Hooten & the Lady

This was really good! Why would they cancel something that lots of people clearly enjoy. It had everything, a bit of love interest, adventure, comedy the lot. So annoyed.

Lady Alex Lindo-Parker (Ophelia Lovibond) convinces her bosses at the British Museum to fund an Amazon expedition to find the lost Victorian explorer Percy Fawcett last seen in 1925. She is captured by natives along with treasure hunter Ulysses Hooten (Michael Landes). They escape and find Fawcett's map to the legendary city of Z. They would continue to have many adventures retrieving lost artifacts.

This has the Romancing the Stone vibe. Lovibond and Landes have a solid combative romantic chemistry. There is a bit of exotic with the locations. The production is relatively good. With more money, it could really take off. On the other hand, the show has structural problems. The fact that the two leads aren't together means that the show has to construct various reasons to pull them together every week. It has to waste ten minutes out of every episode to make up an excuse for them to join forces. It would have been so much easier if the pilot has Hooten arrested and part of his parole is to help the Lady retrieve artifacts for the museum. There is also very little need for the museum people. The boyfriend is useful but he should be jettisoned at the end of the first season. The show doesn't last that long and is canceled after eight episodes.

This is probably the only show at the moment that does not have. 1. a character with special powers/abilities that helps the local police department solve crimes (Lucifer, Lie to me, Continuum, Sleepy Hollow, Mentalist, Bones and so on.) 2. a nudity (Westworld, Game of Thrones) where geeks can finally satisfy themselves with anything other than PoornHub 3. where the character is 50% of the time a CGI stunt or fighting/shooting/trying to survive some kind of apocalypse

This is one of those TV shows where you can just sit down and enjoy lighthearted story line. you know what will happen and that is the idea of it. you know that Hooten will f^&k up something somewhere... but you don't know where

Its as cheesy as riders of the lost ark, or the temple of doom... and there is nothing wrong about it.

Having been a fan of Michael Landis for a long time I was pleased to see that he had another series coming up. I recorded the first episode and watched it with my beloved wife. She summed it up in one of our family's time honoured phrases, "Another guilty pleasure!" HatL stands in the archaeologist tradition of Indiana Jones but is more closely allied with the Michael Douglas motion pictures begun with "Romancing the Stone": boorish adventurer with a heart of gold teams with a snooty, wealthy and very beautiful woman join forces to find lost artifacts. The secret ingredient in HatL is the dynamic interplay between the two lead actors, and the brilliant writing. The crisp dialogue is always refreshing. And it is laugh-out-loud funny! We love it and hope you might too.

It doesn't shy away from the genre clichés and is all the better for it. Written with care and made with a decent budget, this is an enjoyable and long overdue "fill in" between the rare quality action adventure movies that 40somethings grew up on. The acting holds up, just, and the lead characters love/hate relationship has depth and seems to lay a basis for a long run on the series. Let's hope so. In some ways the TV format struggles as the stories have to be fast paced to get the story in. Or maybe we are just used to movies padding them out. Either way the format takes a little getting used to and I hope that the series develops some longer term, undercurrent story lines that take the series beyond the "Popcorn label" that I would give it at present. However a fine effort and well worth your time and sky harddrive spent.