Archive | March, 2015

Spring 2015 Review: Battle Creek

6 Mar

Battle Creek

Battle Creek is a cop drama which is the joint product of two heavyweight television creators – David Shore, who was behind House, and Vince Gilligan who created Breaking Bad and co-created its spin-off Better Call Saul. And for all that talent, what Battle Creek amounts to is, well, nothing.

Here’s the set up. Dean Winters plays a big detective fish in a small pond, the king of the chronically underfunded Battle Creek police department. Battle Creek, a mid-sized town, seems to have a disproportionate amount of crime, and its cops are strapped by their lack of resources – in the a bust in the opening scene of the show, both their recording equipment and tasers don’t work. The FBI swoops in for the rescue in the form of the preternaturally perfect Josh Duhamel. The golden child, he’s good-looking, great at just about everything, and brings a winning attitude along with access to forensics and proper equipment that the department desperately needs. Everyone else at the department is overwhelmed and excited by Duhamel personally and the resources he brings but Winters is struck by jealousy and a nagging obsession that there has to be something wrong with Duhamel for him to be sent to Battle Creek. Who is this outsider, he wants to know, why is he so friendly and consistently unfazed, and why is he getting all the credit for what they could have been doing with proper resources.

Of course, they’re partnered up and banter back and forth, Duhamel relentless upbeat, Winters the constant cynic, with their contrasting approaches making them a formidable team.

Battle Creek is not a particularly serious police procedural. It’s light, and makes active attempts at humor. It’s really not far off from an USA procedural, and much closer to USA or Fox than to the rest of the CBS procedural family. Nothing is all that serious. It’s purposefully silly and humor is mined from just how strapped the Battle Creek department is versus how flush Duhamel and the FBI are.

There’s really not even a lot to say about it. There’s just nothing to it. It was watchable, but eminently forgettable. Everything is competent enough but no more. There’s simply no hook to keep a viewer interested in coming back week-to-week. Battle Creek doesn’t appear to have been crafted with the kind of care one would expect of Shore or Gilligan. There’s no ambition. It’s the same problem that often haunts USA shows, but it doesn’t have the sense of fun or style that propels the better USA shows, though it’s certainly going for it.

Will I watch it again? No. There’s really no need to. Battle Creek came in and out with a whimper.

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Ranking the Shows That I Watch – 2014 Edition: 19-16

4 Mar

We’re halfway there. Four more. Young series all. Two debuts, a second year, and a third year, three comedies, and a drama. Let’s go.

Intro here and 43-40 here and 39-36 here and 35-32 here and 31-28 here and 27-24 here and 23-20 here.

19. Brooklyn Nine-Nine – 2013: 16

Brooklyn Nine-Nine

Co-created by Parks and Recreation creator Michael Schur and writer Dan Goor, Brooklyn Nine-Nine was more fully formed out of the box than Parks and Rec. While Paks and Rec modeled itself after the Office, Brooklyn Nine-Nine modeled itself after Parks and Rec. Parks and Rec took itself from a shaky at best first season to an excellent second season, and while Brooklyn Nine-Nine started higher, and has remained up to first season standards, it hasn’t quite made that jump. Brooklyn Nine-Nine is, no matter what else, a very solid, funny, and enjoyable show, and I look forward to watching it every week. Andre Braugher is a national treasure who should be kept in a museum when not filming the show for preservation purposes. I mean it as a sign of my high expectations for the show rather than an insult to say that Brooklyn Nine-Niane, while continuing to be good, hasn’t quite become transcendent the way recent similar network comedies The Office, 30 Rock, and Parks & Recreation did at points relatively early in their run. Brooklyn Nine-Nine always has some laughs, but it can be a little inconsistent, it hasn’t always found its own tone, and most of the characters are still working towards really being fully formed. Parks didn’t really hits its heights until the third season though, so I haven’t lost hope for this jump yet, and I’ll continue to laugh away in the meantime.

18. Silicon Valley – 2013: Not Eligible

Silicon ValleyA new entrant on this list, Silicon Valley is a spot on satire of the tech sector and is laugh-out-loud funny to boot. Only in actually watching Silicon Valley did I realize how shocking it was that there hasn’t been a well-regarded satirical take on such an easily parodied industry that has played such an important role in the American cultural landscape for nearly two decades. Silicon Valley takes advantage of this lapse and mines the industry for all its worth. It seems (from external sources including my brother who worked there) that there is lots of truth to Silicon Valley’s portrayal, even if gets some details wrong or exaggerates for comedic purposes. The show definitely has a bit of a woman problem; and while some of that is endemic to the premise of the show (it would be more dishonest realistically to have a group of programmers as split evenly between male and female), dragging the one female character into a romance with the protagonist that doesn’t really fit on screen is forced at best. The characters can on occasion be a little cartoonishly nerd-like, and though the touch is gentle and loving, the nerds-can’t-function-in-society button is hit one too many times. Still, Silicon Valley delivered an extremely promising and funny first season, which gives me great anticipation for the second. Lastly, a moment for the late Christopher Evan Welch who may well have been the break out performer if he wasn’t tragically felled by lung cancer; his venture capitalist Peter Gregory was a delightful weirdo.

17. Fargo – 2013: Not Eligible

Fargo

Fargo began from an unusual idea; creator Noah Hawley didn’t want to remake, or make a sequel or prequel to the much-lauded 1996 Coen brothers movie Fargo. Rather, he wanted to set a similar story in the world of Fargo, keeping the tone and atmosphere that make that film so successful. It was an unusual idea and a bold one (the closest I can think of offhand is Ron Moore’s BattleStar Galactica remake – but that was almost the reverse – the new show appropriated characters and concepts, but changed the tone completely). For the very most part, it worked, and was one of the best new shows of the year. The show deftly married dark humor and riveting drama, created similar analogues to the movie’s characters that were different enough to stand up to the rigor of a TV season where characters have to develop and grow. The four major characters were each entertaining and brought something different to the show, and many of the secondary characters were treats as well, as Fargo made good use of playing comedic actors in more dramatic roles. A couple of plotlines seemed out of nowhere, weaving in and out with no real purpose or resolution, and a couple of the characters felt oddly used, sometimes under, and sometimes over. Still, overall, Fargo brought the most important ingredient to its success consistently; its tone; dark, comedic, with an underlying small town warmth.

16. Veep – 2013: 27

Veep

Veep has been a steady climber in these rankings. I watched its first season, finding it amusing enough to keep up with, but not to make it a must watch immediately – it frequently got pushed below the hoard of other Sunday shows, and was eventually viewed later in the week. The second season was better. All of a sudden, I made more of an effort to watch sooner. The dialogue crackled a little more. The cast seemed to be more familiar with one another’s timing and comic beats – the chemistry between nearly every two-person pair was sparkling. The third season ramped it up another level. It’s easy to see why Veep, a modest comedy which doesn’t go for the loud humor of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, the high-concepts of Community, or the emotional depths of Parks and Recreation, hides under the radar, but it’s snuck its way to being one of the best comedies on television. Veep simply put together a season of being consistently minute-by-minute funny.

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Spring 2015 Review: The Last Man on Earth

2 Mar

The Last Man on Earth

Hey, The Last Man on Earth was kind of funny. There were more laughs than most network comedies, or really any comedies produce in a pilot, Many a somewhat promising pilot has had other aspects of their show more or less coalescence over the course of 21 minutes, such as the basic premise, the relationships between the characters, the vague personalities without being, well, funny. That can be okay; humor is the hardest part to get right, and often takes some time as the stars develop chemistry and writers learn to write to their actors. But if you can be funny in the first episode, well, that’s a big one up over everyone else.

The Last Man on Earth takes place in a world in which, to his and our knowledge, Will Forte’s Phil Miller is the only man remaining in, if not the world, at least the United States. He, in an opening montage, drives around the country trying to find any other living humans. Everyone was wiped out by a virus, and any information beyond that, and really that in and of itself, is really beyond the point; the apocalypse exists to get us to this end of the world scenario. The distinctive part of the idea is that seeing a post-apocalyptic world, usually played for drama (see currently the phenomenally successful AMC’s The Walking Dead), actually played for laughs.

The Last Man on Earth made a smart decision to air back-to-back episodes as its premiere because the show, which is very up and down humor-wise in the first half hour with Forte as a solo act, really starts to pick up when person #2, a game Kristen Schaal, shows up. The hit and miss early scenes feature Miller having fun blowing stuff up and knocking stuff and down and were far and away funniest when Miller talked to his cadre of friends he assembled from different balls. Schaal and Forte in their back and forths play a version of the very classic men-are-from-mars schtick, but the absurdity of the surroundings and the fact that they are two very funny people really made it work in a way that it didn’t have to and could have easily not. Schaal is purposefully ridiculously annoying and grating, insisting on following ridiculous rules that don’t make any sense. Schaal’s insistence on correct, or really incorrect grammar, and parking in parking spots in the face of the apocalypse were funny, again as much due to Schaal’s delivery as much as the material

Not a lot actually happens in the hour, which shouldn’t be surprising consider the nature. Phil fucks around, does a bunch of stupid shit, talks to balls, meets Schaal, shoves her aside after she’s so irritating, and then gets slightly inspired to try to actually improve his circumstances rather than just defecate into a giant pool, blow stuff up, masturbate. Some of the jokes were one-note, and while funny the first time could easily grow old – namely jokes that work around the humor of seeing someone try to comply with typical rules in the face of the apocalypse where those rules make no sense.

Still, it’s one episode; there’s only so much you can ask. My expectations were reasonably high coming out of the gate for a network show, because of the personnel involved, and while the show wasn’t a masterpiece right out of the gate, it was different, interesting, had its share of laughs, and did more than enough to warrant watching another episode.

Will I watch another episode? Yes, I’ll give it a shot.

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