roximunro Reviews

Seeing Things (1981–1987)

Please bring back or remake this show!

[23 March 2005]

I loved this show when I was a kid and have rediscovered it just in the past few months. Compared to some of the shows on TV today this one is very good. Louie was a Canadian cross between Groucho Marx and George Costanza. DelGrande's ad-libs are hilarious. I wonder how much funnier the outtakes were.

Sadly, the CBC will probably never bring this out on DVD. Broadcast royalties were part of most contracts for the crews of CBC shows back then so if they were to bring a show out on DVD they would have to pay massive royalties to anyone who was linked to the show, from the stars all the way down to the clapboard clapper.

Andromeda (2000–2005)

In the end, a waste of time

[15 January 2005]

After making Gene Rodenberry's Earth: Final Conflict, an interesting idea turned into a meandering pointless series, the gods of cheap-to-make syndicated Canadian TV shows decided to draw one time too many (AGAIN) from the Rodenberry well. The original premise was good, but after Kevin Sorbo fired the head writer, the plots of episode after episode lost any sign of a story arc. Major events in the storyline happened between episodes. Characters lost goals if they ever had any to begin with. I've sat down to watch some episodes and ended up wanting that hour of my life back. The only reason the show is still running is because the profit margin between selling the show to foreign markets and the cost of making episodes is nice and wide. Would it kill them to spend money on better and more consistent writers? And now the whole show has been exiled to some bar on some planet?! I've seen better production values at my high school drama class!

And now they're all hanging out a bar on some little planet?! Good lord, cancel the show. Put the actors out of their, and our, misery.

The only thing I did like about this show was Laura Bertram. She's grown up on television into a very beautiful woman. I like how she played both the purple perky airhead Trance and then the older wiser browner Trance. Maybe her character was an evolved and sentient grape who grows into a raisin?

Nowhere Man (1995–1996)

It was so good it made ME paranoid

[9 August 2003]

This show used to play on Friday nights at midnight up here, which just made it a more interesting and frightening show to watch. The premise was simple and solid. There were so many unsubtle tributes to other paranoid conspiracy tv shows and movies (ie The Prisoner, Three Days of The Condor). I wish it had been renewed but I am glad they gave us at least a little explanation in the last episode.

Oh and if you do catch reruns of this show (it played on Space in Canada at one time) DO NOT watch it while under the influence of a cold or cold medication. It'll keep you up all night, jumping at every shadow and sound you hear. Trust me on this one.

Red Dwarf (1992 TV Movie)

I didn't know this existed

[9 August 2003]

I was surprised to see a US pilot for Red Dwarf, then shocked and saddened when I actually watched it. US Lister was so whitebread and unscuzzy. Rimmer snivels so little that I actually thought the actor would make a better Lister than the one I was watching. Cat no longer had his Little Richard-ish persona. It WAS nice to see the original Kryten (loved the eyeballs in the coffee gag) and Jane Leeves as Holly (*spark* ooh that one felt gooood) but they wouldn't have been able to save this US version from oblivion. As for pilot number two, which I've only seen a cast photo of, it was interesting to see Terry Farrell dressed up like a cat but it was far from being sound as a dollar-pound. Don't mess with perfection!

Matrix (1993)

Rip-off of "Equalizer" episode

[29 July 2003]

I thought this show was quite good for a forgettable Canadian-made/Foreign-sold tv show, but I was surprised to hear the show's premise word for word on an episode of the US show "The Equalizer". In the episode called "Trial By Fire" Robert McCall (Edward Woodward) is hired by a New York school to rid it off gang violence. He takes them to the city morgue to scare them straight and at the morgue he introduces them to a former hitman who had his own near death experience. The hitman's monologue (standing by an ocean of fire, surrounded by all the people he killed, watching God walk past him) is exactly what happens in the pilot episode of "Matrix". Did one of the crew work on both shows or did they just steal the idea?