TV Review: Ja'mie - Private School Girl

Ja’mie, We Already Knew You

Eight years on, is our homegrown queen teen bitch still (to use her own parlance) Ja’miezing?

Ja’mie King was back in the day. She was fresh, funny and fantastic when she burst onto our screens in We Can Be Heroes in 2005 and still had it going on in the follow up Summer Heights High as the ultimate grotesque with alter ego, the uber talented Chris Lilley pulling the strings.

"There’s nothing really new in her school bag of tricks."

But take away the new pop culture references and abbreviated teen slang and it’s as if time has stood still in Ja’mie’s third outing Private School Girl.

She’s still a fan of humpy dance moves, still fires off abusive quips like a firecracker, still spoilt rotten, still a cradle snatcher, still politically incorrect, still delusional, still the ultimate grotesque.

There’s nothing really new in her school bag of tricks.

And the laughs have become scarce. They’re more like scoffs at just how horrible she’s become and just how low she’ll go. Last week she concocted the ‘A Boy In Need Is A Boy Indeed’ program, shamelessly parading around her ‘povo’ African project Kwami and her Christian values in a bid to win The Hilford Medal.

Twerk that Miley

Sure that was always the gag. Lilley’s characters’ foibles most often shine a light on society’s own prejudices. But with her own show, Ja’mie is pretty much in every scene and the act is starting to feel as stale as last week’s ‘quiche’. Borrowed that term too, Ja’mie.

It can’t be easy to find something new in a well established, well loved character even if you are the exceptionally talented Lilley, though Barry Humphries has managed to keep his Dame Edna Everage endearing for well over half a century. You can’t help thinking that after the mixed response to Lilley’s last project, the bold Angry Boys that he’s retreated to safer ground.

Miss King could well do with another fish-out-of water interlude a la Summer Heights High. Perhaps her mooted gap year in 'povo' Africa where she could really get those bangs dirty, or a comeuppance in the cut throat world of PR?

TV Review: Homeland

Missing In Action

Spoiler Alert!

Firstly, some disclosure. I've been a fan of Homeland from the beginning, engrossed in the twists and turns of intelligence and espionage that Homeland proved so adept at in Season 1 and parts of it's sophomore followup. I'd even hoped that Brody's pace-maker quid pro quo with Abu Nazir which saw the offing of Vice President Walden was simply an aberration.

But now in Season 3, my patience is being sorely tested.  

For all the talk of Homeland starting afresh, sidelining a headline character for almost half a season (to date) - however much the storyline might dictate it - is either one hell of a bold creative move or a kamikaze mission.

I hate to say that on this season’s showing so far it’s the latter. The series’ scribes wrote themselves and war hero cum senator cum suspected terrorist-on-the-run Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis) into yet another corner in what was admittedly a doozy of an episode. It ended with our anti-hero seemingly succumbing to the drug-addled, colourful concrete ghetto of Caracas’ ‘Tower of David’.

"Homeland scribes I implore you, bring Brody back sooner rather than later..... Otherwise you might as well shuffle Brody off this fictional mortal coil and truly reboot Homeland, thereby putting him and us out of our misery."  

But that was one – count ‘em one - miserly episode out of six so far. An integral protagonist M.I.A stretches the audience’s patience too like a rubber band. If there’s no pay off in sight, it may just snap.

Nick Brody: So far, so sidelined.

The good news is that Homeland can still be taut, gripping viewing with the considerable power to induce pulse-racing, bum-on-the-edge-of-your-seat moments; last week’s episode anointing a new terrorist baddie etched in blood, Iranian intelligence high-ranker Majid Javadi  (Shaun Toub) a case in point.

The bad is that for a series built on the verisimilitude of the US War on Terror, Homeland continues to stretch credulity, even if you factor in that yes this is after all a fiction.

This season’s long-con twist tried to seduce us into believing C.I.A caretaker Saul (Mandy Patinkin) had thrown bi-polar agent Carrie (Claire Danes) under the bus - straight to the psych ward. And what are we to believe of Carrie’s apparent pregnancy? Is Brody really the baby-daddy?

Pin the tail on the Brody

And I think I speak for all fans of the show when I say enough of the melodramatic misadventures of troubled teen Dana Brody. Last week, it looked as though she was leaving for good. Please writing Gods make it so so that screen time can be allocated back to where it belongs.

With Brody still M.I.A (at least if episode seven’s promo is to be believed) Homeland scribes I implore you, bring Brody back sooner rather than later. 

Otherwise, as Lewis himself has reportedly suggested, you might as well shuffle Brody off this fictional mortal coil and truly reboot Homeland, thereby putting him and us out of our misery.