Archive | November, 2012

Fall 2012 Review: Malibu Country

29 Nov


Oh boy, this show fits into my favorite category ever, traditional sitcoms with multi-camera set ups and laugh tracks.  It’s not so much that a show can’t be good with both of those features (though with a laugh track it’s increasingly difficult)  as much as that better shows tend not to make those choices (admittedly without thinking too hard I doubt any of the ten best half hour comedies since Seinfeld have laugh tracks or are multi camera).

Malibu Country, while not nearly as archaic as ABC Friday night partner Last Man Standing (admittedly, that’s a difficult feat to achieve), is still a solid fit with the show as another traditional sitcom trying to wear it’s modernity, getting all up with 2012, on its sleeve, while at the same time missing out on all the sitcom innovations that make even many generic shows in 2012 better than shows 20 or 30 years ago.

Malibu Country starts by trying to assert its “modern” direction when Reba (I don’t remember what her non-McEntire last name is, we’ll suffice to call her Reba) leaves her cheating country music star husband after calling him out at a press conference where she was supposed to stand by him.  Thus, now she’s on her own, a single parent with two southern kids and her wise and wisecracking mom (played by Lily Tomlin – man Lily Tomlin is old, to be playing Reba’s mom) and they’re all off to SoCal from Tennessee (Malibu because her husband apparently had a love shack there that she’s getting in the separation).

While you can take the family out of Tennessee, you can’t take the Tennessee out of the family it seems, and Reba feels like a fish out of water is the fast-moving plastic-surgery-filled world of Southern California.  Reba’s vapid neighbor, played by TV-shows-no-one- watches-veteran Sarah Rue (Popular, Less Than Perfect), represents everything that makes Reba uncomfortable, chilling with a glass of white wine while telling Reba not to freak out that she just walked in on her teenage daughter making out with Rue’s stepson.  This is new school, Hollywood-style parenting where Rue’s step-son even calls her by her first name!

Her mom, Tomlin’s character, of course, is allowed to be rude and lewd, a privilege accorded senior citizens, and Tomlin takes it further by purchasing some pot lollipops, which Reba reminds her, ain’t legal back in Tennessee.

Reba hopes to finally resume her country career which she put aside a couple decades ago to raise her family.  When trying to milk a contact using her husband’s connections, she’s told by Jai Rodriguez’s sassy gay assistant that unless she writes songs, she’s not making it in today’s music world, as she’s no longer young and sexy.  I’d like to note here that Jai Rodriguez’s character has an extremely irritating accent, irritating accents are always obvious bad show warning signs for me (see: half the characters on 2 Broke Girls).

The heartwarming moment occurs at the end of the episode, when Reba, about to despair, gets some wisdom from her mom.  Lily Tomlin’s husband cheated on her too, and Tomlin regrets that she never left him.  Reba works twice as hard on her music, comes to Jai Rodriguez’s office with a new demo, and refuses to leave until it’s listened to.  Boom, she has a record deal and a song on the radio by the end of just one episode, and it looks like life in sunny SoCal ain’t so bad after all.

This sitcom isn’t written for me, I know that, but it still rubs me the wrong way.  Besides being simplistic and retrograde, it just wasn’t funny.  I couldn’t believe how many lines there were which got large laugh track receptions and I couldn’t even understand what the genesis of the joke was.  At one point during the episode, Reba’s son, Cash, an idiot who coasts by on his looks and knows it, says “Finally you’re back” to his mom when she returns.  In response, she says, “Good to see you too,” and THE LAUGH TRACK GOES WILD.  Seriously, if we can’t get rid of it, can we set minimum standards for laugh lines?

It’s time to move on from this, comedy-wise.  A bunch of Southerners moving to California who don’t understand their newfound California lifestyle just doesn’t cut it anymore as a premise.    You have to work a little harder to get laughs nowadays, and that’s a good thing.  Of course, I watched the whole episode, but it’s easy to tell within two minutes that this is a show that I won’t like and that no one I know will like.  It’s so uninspired; I have a hard time thinking a writer pens this material and reads it back to himself and thinks it’s funny.

Also, while Reba, her son, and her mom all have southern accents, the daughter does not.  Odd.

Will I watch it again?  Nope.  Besides, if I want to watch episodes of a single parent family bringing their kids from Tennessee to California, I can always watch old Hannah Montana episodes.

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Fall 2012 Review: Beauty and the Beast

28 Nov

Beauty and the Beast is the CW’s loose revival of the 1987 series of the same name starring Linda Hamilton and Ron Perlman.  I know little beyond the basic premise of the original series, so we’ll ignore it from now on except to note how unlikely of a revival it is, and that Hamilton and Perlman actually went on to have really solid careers, so kudos to them.

Kristin Kreuk known for her performances as Lana Lang in CW’s Smallville (CW takes care of its own) and as Street Fighter icon Chun-Li (in, well, Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li) plays Catherine Chandler.  In the opening scene, set in 2003, Chandler, outside the bar where she works, witnesses her mom’s murder at the hands of a couple of mysterious men who try to kill her too until she’s saved by a man-beast. Everyone else (police, relative, friends) thinks she’s made up the man-beast when she describes him after the fact.

In the current day, as the sounds of M83’s Midnight City blare, Chandler is a New York City homicide detective with a partner with a super thick Noo Yawk accent.  Being a detective is clearly her life.  We know this because, possibly due to her workaholic tendencies, her douchebag dude leaves her for another woman in the first scene (we know he’s a douche because he broke up with her by text, and because the Noo Yawk partner calls him a douche at least twice).  Chandler and her partner are investigating the death of a hip NYC fashion editor on the rise, and discover DNA on her body which comes from a dead former member of the military.  Their investigation into him takes them to a seemingly abandoned warehouse where a biochem professor who was an old roommate of the dead military man Vincent Keller resides.  They are suspicious but find nothing.

Later, Chandler finds further reason to check back at the warehouse, and runs into the dead man, realizing that he’s the very same beast-person who saved her when her mom was killed (I actually don’t remember when she realizes this – she has three or four heart to hearts with him.  Sometime before the end of the episode though).  She also finds out that he’s some sort of man-beast hybrid who was a product of some super duper secret government military experiments.  He pleads with her to keep his not being dead a secret, and she complies, convinced that he tried to save the girl rather than kill her.

She tries to investigate her mother’s death further and ends up meeting an FBI agent who worked on the case in a subway station to pick his brain for more info.  In an insane scene, he ends up attacking her and she defends herself against him and two other agents, because there’s apparently NO OTHER PEOPLE ON THE SUBWAY PLATFORM.  Also, meeting on the subway platform would be the worst place ever to meet because you’d have no cell service if you couldn’t find each other.  Anyway, she knocks down the one guy but another throws her on the tracks, where she’s saved by Keller, who does a bunch of shadowy manimal killing.

Nobody seems to take any more time to talk about how she was mysteriously attacked by an FBI agent and two others on the NYC Subway track  and almost run over by a train, even though this seems like it would be a huge deal, but her partner does remark that she didn’t know Chandler took the F train, even though the station was clearly the 1-2-3 Canal Street station – Continuity, people!

Anyway, blah, blah, blah, they solve the procedural murder, and while Keller originally tries to get her to stop looking into stuff because of secret conspiracy danger, eventually they realize they just may need each other’s help after all.

Going forward, presumably, it’s part cop procedural, with Chandler being assisted by her partner, fellow cops, and Keller to solve a murder of the week while also steadily investigating the shadowy government conspiracies that resulted in Keller’s transformation and the murder of Chandler’s mother.

I didn’t really enjoy the show.  For the concept to be successful, the show should have been a lot more fun to watch.  I have no problem with any particular actor, but the show just seemed relatively lifeless.  Arrow, the other new CW show, could have easily been similar in character to Beauty and the Beast; both shows heavily feature conspiracies, and both have types of masked superheros in Green Arrow and the Beast.  However, I enjoyed Arrow much more; Beauty and the Beast was overly serious and heavy and not very rewarding.  The characters didn’t seem particularly interesting and the Beast was a little bit too brooding initially for my taste.  I was much more interested in finding out what Green Arrow’s mom was up to after finishing that pilot than the conspiracy theory in Beauty and the Beast, and the murder of the week could have been taken out of any procedural on TV.

I could watch it again; it was far more mundane and generic than unbearable, but I have no particularly reason to.  The only aspect that seems potentially interesting (the characters and writing didn’t stand out) is a nice juicy complex conspiracy plot, but there’s probably a fairly low possibility of that anyway.

Will I watch it again?  Nope.  It wasn’t awful, but I think that’s enough for me to say.  It met the watchable standard, but not really anything else above that threshold.

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The Walking Dead’s Passing Resemblance to Lost

27 Nov

 

Warning:  Walking Dead and Lost spoilers ahead.

It dawned on me while watching the last couple of episodes of The Walking Dead, that the current situation in the show bears a striking resemblance to certain periods of Lost.  These similarities are not necessarily one for one, but rather in overall feel as well as certainly matching elements of both shows.  Granted, I’m stretching a little bit here and there, but just follow along with me.

First, the Governor and his people are the Others.  The Governor is Ben.  The post-Apocalyptic southern landscape resembles the Island in the fact that danger lurks everywhere outside of protected areas, and that resources are scarce and technology is limited.  Like the Others, the Governor’s people live some semblance of a normal life, unencumbered by the constant dangers and shortages faced by those outside (Jack’s group in Lost, Rick’s group in The Walking Dead).  The Governor, like Ben Linus, is clearly an archvillain, from the viewer’s perspective, but we don’t know his exact history (at least in the first couple of seasons of Lost), and clearly he didn’t necessarily start out with the intention of being evil (well, neither thinks  of themselves as evil, but let’s say, their intents were not purely negative like a true evil villain).  Also, it seems that many in Governor’s group don’t know exactly the full story about the Governor’s motives and villain-ness; it also seemed that way for Ben as well in Lost, though that may just be an impression I got, especially in the episode (the first episode of the third season, A Tale of Two Cities) that showed some of the Others at a book club when Oceanic Flight 815 crashed (more of the Others obviously knew something was going on, but I’m not sure how obviously villainous it was to all of them, at least at first, there were innocents, like Juliet).  Like Lost, our good guys are composed of a rag team group of strangers who didn’t know each other until a tragic set of circumstances, nad have to band together to stay alive.

The interrogation scenes with Glen and Maggie have no exact parallels, but remind me of not one but two major interrogations in Lost.  These are when Jack’s crew had Ben locked up, without knowing his identity, for the last few episodes in the second season, when Ben claimed his name was Henry Gale, and when the Others captured Jack, Sawyer and Kate early in the third season, and particularly when Juliet interrogated Jack (by the way, if we’re really stretching this out, Rick is obviously Jack and Daryl clearly a much nicer Sawyer).  As in Lost, in The Walking Dead, we know these two groups are going to clash at some point, as the much weaker good guy crew dares to take on the much stronger bad guys.  There’s something not quite right about the Governor and his crew, which is exactly the feeling that viewers developed with the Others, even besides their simply being antagonists – the idea that they’re up to something fishy and underhanded aside from just wanting to defeat our protagonists.

Of course, Lost spent a lot more time developing these groups (the Others are around by the end of the first season, while the Governor doesn’t enter until the beginning of the third of Walking Dead, though the latter is on cable, and the episode count per season is significantly less) and then went way off the rail afterwards (time travel, um, purgatory, nuclear explosions).  Lost involved elements of the supernatural that aren’t present in Walking Dead.  Walking Dead involves the science fiction of zombies, and that’s about it.  Many of Lost’s best episodes were when the Others were still mysterious and when Ben’s creepy stare and constant lies-that-might-be-part-truths were captivating instead of tiring and repetitive (why did anyone ever believe Ben by the end of the show?).  The combination of the human dynamics amongst people who don’t know each other yet must work together set against the tension between opposing groups and the continuing plot mysteries that kept audiences guessing, anticipating, and theorizing were what made Lost so tantalizing, and what The Walking Dead does on its best days.

To its credit, I think The Walking Dead has soundly avoided the problem of biting off more than it can chew, plot mystery wise , and having source material, even if it’s not entirely faithful to it, probably helps a lot (I think the lack of limitless supernatural elements helps as well).  In addition, it smartly stayed away from the flashbacks, which I, and I realize this is a divisive opinion, always hated.  We can learn all we need about the characters from their actions at the present time.

I admit, the comparison is a stretch at times, but I do think Lost viewers will recognize at least a feeling in The Walking Dead right now which resembles some of the magic of the earlier (and best) seasons of Lost.  The show, which has had its share of issues over the first couple of seasons, has had its strongest half season so far.  Hopefully Walking Dead will continue its positive run of episodes;  for the first time in a while, I’m really looking forward to the next episode, the midseason finale.  So, kudos, The Walking Dead (and visiting the Lost wikipedia page just reminds me again of how Lost made me crazy (like visiting an ex’s facebook page) but that’s for another day).

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The Sad Decline of The Office

21 Nov

I’ve been reading some Onion AVClub episode recaps about Seinfeld, one of the best comedies of all time, and I’m getting to the last couple of seasons, and while Seinfeld’s last seasons had great moments and some very good episodes, they clearly weren’t as consistent as Seinfeld at its peak, and there’s some very interesting reasons for it, that tv writers would be wise to study.

There’s a lot more to say about the general ends and declines of shows, but that’s for another article.  Today, this had me thinking more specifically of the sad decline of The Office.  I’ve been a consistent defender of later seasons of The Office, but there’s no defending it anymore.   The show is mediocre at absolute best and I’m probably only watching this season because it’s the last, and because I’ve watched the whole show and I still have very fond feeling towards it, which makes its struggles all the more frustrating.  The Office is that baseball or football player who starts struggling as they age, and you convince yourself, that it’s just a matter of time til they start at least resembling a shadow of their former self, and then eventually come the conclusion that they’re probably done (think Jason Bay on the Mets).

What has particularly surprised and disappointed me was how rudderless the show has seemed since Steve Carell and his iconic Michael Scott character left at the end of Season 7.  I had thought of the idea of replacing Michael Scott a couple of seasons early as a way to keep the show fresh and forestall decline, because his character had a lot of inherent limitations (which just makes it more impressive that Carell kept him consistently tolerable enough) but the way the writers handled the post-Carell era make me glad they held on to Carell as long as they could have.  It’s just disheartening that given Carell’s growing film career and the fact that he could have left at any time, the writers couldn’t have cobbled together a better succession plan.

Last season was a total mess, as the writers threw a bunch of ideas at the wall with a frustratingly low percentage of success, like a lousy shoot-first guard in the NBA (Nick Young?).  James Spader’s Robert California was an amusing one-joke character that got less and less funny in every episode he appeared in.

New boss Andy has become an entirely different character that sometimes isn’t even a character, changing his personality to serve the needs of a particular episode, and has been portrayed too often a poor man’s Michael Scott, rather than as his own character.  New character Nellie was just terrible, and increasingly irritating as the season went on.  The subplot involving a random new female character (Jordan?) hitting on Jim completely missed the mark.  The plot involving Darryl trying to get with random warehouse worker Val?  Swing and a miss.  The show said goodbye to Gabe at the end of the season, one of the few highlights of the last couple of seasons.

I, for some reason, had hope for this last season, because knowing exactly how many episodes there are left can often be liberating for a show, even a largely non-serial comedy, just in the ability to put everything out there.  However, if anything, this season has been even worse.  The two replacements for Kelly have done nothing for me and the strange plot of the non-Clark Duke employee slowly establishing a rapport with Erin while Andy acts increasingly erratic I don’t really understand and don’t have any interest inn.  Andy has evolved further into Michael Scott territory, and as much as I’ve always liked Ed Helms, it both makes me appreciate Carell, and wonder why they can’t create a consistent character for Andy.  Jim and Pam just have nothing left; the major plot this year involves Jim wanting to leave work to start a new company with his friends in Philly, but it’s really hard to care.  The show has tried, for some reason, I don’t understand at all (non-refundable contract?) to redeem Nellie, deciding to simply forget completely how irritating and terrible a character she was for her first few episodes.

There’s not to say there aren’t occasional laughs to be found; it’s just that they’re fewer and farther between than ever before.  Erin is possibly the best part of watching the last few seasons of The Office, and Dwight’s ridiculousness holds up better over time than the antics of Jim, Pam, and Andy.  I laugh at these occasional moments when I watch now; but if this was the show I was watching new from the beginning, I have a hard time thinking I’d keep watching.  Anyway, I still hope against hope that the second half of the last season will leave us on a better note, but they haven’t provided much reason to keep watching.

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Fall 2012 Review: Emily Owens, M.D.

19 Nov

Most shows, at least what you get from the pilot episode (Last Resort aside), can be summed up pretty quickly.  Emily Owens, M.D. can be summed up even quicker than that.

Being a young doctor right out of med school is just like being in high school.

I’ll say more, but there you have it.  You could read that line and have a pretty good idea what the show is about.

Here’s another way that I think is fairly good to sum it up.  It’s like Scrubs without the jokes.  It actually has a pretty similar sensibility to the with the camaraderie between doctors and the high school drama matched up with the seriousness of illness and death the doctors deal with every day.  There’s even a speech given to Emily by another character about which doctors represent which high school cliques, and I really felt like I was watching Scrubs.

The main character is unsurprisingly Emily Owens (played by Mamie Gummer, daughter of Meryl Streep, and yes, you can totally see it), a high school nerd/loser/choose your adjective here who thought that her life would turn around and she’d become who she always thought she would be and bloom post-high school, only to find out, yes, that doctoring is just like high school.  This isn’t just me saying it by the way; multiple characters express this to her within the first few minutes of the show.

She’s spending her first year with a motley crew of colleagues including her med school crush, her old high school nemesis whose appearance unnerves her, and a friendly lesbian who turns out to be the big boss’s daughter.  Owens spazzes constantly (spellcheck does not pick up spazz, but screw that) making lots of little, and one or two big, mistakes along the way, pissing off the doctor she came to this hospital to work under, but also making a couple of friends and partly redeeming herself along the way.  All in her first day too, which the entire episode takes place during; I doubt that every day as a doctor can be quite this meaningful and frantic, but what do I know.

The boldest move, for both her and the show, in my opinion, which I appreciated the most, and will probably be the only thing I really remember from the show, is that she basically comes out and confesses her love for her crush (yes, we’re using crush; this is high school) right in the first episode, and gets rejected in the absolutely nicest way possible making it incredibly awkward for both her and the guy, which makes you feel terrible for both parties (worse for her, but still).  As an awkward person, I did appreciate her completely believable amount of awkwardness, which seemed true to life rather than person-who-clearly-doesn’t-live-in-society level.

Other than that, well, there was nothing memorable about it.  Nothing made my irritated or angry or offended or any of that bad stuff.  There just wasn’t really much good stuff.  It was a show, and well, if you liked Scrubs without the jokes, maybe you’ll like it (actually it was still less self-righteous and lesson teaching than those Scrubs monologues – boy did I hate those).  You’ll probably forget about it within a couple of days of watching it though, like I’m predicting I will.

Will I watch it again?  No, it wasn’t execrable by any measure, but it was forgettable, and for getting lost in a crowded fall schedule, that’s almost as bad.

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Fall 2012 Review: Arrow

15 Nov

The titular Arrow is DC superhero Green Arrow, on whom the show is based, although I don’t know exactly how close.  My knowledge of Green Arrow is more or less limited to his name, Oliver Queen, his city, Star City, his sidekick, Speedy, and the fact that he and Green Lantern had a well-known comic in the ‘70s where he was liberal and Lantern was conservative.  I probably know a little more if I rack my brain, but I decided to leave it at that for this viewing and review, and save any further Green Arrow research for after.  So I’m not sure how accurate this show is, and can’t be angered/buoyed by changes made/not made for better or worse.

Oliver Queen has just been rescued, when we come in, from an island where he spent five years after a shipwreck in which he was the only survivor.  A super rich twenty-something playboy beforehand, Oliver changed profoundly on the island (seems plausible enough that five years on an island alone could do that), but he’s trying to convince many people he hasn’t, especially not telling them about his city-rescuing alter ego, a dude in a green hood with mad archery and not-getting-killed-by-guys-with-guns skills (which he gained on the island somehow?  I’m willing to suspend disbelief for a comic show).  He was apparently inspired by his dad (played by evil Homeland vice president Jamey Sheridan), who was on the boat too, and did everything he could to ensure that Oliver lived, pushing him to make up for all the bad that the family company had done after he was rescued, and somehow transmitting a very Revenge-like list of villains that have something come to them.

He reconnects with the people in his life, introducing them to us as they get reintroduced to him.  There’s his mom, who is now married to a former partner of his dad’s (if this was Castaway, she’d be Helen Hunt, and the new husband Benjamin Bratt).  There’s his sister, nicknamed Speedy (hint, hint?), who may have developed a drug problem in Oliver’s absence.  There’s his best friend, Tommy, who wants to rush Oliver right back to his playboying ways, throwing a big party to celebrate his return.  And finally, there’s his ex-griflriend, Laurel, now a do-gooder lawyer fighting for legal aid, whose sister died in the shipwreck, where Oliver was cheating with her, on Laurel.  Oh, and she’s now kind of seeing best friend Tommy.  Awkward.

We know he’s out to get all the people on his list, but no one else knows yet, and he shows his island-gained bow and arrow abilities in a couple of nice action scenes, taking out a shady corrupt businessman from the list and his legion of guards.  Oh, and his mom apparently was behind a kidnapping of him, which he escaped from towards the beginning of the episode.  So that’s about something.

I know more about comics that most people, but less than anyone who has ever seriously read comics, so as I said, I’m not judging this with the comic in mind.  I thought there was a chance that I would like it based on the little I knew and assumptions I made in my head, and I did enjoy it, which I think that’s more of an achievement than it seems.  I didn’t think it was great or a cinematic achievement or was blown away by it or plan on immediately telling everyone I know to watch.   I am going to watch the second episode though, and that’s pretty good; only a few series get that far every year  (the TV show equivalent of getting my Top Chef jacket and making the main competition – sorry, just watched first episode of new Top Chef season).

I enjoyed the set up and I think there’s promise in exploring the mysteries behind the shipwreck, his history, and what his mom is out to get, and I liked the characters and actions scenes enough to feel like I wanted to watch another episode after this first one finished.  There’s not much to the characters right yet, other than the broad strokes the episode generated – reformed playboy, debaucherous best friend, legal aid maturing ex, troublesome sister, but I think what kept me interested most was that it seemed to hit the right feel between serious and light and feeling comic book-y, where broad strokes, at least to begin with, are part of the natural order.

Random note:  The three things we see Tommy refreshing Oliver on which happened during his five years on the island –  Super Bowl winners, Black president, Lost ending (which, rightly, he doesn’t understand).

Will I watch it again?  Yeah, I think I will.  It’s not an instant must-watch by any means but it’s certainly at least on the level of Revolution which I gave a few more episodes, and I’ll at least give it two or three more and see if I stay intrigued or fall away.

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Fall 2012 Review: Cuckoo

7 Nov

Cuckoo is a BBC comedy (BBC 3 to be precise, but please don’t ask me what the difference is) about a normal-ish family trying to get along with their weird new son-in-law.

While I was watching the first episode, various comparisons kept coming to mind, but my brother crystallized it best –  Cuckoo most closely resembles Meet the Parents in reverse.  Instead of a normal, if easily intimidated and sometimes awkward, workaday guy, being forced into bizarre uncomfortable situations with a super weird and intense parent of his fiance, it’s about a normal workaday family, the father, especially, being forced into bizarre uncomfortable situations with a super weird and intense son-in-law his daughter brings home after marrying him during her gap year abroad (could you get more UK than gap year?).

While the rest of the actors haves some British cred (Greg Davies, who plays the father, is the head of sixth form in other recent British comedy hit, The Inbetweeners), the only one known to Americans is Andy Samburg, who plays the new son-in-law, who calls himself Cuckoo (hence the title).  While I imagined Samburg would play his standard doofus-y type character which I thought would fit seamlessly into this plot, he plays just as ridiculous and over the top a character, just not what I was expecting in that vein from him.  He’s a super arrogant, super non-self aware, eastern-philosophy type, pretentious and with no basis in reality.  His work is writing his magnum philosophical opus, and he casually insults the father unwittingly within just a couple of days of knowing each other (how this is unwittingly is a mark of how extreme the lack of self-awareness is) by calling his beautiful English countryside shit, compared to all the beautiful places Cuckoo has been, and by calling the father a worker, while he, Samberg, is a thinker who works on a higher plane while the workers handle more menial tasks.

If you haven’t guessed yet from just the description so far, well  the show doesn’t really work.  It doesn’t really work on either of two primary levels, idea and execution.  It starts with kind of a simple, stale idea, and doesn’t bring anything particularly new or innovative to the idea nor even take advantage of what humor can still be mined out of that existing idea.

It’s really difficult to understand what the daughter, Rachel, sees in Cuckoo, but even taking that as a given and putting it aside, it’s just not very funny.  Rachel really wants her parents to like him, but she’s amazingly oblivious to his inappropriate and weird comments, and not even really trying to make excuses for his behavior, like you’d think someone would.  There’s lots of sitcom standard miscommunication, where two characters are talking on different frequencties, and we the viewer realize this at the time, while they realize this later on, and there in allegedly lies the humor.  Primarily at one point in the pilot, the father thinks he’s convinced Cuckoo to take some of the father’s hard earned money and leave for good, for Rachel’s sake, so she can have an ordinary university life, where Cuckoo naturally doesn’t get what the father’s saying at all and uses the money to buy a ridiuclous truck, and soon the father realizes he’s wasted his money but has to claim otherwise to save face with the rest of his family for are trying to be more considerate to Cuckoo.  Cuckoo’s so wacky and oblivious!  It’s awkward for everyone without being funny to compensate properly.

Will I watch again?  No.  It wasn’t awful; it mostly was stale instead of cringe-inducing, and there were one or two moments where I laughed.  It just wasn’t very good and was rather disappointing; I’m not sure I had any reason to expect more from this show, but for some reason (likely that I generally like Andy Samberg) I did.

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The Zeljko Ivanek Hall of Fame: Stephen Tobolowsky

3 Nov

(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)

An actor perhaps best known for his small role in an early ‘90s movie (Ned Ryerson in Groundhog Day, you know his quote “watch out for that first step, it’s a doozy!”), he’s come back to TV over and over in numerous recurring roles and many single episodes, and because his career has been constant for over two decades, please pardon the especially long entry today as we induct Stephen Tobolowsky into the Zeljko Ivanek Hall of Fame.

Tobolowsky’s first credited television role was as TV Clerk in 1983 TV movie Cocaine and Blue Eyes.  He then appeared in a series of single episode roles throughout the remainder of the ‘80s including Alice, Knots Landing, Falcon Crest, Cagney & Lacey, Stir Crazy, 222, Designing Women, The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, and L.A. Law. Then, a series of TV film appearances in Roe vs. Wade, Last Flight Out, The Marla Hanson Story, Tagget, and Perry Mason: The Case of the Maligned Mobster.  Then, more single appearances in shows Lifestories, Down Home, Baby Talk, and Shannon’s Deal, and then on Seinfeld, as a holistic healer who diagnoses George and proscribes a tea which puts George in the hospital (Jerry accompanies George to the healer for the potential comedy value).

A few more bit roles followed, in single episodes of Picket Fences, Civil Wars, and Café Americain, as well as TV movie When Love Kills:  The Seduction of John Hearn.  Apparently this little TV movie starred Gary Cole as John Hearn, a real life ex-marine, who Debbie Bannister, played by CSI vet Marg Helgeneurger, convinced to kill her husband and her sister’s ex-husband.  The movie also featured Michael Jeter and Justified main cast member Nick Searcy.

Next, he got his first main cast role on Against the Grain, a show I can’t believe I’ve never heard of for two reasons.  First, because one of the other main cast members was Ben Affleck a good couple of years before Good Will Hunting.  Second, because the show is based on a little book by Buzz Bissinger called Friday Night Lights which went on to become a somewhat more successful show a few years later (not to mention a feature film).  I’m going to have to investigate this show more in the future, but the coach role was played by John Terry, best known as Jack’s dad in Lost (and unrelated, as far as I know to the controversial Chelsea defender).

He appeared in an episode of Harts of the West before getting another main role in a series called Blue Skies that doesn’t even have a wikipedia entry.  He did act in it next to possible future Ivanek nominee Richard Kind.  After two episodes of Chicago Hope, and two of A Whole New Ballgame, he co-starred again in the 1995 CBS sitcom Dweebs.  Dweebs seems like an earlier take on The Big Bang Theory idea or possibly the British IT Crowd.  A normal human woman, played by Farrah Forke, is hired to manage a bunch of uber nerdy software workers.  Bosom Buddies’ Peter Scolari owns the company, and Tobolowsky is an employee aside other luminaries such as Corey Feldman.  The show aired six episodes before cancellation.

Next up were single episodes of The Home Court and The Pretender along with an appearance as Principal Flutie in the unaired pilot of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  Tobolowsky was back in a regular series in 1996 with Mr. Rhodes, starring comedian Tom Rhodes, and yet again, bizarrely, Farrah Forke.  The show co-starred Lindsey Sloane and Veronica Mars’ Logan, Jason Dohring, and lasted 19 episodes.  After four straight failed series, Tobolowsky spent the last few years of the 20th century guesting in a number of series.  These included three episodes of Murder One and Snoops and single episodes of The Naked Truth, Promised Land, The Drew Carey Show, The Closer (the less heralded Tom Selleck one), Suddenly Susan, Vengeance Unlimited, Mad About You, The Practice, That ‘70s Show, and Odd Man Out, along with TV movie Don’t Look Under the Bed.

He recurred in 2000 in one season USA mystery show Manhattan, AZ, as a small town veterinarian who also works as a regular doctor (hey, it’s a really small town).  After that it was back to one off appearances in Any Day Now, Hollywood Off-Ramp, That’s Life, Bull, The Lone Gunmen, Roswell, Malcolm in the Middle, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Oliver Beene, Stephen King’s Dead Zone, Las Vegas, The West Wing, Married to the Kellys, It’s All Relative, According to Jim, Will and Grace and Complete Savages (seriously, this only covers about four years) and TV movies with amazing names like Alien Fury: Countdown to Invasion, The Gene Pool, On the Edge, Black River, The Day the World Ended, and Twins.

He appeared in five episodes of CSI: Miami as Assistant State Attorney Don Haffman.  He became likely one of if not the only person to appear in both series titled The Closer (the more famous Kyra Sedgwick one this time) and showed up in Curb Your Enthusiasm as Jeff’s conservative brother-in-law Len Dunkel.  He followed this by guesting in Reba, Ghost Whisperer, and Desperate Housewives.  He was in 9 episodes of Deadwood, mostly in the second season as Commissioner Hugo Jarry, a politician trying to angle for the inclusion of Deadwood into the Dakota Territory, negotiating with Al Swearengen, Cy Tolliver and occasionally Sheriff Bullock, with mixed results.

He was a regular cast member in the short-lived Big Day, a show which takes place on a couple’s wedding day, and in which he portrayed the groom’s father.  He was then in TV movie Valley of Light and episodes of Boston Legal, Raines, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, and Entourage, in which he played the mayor of Beverly Hills.  He was in three episodes of HBO’s one season John From Cincinnati and one of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.

He appeared in 11 episodes of short-lasting phenomenon-before-turning-terrible Heroes as Bob Bishop, a member of the evil company who also has the power to turn anything to gold, which allows him to fund the company, and is a member of the older generation of heroes that had some large conspiracy in place from years ago and well, trying to explain more about what he does, it would just make less sense than this.  He did two episodes of The New Adventures of Old Christine as a principal, one of Community as a professor, and episodes of The Sarah Silverman Program, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, The Defenders, and kids show True Jackson, VP.

He’s been in eight episodes of Glee as recurring character and creepy ex-teacher Sandy Ryerson (a nod to Ned Ryerson from Groundhog Day I assume?).  Sandy is the former director of the Glee club and is super creepy and one of those says-he’s-not-gay-but-is-obviously-gay types who apparently has had disturbing incidents with harassing male students (yeah, it’s kind of creepy).  He’s meanwhile been in 19 episodes of the can’t-believe-they’re-on-their-sixth-season Californication.  He was in the last two seasons as movie producer Stu Beggs who dates and then marries Marcy, played by Louie recurring actress Pamela Adlon, who used to be married to Evan Handler’s character, Charlie.  He also appeared in two third season episodes of Justified as a an agent out to get Raylan Givens.

Tobolowsky is now a main cast member (though he hasn’t been in at least a couple of the first batch of episodes, so maybe he’ll end up simply recurring) on The Mindy Project as Mindy’s practice’s head and veteran doctor Marc Shulman.

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