Penny Dreadful isn't just a great drag name. It's a terrific title, and a fairly audacious one, for a new series from Showtime. Those smug folks at Showtime had better not go poking a TV critic with such a tempting title, unless the show is really good. And it really isn't. Neither is Penny Dreadful particularly dreadful. It is just tarred with the brush of confusingly high production values, expensive casting, pastiche and unoriginality that dogs so much current pay TV.
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Penny Dreadful (Showcase, Thursday, 7.30pm) is a sideshow alley collection of slightly scary crap: undead monsters from ancient Egypt, seances, Josh Hartnett dressed up as a cowboy, Dorian Gray and Victor Frankenstein. This motley crew might be entertaining, stranded in a remake of Gilligan's Island, but lurking in candle-lit darkness, like a dusty pile of Mary Shelley's worst rejected ideas, who is going to care.
I know I'm supposed to love Newsroom (Showcase, Monday, 7.30pm). But I don't. Even though it has been filmed on an old West Wing camera, with the Smug and Supercilious Filter permanently attached, series three is oddly, very watchable. Our season begins with a literal bang, as Will McAvoy and Mackenzie McHale are planning their wedding, and super producer that she is, Mac catches a glimpse of an explosion on a monitor in a distant studio. Yes, our very own Lois Lane has discovered the terrorist at the Boston marathon.
In this, the final series, and possibly Sorkin's farewell to television, the writer-producer is channelling Jimmy Stewart, determined to filibuster the American people of his passion for democracy. He has his hand up Jeff Daniels', Jane Fonda's and Sam Waterson's dresses, and they all look ventriloquistically exhausted.
I've no squabble with Aaron Sorkin or his desire to shine harsh critical lights into the murky corners of modern broadcast journalism. But his voice is sanctimonious and dated. His characterisations are tired and the soliloquies that hijack the action while Sorkin drools on his own soapbox are wearisome.
He has gone overboard in his desire to woo and possibly sleep with angry politically correct women. In Newsroom, every woman has an IQ 50 points higher than her corresponding male colleague/romantic interest, and he loves it. That these women all talk dismissively and at high speed like Katherine Hepburn on crack cocaine, gives the male cast members of Newsroom a solid boner. In fact, their predominantly high-strung histrionics are the only thing that stops these men on their Dudley Do-Right quest to uphold Ed Murrow's values at a pay TV network that nobody watches.
Hey! Don, Sancho, Dulcinea! They're not giants or windmills. They are Rupert Murdoch's most unholy creations and you are about 30 years too late in noticing them. Any point Sorkin would like to make was more or less covered in Broadcast News, the brilliant feature film of 1987.
He might do better to get on his high horse about internet celebrity. Fashion Bloggers Australia (Style, Wednesday, 8.30pm) is a reality show about unemployable self-promoters and their passion for fascinators and glycolic peels. It's not a comedy, or an insightful documentary about the destruction and devolvement of journalism. It's a reality show… about bloggers. In culinary terms – that would be a Chokito that has been deep-fried in a Chiko Roll. With the exception of the rather more impressive Kate Waterhouse, all the bloggers speak with the voice of a chihuahua that has swallowed helium. Much scarier than Penny Dreadful!
