FUBAR (Netflix)

Arnold Schwarzenegger stars in his first TV role as a retiring CIA spy. However, one day he discovers that his daughter Emma has also been recruited by the CIA and his life is turned upside down. Oh no! Dad finds his daughter's secret lipstick vibrator! How stiff! How embarrassing! Imagine True Lies, but without any edge, suspense, budget or personality - and you get FUBAR, an easily digested semi-finished product that feels like a fake show. You know, one of those shows that only exists in another show to act as a parody. However, it's all real and broadcast in our living rooms for... well, who is the target audience for FUBAR?

Arnold fans will absolutely not get a kick out of a watered-down low-budget action thriller. Netflix moms won't be interested in a stilted action man who is forced to pronounce Zach Galifianakis' name and replace "Fuck" with "Fluff" to be as accessible to the widest possible audience - something that rarely works. It's a sleazy father-and-daughter show in spy garb that employs the most basic and hackneyed sitcom situations to create the illusion that the show is a heartwarming comedy and not an artificial one-of-a-kind production that exists solely to buzz in the background while doing something more meaningful in the living room.

FUBAR tries to be like the animated agent show Archer, where the dysfunctional relationship between parent and offspring often gets their spy agency into trouble. The difference between Archer and FUBAR is that the childishness of Archer works because of the characters' human dynamics, bitter conflicts and hysterically large egos. Archer is funny because the characters are adults acting like children. FUBAR is boring because the characters are children trying to act like adults and it doesn't work for a minute. CIA is run like a clown show for paper-thin characters who constantly over-explain everything, shove Big Bang Theory humour down the viewer's throat and talk about how they've learned their life lessons at the end of each episode as if it were a children's show.

In the 90s, the premise of a secret spy's daughter and Schwarzenegger might have worked in the right hands. It could have worked as a tongue-in-cheek two-hour action flick that managed to balance the hard-boiled with the cheesy, as in Schwarzenegger's Golden Age. Here, however, it's mostly exhaustingly forced and flamingly dull. There are one or two episodes that work, such as when the daughter has to seduce a person for the first time to gain access to his state secrets, but eight episodes is an agonizing amount to get through to reach a climax that mostly just lacks direction. As much as Schwarzenegger tries to charm as a cuddly CIA grandfather, it's clear that the Terminator icon's heyday was over 20 years ago, and FUBAR won't exactly bring Commando fans back to the TV couch.