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Fall 2011 Review: Boss

10 Dec

Boss wastes no time in its pilot.  Its first scene is a doctor letting the titular “Boss,” Kelsey Grammer’s Tom Kane, current mayor of Chicago, know that he has a degenerative brain disease, which will slowly deteriorate his higher and then lower mental functions.  Eventually he will barely be able to function and will need full time care.  He takes the news, reminds the doctor that the report is confidential and moves on with his day.  He makes a speech on behalf of the current gorvernor, but we soon learn that even though he’s nothing but kind in person, he’s looking to unseat the governor with a young state treasurer.  He offers to put his support behind the treasurer in exchange for favors later.  A find of Indian artifacts in a graveyard throws off his big legacy project, an expansion to O’Hare and Kane engages in a variety of different hardcore old-style political maneuvering to get his airport expansion back on track.  This includes paying off the Indians with building contracts, tacking on an amendment to give him all decisions over the Indian artifacts to a necessary trash bill, and violently assaulting the alderman responsible for the contractor who discovered the Indian artifacts and talked about the discovery on TV.  The airport expansion seems like his most important legacy and he’s willing to do absolutely whatever it takes to get it done.  That of course entails telling no one about his medical condition and more than that having an associate of his associate violently threaten the doctor about not revealing any confidential information.

We see a little bit of his family as well.  His wife is seen at a school dressing down a contractor who was supposed to bring the schools up to some minimum condition.  It’s clear that she’s a veteran of playing old-school political games as well.  At home, it seems like things are strained between them but there’s obviously some respect.  We meet Kane’s daughter as well who has the strangest plot of the episode.  She is working as a medical clinic and after helping a young African-American and his uncle, tracks down the kid for some drugs which she then throws away.  Also, she appears to not be so close with her father; they talk briefly, but he doesn’t have her cell number.

There was also a gratuitous stairway sex scene between the state treasurer and Kane’s advisor that I don’t exactly understand the purpose for, but okay.

Overall, Boss used its first episode fairly wisely and ended up being a much more interesting pilot than I expected.  It helped us learn a fair amount about our main character, and enough to make some bigger guesses at character relationships while setting several plot strands into motion.  These strands seem likely to crash into one another at one point in the future.

Kane has the making of a fascinating character, struggling to do good both for himself but also for his city, while willing to cross many lines to do it.  Like Walter White in Breaking Bad, this is all complicated by a premise of a disease which is a ticking clock, limited his time to get things done.  The political arena is ripe for a character drama.  Kane is old school and hard and certainly no Jeb Bartlett from The West Wing, nor Tommy Carcetti from The Wire, though maybe he’d be more similar to Carcetti’s predecessor Clarence Royce if we ever saw a drama about him.  The first episode was a chance to see Kane display the full range of his political tactics and watch them work so we can understand why he’s both a respected and feared mayor and so we have a baseline for when situations inevitably go less smoothly as the season goes on.  There’s a host of relationships to be explored, between Kane and his wife and daughter as well as between Kane and his long time staff members.  He’s going to have to continue to maneuver to keep his airport project on track as well as push his favored candidate for governor from behind the scenes.  Honestly, I think the show sounds intriguing even without the looming medical condition.

Will I watch again?  I’m not sure why I expected to not like the show at all, but I didn’t, and I was pleasantly surprised.  It’s earned at least a couple more episodes.

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Fall 2011 Review: Hell on Wheels

9 Dec

The first episode of Hell on Wheels left me intrigued but not excited.  The pilot gave me just enough to make me want more but not enough to draw me in immediately like Homeland did, for example.

The story takes place soon after the Civil War as the great project of building the transcontinental railroad commences.  Our protagonist is former southern soldier Cullen Bohannon who heads out to work on the railroad, getting hired as a foreman because as a former slave owner he may have a rapport with the black workers, who while free, are treated as barely better than slaves.  Before he heads out, he kills a priest who we find out had something to do with Meridian, a place in Mississippi, in which events resulted in the death of Cullen’s wife.  Cullen’s goal is to find everyone else responsible and kill them as well.  The northerners and southerners get along pretty much right after the war, while the former slaves bear the brunt, the scenes seem to show us.  By the fringes of the railroad, civilized law doesn’t apply.  Rather, the territory is controlled by our antagonist, railroad baron Doc Durant, played by Irish television veteran Colm Meaney.  The episode ends with a long Richard III like speech by Durant, self-identifying himself as the villain but noting that that’s what it takes to get things done, in this case to get the railroad built and of course make him as much money as possible in the process.

Before this, Cullen learns in discussion that his immediate boss had a hand in Meridian, leading the boss to pull a gun on Cullen but inform him that he knows the name of his wife’s murderer.  Unfortunately, a black member of Cullen’s crew, played by Common, slits the boss’s throat before the name of the murderer can be revealed.  Other potential main characters appear to be the wife of a surveyer who is killed by Indians, a reverend, an Indian recently converted to Christianity and a couple of Irish brothers who were on the same train to work as Bohannon, but none of these characters had a whole lot to do in the first episode.

It’s hard not to think of Deadwood when watching even the pilot, as the shows are both set in roughly the same time period and both evoke the spirit and lawlessness of the old west, where there were no legal or moral rules governing society.  The main character seemed at first view like a poor man’s Timothy Olyphant and Durant’s ending speech was needlessly over the top.  We get that you’re a villain, and I can understand a small amount of cartoonish theatrical rationalizing, but it was a bit much.  Many of who appear to be other main cast members didn’t do much in the first episode so it’s hard to evaluate them.  The show is a little bit over serious and could get buried under its own weight if it’s not careful.

That said, there’s enough going on to interest me.  I love the setting and the idea of the moving railroad town and I think there’s a lot of potential there.  I think the revenge plot has possibilities.  Honestly, it’s not so much that the show has done a lot in the first episode to keep me coming back for more as much as raised the possibilities of good things coming in the future.  I’m taken in enough by this though that I’m willing to give it a few episodes to start delivering.

Will I watch it again?  Yes, I’m going to give it another try to see if it builds intrigue and finds its footing.  I’m the first to admit I’m a sucker for historical dramas.  That said, I hope the parts get moving relatively soon and the characters become a bit more compelling.

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Mid-season Report: The Walking Dead

8 Dec

(This should go without saying but this midseason report contains spoilers you’re not going to want to read if you’re not up to date on the show and plan on watching it)

This first half of the second season of The Walking Dead ends with a great TV moment which shows everything The Walking Dead can be when it’s at its best.  The barn full of zombies, which has been revealed to us a couple of episodes ago, and to the whole crew more recently, is opened up by Shane.  Dramatically, the zombies are shot one by one by everyone except Rick, until, last out, comes zombie Sophia, wearing the same clothes she was wearing when she got lost.  Everyone is stunned, too stunned to react, and finally Rick steps up and shoots her, taking on his leadership role and showing he’s willing to play rough at the same time.  Even though I hadn’t cared so much about Sophia before, the way she came out out of the barn as a zombie had an immediate visceral emotional impact, and the misdirection of the barn plot had me forgetting about the search for Sophia temporarily.  The scene was extremely powerful and exhibited surprise, plot development and characterization all at once.

The Walking Dead is a show which with a short season and a half behind it is still trying to find its footing.  It’s a good show, and it shows flashes of being a great show, but there are several areas that need improvement.  There are two top-notch moments in the first half of the current season.  The second is the barn scene that ends the half-season, leaving a very good impression going into the second half.  The first is when Shane is shown in flashback shooting poor helpful redneck Otis to get out of the school with the hospital supplies alive.  Both of these moments were character defining, hold your breath, call your friends and talk about them immediately after they happen moments.  Not all of The Walking Dead can be like this – no show can have moments like this constantly and be sustainable.  Still, the payoff of these scenes remind me how good the show can be.

Characterization and pacing are probably the two biggest areas of The Walking Dead that need work.  The Walking Dead has a lot of work to do buidings its characters up.  The best developed character so far in the show is Shane, who began as the best friend who looked after Rick’s family before Rick met up with them, and who has slowly emerged as the primary antagonist in the show.  His journey to antagonist has seemed fairly natural as he’s struggled with losing Laurie and dealing with Rick’s less practical, more soft leadership style.  The rest of the cast either hasn’t gotten a chance to grow or have had their moments in stops and starts.  Daryl, the redneck with the heart of gold, had one half an episode in which he has some battle with a hallucinated version with his brother, and other than that it’s not exactly clear what his deal is, or why he’s so friendly when he seemed more hostile in the first season (think Sawyer from Lost, but skipping past a few seasons).

The Walking Dead needs to decide what its relationship with its own status quo is.  Some shows constantly change while others like Battlestar Galactica feel uncomfortable once they venture too far from their original set up and work on getting back to it.  I’m not sure whether I can expect constant change in The Walking Dead universe or whether even when they move from place to place as seems inevitable, they’ll just settle back into their routines.  One way is not necessarily better than the other, but it affects the pacing of the show.  In the first season, the characters moved around a lot and the plot almost felt rushed.  Another episode at the camp might have let us learn about the characters more and laid down the groundwork for future conflicts.  The second season, on the other hand, has remained at the farm and it feels like an episode or two could have been cut.  All that time could have been used for productive characterization, but it wasn’t.  Often, instead of organically feeling like a character got to a particular state, it felt like he got there because the story needed him there.  An example of this is Dale’s admonishments of Shane in the last two episodes.  For Shane, the journey to antagonist actually seems natural as I mentioned before.  For Dale to hate Shane though, seems to come out of nowhere along with his certainty that Shane killed Otis.  There were no scenes showing us why Dale would feel this way or why he would suspect Shane, connecting the dots.

There’s three main story reasons to kill characters in this show that I can think of offhand.  First, to provide a powerful emotional moment for the viewer.  For this, there needs to be a lot invested in the dying character.  Second, to show a big moment for another character.  For example, Shane killing Otis.  We don’t care that much about Otis, but it’s a powerful moment for Shane.  Third, to show how dangerous an enemy is, such as the zombies.  This is the main motivation between killing many of the early first season characters.  This is a horrible world and the zombies are deadly.  I have no way of knowing, but this seems like the type of show that’s going to want to kill off characters as it goes forward and right now I feel like for a majority of the characters I wouldn’t feel that much if they died (think Boon from Lost).  There’s plenty of time to change this, but it’s something the show should be working on so they can give us more moments like the final scene in the last episode.

I’m by no means souring on The Walking Dead. It’s just frustrating to watch a show that has so much potential not yet fill it.  Unlike shows like Heroes and Lost that had me extremely excited only to lose me for good after I was quickly disenchanted, The Walking Dead has me right now thinking it has the same chance of being great as it did when it started.  There hasn’t been any creative decision which is such a mistake that they can’t turn back from it and I have no reason to think there will be.  The pieces remain in place, they’re just shifting back and forth waiting for someone to get the configuration right.

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Fall 2011 Review: Charlie’s Angels

20 Nov

I tried holding off watching Charlie’s Angels as long as I could; it was probably the hour long show I was least interested in making it through.  I waited so long, in fact, that the show was already cancelled by the time I watched it.  Of course, that wasn’t particularly surprising.  Long before I watched it, and very soon after I heard of the existence of the reboot a quick cancellation seemed inevitable.  It’s hard to explain exactly why it seemed so certain before even the details behind the show were, but quality programming seemed exceedingly unlikely.  The revival of a ‘70s series there seemed to be absolutely no one clamoring for a reboot of was ill-advised in and of itself.  The show is remembered, but more for sex symbol Farah Fawcett than for anything else, let alone its quality, and my friend is convinced the only reason Charlie’s Angels was so successful in the 1970s was because looking at hot girls on TV was a bigger draw before the advent of the internet.

I put myself through the paces of watching, and it was certainly bad, though it was by no means absolutely unwatchable.  One lesson watching pilot after pilot has taught me is that the worst dramas can never stack up next to the worst comedies for cringeworthiness or sheer unwatchability.

The first episode begins with the short prologue that three girls ran into trouble with the law but the mysterious Charlie character got them out of trouble and gave them a second chance, and they became his Angels, some sort of private investigators.  I quickly noticed that one of the introduced Angels was Nadine Velazquez, rather than Minka Kelly and anticipated a near-immediate grisly death for Velazqeuz, which happened within the first seven minutes or so of the show.  Kelly is Velazquez’s best friend, and helps the remaining two Angels avenge her death, eventually joining their ranks at the end of the episode.  24’s Tony Almeada, Carlos Bernard, plays the villain, responsible both for the death of Velazquez, and the capture and sale into slavery of children – not a good guy.  They do this all with the help of Bosley, the sole male major character who works with the girls and seems to be a conduit for messages from Charlie.

The action scenes were fine.  It’s a bit of a stretch to think that characters who were allegedly cat burglars and hackers have action skills like experts, but if it wants to be a silly little action show I can live with that.  What I can’t live with is the particularly terrible writing and acting.  It felt extremely forced and unnatural and not in a good stylized David Mamet or Qunetin Tarantino way.  There’s jut not really anything worth watching here.  None of it makes me angry enough to go on a rant, and the show met its cancellation fate which is no more or less than it deserves.  It just makes me wonder what studio executives ever though this would work.

Will I watch it again?  The question’s moot, and honestly, the fact that I took this long to watch it means the question would probably be moot regardless.  That said, it’s unfair to judge ahead of time, but the show lived up to my expectations and I would not watch it even if were on to watch.

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Fall 2011 Review: Grimm

19 Nov

Grimm starts with a college student running in a red hoodie being assaulted by some sort of creature who we can’t really see, but who tears her limb from limb.  Detective Nick and his partner Hank, investigate the crime and debate whether the killer is a human or animal until they eventually find a boot print.  Meanwhile, Nick is buying a ring to propose for his girlfriend, but starts seeing strange things – people’s faces turn into monsters’ faces for a couple of seconds at a time, almost like the way humans look like aliens when Roddy Piper wears the special sunglasses in “They Live.”  As Nick and Hank work on solving the case, a little girl goes missing, also wearing a red hoodie (Little Red Riding Hood!  I get it!) and as they investigate Nick suspects a man whose face does the weird monster transformation who lives by the edge of the park where the college student’s body was found.  Nick’s dying aunt, who apparently raised him, comes over to his house and lets Nick know some important information:  He is a GRIMM – an elite line of fairy tale monster-hunters who can see these monsters while they attempt to blend in with humanity.  As the aunt tells Nick, she hands him a key he must protect at all costs and she’s attacked by a monster, who after a prolonged fight, injures her badly, but is killed by Nick.

Nick goes to the house of the monster he saw earlier at the edge of the park, attacks him, and gets into a fight before discovering that this monster is instead a reformed monster who drinks beers, goes to church and pees to mark his territory like a normal person.  The reformed monster tells Nick a little about GRIMMs and assists Nick eventually in locating where the offending wolf-monster might be and takes him there.  Nick calls his partner, and though the partner is initially suspicious, they eventually are on the same page, and after some time kill the monster and find the girl.  Nick realizes he has a lot yet to learn about being a GRIMM, and at the end he saves his aunt, still unconscious, from an evil monster attacker, who seems like she will be part of the serial plot.

Grimm is the second fairy tale inspired show to air this year along with ABC’s Once Upon a Time, but Grimm shares more in common with Buffy the Vampire Slayer in style, if not in quantity.  I was only slightly surprised to see that Grimm, after I made that comparison in my mind, was co-created by David Greenwalt, a former Buffy writer.  There’s a number of reasons this comparison felt apt.  The main character, like Buffy, is learning to see monsters who hide in plain sight, something which only a  small and elite group of people can see (yes, Buffy already technically knows she’s a slayer at the beginning of the TV show, but more or less she’s learning).  These monsters threaten humanity every day and the protagonist now realizes he (or she) has a responsibility to the world to use his (or her) powers to protect humans, threatening to damage his (or her) personal life.  It has a procedural but serial feel similar to Buffy; there’s a monster of the week, but the potential for a slowly moving storyline; if it’s anything like Buffy, the serial plot will develop slowly at first and then become more prominent over the last few episodes of a season.  The idea of a reformed werewolf who assists the protagonist is a classic Buffy-esque touch; one of the great concepts of Buffy was that demons weren’t always evil, breaking general conventions.

Unfortunately for Grimm, it didn’t have many of the hallmarks which made Buffy so great such as  the using of demons and monsters as ways to interweave stories about the struggles of the main characters in their personal lives, the mixture of comedy and drama, and the witty and distinctive dialogue.  It’s unfair, though, to compare Grimm to seven seasons worth of Buffy; Buffy’s first couple of episodes had their problems as well.

Right now Grimm seems like, if not opened up a little bit, it could wear down to a simple spin on a police procedural where the killers are monsters.  That could still be passable, but the show could be stronger with some drawing on the mythology of the fairy tales and the Grimms and I think there’s a chance the show could go in that direction.  A tad more humor might serve the show well, as well.

As a note, it seemed odd that, at the beginning of the episode the runner who is murdered is listening to Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) by The Eurythmics, and when the detectives find her iPod, it’s playing the same song.  Either they incredibility coincidentally came upon the iPod as the playlist was at the same place, or her running playlist consisted of that song repeating over and over again.

Will I watch it again?  I don’t think so, right away anyway, but I do think this show has a better chance of being good than Once Upon A Time.  From just the premises, Once Upon A Time sounded better to me.  It was more serial, had an open world with interesting questions, and Grimm sounded more like a fantasy procedural.  Those vague descriptions were accurate, but from one episode, Grimm has more potential.

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Fall 2011 Review: Once Upon A Time

13 Nov

Once Upon A Time is the story of a group of fairy tale characters who have gotten trapped in our world in the town of Storybrooke, Maine by an evil witch and who have no idea that they’re fairytale characters.  They also can’t leave the town for some reason that was unclear in the first episode.  The first episode is told as two separate plots which are cross cut.  First, in the past, fairy tale characters led by Snow White and Prince Charming must deal with the curse of the evil witch and eventually learn that the only way to save themselves is to preserve their daughter who will save them from the cursed in 28 years. Second, Jennifer Morrison is a modern day independent, but friendless woman who is approached by a little boy who it turns out is her biological son who she gave up for adoption ten years ago.  The boy tells her that he’s her son, and convinces her to return him to his hometown of Storybrooke.  She has some either super power or sharp instinct to determine whether people are lying, and sees that he is telling the truth.  He tries to convince her that the town is made of fairytale characters, of which she is one, putting her in the classic this-is-ridiculous-but-she-has-to-eventually-believe-it-for-the-show-to-work scenario that we’ve already had in The Secret Circle and A Gifted Man.  She’s not all the way there by the end of the episode, but she agrees to stay in town a week and hang out with him, against his mother’s wishes, because she’s convinced the mother doesn’t love him.  Or something.

The word of the day for Once Upon A Time is a word I stray away from generally, because I’ve known people who have overused it in the past, but here I think it’s called for:  cheesy.  It’s not a sophisticated word, but it’s accurate for about everything about this show, and though I’m probably being slightly derisive about the show overall in this review, I mean cheesy in a simply descriptive way.  The plotlines are cheesy.  The show would have been better off leaving out the flashbacks entirely.  Snow White and Prince Charming in the past go downstairs to hear a prophecy from the prisoner Rumplestiltskin and the whole scene just seems like it should be from a children’s cartoon rather than a primetime drama.  The writing is cheesy – the dialogue is canned and corny.  The production values, which I’m usually willing to cut some slack to and aren’t my biggest concern, are cheesy as well.  The limited cgi.  The costumes for the dwarves.  Everything feels a little kiddy.  I’m not saying something has to be dark as night to interest me, but it could at least by a little bit complex.

It was hard for me to watch this and not mentally compare it to a comic series called Fables.  Fables, written by Bill Willingham, posits that a great evil (The Adversary) chased the fairy tale characters out of their homelands and they escaped to a part of New York called Fabletown.  His depictions of the characters and their interactions are clever, nuanced and funny.  Prince Charming, for example, is the same prince from Snow White, Cinderella and other stories, so instead of being a doe eyed eternally loving husband, he’s a handsome sleazy womanizer.  Anyway, this has pretty much just been a paragraph long advertisement for a comic series that I’ve only read half of the existing issues, but it was similar enough that it was hard to get out of my mind while watching the show, and I continued to compare Once Upon A Time to it, negatively.

Also, Howling for You by The Black Keys makes another pilot appearance.  It’s all over Prime Suspect, and now in Once Upon A Time also.

Will I watch it again? No, I don’t think so.  It’s certainly innocuous enough and if people told me it got really interesting from here on in I’d give it a chance, but it’s hard to get a feeling that it will from the first episode.  The whole thing isn’t very sophisticated, and maybe that’s too much to ask, especially from a show that bills itself as family friendly, but it could try a little harder.

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Fall 2011 Review: Man Up

12 Nov

Part 2 of the ABC Man Block, Man Up is the story of three men, a happily married husband and father of a son and daughter, a bitterly divorced man, brother in law to the first man, and their friend, who is still devastated by the loss of his long-term girlfriend.  Unlike Tim Allen in Last Man Standing who is an outdoorsman who does manly deeds all the time in a world devoid of them, the three main characters in Man Up, Will, Craig and Kenny, spend their time doing teenage-ish activities like playing video games (Will thinks that his wife’s present of a violent war game is for him, rather than for his son).  Over the course of the episode, which consists of a birthday party for Will’s son, the three band together and decide they want to act MANLY like their fathers who presumably fought in some sort of war and maybe worked in a factory for thirty years would have acted.  They’re tired of being emasculated; not in the same way Tim Allen is tired by living in a house full of women, but by emasculating themselves with their boyish attitudes.  It’s time to MAN UP.  This involves mostly, in this episode, getting into a fight with a bunch of hooligans who one of them (Craig?  Maybe?) pissed off (by barging on his wedding and serenading his finance) instead of calling the police when the hooligans barge onto the front lawn of Will’s house while the kids are having their party.  Apparently they don’t do a whole lot to win the fight, but they still feel appropriately manly afterwards, and Will’s wife seems to be surprisingly forgiving of what seems like an incredibly stupid action.

(Note:  I understand Man Up is not a very popular TV show.  Still is it more obscure than the third album by Danish blues-rock group The Blue Van which comes up ahead of it on wikipedia?)

Man Up is far less patently offensive than Last Man Standing.  There’s less overt sexism and homophobia (which is not saying a lot, to be fair) and very little makes you straight out cringe.  Unfortunately, it’s still not very good.  Forget the idea of manliness, which admittedly seems a little dated, and could distill into worse emasculated man stereotypes but certainly didn’t show any real signs of that yet.  The friends seemed like relatively normal people.  The show just was weak in the way that the vast majority of bad shows are weak.  The jokes aren’t funny, the characters aren’t very interesting, and there’s no aspect that is compelling and makes me want to come back for more or think that I’d want to come back for more in the future.

Will I watch it again?  Nope.  In some of these I talk about how it’s close or how I’m thinking about it or it could improve.  Not here.  It’s not truly offensive like Whitney or 2 Broke Girls or Last Man Standing – it’s just a straight up regular ol’ traditional type of bad show.  It could be good if it was another show entirely, but short of that it’s not high on signs of hope.

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Fall 2011 Review: Enlightened

5 Nov

When I started HBO’s Enlightened I knew less than I do about most shows going on.  The premise is told in the first ten minutes or so of the episode.  Laura Dern is a high-powered corporate manager who has been sleeping with a married colleague and has a high-profile extremely embarrassing nervous breakdown at the office in which she curses out several co-workers.  She goes to breakdown/stress rehab, whatever the technical name for that is, in which she relaxes in tropical climates for a while and learns to access her inner chi and relaxation techniques and shit like that.  She comes home newly centered and tries to put her life right again, back at work, with her ex-fuck buddy, with her mom, played by Diane Ladd, and with her ex-husband, played by Luke Wilson.  The show is created by Mike White who I know best for writing School of Rock, but who has also written such classics as Nacho Libre, Orange County and The Good Girl.

It’s a half hour comedy, but it’s more in the vein of a makes-you-smile Entourage style comedy than a laugh out loud comedy.  That said, it didn’t make me smile all that much.  This is largely because I couldn’t stand the main character.  I have no problem with Laura Dern as an actress, but her character, Amy Jellicoe, when she comes back from rehab has this hippy-dippy, uber-positive, meditative and vaguely cosmicly spiritual personality which I find to be one of the most irritating personality archetypes out there.  Since, so far at least, she pretty was the show, and was in every scene, there wasn’t much else.  Not only would I find her incredibly obnoxiously in real life, I really don’t want to spend a half hour a week with her on screen either.

Enlightened was already off to a bad start and there was simply nothing else that pulled me in about the show.  I could buy feeling bad for someone who had a nervous breakdown, and watching her search for redemption but not when she acts like that when she’s trying to claw her way back.  The supporting characters were fine.  I didn’t have any particularly strong feelings about that one way or the other.

There’s certainly a chance they’ll tone her oppressive personality down as the season wears on and she starts acting more within the realm of the normal, and that certainly wouldn’t hurt the chance of the series actually being good.  In some comedies though it feels like if they could just remove a couple of small kinks, the show would be off and running.  The essential premise here isn’t the problem, but the level of tuning up needed here to make the show a success far exceeds a couple of kinks.  If New Girl is an oil change and a new set of tires from being good, Enlightened needs a new transmission (the analogy is admittedly a stretch, particularly because I don’t know enough about cars; just go with it).

Will I watch it again?  No, I’m not going to.  If I take a peek in later during the season, I’ll hope they’d made her character a little more tolerable, but even then I’d need a little bit more to make it compelling viewing.

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Fall 2011 Review: Prime Suspect

22 Oct

Girl power isn’t just found in sitcoms (girl power sounds patronizing – woman power?) this fall TV season.  It’s also in dramas.  Prime Suspect is a police procedural but with more of an attitude than the standard CBS version.  Maria Bello plays a cop looking to move up the ranks, who has just been transferred to homicide somewhere in New York (from somewhere else in New York).  She’s a damned good cop, but apparently due to something she did (an affair with a senior officer? It wasn’t mentioned specifically in the pilot) the squad’s old boys’ club view her as an outcast who cheated her way up the ranks.

The homicide detectives in her new squad keep skipping her name when homicide calls come up, which seems pretty disrespectful to say the least, and while the boss of the unit seems to genuinely respect Bello and feels sympathetic, he doesn’t want to rock the boat and tells her she’ll just get the next case.  Only thing is, this particularly case she was skipped on was a brutal murder getting lots of press, and she thinks she has a novel theory – that it’s connected to an existing series of rapes, – which no one else believes, including the current detectives on the case.  So she’s both isolated and unable to solve anything until one of the detectives on the team, a veteran to the force, keels over and dies unexpectedly.  She makes a poorly timed request to her boss to take the detective’s place on the case, and though the boss is displeased by her timing, he gives her the shot.  She is curt and bosses her way around the investigation, getting respect from some but resentment from others, particularly the dead cop’s best friend on the force, but through it all eventually solves the case proving her theory correct.

The show has more going for it towards making it a weekly watch than an average procedural.  Maria Bello is certainly the biggest factor going for it.  She’s rough around the edges and a little bit irritable but effective, and I think it’s well played that even in the first episode, while you’re mostly on her side, you can understand why she gets under some of the detectives’ skin, aside from the one who really hates her.  She acts only as barely respectful as she needs to be and isn’t willing to cut anyone any slack, especially right after the death of the other detective.  The best parts of Maria Bello on the show though are still when she’s making things happen solving the case though.

It seems a little bit much in terms of the way she’s treated so poorly, particularly just because she’s a woman, in this day and age.  It’s one thing to have some minor resentment, but the cops in this episode definitely go farther than that, particularly the one cop that really, at this point, just seems like a jackass.  It’s one thing to forgive him at the beginning of the episode after the loss of his friend is so fresh, it’s another towards the end when he gets on her case for no real reason.  That said, it would only require a little tweaking to solve that problem, and move the resentment to focus on her attitude and demeanor and less solely on her identity as a woman.

Will I watch it again?  Again, probably not.  But I’m also considering it.  I could make up a middle tier of shows this season, and this would be right there.  I can see it growing up better and I think the characters could be fleshed out well.  These are all good things and it makes me think about it but it’s hard for me to really get into a show like this with at least a little bit of a more serial element.  Maybe if it was on USA.

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Fall 2011 Review: Free Agents

20 Oct

The inevitable fact of spacing these reviews out of the course of a few weeks means that some of the shows will be already cancelled by the time I write about them.  Free Agents, moreso, was just about dead on arrival.  It was one of the easiest shows to call as a quick cancellation, but unlike other easy calls like The Playboy Club and How To Be A Gentleman, it’s not simply because it was bad, though it was by no means great.  It’s because it was a bad fit, time and network wise, and didn’t receive much promotion.

I was mildly pleasantly surprised upon watching Free Agents, not because it was great, but because my expectations were relatively low.  That said it really wasn’t bad.  It wasn’t good either, but it wasn’t bad.  Here’s the premise.  A couple of relatively recently single middle-aged folks work at a public relations agency.  Hank Azaria plays a recently divorced dad, and Katherine Hahn, a recently widowed woman.  The two of them have gotten together on a one-night stand at the beginning of the first episode, and the show continues as they go back to work with sexual tension and a will-they-or-won’t-they dynamic.  They’re surrounded by some wacky co-workers, played Al Madrical and Mo Mandel, a wacky British boss, played by Buffy the Vampire Slayer librarian Giles, Anthony Stuart Head, and a wacky janitor played by Judd Apatow bit part player and former The State member Joe LoTruglio.

What works best about the show are the two leads.  They’re generally likable and they play their parts well,  A couple of their lines hit and all the best scenes of the show were with them and particularly when they were talking to one another. Even the parts where Azaria is crying about his divorce don’t seem nearly as cartoonish as they could.  The side characters are another story.  Irritating and over the top for the most part, they seem like a bunch of cardboard cut outs particularly put next to the genuinely engaging lead actors.  Head, though I love him as Giles, was occasionally excruciating to watch in his scenes as the incredibly inappropriate boss who makes his employees feel uncomfortable.  The other awkward side plot about how one of the friend characters wanted to go out on the town and the poor married friend wanted to come along but didn’t understand single life did not work either.

Will I watch it again?  Well, it’s cancelled, but I wouldn’t and didn’t.  It’s not dreck though, for what it’s worth, and it was a little rough to have only four episodes of it to air.  I’m not crying about it though.

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