From left, Showtime’s Meadowlands and HBO’s Conchords
Work on an unspecified Big Fat Project has prevented me from cranking out many full-fledged reviews lately but I want to put in a word for Meadowlands, an eight-episode British import drama that starts on Showtime Sunday. It’s a dark, fanciful mystery about a tough guy and his family who have moved, through a witness-relocation program, to an idyllic yet sinister gated community that’s more than a little like The Village from the paranoid ’60s drama The Prisoner. I won’t say it’s in the same league as that show, but it’s a gloomy, involving, sometimes ultraviolent diversion. And no, it has nothing to do with New Jersey or Jimmy Hoffa’s burial place.
Also, I won’t expand on my earlier plug for the understatedly funny Flight of the Conchords on HBO, except to say that this week in TIME my editor, Belinda Luscombe, concurred with my praise. She’s Australian, and if this show can get an Aussie to say something good about two New Zealanders, you know it has to be good.