good Place), and in their long, tortuous (and usually very silly) journeys, blunder their way towards enlightenment. Kristen Bell and Ted Danson are perfect in their respective roles (Eleanor and Michael, the Demon-turned-Angel architect); William Jackson Harper as the gloriously indecisive but erudite moral philosopher Chidi; Jameela Jamil as the vainglorious socialite; Manny Jacincto as the wonderfully vacant Jason / Jianyu, and D'Arcy Carden as Janet, the super-intelligent all-knowing afterlife oracle ('not a girl'), are all equally good. Honorable mentions must go to Mark Evan Jackson, who is hilariously wicked throughout as Michael's Bad Place boss, Shawn, and Adam Scott, for his cameo as surely the jerkiest demon ever. If you haven't watched it yet, you're in for a treat - 53 treats, actually. If you have, it really warrants a repeat viewing. I don't know if anybody else found the last episode hard to watch, but I certainly did. As Carole Burnett said: "Comedy is tragedy plus time." The Good Place is certainly not a theological nor philosophical study, but for light entertainment, it definitely makes you think about what life is, and also about what might follow. What the fork, man? Get your shirt together and give it a watch, if you haven't seen it!

Dark on the Water. I guess that's how Baran bo Odar pitched 1899 to Netflix. There are superficial similarities: everybody's troubled, gloomy, introspective, sinister, rude, hostile, weird etc., and they're all stuck in never-ending causal loops that were a feature of the far superior "Dark" series. Anyway, all these delightful characters are on the good ship Kerberos to New York, before being waylaid by a signal from sister ship Prometheus, that they find dead in the water, a Victorian Marie Celeste. Apparently it's partly an allegory about displacement, the plight of refugees and even Brexit -- i.e. a multi-lingual lens through which the problems of Europe as a whole are explored via the increasingly weird symbolism of the storylines. As wacky as it all is, and as annoying to some people that it doesn't make much sense (all these criticisms are true, by the way, it's bonkers), it is very atmospheric, and some of the performances are quite good, if you're into moody Scandi / German minimalism. Emily Beecham is a good lead, but its Andreas Pietschmann's turn as haunted, grizzled Captain Eyk Larsen who sets the tone. If you like stories set at sea, particularly "ship of the damned" type things, you might like 1899. Apparently, bo Badar and co-creator Jantje Friese had mapped 1899 as a three season concept (the abiding symbol throughout is a triangle), but despite pulling 90 million hours of viewing, Netflix decided they'd had enough, and didn't fancy splashing another $60m of their cash on SS Shipwreck the Sequel. Passes the time, if you like spooky stuff.

There's half a good film in here, like the original Butterfly Effect. The mistake they made was essentially re-treading the path the first (very flawed) film took - multiple flashbacks leading to several alternative timelines etc. The movie therefore suffers from diminishing returns of a potentially good idea that might have been taken forward, but in the end, flounders on the remnants of the original film. Shame really, because the two principal characters (Eric Lively and Erica Durance) turn in good performances, and do their best with a messy story that lacks both coherence and narrative drive.

** SPOILERS ** Code 8: Part II is a decent sequel to Code 8, picking up the story five years after the first film. Robbie Amell (Connor Reed) and Stephen Amell (Garrett Kelton) reprise their roles from the original 2019 movie. In the near future a special city (Lincoln City) is built of people with special powers (merely called "powers" in the story). Around 1 in 25 of the population have developed specific powers (electric, pyro, transducers cryos etc), and are used as cheap labour to fuel the Third Industrial Age. However, despite their gifts, they exist in extreme poverty and face constant suspicion and prejudice from the general population and a corrupt, militarized police force. In Part II, five years after the first story, Connor is released from prison, and while Kelton has built a supposedly ethical drug empire (psyke, drawn from powered donors floods the streets), Connor has languished in prison, and wants nothing to do with his former associate. A young powered girl (Pav) witnesses her brother being murdered by a K9 unit supposedly designed not to inflict harm, under the control of rising (and highly corrupt) cop, 'King' Kingston. Connor is therefore forced to seek Kelton's help to protect her from the police. Part II is a reasonable attempt to continue Code 8, told in a similar, almost unremittingly grim vein, one of Netflix's seemingly never-ending stream of SF dystopias. One problem is that the ghost of X-Men haunts the basic premise quite strongly - particularly the widespread prejudice the powered characters face from public and officials alike, and another issue is the somewhat generic nature of the characters, particularly in the second movie. However, if you're looking for almost infinitely powerful characters like Storm, Cyclops and Wolverine, you've got the wrong movies. Code 8 is grittier, and the powered characters have fairly well defined limits to their abilities. Another more general problem is that the proliferation of Marvel and DC movies (of decreasing quality) has led to a general superhero fatigue by the viewing public, with many critics thinking its time to give the whole genre a good long rest. The Amell cousins are talented actors and are beginning to carve out a name for themselves thanks to roles such as Arrow (Stephen) and Robbie in The Flash, Upload and The Tomorrow People reboot. I hope they don't allow themselves to be dragged into further sequels and debase two fairly decent films -- the law of diminishing returns tends to rapidly devalue superhero franchises. Code 8 Part II is well thought through, the effects don't suffer from the overwhelming garishness of the Marvel franchise, the acting is good, and the story can be viewed as an allegory for the ongoing decline of the United States, particularly the corruption in many parts of its governmental institutions, and the militarisation of its police forces. As a contribution to the SF genre, it breaks no new ground, as tends to be the way with Netflix offerings, but it is a good watch. Definitely not The Matrix, but neither is it merely chewing gum for the eyes. To that end, it's a good tale, well told -- but that tale has, perhaps, been told better elsewhere.

A thoughtful and depressing dystopia on the defunct superhero genre. Robbie Amell gives a strong, nuanced performance as Connor Reed, an 'electrokinetic' Connor Reed, a 26-year-old Electric ("electrokinetic") looks after his mother, Mary, a 'cryokinetic', whose ailment prevents her from controlling her powers, and the family are too poor to afford treatment for her. Connor finds himself drawn into crime by Garrett Kelton (Stephen Amell), the backdrop being that a powerful crime syndicate 'The Trust', is supplying a powerful drug Psyke, which quells an increasingly poor population. Hunted by two cops, Connor finds himself conflicted between a life of crime that will fund his mother's treatment, or a life of unemployment were 'powered' individuals are marginalised and treated with suspicion -- with an impending vote to outlaw all powers. The fact that the low budget probably meant the filmmakers couldn't resort to the sort of expensive CGI that have ruined so many Marvel films is probably a good thing -- the performances are pretty good across the board, but there are too many characters to allow for any real development of their story arcs. If anything, Code 8 is more a searing portrayal of late-stage capitalism, where all but the very richest prosper, and everybody else is at each other's throats. The powered characters serve as a symbol of how potential and power are exploited, wasted and feared, and the police (and their robotic 'Guardians') are, at best, a morally ambiguous force for a status quo that has everybody circling the drain. Code 8 is a thoughtful, depressing, dystopia that breathes a little more life into the bloated corpse of a defunct, discredited, and exhausted superhero genre, at least for a little longer. Robbie and Stephen Amell's performances deserve much credit here, as does Kyla Kane's Nia and Sung Kang's conflicted police officer, Park.