Archive | Fall 2011 TV Season RSS feed for this section

Fall 2011 Review: Pan Am

3 Oct

Pan Am, one of two new shows this season set in the Mad Men era, the early ‘60s, thankfully does not try to emulate Mad Men in mood or feel.  It’s hard not to at least make a comparison, but while Mad Men is largely serious, Pan Am is light and fluffy, even buoyant.

Pan Am is the story of a group of stewardesses (they were certainly not called flight attendants yet) and pilots who work in the exciting world of intercontinental airfare.  In the first episode, they inaugurate a new jet.  There’s definitely a bit of soap feel, but more of a fun, light, escapist feel than, say,  in Revenge, which has more of a fun, but darker, trashy feel.

So far it seems we’ve got four main stewardesses.  Two are sisters, one who ran away from the altar just before her planned marriage to join her sister as a stewardess, and who was pictured on Life magazine as the face of Pan Am airlines before her first flight.  Her resentful sister has been working at Pan Am longer but has just been initiated into helping out US and British intelligence services.  The third stewardess is French and finds out that a man she’s been sleeping with is married, and the fourth is Christina Ricci, who seems a bit more of a hipster than the other girls, in the old-school Bob Dylan, early 60s sense, but flies around to see the world.  We don’t know nearly as much about the pilots, except that the captain was in love with a stewardess who we, but not he, know was also an agent for US and UK intelligence and now has to quit Pan Am for some reason.

It didn’t leave a strong impression as to what’s going to happen for most of the characters.  The only character for whom I got a feeling of what will happen going forward is Laura, the stewardess who will presumably be taking on new and exciting intelligence missions.  For the rest, well, personal drama, sure, but I can’t quite tell how much of the show we can expect to be serial, and how much episode by episode, and I’m not sure what manner of adventures we’ll see – hijackings?  Missed connections?  Angry customers?  I’d be interested to watch a mid-season episode if for nothing else to see what level of problems the stewardesses and pilots are dealing with.  I can’t imagine it being too dour week to week, or it would largely destroy the tone.

Will I watch it again?  Honestly, I probably won’t watch it next week.  That said, I think it’s so far the closest show on the border.  It wasn’t bad or disappointing, it just didn’t hit me hard enough with so many other commitments on board.

Tags: ,

Fall 2011 Review: A Gifted Man

1 Oct

Patrick Wilson is a renowned neurosurgeon in New York, operating on the richest and most exclusive clients (billionaires, world class tennis players) and basically being the best damn doctor he can be.  Unfortunately, he’s kind of a jerk, focusing only on his work, forgetting his assistant’s birthday (played by Margo Martindale who was wonderful as Dixie mafia leader Ma Bennett in Justified; she’s slightly less evil here), or being rude to his sister.  All of a sudden, during one day of his cold, nearly emotionless life, he appears to run into his ex-wife, who he hasn’t seen in years.  They get dinner and chat at his apartment, and he mentions to his sister that he saw her.  Later, he finds out she died three weeks ago in a car crash.  She visits him several times during the episode, in ghost form, and convinces him to help out the free medical clinic she left behind, by putting her password into the computer there, and to help out of the clients at the clinic in need, even though it takes time away from the VIP clients he normally services.

Wilson plays a privileged middle aged dick-ish guy as well as anyone (see:  Little Children) and I actually find myself liking him more than I’m supposed to.  Sure, he was kind of a jerk, but he was really more of an insanely career driven guy than anything else.  I’m actually not sure whether I’m supposed to like him more or less, but it’s probably better to like him more if I’m going to watch again.  The main hook of the show is that his dead wife’s ghost will try to make him a better man, which sounds utterly cheesy but didn’t play out as sappy as it could have.

This series faces the same issue I talked about in my review of the Secret Circle, or in many supernatural shows set in the real world – the how-long-should-it-take-before-I-believe-something-that-seems-insane syndrome as Wilson struggles with the existence of the ghost of his wife.  He has himself checked for a tumor with his MRI machine but by the end of the first episode it seems he’ll more or less have to get used to the existence of ghosts.  He visits some sort of spirit healer played by Pablo Schreiber, best known as The Wire’s Nick Sobotka, to attempt to remove the spirit, but bails out at the last minute when the ghost convinces him not to.

I watched this on back to back nights with Person of Interest, both on CBS, so it’s hard not to attempt to make a comparison.  Both shows were in a way the opposite of what I thought they’d be.  Person of Interest I thought would be a sort of sci-fi serial, and it seems to be more of a week by week procedural.  A Gifted Man, I thought, and I’m not sure I have a great reason for this, would be at least mostly procedural, and after one episode, it’s not really clear that that’s the case.  I still think there’s likely to be episode to episode plots, but the most important aspect of the show with Wilson and his wife’s ghost and him growing as a person and so forth has to be serial.

If I bashed the fake New York-ness of 2 Broke Girls, I should compliment shows set in New York that are clearly filmed in New York.  A Gifted Man doesn’t let you forget it, showing at least twice Wilson jogging by the East River.  Good for A Gifted Man.  It may be occasionally gratuitous but I’m happy to reward shows actually filming in New York by tolerating their showing it off.

Will I watch it again?  Probably not, but it was better than I thought it would be.  It’s a very respectable show, and I think has the potential to be more interesting than it sounds like it would be from its description.  That said, it’s not particularly up my alley just from the description alone, and it wasn’t quite good enough in any one way to make me really feel any need to see another episode.  I’m vaguely curious to check out what the show looks like if it’s still around for my midseason review.

Tags: , ,

Fall 2011 Review: Person of Interest

23 Sep

Person of Interest has a high concept, but the high concept here is surprisingly beyond the point or so it seems from one episode.  It’s really a classic CBS procedural disguised as a JJ Abrams complex serial show.  The premise is that a super rich programmer, portrayed by Lost’s Michael Emerson, has after 9/11 tapped into the wide range of data collected on everyone and everything by the federal government, and can get a list of social security numbers which refer to people who will be involved somehow in a violent crime.  Unfortunately, Emerson can’t get any more data than this without getting caught stealing the information from the government.  Emerson, through his eyes and ears everywhere, finds Jim Caviezel’s character, an ex-CIA agent who looks like a homeless person and is drinking himself to death due to his life falling apart by death of loved one or government betrayal or a lack of purpose or all of these things.

The show tries several times to tap heavily into a post 9/11 PATRIOT Act Big Brother paranoia theme but it seems a little clumsy and obvious.  It’s kind of screaming YOU ARE BEING WATCHED ALL THE TIME!  It’s not really bad so much as it seems kind of pointless.  They could be doing it for major use of a paranoid angle but the first episode didn’t do a whole lot with that and it doesn’t from that episode seem like it’s planning to (Contrast it to say, Rubicon, where good, or bad, that was a critical element of the show).

As I mentioned before, it seems like it’s going to be a procedural.  Every week the machine will spit out a number and Cavaziel will go on the wild goose chase and figure out where the crime is and how to stop it using his CIA bad-assery skils.  That’s not necessarily a bad thing in the big picture, but it’s a bad thing in terms of getting me to watch every single week.  With the Jonathan Nolan and JJ Abrams name attached, I thought there would be a little bit more of a serial plot.  Procedurals are generally eminently watchable, but they also are rarely compelling enough to warrant regular viewing.  I could sit down and watch a couple of NCISs easily but that doesn’t mean I’m going to set my DV-R for it.

I posted a review earlier yesterday about Boardwalk Empire and about how the show seems to lack any fun.  Interestingly enough, watching this, I sort of thought the same thing.  It doesn’t have to be a USA show to have fun or have cheesy one-liners.  Even Emerson’s character on Lost, Ben, the creepiest, and most villainous character always seemed to be having his own fun.  Right now, I’m putting this mostly on Cavaziel.  If the show is going to be a procedural it could use it.  I think a more charismatic lead could easily inject just a little bit more life.  All serious all the time can be fine, but if you’re going to do that, you better be doing something that warrants it.  Cavaziel is kind of boring and bland, at least through this one episode.

Will I watch it again?  Probably not.  I don’t mean I won’t ever again;  I could easily find myself taking in a repeat on an early Saturday afternoon.  Am I going to watch it next week, though, or on a weekly schedule?  I highly doubt it.

Fall 2011 Review: Revenge

22 Sep

(Here at Television, the Drug of the Nation we’ll be doing one review for one show on each day of the week, each week.  For example, one Tuesday we might review 2 Broke Girls, and then the next week Terra Nova or The Playboy Club.  So, if your favorite or least favorite show didn’t get reviewed yet, not to worry)

Without ruining anything outside of the first half hour, here’s what we know so far in broad terms about Revenge.  A woman in her 20s moves into the Hamptons for the summer into a house where she spent summers when she was a little girl.  She’s there under an assumed name, she’s rich, and she’s determined to take revenge on people who wronged her father, framing him for a horrific crime he didn’t commit, by taking them out one by one.  The chief of those upon who she seeks vengeance is a regal Hamptons presence, Victoria Grayson.

After sitting through an hour of Revenge, there were a surprising number of parallels to another new season debut, Ringer.  Like Ringer, the main character is a relatively young woman, and a theme of doubling is prevalent, though less literally than in Ringer.  Emily van Camp’s character now goes by the name Emily Thorn, but was once Amanda Clark, and at least a couple of characters new her as this alternate persona.  Like Ringer, the action takes place in the midst of a high end socialite circle, through which we dive right into the seedy underbelly of the rich and powerful, complete with affairs and cover ups.  Like Ringer, there’s an unclear mix between soapy trashiness and action and suspense.

Compared to Ringer, Revenge didn’t get quite as far in terms of plot.  In the first half hour, I was just waiting to get moving a little bit.  The pacing was undoubtedly deliberate.  Unfortunately, in a show like this there’s no way to tell if it’s just a slow build, or straight out boring without at least a couple more episodes.  The second half definitely moved a little bit better and we got at least a couple more glimpses into what we’ll be looking at for the rest of the year.

I did like something that we saw towards the end of the episode.  Initially it seemed like this was Emily versus everyone with her British best friend acting as a sidekick who doesn’t know a thing.  We learn though that at least one of the characters, an internet millionaire allegedly loyal to her father, also despises the Graysons and would love to get in on the revenge, but Emily is not interested in sharing.  Almost any time conflicts become multifaceted instead of straight one on one they become more interesting.

I also wanted to note that Revenge uses a device dramas like to use sometimes (Damages does it, Breaking Bad sometimes as well) that I’m almost never a fan of, which is starting the beginning of a season or an episode with a flashforward which shows terrible and possibly tragic things happening.  The goal of this flashforward to leave you with a taste of what will be happening if you watch the rest of the season and to provide suspense for how we get from here to there.  It’s not that I think that this technique is inherently flawed.  It can absolutely work well sometimes. I just think that most of the times it’s used it doesn’t add a whole lot.  Even based on the first episode, we know we’re in for a show in which people are going to have at the very least their lives ruined; there’s no need to show us what will happen it at the end of the first season or half season.  If anything, it makes me worry that the show will go too slow.

Writing this review reminded me of the limits of judging shows after just one episode.  With comedies, this is because they generally take at least a couple episodes to gel and to find their niche.  With long building and complex plot shows like Revenge, it’s difficult because we just don’t get enough.  We get the premise, some general tone and mood, and a quick appraisal about how we like the actors.  After five episodes we won’t know whether the ending will disappoint us and whether the season-long plotting is poor, but we’ll at least get more of a sense for the pacing, more of the characters and at least a little clearer sense of where the show is going.  Judging it after one episode less like judging after one full chapter and more like judging after just five pages (which is why we’ll be doing midseason reports to see if some of these shows keep up on or fail their promise).

I liked Emily VanCamp so far, and that’s certainly going to be important going forward as it looks as though everything will revolve around her.  I also liked Madeleine Stowe as Victoria Grayson. She seems like she has everything she needs to be a quality ruthless villain holding up one side of the show.

Will I watch it again?  I think I’ll try it again at least one more, as it has at the least bare minimum essentials to put together a good show.  I think this is going to be in the category of watch five and reevaluate.

Tags: , , ,

Fall 2011 Review: New Girl

21 Sep

(Here at Television, the Drug of the Nation we’ll be doing one review for one show on each day of the week, each week.  For example, one Tuesday we might review 2 Broke Girls, and then the next week Terra Nova or The Playboy Club.  So, if your favorite or least favorite show didn’t get reviewed yet, not to worry)

Coming into the first episode, I had two thoughts about New Girl.  First, I felt that no one debut this season was being sold so much on the back of one person, in this case, on the shoulders of star Zooey Deschanel.  Second, while I didn’t think much of the show a month ago, as it got nearer, for reasons I’m not entirely sure of, I started to get a little bit more excited about it.

As for the first at least, Zooey Deschanel did a good job but what I was surprised by was how much I liked the supporting cast as well, which consists of her three new roommates.  (Unlike a complex drama, I can sum up the first episode plot here in one sentence:  Zooey, as Jess, comes home to her boyfriend, finds him cheating, moves into a new place with three dudes, and is still depressed about the break-up).  Her model best friend is also on tap to be a main cast member, but she was only in the show for a minute or two, so it was hard to get a feel for her one way or the other.

The three roommates consist of three kinds of archetypes, a poser-y white guy quick to take off his shirt and call people bro, an athletic trainer who wears gym shorts and yells a lot, and a guy still depressed about a girl who dumped him months ago who dials her up when drunk.  Over the course of the episode though, these archetypes quickly fade into real people, with maybe the slight exception of the take-off-the-shirt guy, named Schmidt, but even he is normalized by the fact that his roommates make fun of him constantly (the trainer, who everyone seems to call Coach, makes him put money in a Douchebag jar every time he acts like well, a douchebag) and even he seems to not take himself too seriously.  There’s a degree of self-awareness, and a much more accurate acknowledgement of what archetypes are; they’re one side of someone’s personality, but if you dig deeper, and often not very much deeper (this was 20 minutes of tv, after all) there’s generally a person who is more or less like anybody else beneath.  I’d rather characters a little less developed in a pilot (again 20 minutes of TV) than characters who are instantly labeled by a few choice phrases and actions, pigeonholing them for the future.

Like the two new Whitney Cummings sitcoms, 2 Broke Girls and Whitney, New Girl is all about a 20-something female with a strong personality which she asserts as a force on all those around her.  Unlike those two shows, New Girl is single camera instead of multi camera, doesn’t use a laugh track, and is good.  Not to pile it on to 2 Broke Girls on top of what I’ve said before, but every character aside from the two main ones was a thin stereotype.  I know it’s just one episode, but in just twenty one minutes or so of New Girl all the characters managed to seem like real people (second time I’ve used the phrase, I know); by the end, when the roommates ditch their party to hang out with Jess who had been stood up by a guy, it already felt like a warm moment which was earned and not overly cheesy, and I already liked all the major characters.  That’s impressive.

Even within the episode, the show took a few minutes to find its footing.  Jess’s depression became a little much, and she has this tic where she talks in kind of a weird voice which became a tiny bit grating.  The show becomes a lot better when she starts smiling a little bit and having fun, and hopefully she’ll be getting over her depression in future episodes.  These are relatively minor complaints; it’s by no means a slam dunk instant classic, but what is?  It’s very very hard to produce a sitcom that’s great right out of the box – even the best often need a few episodes to find their footing.  Whether it will find said footing and become a really top tier sitcom or just slide along at being generally enjoyable enough to make you smile and laugh a couple times an episode, I don’t know, but to even put itself in that position after one episode is pretty damn good.

Important note:  The athletic trainer roommate Coach played by Damon Wayans Jr. in the pilot is being replaced, as his Happy Endings got unexpectedly picked up for a second season. It will certainly be interesting to see how the new roommate compares to the old.

Will I watch it again?  I was legitimately 50/50 before I saw it, but yeah, I think I’m going to.  The first episode got stronger as it moved forward, and although anything can go in any direction, I think it’s more likely to get even stronger as the season moves forward than not.

Tags: , , ,

Fall 2011 Review: 2 Broke Girls

20 Sep

I thought about sub-titling this review, “In Defense of Hipsters.”  I didn’t, but we’ll get back to that shortly.

It’s very early in the fall premiere season but we have an early contender for if not the worst show, the show I find most personally offensive.  Honestly, it’s not because the writing is bad, although it is.  But honestly, (and here’s a kind of compliment, to show this is all even-handed), the writing wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.  And Kat Dennings, who I haven’t liked since Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist  wasn’t as bad as I thought she would be.  The problem with this show is both its absolute lack of understanding of what it’s trying to make fun of, and the ridiculously one-sided stance that comes from that.  Allow me to explain.

The first minute or so of the show is the worst minute of television I’ve seen in years (is decades too far?) and although more concentrated than the rest of the show, is a good microcosm for the show at large.  I made a mention of a Coldplay reference in my preview of the show but I’m going to break it down further and attach the youtube so you can see for yourself.  I’ll break down the clip below.

Two men are sitting at a table in the diner in which waitress Kat Dennings, named Max in the show, works.  The men are maybe in their mid-20s and are dressed in plaid and have wool caps on.  One of them, after attempting to call her over to the table, snaps at her (finger snaps, not snaps in anger).  Without question, this is a rude action.  She then retaliates eight-fold.  She snaps directly in his face, an action far more rude in and of itself than snapping in the air for the waitress.  She then calls out the patron as a hipster, for having no job, which, first, she has absolutely no way of knowing, and second, even if she did, it would be extremely uncalled for and none of her business.  She and him are nothing alike at all, she asserts.  After the second man at the table notes that his friend has been “burned,” Max lets him know that he doesn’t get off either for this seemingly minor transgression.  She, she tells him, wears wool hats because it’s cold, while he, she claims, wears them because of Coldplay.

Let’s break this down.  First, if she was pissed, she could have, I don’t know, told them that snapping was obnoxious.  Instead she decides to be a total asshole, far more than was called for in retaliation for their snaps.  Second, these people don’t dress like hipsters do in New York.  Anyone who lives in New York should know this.  There is stereotypical clothing they could pick, horn rimmed glasses and tight jeans and trucker hats or beards, but they just got it completely wrong.  Third, fucking Coldplay?  I’m sure someone wrote this line and thought it was so brilliant that they didn’t want to actually bother to think about accuracy.  Coldplay could not be farther from a hipster band.  Do hipsters like Coldplay?  Sure, maybe, because EVERYONE likes Coldplay.  I’m going to go farther though.  If anything, hipsters are more likely to HATE Coldplay.  In wikipedia’s article on the hipster subculture, they rip a Time magazine quote which says (I know, Time magazine is truly the definitive source on hipsters), “Hipsters are the friends who sneer when you cop to liking Coldplay.”  I’m sure Max would like Coldplay if she didn’t seem to hate everyone and everything that wasn’t hardscrabble and poor and an underdog.  They’re probably too successful so she has to resent them.  Fourth, why can’t they wear wool hats?  Why is this an objectionable stylish statement to you?  If he’s uncomfortable or hot inside, this bothers you why?

And to the greater point, as I alluded to earlier, what the fuck is with this defenseless picking on hipsters for no reason?  Why is Max on so much of a higher plane than them?  Because they like indie music?  Since when did hipsters become so horrible?  I’m tired of them being an easy target for honestly no reason, even beside the fact that if there was going to be hipster bashing it should have happened five years ago.  There’s plenty of understandable reasons to pick on hipsters; their pretentious music taste, sure.  Where is this stereotype that hipsters would be mean to waitresses?  Later in the episode, Max notes that she doesn’t envy the other waitress because an Arcade Fire concert just got out next door and hipsters would be crowding the diner.  Why the fuck is this so terrible?  Not to mention, the Arcade Fire sell out Madison Square Garden.  They wouldn’t be playing in Brooklyn.  Of course, most of the audience of this show probably doesn’t even know who the Arcade Fire is, Grammy and #1 album or not and they certainly wouldn’t know a real indie band (The Drums, Yuck, or Wild Beasts, just to name a couple actually playing the Music Hall of Williamsburg in the near future).

The Big Bang Theory is despicable for its depiction of nerds, but at least it plays correctly to the horrible stereotypes of nerds.  2 Broke Girls can’t even get that right.

I can’t spend this amount of time on everything else in the show, and admittedly, that’s the single most painful minute, so I’ll move more quickly.  Williamsburg, a very gentrified area at this point where rent is not cheap by any means, is portrayed as a rough shithole where second broke girl Caroline, who lost all her money when her dad, a Bernie Madoff take off, got caught, can’t wear her nice coat for fear of getting robbed.  Her apartment definitely costs a significant amount of rent for such a titular broke girl.  The subway the two are on looks more like a stereotypical subway from the ‘80s than one from today.  By no means are all subways immaculate, but nor are they covered in graffiti.

Also, Max works a second job as a nanny for a clueless rich socialite in big bad MANHATTAN.  Max is smart and streetwise.  The woman she works for though, boy, rich people are so STUPID and LAZY, they can’t even pick up their own kids.

This isn’t fucking Williamsburg.  There is nothing New York about this show.  I know Michael Patrick King worked on a definitive New York show in Sex and the City but this couldn’t be farther from that.  It’s filmed on a sound stage and doesn’t look or feel at all like New York.  Beyond that, it’s just painfully inaccurate and patronizing to the people and to the neighborhood.

And I’m sure all this ribbing of hipsters and rich people and New York is all supposed to be taken in good fun, and you might say, chill out, it’s just a sitcom.  If that’s how you feel, that’s fine, I’ll respect that.  But to me, relying on stereotypes, and worse relying on inaccurate stereotypes is the worst, and maybe worse than worst, the laziest type of comedy.

I’m sorry this review is extra long, but I know I came in biased to this premiere so I wanted to make sure these were really my feelings and I wasn’t forcing it because I wanted to hate the show.  I took a good long think about the comedies I do like, and none of them have this attitude of patronizingly picking on certain defenseless easy target groups.  Sure, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia picks on everyone, but those characters are supposed to be despicable people, while somehow I think you’re supposed to love Max.

Will I watch it again?  No, I will not.  You don’t have to hate it.  But it wouldn’t hurt if you didn’t watch it at least.

Tags: , ,

Fall 2011 Preview and Predictions: ABC

19 Sep

(In order to meld the spirit of futile sports predictions with the high stakes world of the who-will-be-cancelled-first fall television season, I’ve set up a very simple system of predictions for how long new shows will last.  Each day, I’ll (I’m aware I switched between we and I) lay out a network’s new shows scheduled to debut in the fall (reality shows not included – I’m already going to fail miserably on scripted shows, I don’t need to tackle a whole other animal) with my prediction of which of three categories it will fall into.

These categories are:

1.  Renewal – show gets renewed

2.  13+ – the show gets thirteen or more episodes, but not renewed

3.  12- – the show is cancelled before 13)

ABC’s got more new scripted shows than any of the other networks, but they also have a couple that look certain to fail, so it’s a trade off.  Charlie’s Angels, Revenge and Pan Am debut within a week, while everything else comes later.

Charlie’s Angels – 9/22

My friend posited that the only reason the original Charlie’s Angels was popular was because there was no easy access to attractive women on the internet in the 1970s.  That may be a bit simplistic, but this edition of Charlie’s Angels certainly doesn’t seem to be doing anything to improve views of the franchise.  There’s nothing to see here; while it probably won’t be embarrassing, I don’t think it will be very good, and I think audiences will not find much reason to watch the show.

Verdict:  12- I don’t think that ABC has put a ton of eggs in the Charlie’s Angels basket so it may not feel obliged to keep it around too long if it’s unsuccessful.  Other ’70s adaptation Wonder Woman didn’t even make it to TV, so maybe the trend isn’t there.

Last Man Standing – 10/11

There are few instant obvious choices for pure unredeemable terribleness on the schedule, but we’ve got one here.  I’m not sure what the exact word opposite of can’t miss would be (must miss?), but this would be categorized under it.  Tim Allen plays a Colorado man whose home life is dominated by women, his wife, played by Nancy Travis, and his three daughters.  He’s a man emasculated by their constant and overbearing female presence and misses times when men where  men.  Oh, and Hector Elizondo is in it for some reason.

Verdict:  12- This just be my easiest 12- of the entire season.  If it didn’t have Tim Allen on it, it wouldn’t be on TV.  Even if it did have Tim Allen, it wouldn’t be on TV if ABC didn’t owe him so much for years of Home Improvement

Man Up – 10/18

This series, part of the Man block with Last Man Standing, also deals with emasculation and seems at first blush about as likely to succeed as Last Man Standing.  The show is about three men who have decided they want to “man up” and start being well, more manly.  About the only thing I can see offhand to like is the appearance of Mather Zickel who plays a news magazine host in my favorite episode of Childrens Hospital and a pornographic film maker in a fantastic episode of Party Down.

Verdict:  12- It both looks terrible at worst and mediocre at best, has absolutely no buzz or backing and nothing to recommend it.  ABC has more new shows this fall than anyone; some of them have got to fail.  It’s supposed to be better than Last Man Standing to be sure, but that’s not saying much.

Once Upon a Time – 10/23

The other fairy tale show (along with Grimm), Once Upon a Time stars Jennifer Morrison, best known as Cameron from House, as a bail bondsman who finds out she may be the daughter of Snow White, and that she may be the only one who can save both the real and fairy tale worlds from, well, something bad, I’m sure.  The show takes place in Storybrooke,Maine where fairy tale characters like Snow White and Prince Charming have regular jobs (much like the comic series Fables, which I recommend to anyone who thinks this premise sounds interesting).  It has a very minor bit of cache coming from a couple of Lost writers.

Verdict:  13+ – one of the shows I could very easily see going either way, both critically and commercially, so I’ll take the easy way out.  I could see it being great, as the premise is interesting, or being terrible, as sometimes ambitious premises have the lowest floor, but it’s mostly likely to be somewhere in the middle

Pan Am – 9/25

The other early ‘60s show (along with The Playboy Club), Pam Am for sure looks like the better of the two.  Pan Am features Christina Ricci and others as Pan Am flight attendants who are also somehow involved with espionage.  The tone is light and fluffy rather than serious, and I’m interested enough to at least give it a chance, though I’m still quite apprehensive.

Verdict:  Renewal – it’s a good fit on ABC’s Sunday night next to Desperate Housewives, as hopefully for it, it will put people in the proper mood for a show that is closer in tone to Desperate Housewives than to Mad Men

Revenge – 9/21

Revenge is loosely based on The Count of Monte Cristo, the basic plot of which I finally had explained to me last week.  Instead of in France, Revenge is set in the Hamptons where mysterious woman Emily Van Camp of Everwood and Brothers and Sisters looks to take the title action on Madeleine Stowe and friends.  Every year, one or two series intrigue me for reasons I can’t quite explain, usually series where I don’t know enough information to make me realize they will be bad, so the series sound open to any possibilities.  I think this year’s edition is Revenge.

Verdict: Renewal – I may be well be wrong (on all of these, actually) and the show may be terrible, but I have not taken a subway not filled with Revenge ads in the last two weeks and if I’m intrigued maybe other people will be.  And maybe it will actually be good!

Suburgatory – 9/28

TV’s answer to satirical the-jungle-that-is-suburban-high-school movies like Mean Girls and Easy A, everyone is already labeling star Jane Levy as the new Emma Stone or Lindsay Lohan.  Levy plays a girl who was moved from NYC to the more affluent ‘burbs by protective single dad Jeremy Sisto.  I might be getting ahead of myself, but this show could actually be good; it’s a time tested premise, but what will make or break it is how it’s done.  Alan Tudyk of Firefly and Rex Lee of Lloyd in Entourage fame appear in the show as does Curb Your Enthusiasm’s Cheryl Hines as a catty neighbor.

Verdcit: 13+ Writing up that preview I almost convinced myself that it would be good enough to just put renewal on a whim, but I’m going to be cautious.  I haven’t seen a whole lot of advertisements around for it.  However, if it actually is good, I think ABC could be a decent home for it.

ABC is the last of the networks to be previewed, so it’s time to sit back and see how the shows go from here.  We’ll be here all week with reviews, and probably another broad cable show preview at some point.

Tags: , , , , , , ,

Fall 2011 Review: The Secret Circle

17 Sep

There will be some shows this fall season for which I won’t at all know what to expect; The Secret Circle is the exact opposite.  I came in with a very specific set of expectations and the show met them exactly.  The Secret Circle is based on a series of books by LJ Smith, who also wrote the Vampire Diaries series of books, and who moonlights as an NFL tight end.

The pilot episode begins with a teenage girl getting into a mysterious car accident while her mom is killed at her house by someone using what looks to be witch-like powers to set the house on fire.  Cassie, the teenage girl and our protagonist, moves to her grandmother’s house in the town where her mom grew up.  Things get weird right away as her room starts acting strange and the roof looks like stars.  At her first day of school, we meet our cast of kids, all of whom seem to be awaiting Cassie’s arrival eagerly.  We’ve got Diana, the leader, Faye, the trouble maker, Melissa, Faye’s sidekick who seems to only be allowed to speak after Faye, Adam, Diana’s broody boyfriend, and Nick who attempts to look through the window at Cassie undressing and says just about no other words in the first episode except for introducing himself.  There’s our team, ladies and gentlemen.

They’re particularly excited because they know, but Cassie doesn’t, that they’re all witches and six is some sort of magic number for witches, so when Cassie joins their circle, they’ll all get crazy more powerful.  Over the course of the first day, Cassie also meets the second round of characters, the parents, including Faye’s mom, Dawn who is the principal at the local high school, Adam’s dad, Ethan, whose a bit of a melancholic drunkard, and Diana’s father Charles, who if we really look at him and think for a second, turns out to be the man who we saw at the beginning of the episode who was responsible for killing Cassie’s mom!

Cassie meets everyone, and they finally confront her and tell her that she’s a witch and they need to join the circle; they’re all scions of powerful witch families who have been witching it up for generations.  She does the requisite denials (this is crazy! you’re all insane!) , while they try to convince her by telling her all about their family history and how earlier in the episode one of them set fire to her car with magic and with demonstrations of their power.  Adam shows her what she can do with a flying water droplet spell and almost kisses her.  (sidenote: I’ve often wondered exactly how many times I would deny it if someone told me that there were witches, or vampires, or whatever – it’s so frustrating watching characters in denial when we know it’s real, but the first episode would probably just me denying it for an hour).

Anyway, she kind of accepts it by the end, after she uses her power to stop a violent rain storm started by Faye, and we also see some of the evil machinations of the father Charles and the mother Dawn who are clearly covering up some series of events that led to Cassie’s father’s death a generation ago and are planning something likely equally villainous.

That was a little bit of a long description, but I have to say the show was not bad by any means.  The dialogue was clichéd and the characters were certainly archetypes.  This show isn’t breaking any molds by any stretch of the imagination.  The writing is certainly far from standout.  But for what it’s trying to be, it does well.  By the end I was genuinely interested in knowing what the cover up might be that the parents were hiding for all these years.  That might be one of the advantages about basing a show on a successful book series; you already have a blueprint that you know works.  There’ll be plenty of teenage angst undoubtedly and growing up and likely love triangle between Adam and Diana and Cassie, and they’ll look and sound like other shows but if the pilot is a basis, then in a very respectable way.  Also, I’d like to issue a quick shout out for the nice use of The Joy Formidable.

Will I watch the next episode?  Probably not, admittedly. It doesn’t quite stand out enough in any one facet.  But I’m kind of thinking about it, and just that fact means the show is not a total failure.

Tags: , ,

Fall 2011 Preview and Predictions: Fox

16 Sep

(In order to meld the spirit of futile sports predictions with the high stakes world of the who-will-be-cancelled-first fall television season, I’ve set up a very simple system of predictions for how long new shows will last.  Each day, I’ll (I’m aware I switched between we and I) lay out a network’s new shows scheduled to debut in the fall (reality shows not included – I’m already going to fail miserably on scripted shows, I don’t need to tackle a whole other animal) with my prediction of which of three categories it will fall into.

These categories are:

1.  Renewal – show gets renewed

2.  13+ – the show gets thirteen or more episodes, but not renewed

3.  12- – the show is cancelled before 13)

Time to tackle Fox’s slate of four new fall non-scripted shows (X Factor the big unscripted debut).  New Girl starts next week and Terra Nova the week after.  The other two start much later, owing to Fox’s yearly late start due to postseason baseball airing all October.

New Girl – 9/20

Fox is trying to add “adorkable” to the lexicon, and as much as I hate forced additions to the lexicon by advertisers (see: my hatred of the old cell phone commercials trying to get your “five” to catch on), I have to admit it’s a pretty good word and as apt for series star Zooey Deschanel as for anyone.  Zooey, as Jess, breaks up with her boyfriend at the beginning of the show and moves in with three dudes, who teach her a little bit about life, while she has something to teach her too.

Verdict:  Renewal – the show doesn’t sound or look great, but even I have to admit Zooey Deschanel has some undeniable charisma even if I’ve never been infatuated with her

Allen Gregory – 10/30

Fox is the leader in primetime animated series, in their vaunted Sunday block, anchored stalwarts The Simpsons and Family Guy.  When I read that Jonah Hill was creating and starring in an animated series on Fox, I was interested.  Hill voices the title character, a snooty 7-year old with two gay parents.  Unfortunately, I’ve read seriously bad notices about the show being both derivative and more than that straight out bad.

Verdict:  12- Hill’s name should count for something but with the Napoleon Dynamite animated series barking at the door, I’m not sure the series will be given that much room for failure

I Hate My Teenage Daughter – 11/30

Two suburban moms, portrayed by Jamie Pressly and Katie Finnernan, find, to their dismay, that their daughters are becoming the type of kids they hated when they were in high school.  The dads, both exes, are incompetent, as the mothers try to do their best to straighten out their daughters.

Verdict:  12- Another of the class of it’s just going to be bad.  It’s not that the premise is as forced as How to Be A Gentlemen; a show with this premise could in theory work.  Still, it’s not going to; it’s going to be very bad.

Terra Nova – 9/26

Probably the winner of this year’s biggest Lost clone award, Terra Nova is actually somewhat of a Lost meets Land of the Lost, as future people, with the planet in danger (take that climate change skeptics) build a time machine and go back millions upon millions of years to create a human colony in the ancient past.  Oh, yeah, and they built their colony in the middle of killer dinosaurs.

Verdict: Renewal – well this is half a cheat, since Fox skipped ordering a pilot and just ordered 13 episodes straight out, a highly unusual step.  It’s probably the most expensive new series and it looks it.  I don’t know whether it’s going to be interesting, whether the characters will be compelling, and whether the story line will make sense, but it’s going to look fantastic.

Tags: , , , , ,

Fall 2011 Review: Up All Night

15 Sep


Up All Night is a sitcom about a couple, Will Arnett and Christina Applegate in their late ‘30s/early 40s, whose life is changed when they have a baby.  Arnett’s character leaves his law job to care for the baby while Applegate’s character goes back to work for her wacky and overbearing boss, Ellen/Oprah-like daytime talk show host Ava, portrayed by Maya Rudolph.

I came in expecting the show to be disappointing, and I found the show in practice to be underwhelming, and I’m still not sure if these are the same thing.  While the blogosphere lit up in excitement for a show that combined the considerable talents of Will Arnett, Christina Applegate and Maya Rudolph, I was less impressed, having never seen Arnett as successful outside of playing the oversized G.O.B. in Arrested Development, a character who can’t work as a lead in a non-absurdist show.

Yet this wasn’t the problem with the show at all.  Arnett was absolutely fine, as were Applegate and Rudolph.  I don’t mean fine as a bad thing.  It’s not that they didn’t sell the lines or the jokes well, it’s just that there wasn’t that much to sell.  It was by no means bad with a capital b; unlike watching the previews of Whitney or 2 Broke Girls or the poster of How to Be A Gentleman I never cringed or felt bad for the actors and the producers and everyone who made the decision to put that particularly show on the air.  I just didn’t really feel anything.  There were a couple of smiles, I’d admit, maybe a chuckle or two but not much more.  I was waiting for it to gel and get to the point where the light turns on and I know why I’m watching but it just didn’t hit that point in the first episode.

I will note that Maya Rudolph’s character has the potential to become very cartoonish very quickly.  As the outsized television host personality, Rudolph is needy, loud, and a little bit off her rocker and is clearly looking to be the break out character.  I normally dislike that type of exaggerated sitcom character but while I by no means found it hilarious, it didn’t bother me too much either in this episode.  That said, it’s something to watch for and see how the writers handle in future episodes.

Will I watch again?  Not right away, I don’t think..  I’ll take the Parks and Recreation route.  When I watched the pilot, I wasn’t impressed and I didn’t watch the rest of the season.  When everyone I have ever met told me it was different and better and that I NEEDED to watch it, I gave in, and everyone was absolutely right and it’s one of the best comedies on TV today.  That is to say I’m going to assume it’s just kind of okay unless I hear an outpouring of raves later in the season; it could need time to grow into its own.


Tags: , ,

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →