Archive | August, 2011

Show of the Day: Bull

19 Aug


To say that something is long forgotten assumes it was once remembered to begin with, which is why that phrase would not be applicable to Bull.  I’ve never met another person who remembers the existence of the show.  That said, even if you’ve never heard of the show it holds an important distinction in the annals of cable TV.  It was the first ever original series on TNT.  Now there are Leverage and Dark Blue and The Closer and Saving Grace and Rizzoli and Isles and all of them owe a little something to Bull, as the oldest child it may not have been the most successful, but it paved the way.

Bull was almost doomed from the start.  Named after the Bull market that seemed ready to last forever, the show aired as the dot-com bubble began its crash, making it look very out of place with circumstances.

Bull was a story of a group of young ambitious investment bankers who were about to break apart from the large, well established investment bank they were part of.  Making this transition even more controversial was the fact that the leader of the breakaways was the grandson of the founder of the investment they were all leaving.

I didn’t know a damn thing about investment banking when I watched the show (I don’t know all that much more now), but they managed to make it seem like a crazy, exciting, high-stakes world where the success of their young firm hinged on ten things going right every episode.  In the first episode, the rebellion from the old firm begins led by proud WASP scion Robin Roberts III, played by actor George Newborn, who might best be known for providing the voices for Superman in the Justice League series of cartoons, and Final Fantasy character Sephiroth in any English language incarnation of games that featured him.  His dad was portrayed by Ryan O’Neal, and his grandfather, known as the “Kaiser” who would become the primary antagonist of the show, was played by Donald Moffat, a British actor who might best be known for playing the evilUSpresident in Clear and Present Danger.  The show also featured Elizabeth Rohm who went on to a stint as Assistant District Attorney on Law & Order for a couple of years, and Stanley Tucci who played a more experienced negotiator who the team needs on their side to survive, but whose loyalty is in debate in nearly every episode.

Basically, in each episode they try valiantly to stay afloat, as the old firm tries to bring them down, attempting to sabotage their every deal.  There’s plenty of personal tension abreast as well.  We never got any resolution; Bull was cancelled halfway through its run, and I know of know way to get my hands on the second half of the season – though a youtube commenter on the preview above mentions that they showed the whole thing in Finland.

Did Bull make television history?  No, not really.  But I watched it, it deserves at least a rememberance that it once existed.  A marked grave, if not necessarily a yearly candle on its day of death.  I don’t think that’s too much to ask.

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Ranking the Shows That I Watch – 30: Royal Pains

18 Aug

My friend and I saw the commercials in the summer of 2009 – “Some Doctors Still Make House Calls.”  Done.  We were hooked.  We had already decided, as previously mentioned, that we would watch just about every USA show, but now we had a favorite, and it hadn’t even aired yet.  Even better, it took place out in the Hamptons on our very own home island, Long Island!  We declared it our favorite show on TV, and started quoting the catch phrase.  Now, as much as I loathe to admit it, this all was a bit ironic.  We know how to take irony far, though – we don’t half-ass it.  We watched every episode of the first season.  We quoted the part from the first episode which was in the “Previously On” section of literally every single episode –

Okay, this is going to require a brief explanation of the premise of Royal Pains.  Doctor Hank Lawson is a high-powered surgeon in a big New York City hospital.  A crazy circumstance occurs in the first episode, the premise episode, in which he has to choose between treating a rich hospital trustee and a teenager.  He chooses the teenager because he believes the teen has a better chance of living.  He saves the teen, but the trustee dies.  The hospital board is apoplectic, and fires him.  During this scene, the head board member asks him a question about how could he let a trustee die.  Hank says, “I made a judgment call.”  The head board member woman says in response, “You made a mistake”

Those two lines are literally in every previously on.  I’m not exaggerating.  So next time you need to impress a couple of Royal Pains fans, throw them a little “I made a judgment call” action and see if they give you the correct response.  It would be ideal as a call and answer to let Royal Pains fans into a speakeasy.

Basically, after that Hank and his brother go out and visit the Hamptons and due to a crazy set of circumstances, he lives at a mysterious rich guy’s villa and operates as a concierge doctor in the Hamptons, visiting patients, and having an on-again, off-again romance with an administrator at the local hospital.

All this said, the first season wasn’t all that great.  It wasn’t terrible by any means, it had its moments, but it was not the strongest light USA doctor procedural.  But we were committed and it was already cemented as our favorite show ever.

Then we watched the second season, and yeah, it’s no Sopranos, but it became an eminently enjoyable show, making us wonder what the ratio had become between ironic and actual viewing.  The show-runners seemed to get a lot more comfortable with the pieces they had, and though the episodes remain pretty light, and summer-y, as befits the show’s season and location (so far Hank has saved every patient he’s worked on), it’s really not a bad show, and I mean that as a compliment.

Why it’s This High:  It’s on USA, it’s on Long Island, and I’m a sucker for recurring guest star Campbell Scott.

Why It’s not higher:  It’s ceiling is unfortunately low – enjoyable should be what it’s aiming for, and getting, but its aims are not much higher.

Best Episode of Most Recent Season:  “A History of Violins” – honestly, it’s the great title, going more in depth into the plot is meaningless – it’s just a great title.

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The Zeljko Ivanek Hall of Fame: Greg Grunberg

17 Aug

(The Zeljko Ivanek Hall of Fame is where we turn the spotlight on a television actor or actress, and it is named after their patron saint, Zeljko Ivanek)

This week we’ll spotlight the career of successful televsion actor Greg Grunberg.

Unlike (probably?) most actors, Grunberg owes a large part of his television success to one man, a childhood friend, J.J. Abrams, with whom he grew up as fellow jews in Los Angeles in the 1970s. Grunberg, born in 1966, didn’t appear in anything until the early ’90s.  Wikipedia sums up his career up to his first big break in 1998 with the short sentence, “Grunberg has had guest roles in television starting in 1990. “ Amongst those guest roles were spots on Murphy Brown, Ned and Stacey, and a one season drama called Relativity (which starred Richard Schiff and Lisa Edelstein amongst others). Finally, in 1998, he got his big break – his buddy J.J. Abrams cast him as Sean Blumberg in Felicity, Abrams’ first TV series. Unlike many of the other characters in the series, Grunberg’s Blumberg (okay, those names almost rhyme right? That’s not just me?) is not in college, but is rather a jobless 20-something who is always coming out with cockamemie ideas for products, including shrimp yogurt, marzipan boxers and “Before and After” – a restaurant that only serves appetizers and desserts (that’s definitely kind of brilliant). Apparently half the characters at some point are roomates with him.

After that, and three appearances in NYPD Blue, he jumped right into Abrams’ next series, Alias, in which he played Eric Weiss, another good natured friend character who does not get involved with the lead. Descended from Harry Houdini, he is initially friends with Jennifer Garner’s Sydney Bristow through her CIA handler Michael Vaughn, and dispenses advice to other CIA characters in the show. Grunberg next guested on a House MD episode, as well as a more notable guest role as the pilot on Oceanic Airlines flight 815, the flight which crashed in Lost – his character died in the, well, pilot. He starred in a series produced by JJ Abrams for him called The Catch, about a bounty hunter, but while the pilot was shot, the series ended up never getting picked up, sadly. He also appeared in an NBC sitcom called The Jake Effect, alongside Jason Bateman and Nikki Cox, which never aired, even though seven episodes were made. Bravo thought highly enough of it, though, to air it in 2006 as part of its “Brilliant But Cancelled” programming.

He appeared in a Monk episode, and then got the third of his three big-time roles, the first not under the auspices of JJ Abrams, in Heroes, as Matt Parkman. Parkman is a telepath, whose powers continue to expand and expand, until they extend to mind control and making others see illusions which aren’t present. He starts as an LAPD cop, and, well, if I even try to explain any of the plot after that, it would take me at least another thousand words (wikipedia does a pretty good job here). After the sad but inevitable demise of Heroes both critically and commercially, Grunberg found a home on NBC midseason replacement Love Bites, which by that time became an anthology series about love stories, but with Grunberg or a couple of other characters always appearing. The show was cancelled after six episodes aired. As that show was cancelled less than a month ago, Grunberg is a free agent at the moment, but he has other talents as well, as a member and creator of Band from TV, a cover band of television actors which records songs for charity. Other members include Hugh Laurie and Adrian Pasdar.

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Ranking the Shows That I Watch – 31: Rubicon

16 Aug

By the skin of its teeth, Rubicon makes it onto the list, as it aired last summer, and well, won’t ever be airing again, but I did watch each and every episode, and I imagine I was one of the few.

I was actually extremely into the show when it started.  The main character, Will, is portrayed by the guy who played CTU agent and Elisha Cuthbert lover Chase Edmonds in the third season of 24 (James Badge Dale), though I would never have recognized him as he looks ten years older.  Will was a  socially awkward but brilliant intelligence agent for a mysterious top secret US intelligence agency in New York.  His family had died in 9/11, an unnecessary detail put in because every serious book, movie or television series set in New York has to show its connections to 9/11 to add drama and depth.  He worked under his father-and-law who dies in an insane train crash in the first episode, and we’re led to believe that this was indeed no accident.  The show set itself up as a long serial mystery show, like Lost, in that there would be a little bit of material given to the viewers in every episode, and if it was done well, its audience would be on the internet checking out what everybody else thought, and coming up with their own conspiracy theories about the conspiracy theories on the show.

The feel was of a classic, Three Days of the Condor-style ‘70s conspiracy thriller.  It got this part exactly right.  The mood was ominous, there were code names aplenty, and paranoia was everywhere.  Within a couple of episodes main character Will became paranoid, and then realized he wasn’t nearly being paranoid enough – his room was bugged, he didn’t know which high level employees were out for him (but at least a couple were), and eventually he had an assassin after him.

There are a lot of reasons why it ended up not working.  One might be that it played too far into clichés.  The plot really was that the events of the world being more or less controlled by a group of old white men (a very white show for a very white genre, I suppose).  Another reason was that the second most important plotline , which involved Miranda Richardson, as the young second wife of an old white man who died mysteriously/was murdered because he violated the terms of his cabal (we didn’t know this exactly at the time), was a lot less interesting than Will’s.

Throughout the show, away from the cabal, we saw the project Will and his team were working on at the top-secret-more-powerful-than-CIA intelligence agency, and the show ended up spending much more time on this plot, which seemed kind of irrelevant, until it was revealed that it was connected to the kind of cabal in a sort of ridiculous and pointless way.  The show had off-the-screen trouble with its showrunner and stuff turnover as it was being filmed, and it was easy to see watching the show.  The show just didn’t seem plotted or paced well, and the payoff at the end was a little bit disappointing and didn’t feel right.  Even though the last episode ended with a cliffhanger and I would have liked to see how it turned out, I didn’t feel all that disappointed that it was cancelled; I couldn’t say it didn’t earn it.

Why it’s this high:  It did a great job of setting mood, and brought back a great underused genre.

What it’s not higher:  It didn’t come together – the plot had no real direction and the pacing was poor and strange to say the least.

Best Episode of the most recent season:  I had to dig back in the archives here, but I think I’m going to say the first episode, because this is the type of show where that was really the high point– experiencing the potential before the execution kind of bungled it.

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Power Rankings: Party of Five

15 Aug

’90s  teen drama Party of Five on the agenda this week:

(Power Rankings sum up:  Each week, we’ll pick a television show and rank the actors/actresses/contestants/correspondents/etc. based on what they’ve doneafter the series ended (unless we’re ranking a current series, in which case we’ll have to bend the rules).  Preference will be given to more recent work, but if the work was a long time ago, but much more important/relevant, that will be factored in as well)

  1. Matthew Fox (as Charlie Salinger) – It’s fair to make it a close call between the first two, but there’s a one word answer for why Fox takes home the title:  Lost.  Simple, yes, but important as well – it’s just one TV show, but Jack was the first amongst equals in the ensemble cast, and though that’s really the only major project Fox was working on for years, it’s far more significant, culturally relevant, and memorable, horrible ending or not, than anything our second place finisher has come home with.  Honestly, that’s just about it – it’s just a really big one, but I should at least mention his role in colossal flop Speed Racer, short-lived pre-Lost UPN series Haunted, and in, what I suppose might be his largest movie role, We Are Marshall.
  1. Jennifer Love Hewitt (as Sarah Reeves Marin) – While Matthew Fox would wait a solid four years from the end of the Party of Five for the role that would make his career, Hewitt was the breakout star almost immediately, and her career has pretty much gone downhill from there.  Arguably her two best remembered film roles happened while she was still on Party of Five, with I Know What You Did Last Summer and Can’t Hardly Wait.  At the time same time as the last season of Party of Five was airing, Hewitt got her shot at a spin-off with Time of Your Life, co-starring Jennifer Garner, which failed after a single season.  From there, feature film pickings have been relatively slim, with two Garfield movies and The Tuxedo, and a whole lot of made-for-tv movies.  She lasted a hard-to-believe five seasons starring in her own show, Ghost Whisperer, which reruns on PAX constantly.  Does she have more on her resume than Fox?  Certainly.  That said, all combined, I still don’t think it equals one Lost.  And this is including her musical career, topped by single How Do I Deal which peaked at 59 on the Hot 100.
  1. Scott Wolf (as Bailey Salinger)– Never with the starpower of either of the first two actors on the list, Wolf has nevertheless put together a workmanlike career of appearing in the main cast of relatively unsuccessful but at least vaguely remembered shows.  First, four years after the end of Party of Five’s run, he joined the cast of the third and fourth season of Treat Williams-led drama Everwood.  Next, he was in the main cast of the ambitious but ultimately unsuccessful The Nine (constantly confused by me with other failed pilot that year Six Degrees).  Most recently, just these past two years he was a key member of ABC’s ‘80s Sci-fi reboot, V.  Nothing spectacular, but steady, solid work.
  1. Neve Campbell (as Julia Salinger)-  talk about Jennifer Love Hewitt, squared – Campbell was as big as Hewitt at the time of the show, starring in Scream, the movie that inspired Hewitt’s hit, I Know What You Did Last Summer, along with Wild Things, The Craft, and Scream 2, all before the end of Party of Five’s run.  At that time, Campbell’s theatrical career took off in the wrong direction, but she still had some things going on, as she appeared in Scream 3, as well as the small-budget but well reviewed Panic, in 2000, and The Company in 2003.  After that, well, it’s a lot of TV movies, and projects you’ve definitely never heard of, rescued only by the resurrection of the Scream franchise and a main cast role in an extremely short-lived NBC series in 2009 I don’t remember existing called The Philanthropist.
  1. Scott Grimes (as Will McCorkle) – So here’s where it gets interesting – I wasn’t even necessarily planning on ranking Grimes – he was only a main cast member for half the seasons of the show, and frankly, I had, unfairly, it turns out, figured that he hadn’t really done much else.  Turns out he put out quite the nice little career.  He played a main character in ER for its final six years, from 2003 until 2009.  He also voices Steve Smith in American Dad, which has now run for six years itself.  He played a supporting role in Band of Brothers as well, appearing in every episode.  Oh, and he charted two top 40 adult contemporary singles in 2005, and appeared as a killer in a fifth season Dexter episode.  Not shabby at all.
  1. Lacey Chabert (as Claudia Salinger) – She’s got one very prominent movie role, as one of the Plastics in 2004’s Mean Girls, and she appeared in Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, and, well, Daddy Day Care, and a bunch of things even worse than that.  That said, voice roles keep her a little more occupied.  She played Meg during the first season of Family Guy, before being replaced by Mila Kunis.  She voiced one of the Wild Thornberrys for that show’s six year run, and in the feature film and she voiced Gwen Stacy in two seasons of a recent Spider-man kids show.  Not great work by any means, but work, and pretty good for the sixth most accomplished cast member in Party of Five.
  1. Paula Devicq (as Kirsten Bennett Thomas Sallinger) – We start getting closer to scrub territory.   She was in the one season produced of the A&E Sidney Lumet created legal drama called100 Centre Street, starring Alan Arkin.  She was in six episodes of Rescue Me.  And she was in the pilot of the Dylan McDermott led TNT miniseries The Grid (of which I own a T-shirt, my favorite random pop culture shirt).  Wikipedia also describes her as “starring” in the upcoming Richard Gere movie Abritrage, and their definition of starring apparently now includes being the eleventh cast member listed on IMDB.  Moving on.
  1. Jeremy London (as Griffin Chase Holbrook) – he was a regular in two seasons of 7th Heaven, and according to wikipedia, he seems to be killing it in a whole bunch of TV movies that don’t even have their own entries.

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Show of the Day: Murder in Small Town X

12 Aug

It was the year 2000, and reality competition shows were just beginning their hey day, ushered in by Survivor’s magical 1999 season.  Fox debuted what would turn out to be the only season of Murder in Small Town X.  Unlike straightforward reality competition like Survivor, Amazing Race and The Mole, Murder in Small Town X is harder to categorize.  Is it a reality a show?  Well kind of – there are a bunch of real life contestants competing over a prize.  But unlike your typical reality competition show, there’s a pre-written  dramatic plot – it plays like a murder mystery.

Basically, ten contestants are brought together as detectives to solve a series of fake murders in a fictionalMainesmall town.  Just about everyone in town was a suspect.  The contestants/investigators each week would be sent on various investigatory missions to learn more about the crimes – clearing suspects as they did it.  At the end of the first episode, the investi-testants (my quick, and albeit not great shorthand for investigator/contestants) are given a video from the killer, narrowing their suspect pool to 15, which are slowly eliminated over the course of the season by the players answering questions correctly, or because other suspects are murdered along the way.  At the end of every episode, two investi-testants would be chosen to investigate two separate leads.  One of these would result in an important clue while the other would result in being murdered by the villain and eliminated from the game.

The murder plot was oddly compelling, even game show aspect aside, as intricate as any Agatha Christie novel.  It all started, for the investi-testants, with the murder of a family known as the Flints, and continued with the murder of four of the 15 suspects.  It turned out that the story dated back to the 1940s, when the members of another local family, the Duchamps, were murdered on orders of a secret society made up of the big wigs in the town after the Duchamps discovered a secret illegal liquor smuggling operation being conducted by the society.  One of the family members survived the fire set to kill them, and this “Burnt Face Man” as he would become known left a number of clues for the investi-testants to find, videos for his son.  The “Burnt Face Man” killed one of the members of the secret society before guilt turned him to suicide, but his son turned out the be the killer, murdering still living members of the secret society and their descendants.  His son turned out the business partner of the patriarch of the family murdered at the beginning of the season.  I had to avoid a great deal of detail to sum up the story quickly, but if for some reason, you want more you can find unbelievably detailed recaps of each episode here.

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Ranking the Shows That I Watch – 32: Fairly Legal

11 Aug

 

My friend and I, some years ago (two, maybe?) swore some sort of blood oath that we would watch every new USA program, or at least give each program a chance.  This may have been at least partially ironic at the time, and it probably still is now, but it has lasted, and we’re still watching them (well, except for In Plain Sight – ironically, we never seem to catch that one).  Also, as a fellow lawyer who doesn’t practice law, I feel like owe it to mediator and main character Kate Reed  to watch her show about same.

In Fairly Legal, Reed (portrayed by the able and sassy Sarah Shahi, best known for her L-word work), a top-flight lawyer at the firm founded by her father decides that her profession doesn’t fit with her ideals, and so instead decides to become  a mediator, to solve disputes between parties without having to resort to the frictions and unfairly legal practices of the courtroom.  Each episode features her mediating a what-looks-to-be-unmediatable case, getting parties that often hate each other on the same page through her sheer charisma and powers of persuasion.

In the great USA program family tree, Monk is the patriarch – he came  from broadcast television, started the family, but now he’s retired and down on his development in Arizona resting and playing golf.  The father, his son, Pysch, took a lot from his dad, but learned some new tricks of his own as well, and is still at hand.  Now, to get to Fairly Legal, we move a couple of generations down the line, and assume that there was either some incenstous behavior or some dystopian cloning leading to Fairly Legal because it’s like a real USA show, but with, well, something a little bit off.  The familiar guidelines are there – lightheartedness, a mix between drama and comedy, largely self-contained episodes with a slow-moving serial plot that makes progress over the course of a season.  However, it’s just not put together particularly well.  The plots are weak, which is a shame, because, by USA standards, anyway, the concept could have some legs (like Shahi, zing).  USA has clearly recognized this and has put new showrunners in charge.

The other interesting note about the show is the unusual premise of starting with Reed and her husband estranged, though not yet divorced.  Her ex, portrayed by Battlestar Galactica’s Michael Trucco (Anders in BSG, Justin in fairly legal), is a San Francisco ADA, who loves Kate but is frustrated by her always putting him off for work, and other things.  Justin is still the main love interest for Kate throughout the first season, and they get back together and break up again a couple of times.  It’s nothing mind-blowing but I can’t think of another show where the series began with the main character and his or her featured love interest estranged.

Why it’s this high:  I watch this show on television, and, hey, it’s about lawyers who decided being a lawyer sucks.

Why it isn’t higher:  Sarah Shahi is pretty great, but the show really isn’t.

Best episode of most recent season:  “Bridge” – they’re really all about the same, but I’ll give the season finale some points for ratcheting up the drama in USA season finale fashion as a custody battle between father and grandmother is in danger of turning into an international incident.

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The Zeljko Ivanek Hall of Fame: Peter Jacobson

10 Aug

I’d like to use this edition of the Zejlko Ivanek Hall of Fame to salute nebbishy Jewish character actor Peter Jacobson.

Born in 1965, Peter Jacobson didn’t really get a chance to play a role of consequence until getting regular cast credit in the unbelievably short-lived (no wikipedia entry) Talk To Me, a comedy about a radio station which had only three episodes before cancellation, but featured the relatively high profile talent of Beverly D’Angelo, Kyra Sedgwick and Nicole Sullivan.  After that, he worked for five episodes on the short-lived TNT series Bull, appeared in HBO’s 61* about the home run race between Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris and guest startrd in an episode of Ed before getting his second shot as a series regular, in the Scott Foley legal-sitcom A.U.S.A., which aired on NBC and also failed quickly.  Late in Law & Order’s run (though like any good theater actor he had appeared much earlier in the series as a different character) he guest starred in a couple of episodes as eccentric but brilliant defense attorney Randy Dworkin.

His path to relative stardom was still a long ways away.  He appeared in episodes of Scrubs, CSI:Miami, and Method and Red, along with two episodes of Hope & Faith (A two-parter.)  He showed up in five episodes of In Justice, an ABC mid-season replacement starring Kyle McLaughlin, Constance Zimmer and Marisol Nichols about a team who try to free innocent people who have been put into prison and he was a major character in trippy three part SciFi miniseries The Lost Room about a room filled with objects that have weird powers.  The miniseries starred Peter Krause, Julianna Marguiles, and Elle Fanning and Jacobson portrayed Wally Jabrowski, a drifter who is familiar with the objects in the mysterious room.

Jacobson got a chance to appear in relatively successful Debra Messing miniseries The Starter Wife, where Messing plays a woman who is divorced, after several years of marriage to aHollywoodbigwig, who leaves her for a younger woman.  Jacobson plays her ex-husband, who was eventually dumped by the younger woman he left Messing for.  The miniseries was picked up as a regular series, and Jacobson’s part was re-cast.  This was of course, Jacobson had finally found a home.  Not just a home, but rather a House, as Jacobson portrayed one of the candidates for House’s new team at the beginning of the fourth season, Chris Taub.  A plastic surgeon by trade, Taub is #39 during the period when House is choosing his new team.  He eventually makes it through, chosen by Cuddy, buoyed by his willingness to challenge House.  He cheats on his wife, eventually divorces her, and is now living with Foreman.  Jacobson, though a major character since season 4 had to wait until season 7 to finally get the main cast character he so richly deserved, and will enjoy it for what will probably be the last season of House coming up.

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Ranking the Shows That I Watch – 33: Modern Family

9 Aug

In the 2009-2010 television season, two broadcast comedies stood out both critically and commercially and made it all the way to a second season.  Neither of them was divisive, but both had significantly different appeals.  Community was much more of a narrow cult show, full of pop culture homage, and a perfect fit on NBC’s Thursday night block.  Modern Family was a far more traditional family sitcom with many classic elements, which also did a lot of things better than most classic family sitcoms.  It fit in perfectly appealing to a broader audience on ABC.  My friend and I watched both of them that entire year and we enjoyed both, but also had a year long argument over which show was superior – I on the side of the quirkier, much more interesting  Community, while he picked the old-idea-but-new-excellent-execution Modern Family.  I didn’t pick Community because the idea was new – I probably care less about newness and authenticity than almost anybody I know. I just have little love for the traditional sitcom (which makes me very glad I was not born any earlier than I was).  I have fallen behind on Modern Family, but for a rather different reason than I’ve more or less stopped watching Glee.  The decision not to watch Glee eventually became an active choice to stop watching a show that I thought once had a really good direction but lost its way.  The non-decision to kind of stop watching Modern Family came more out of forgetfulness and relative indifference – the show is the same it always was, at the same level of quality.

Now that sounds unduly harsh, so I’d like to take the edge off.  Modern Family is better than I made it out to be by my indifference. I admit it might be a character flaw on my part.  Modern Family, for those who don’t know, is about three related families, a typical nuclear family with two parents and three kids, two gay parents and their adopted baby, and an older man married to a younger woman, and her kid.  The best family is the classic nuclear family led by parents Ty Burrell and Julie Bowen, who are the highlights of the show.   Phil (Ty Burrell) is lovably awkward, an uncomfortable dad, but ultimately a good one.  And, similarly maybe most to Friday Night Lights, which I’ll talk about later in the rankings, the show showcases essentially working families, rather than dysfunctional ones.   For all their arguments, the parents are good ones and there’s no question that even when things temporarily go bad and tempers flare that everyone loves each other.

At its best the show plays by traditional sitcom rules, while at the same time subverting them in simple but important ways – the best example of this I can think of offhand is when, in a first season episode, Ty and Julie’s anniversary is here, and as opposed to the traditional sitcom (think, say, Home Improvement or Everybody Loves Raymond or countless others) in which the husband is always forgetting important dates, Ty remembered and plotted an elaborate series of gifts, while Julie had forgotten all about it.  It’s a small thing, but an important one, which makes the show interesting.

Why It’s This High:  It’s very well done, and although it’s not my favorite, it’s admittedly more a personal preference than because of the show’s failing – what it sets out to be, it is

Why It’s Not Higher:  What it wants to be is just not entirely up my alley – I can appreciate it, but I can’t develop a hunger for it

Best Episode of the Most Recent Season:  I haven’t watched a lot of the most recent season, but I’ve seen a few and I need to follow my own rules, so I’ll say “Unplugged,” in which the Ty Burrell attempts to wean his family from technology by having a contest to see who can go the longest without using it, and accidentally promises their oldest daughter a car if she wins it; when she does, they’re forced to admit they were lying

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Power Rankings: That ’70s Show

8 Aug

Considering the utter mediocrity of this show, it’s astounding how successful some of the cast members have been after its end.

  1. Ashton Kutcher (as Michael Kelso) – this choice was by no means obvious. I think the first two are pretty clearly the first two, but the order is not clear at all.  A couple of years ago, I think it would have been a runaway, but the second place finisher has made it a race.  Ashton Kutcher’s movie career, in which he’s starred in a number of movies, but has largely been more famous than successful, may or may not be enough.  However, the fact that he’s the new star of Two and Half Men, combined with his past, but still noteworthy work on Punk’d, and his other production work with Beauty at the Geek keeps him at the top (Actually, I looked again at how some his movies did, and they were more successful than I thought – While Killers kind of bombed, What Happens in Vegas and No Strings Attached, although tepidly reviewed at best, made a ton of money – Ashton is a clearer #1 than I realized).
  1. Mila Kunis (as Jackie Burkhart) – she came so close to taking the top spot for me, but I thought she didn’t quite have the body of work.  That said, she’s been on the rise the past couple of years, highlighted by her performance in The Black Swan.  While she wasn’t the lead, she was highly acclaimed as the second star in one of the most talked about films of the year.  She also appears this summer in Friends with Benefits, the direct copycat to Ashton Kutcher’s earlier-this-year No Strings Attached, which featured Kunis’ Black Swan co-star Natalie Portman,  so the first two spots have more in common than That ‘70s Show (their characters also dated on That ’70s Show for most of the first four seasons). Perhaps the relative success of the two films will give us a more concrete judgment.  Forgetting Sarah Marshall was her first big, successful movie role, and afterwards she had a couple of fallow years, but has rebounded in a big way.  Bonus points for being the voice of Meg Griffin (yes, I know, it’s Meg, but still) in Family Guy almost since its inception (replacing Lacey Chabert).
  1.  Topher Grace (as Eric Forman) – there’s a big of a dropoff after the first two.  Grace keeps trying to force his way into starring roles, but every time he makes progress, he seems to take a step back.  Way back during the run of That ’70s Show, he starred in the light Win a Date With Tad Hamilton! and the significantly darker In Good Company.  After that there was a break until he filmed his role as Venom in Spiderman 3, which came out after the last season of That 70s Show, in which he showed up only in the finale.  From there, he’s had one of the fifty bajillion roles in Valentine’s Day (alongside showmate Kutcher), and starred in the retro-’80s flop Take Me Home Tonight.  He’ll be costarring with Richard Gere in a political spy thriller as his next chance.
  1. Laura Prepon (as Donna Pinciotti) – Propon’s work has pretty much been relegated to the small screen, with guest star appearances here and there, including most notably for me, a three episode stint in How I Met Your Mother as Ted’s college ex-girlfriend.  She apparently starred as one of the main cast in the one season October Road, which I vaguely remember (but may just be thinking of space movie October Sky or one-hit wonder Blue October) and was about a 30-year old who went off to Europe for a trip, ended up staying there a decade, and is just coming home to deal with his old hood.  Prepon is getting her biggest opportunity in years with the starring role in the new sitcom based on Chelsea Handler’s life, named after her best-selling autobiography, Are You There Vodka, It’s Me Chelsea.
  1. Kurtwood Smith (as Red Forman)– the actor who came into the show with the most renown (a lot easier when you’ve had thirty or so more years to work with) has had a relatively decent amount of work, mostly in television.  He starred as the father in the American clone of British Worst Week, which actually lasted its whole one season run on the air.  He was a major character in 24’s second to last season as a liberal senator, and he starred in the short-lived 2011 series Chaos, as the director of a bunch of rogue CIA spies.  He also appeared in two of the best episodes of personal favorite Childrens Hospital.
  1. Wilmer Valderama (as Fez) – he’s had a little bit of work – in 2006, he was one of many characters in the not incredibly successful Richard Linklater attempt to make a fictionalized version of Eric Schlosser’s classic tale of the tragedy of our food system Fast Food Nation (right up there with Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma) .  For two years, he hosted MTV insult-fest Yo Momma! In 2008, he was in a crime drama called Columbus Day with Val Kilmer which did not actually make it to theaters, and sounds more like it should be the sixth sequel in the Valentine’s Day franchise.  In 2011, he was the fifth lead in Tom Hanks-Julia Roberts kind-of-flop-but-at-least-it-didn’t-cost-that-much Larry Crowne.  Yeah, we’ve fallen a long way from the top two.
  1. Deborah Jo Rupp (as Kitty Forman)– and the entries get shorter yet.  Rupp worked plenty in the years before That ‘70s Show, with key roles in Friends and Seinfeld in the ‘90s.  Afterwards?  Well, she was in an SVU episode (who wasn’t?), she played Jay Baruchel’s mom in She’s Out of My League, and she was the mom in Better Than You, a sitcom I don’t remember at all existing which ran this past television season on ABC before being cancelled.
  1. Danny Masterson (as Steven Hyde) – he was in Jim Carrey vehicle Yes Man, and an episode of well-reviewed Fox sitcom Raising Hope.  He’s also way into DJing, and DJed sets at Lollapalooza the last three years.  That’s kind of cool.
  1. Josh Meyers (as Randy Pearson) – his older bro is SNL head writer Seth Meyers.  He appears in The Pee Wee Herman show on Broadway.  That’s also kind of cool.
  1. Don Stark (as Bob Pinciotti) – it’s pretty slim pickings here, and I consider it a courtesy for me just to list him.  He has been in single episodes of Supernatural and Dirty Sexy Money and a couple of episodes of Disney web series Cory and Lucas for the Win.

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