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Fall 2013 Review: The Millers

14 Oct

Three of The Millers

The Millers stars Will Arnett as Nathan Miller, a successful local newsman ( oddly, one of two new Thursday night comedies where the main character plays a local newsman, along with The Michael J. Fox Show) who was recently divorced but has been holding back that information from his overbearing parents.  He instead confides in his sister, Debbie, played by Glee’s Jayma Mays, and her husband, Adam, played by Nelson Franklin. His parents, Tom, played by Beau Bridges, and Carol, played by Margo Martindale, show up at his place after his father accidentally floods the basement of their home. Will is forced to finally spill the beans about his divorce, and in response his father all of a sudden decides he wants a divorce also, ending his parents four decade long marriage. Tom goes to stay with Debbie while Carol stays with Nathan. Curb Your Enthusiasm’s JB Smoove plays Nathan’s coworkers and friend Ray. Thus, the setup for The Millers.

Broad comedy, which was once more descriptive, has become such a pejorative term, trotted out in a negative fashion to describe Farrelly Brothers shtick and the like. In both the descripve and possibly unfair pejoriative usage, The Millers is more or less a broad comedy.  The jokes are often physical and almost always stupid. Respect for their viewers’ intelligence was not something the creators of The Millers had in mind. The jokes are incredibly obvious and there’s a laugh track which lets you know when to chuckle if you somehow weren’t able to figure out from the blatant big laugh lines.

Maybe the’s is a better term for The Millers; the onion AVClub called it fart-com. There were not one but two fart jokes in the episode, and the worse part about those is that they may have actually been the best part of the episode.  Hey, farts can be funny, which is already more than you can say about anything else in the episode.

On top of the stifling laugh track, the show is chock-full of incredibly stale stereotypes and character tropes.  The dad, Tom, can’t figure out how to use technology; he continues to put metal in the microwave and he can’t understand how to use the television remotes.  Television remotes can be complicated, it’s certainly true, but if the writers really thought they had the first inkling to make an old-guy-can’t-figure-out-television-remotes joke, I’m afraid they’re sorely mistaken.  Carol, the mom, is an overbearing nag who pushes advice nobody wants and constantly overshares inappropriate information. Inappropriate parents are hilarious! Ray and Nathan have an unoriginal time-to-hit-up-the-dating –scene. There’s absolutely no care put into writing these jokes. When Tom can’t figure out how to use the remotes, for example, that’s the joke. There’s no even attempt at clever wordplay or something different to keep an old joke even slightly fresh or new.

Eventually, the episode finally gets to its dramatic conclusion. Nathan’s holding a party at which he thinks he’s found a woman willing to sleep with him while his mother is doing everything in her power to prevent that, unintentionally. Nathan, seeing how broken up his mother is, decides to abandon all hope of getting laid to cheer up his sullen mother with a creepy dance rendition of Dirty Dancing. What a sweet kid. It’s supposed to be heartwarming except all of these people both feel like not only classic types but terrible versions of those types. I’m not cheering for anyone and the scene is awkward without being funny. The characters have all gotten on my nerves in just twenty two minutes.

Everything in this show feels like it’s been done a thousand times before. It’s crass, it’s unfunny; I’m not sure who watching this thought this was good. I know I’m constantly surprised but I’d like to find someone who walked out of a test screening of The Millers and thought this was funny. Honestly, I’d like to know if the executives who put this show on the air actually think it’s funny or just are cynically judging the sense of humor of the American people, which to be fair, they may not be wrong about. Good shows I laugh at, mediocre sitcoms I stare at unmovingly, and really bad shows I cringe at. The Millers has certainly earned itself a place in that lowest category. The jokes are not only not funny, they’re dumb and insulting. This show wastes a number of talented actors, and I hope it gets cancelled quickly so that those actors can put their abilities to something of higher quality.

Will I watch it again? No. It’s an instant contender for worst new show of the year, up there in the Dads category. The only think it has going over Dads is the lack of insulting racial stereotyping. It’s so unfortunately that so many talented actors are wasted on this monstrosity.

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Fall 2013 Review: Hostages

9 Oct

The four Hostages

Hostages, a rare CBS serial drama, is an action suspense series built on the raison d’etre of ratcheting everything up to 11. The show opens with FBI agent Dylan McDermott taking over a contentious bank hostage situation from the local police.  While the police are tentative and willing to negotiation, McDermott barks orders, demands the kidnapper release most of the hostages, and has the balls to shoot first and ask questions later when he suspects the kidnapper has switched his dress with one of the hostages.  Basically, he’s aggressive, risk-taking, and a badass.

From there, It takes 15 minutes to get to the basic premise that anyone who has seen the trailer already knows. The president of the United States needs surgery. He’s chosen a highly trained female surgeon played by Toni Collette to perform the operation, which is invasive but routine. The night before the surgery is planned for, three men and a woman come into her house and take her and her family hostage with an ultimatum. She will kill the president while performing the surgery in a seamless, impossible-to-detect method they’ve already devised, or they will kill her family.

Boom.  There you go.  The president may be assassinated by a prestigious surgeon, whose family is held hostage by a shadowy group of highly-trained operatives, all in about two commercial breaks.

High enough stakes for you?

Nope?

How about this? The conspiracy goes all the way to the top. Dylan McDermott, the heroic, daring FBI agent, who certainly seemed like a good guy, is the leader of the kidnappers. Better yet, his reason for heading up the kidnapping may be because someone has threatened his daughter.  He receives a call from his father, who is sitting at his home watching McDermott’s daughter, sitting next to someone who wants to know about McDermott’s progress in the kindapping.  That person? The president’s chief of staff, who we saw earlier in the episode questioning the president’s decision to use Toni Collette as his surgeon. Whoa.

Not to mention every member of Toni Collette’s family, being held at their home by the surprisingly gentle and gentlemanly (and gentlewomanly) terrorists, has a secret. Her husband, played by Tate Donovan, is having an affair. Her son is dealing pot. Her daughter is pregnant with a shady boyfriend who her parents have never met.

The terrorists consistently anticipate every move that the family makes, as to consistently demonstrate that they’re very good at this.  The ultimate show of this is when Toni Collette sets off the silent alarm.  McDermott and crew not only recognize the alarm going off immediately and threaten Collette’s husband so that she’ll tell the security company that nothing’s wrong, but the security company man who comes to their house just to check is actually working with the kidnappers and presents Toni Collette with a threatening photograph that reveals just how much the kidnappers know about the family.  Damn, they’re good. They’ve got everything covered – how is she possibly going to keep her family alive without killing the president?

That’s the big question and it is a big question.  The problem is that by the time the episode ends, my desire to know that get to the answer of that question should be a lot more urgent than it actually was.  The stakes, strictly in a political sense, were as high as almost any first episode of a television show.  Still, I didn’t feel compelled to see the next episode or all that interested.  Aside from the the high-stakes premise, none of the backing factors such as well-defined characters or well-written dialogue were present to invest me in the dire situation.

Hostages seems like a very poor man’s 24, albeit with more tension and less actual action. There’s suspense with no substance. The show hits the ground running, hoping to draw viewers in from the get go for the super tense action, but the show forgets that in order to get people involved in a television show, you need them to care somewhat about the characters and the situation. Unlike an action movie, where you can watch 88 minutes of people kicking each other’s asses for no reason and just enjoy it for that, to follow 20 40 minute episodes a season of television you need to come up with a little something more. 24, which was the master at action television, at least in its early years before it ran out of ideas, got viewers involved early with its gimmick and high stakes, but supplemented that with characters we cared about (President Palmer!), and taut suspense scenarios in which it never mattered how much they defied logic. More than that, 24 was fun. It wasn’t funny, but it was fun to watch. Hostages really isn’t. Hostages is a drag.

Will I watch it again? No.  It wasn’t absolutely awful. There will be a lot of worse shows, and the worse dramas are rarely as bad as the worse comedies. Still, not worth your time. Watch the first season of 24 again for action and watch the first season of Homeland for suspense if you want better examples of what this show is trying to be.

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Fall 2013 Review: The Goldbergs

7 Oct

Three of the titular Goldbergs

There are many problems with The Goldbergs, but many of the biggest of these stem from one central misunderstanding about comedy. Every moving part in The Goldbergs screams this one great big lesson of comedy entirely unlearned: the value of subtlety.  Nothing, and I mean nothing in this show is subtle, at all.  None of the over the top jokes, which largely don’t work because they’re so obvious and over the top, have any room to breathe, which would starve them even if they were actually funny.

This direction starts with the choice of time period.  The 80s, at least the stereotypical 80s that we imagine now when we think of the decade, with Rubik’s cubes, and A Flock of Seagulls, and Starter Jackets, are loud, Outrageous.  You choose the ‘80s if you want to be absurd and up front.  Shoulder pads, the list goes on – in fact, just in case you don’t think of these images offhand, The Goldbergs actually starts with a montage of major ‘80s pop culture references to jog your memory, along with the narrator mentioning that it’s the 1980s, just in case you’re having trouble following along.

That’s the second point of mind-blowing un-subtlety. The narration.  Patton Oswalt narrates as the adult voice of youngest Goldberg, Adam (based on real life creator Adam Goldberg). Narration in television, and comedies in particular, is 90% of the time a bad idea.  Watching poor narration so far this TV season has inspired me to eventually write a post on all its faults, and here the problem is one of the most common for narration.  The narration serves no purpose.  It explains everything that happens in the show, events which need absolutely no explanation. It patronizes its audience without adding anything either funny or poignant. This happens again and again and again over the course of the first episode. Jeff Garlin’s dad character, Murray Goldberg is one of the top five types of television dad characters (now there would be a good article), the angry father who yells a lot and doesn’t know how to express his love for his children, but actually feels it deep down.  We’ve seen this character dozens of times and can identify it right away without Patton Oswalt’s commentary explaining it to us.

The worst gimmick of the episode follows the same thought process as the narration, and is yet another paean to the gods of un-subtlety. In order to understand Murray, Oswalt narrates, you have to speak Murray. Murray then yells something crude with network-approved faux curse words, after which subtitles appear on the bottom of the screen translating what Murray really means in pixelated 80s-style font (It reminds me of one of my least favorite How I Met Your Mother bits, where a character would say something, only for narrator Bob Saget to tell us “what he really said was this” and we find out the character said pretty much the opposite.  Half the time Murray will yell something indecipherable and it translates to something mean but in English, and half the time he’ll yell something mean, but he actually means something decent or nice. The show seems to think it’s funny because you’d never figure out what Murray’s saying without the hilariously helpful translations. Yes; that’s basic ironic humor.  Someone says one thing but means the opposite.  But we’ve seen Murray many times before. We know exactly what he’s saying. That character has been a television staple for decades and the translation bit just emphasizes what a cliched type Murray is in addition to not being funny.

Oswalt keeps trying to tell us how different his family is from ours. Even though they all love each other, they’re all crazy and yell at each other and fight all the time.  For many of us that’s not that hard to fathom as is. But even if it was not our personal experience, it’s been our television experience over and over. That joke is just not sufficient. There’s a lot of references to ‘80s things, a lot of generational gap humor where the kids will be speaking a different language than their parents or grandfather. It’s pretty boiler plate all around.  It’s not an embarrassment, but it’s generic and forgettable.

Will I watch it again? No.  It’s hardly insultingly bad, like Dads, but it’s just not very good and shows a very basic misunderstanding of what makes jokes and characters funny.

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Fall 2013 Review: Masters of Sex

2 Oct

Johnson and Masters, of Sex

Showtime is absolutely delivering on a frequent complaint of mine towards so many new television shows and I want them to know it’s appreciated.  How about a show, I ask so often, about something new?  There are so many lawyer and doctor and police shows and numerous variations on those core three.  There aren’t a lot of new shows about a bajilllion other areas that could be fascinating.  Well, Showtime decided to order one.  Sure, like any new show, it has elements and influences from many other shows, but its subject matter is fresh.  Well, in terms of fiction anyways, as it’s actually based on real events, but they’re real events that haven’t been covered over and over on movies and television.

In particular, the events consist of the pioneering sex research of Masters and Johnson, the second most famous sex researchers of all time behind Alfred Kinsey. Michael Sheen, who I have a hard time not thinking of as British (he played super-Brit Wesley Snipes in 30 Rock, come on), plays incredibly well-respected gynecologist Williams Masters.  He likes his job well enough, is proud of his work, and is the pride of and biggest money maker at his hospital in St. Louis.  Still, he’s unsatisfied. He wants to move into sex research, which he sees as a more innovative area that he thinks has never been property studied before because of the taboos surrounding it. Masters is initially unable to get formal backing for his research because serious scientists and hospital funders’ opinion about sex research ranges from  inappropriate to ick. Thus, he starts investigating on his own, paying a prostitute to have sex with dudes and let him watch so that he can record facts and take notes. The prostitute, while unable to truly gather the greater purposes of his research, makes an intuitive suggestion: in order for his work to be a true success, he’s going to need the help of a female.

After continuing to expand his studies by himself, he sets out to find this secretary who won’t be squeamish about the subject matter (his current secretary (a tiny guest spot by the always great Margo Martindale) most certainly is).. He discovers his partner-in-crime in Virginia Masters (Lizzie Kaplan), who finds Masters’ work fascinating and wants in.  She lies about her resume to get the job, He hires her at first as a secretary/assistant, but soon she becomes much more important than that.

The first episode speeds through a little bit of the time of her getting acquainted with him and the research, allowing her to grow to nearly partner status within the hour. They’re a particularly good match because she has all the personality traits and abilities that he lacks. Masters is a stern humorless doctor who knows his science down cold but is sorely lacking in people skills, which are particularly valuable when you need to convince subjects to be comfortable with masturbating in your office for science.  Masters has these skills in spades, persuading young women to participate and be vulnerable in very sterile and uncomfortable spaces.

Eventually, Masters needs to secure funding for his project and bring it out into the open, and to do so he asks for money from the hospital.  He attempts to pull a power play, threatening to quit if he doesn’t get the money, and gets his way at the last minute. Research proceeds, with Masters and Johnson watching women masturbate and studying their physiological reactions until they both realize they need to convince a man and women to have sex and let them study to move on to the next stage.  They blackmail a male doctor, which wasn’t that hard once he saw what the female subject he’d be having intercourse with looked like. After this research is a success, Masters ends the episode with a proposal.  While they engage with people having sex, watching and monitoring them, Masters is concerned, or at least says he is, that him or Johnson will experience transference, wanting to have sex with the subjects.  For science, then, to avoid these feelings, he decides, in his hyper-clinical fashion, that he and Johnson should have sex. Realizing, even with his lack of appreciation for social signals and norms, that this is a big ask, he allows her the weekend to think about it.

The distinctive St. Louis mid-western, mid-50s look is quite distinct, and the direction is beautiful.  We’re not that far removed from a time when talking about sex was considered taboo, and it still is in a lot of places and a lot of ways.  The look of the show and choice of palate emphasize the staid location and time where Masters and Johnson are attempting their groundbreaking work, far more revolutionary there than it would have been ten years later even in New York or San Francisco. .Lizzie Kaplan is a gem (I have a soft spot for anyone who starred in Party Down) and Michael Sheen is more than up to the task of playing her counterpart.

I’m not sure exactly where the writers are going to go other than simply a whole lot more sex research. The relationship between Masters and Johnson is the crucial one at the heart of the series as their contrasts best suit their research. They’re much more productive together than either would be apart. The show has an extremely interesting vantage point from which to explore love, sex, and relationships, and the intersecting lines that connect all three. This all plays out in the environment of blatant sexism and male-female double standards of the time period.  All the doctors we’ve seen are men, which is particularly notable in a field like gynecology where all the patients are women. All of these issues come to the fore in the first episode in the relationship between Johnson and Masters’ assistant, Ethan.  In a reverse of the typical male-female stereotypes of the time, Johnson is only interested in casual sex, while Ethan thinks he’s in love and demands more, eventually breaking down and turning drunkenly violent towards Johnson at a party.

The writing is sharp, and while hardly comedic, has just enough of a light touch to avoid seeming over serious, which would hurt a show whose first episode includes something as visually hilarious as a glass dildo with a light at the end. Often the pilot emphasizes the miscommunications exchanged by the characters who, with their moral, psychological, and personal biases are occasionally unable to comprehend the other side’s point of view.  Masters has trouble communicating with his own wife. He loves her but their inability to procreate is damaging their relationship and he appears less at ease with his wife than Johnson does in five minutes of meeting her. For someone as passionate about groundbreaking sex research, he’s mentally stuck in some very of-the-time gender role points of view that are preventing his research from going forward.

Will I watch it again?  Yes. It’s new, it’s interesting, it hasn’t been done before, it’s artful, and I want to see more. It’s way too early to make as a bold a statement as I’m about to make, but depending on how they go, Masters of Sex could eclipse Homeland as the premiere Showtime drama before too long.

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Fall 2013 Review: Trophy Wife

30 Sep

Trophy Wife and Husband

Trophy Wife is yet another child of ABC’s make-everything-like-Modern-Family approach to comedies (which from their perspective makes a lot of sense). The show, like Modern Family, is about an unorthodox wacky and occasionally out-of-control but ultimately functional family with a lot of moving parts.  Malin Akerman’s character Kate is the titular trophy wife. She starts the show with narration, which is almost always a poor choice in comedies, but an absolute staple of the Modern Family school of shows (Modern Family has it at the end, Suburgatory and The Middle have it throughout). She tells the story in very brief about how she went from single girl out on the town to wife and step-mom. It all started with a chance encounter at a karaoke bar with an older man, a suit-wearing lawyer, Pete, played by Bradley Whitford. Kate accidentally fell and broke Pete’s nose, which led to whirlwind romance followed by marriage.  There’s a catch though, to this dream pairing. Pete’s got major baggage in the form of two very different ex-wives, along with three children.

The first wife is the absolutely terrifying, stern and humorless doctor Diane played by Oscar-winner Marcia Gay Harden.  The second is the trippy, new age-y Jackie, played by Michaela Watkins, who has appeared in New Girl, as well as on Saturday Night Live.  Two of the kids are Diane’s –  a teen girl just entering the stage where she really cares about being cool and Warren, a dorky son who clearly doesn’t care at all about being cool. The third child is Jackie’s and is a precocious maybe 9 year old (I’m awful at estimating kids’ ages, so cut me some slack) adopted from China.  Kate’s best friend Meg is also part of the main cast, and helps Kate out with the kids.

Everyone is well-meaning, generally, as people are on Modern Family-esque shows and that’s not a bad thing., The main source of familial conflict laid out in the first episode seems to be that the ex-wives resent the younger Kate who they think is a party girl hardly responsible enough to be with their children.  The oldest child, Hillary, a rebellious teenager, also doesn’t respect Kate’s attempt to play mom.  The pilot features a series of wacky hijinks like Pete and Jackie running around trying to find an identical hamster to replace Bert’s so they can avoid telling him his hamster died.  It also features a quick twenty minute character arc in which Kate desperately craves the respect of Pete’s-kids and ex-wives, almost disastrously loses what little respect they had for her, and then manages to gain a small piece of that respect in in the end.  The episode ends, as again Modern Familly-esque shows often do, with the whole wacky family in the same room, solving all their episode-long problems together.

The words that spring to mind to best describe Trophy Wife are cute, harmless, and inoffensive.   These are classic backhanded compliment words and they are here as well, and very much in both the backhanded and the compliment sense.  It’s a well-produced program with talented actors, a warm tone, and a couple of laughs, but there’s not enough for me to make it weekly appointment viewing.  In my estimation from just one episode, it’s a little bit south of what I call the Suburgatory line, which represents the perfect show to throw on the TV in the background when I’m lying down late at night, because I don’t care if I fall asleep before the episode ends, and I don’t ever plan on watching all the episodes in order.

Not to beat a dead analogy, but Trophy Wife fits in well with this entire block of ABC comedies, all of which sit somewhere around this middle line of being not bad but not great and yet go no further (note: not The Middle line, another of these ABC comedies).  Like most of the shows on ABC, Trophy Wife is watchable, well-intentioned, and heart-warming, but in the competitive television landscape with so many quality shows competing for my viewing time, that’s just not enough.

Will I watch it again?  Probably not.  It was fine.  The first episode had a couple of laughs and I like the actors and actresses so I wouldn’t object if it was on in a room I was in.   There’s an outside chance it’ll get much better, as comedies do often take a while to find their feet, and I’m perfectly willing to give it another try if I hear and read good things. Until then, it’s just not quite funny or promising enough to secure a guaranteed second viewing.

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Fall 2013 Review: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

27 Sep

Coulson is an Agent of Shield

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (pause to mention how absolutely obnoxious it is to have to type out S.H.I.E.L.D. every time) is Marvel’s first foray into television since the success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe which started with Ironman and culminated in 2012’s supermegamonster smash The Avengers. The Avengers was written and directed by Joss Whedon, who has been up to then known best as the cult television writer behind Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly. The show is set after the events of The Avengers, where basically (The Avengers SPOILERS to come) huge swaths of New York were destroyed by giant aliens.  The upshot from that event, known as The Battle of New York, is that everyone in the public now knows about the weird and creepy and supernatural that the government had been able to keep from them before.  People are confused and scared.  S.H.I.E.L.D. is an agency which, as a character notes within the first ten minutes of the show, acts as a layer between the superheroes and super-villains and aliens and the general population, trying to keep the scary out of sight when they can and at least keep people out of harm’s way when they can’t.

Agent Phil Coulson, who appeared in Iron Man 2, The Avengers, and Thor, is back from being seriously injured in The Avengers and he’s putting together a special hand-picked team of S.H.I.E.L.D. agents who will get to run pretty much whatever missions he deems advisable without facing the usual bureaucracy. We don’t know how he got this authority but it’s not all that important. He starts the episode by recruiting an antisocial combat expert named Grant Ward and then convincing pilot Melinda May, who is implied to be some sort of legend, to be part of the team with the promise that she’ll avoid active duty.  They join the already recruited science duo of Leo Fitz, an engineer, and Jemma Simmons, a chemist, both British, who seem to love to squabble with one another about scientific gibberish.

In the first episode, our squad tracks the case of a man who was caught on camera saving a woman from a burning building and showed signs of super strength.  The show follows him and we find out he’s a factory worker who was laid off due to injury and that he’s struggling to survive and feed his kid.  In his time of hardship, he agreed to join an experimental program, called Centipede, in which he gets a device that hooks into his arm and gives him this super strength.  Unfortunately, it also makes him crazy, as he uses his strength to push around his old boss who won’t give him another shot.  It will also, we learn, eventually make him explode.  The Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. are tasked with stopping him without killing him and they have the help of a rebel hacker named Skye who initially sees the agents as bad guys until Coulson convinces her that they really are trying to help people after all.

The show is largely procedural, and though I’’m sure there will be some serial elements, it looks like it’s largely going to start on a one case-per-week basis. At its heart, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is about the team. Group dynamics are at the heart of what Joss Whedon does best, which is why he was the perfect director to helm The Avengers (and why he wouldn’t have made nearly as much sense for any of the individual hero films).  Whedon manages the intricacies and interplay of a group better than anyone and it is what drives his shows and what drives Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. The major villains on Buffy were often the weakest part of the show, as it was how the group worked together to deal with them that was so compelling.   We don’t get enough of the group working together and verbally sparring in this episode, partly due to all the necessary set up, but I can see the pieces coming together.

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is not as daring or new or revelatory as I would hope from a new premium cable show, but that’s not what this is. Joss Whedon doesn’t generally traffic in the completely novel.  What Whedon shines at is making standard genre shows that are a cut above. He turns obvious types into complicated characters that grow and change over time.  He takes the level of dialogue writing most procedurals employ and puts so much more care into each sentence and phrase, imbuing it with a signature witty style. This playful Whedon-esque tone (yes, I’m using the creator’s name as an adjective; he’s earned it) keeps what could easily be seen as occasionally corny or cheesy dialogue from sounding clunky and overwrought (it is vaguely cheesy; at one critical point, Coulson dramatically tells the scientists ” Don’t ever tell me there’s no way ” when they say they can’t stop the factory worker from exploding). Another specialty of Whedon’s is his brilliant balance of the dramatic and the comedic. He marries the serious and the silly better than anyone which keeps the episode fun and unstuffy.

Simply put, Whedon’s style makes what could easily be a color-by-numbers procedural vastly more interesting.  There’s the powers and superhero angle, and that’s great and provides a lot of material to work with, but it’s the quirky dialogue and character building that separate Whedon stories from their peers.

Will I watch it again?  Yes.  I’m a devotee to Whedon and all things Whedon-esque (though I shamefully still have not seen Dollhouse) so this kind of had me at hello.  It was pretty much exactly what I was expecting, and while that doesn’t make the most interesting or captivating show on television, it’s still a good thing.

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Fall 2013 Review: The Blacklist

25 Sep

The Blacklist!

In The Blacklist, which sadly does not refer to the annual survey of hot unproduced scripts, James Spader stars as an infamous criminal. He’s known as the Concierge of Criminals because he plays a middleman between criminals, matching them up and helping them get what they need.  In the first scene of the pilot, he walks into the FBI, turns himself in for an unknown reason, and agrees to help the FBI catch certain super top secret criminals on his list (this is the titular black list). These are criminals the FBI has wanted, and some they don’t even know about, and he’ll do this in exchange for certain concessions and conditions.  The most important and strangest is that he insists that he only deals with Lizzie Keen, an absolutely nobody of an agent, who was supposed to be at her first day working for the bureau in DC after a stint in NY when Spader turns himself in.

In the first episode Spader helps lead the police to a dying terrorist who is planning on kidnapping a general’s daughter (which he does) and using her as a bomb to blow up part of the DC zoo (which he fails at).  Spader at one point escapes police custody with the help of an ally at the hospital. It seems like any person at any time might actually be working for Spader. The point here, which is made a couple more times in the episode, is that Spader is cagey and connected and always has a plan. Throughout the episode, it’s unclear exactly whose side Spader is on, as he helps certain criminals, communicates with others, and then thwarts the ones he earlier helped using knowledge from other criminals.

Somewhere along the line there a smart decision was made which is at the center of The Black List.  Someone decided to have James Spader do what James Spader does best.  I’m not sure whether the idea was to create this slimy character and realize James Spader was the perfect actor to play him, or to cast James Spader as an ambiguous villain/anti-hero and build a character around him, but either way it was the choice that is probably going to make The Blacklist a successful show. James Spader is a great actor, but like the large majority of good actors, he excels particularly in a narrow sphere. For him this role is smug, slippery, and sleazy but competent.  Spader’s character Raymond Reddington hits all of these attributes, though that’s the only time I’m going to call him by his character’s name because the character simply subsumes into Spader, the actor.

At its core, The Blacklist is a procedural. In every episode, Spader will probably pull a new criminal off of his black list and give extremely cryptic tips to help Lizzie and the rest of the FBI follow along and catch the perp. There’s likely to be more serial elements than most procedurals, largely because the premise is much more of a mystery than most procedurals (Law & Order and CSI didn’t start out with obvious questions that needed to be answered).  There are very basic questions that have to be answered at some point.  Why did James Spader turn himself in?  What’s in it for him?  What’s with his obsession with Lizzie Keen? What’s up with Lizzie Keen’s husband, who we learn has a whole box of passports and is almost certainly not who she thinks he is?

For some reason, there have to be other main characters besides James Spader.  Lizzie Keen, played by Meghan Boone, is fine; she’s the young up-and-comer who, even though less experienced, is a step ahead of the rest of the staid-thinking FBI agents.  Spader prods her on, and they have kind of a Hannibal Lecter – Clarice Starling relationship, as he tries to get under her skin through grilling her in-depth about her past which he somehow knows better than the FBI does.  Compared to Lecter though, he’s far less crazy and far more practical.  Everything he does seemingly has some sort of reason behind it which we might learn in time.

Diego Klatenhoff, who played Brody’s former best friend in Homeland, plays the FBI agent who was in charge of Spader’s case. Klattenhoff seems to have the talent of being the most forgettable part of any ensemble he’s part of.  His character seems so far to only play the role of veteran FBI agent who Lizzie Keen is already sharper than. The other main cast members are Keen’s husband, who obviously has something shady going on, as alluded to earlier, and the boss in charge of the FBI team, who we don’t see a lot of in the first episode. His only role is to be the official who gradually accedes to Spader’s demands.

The Blacklist shares a lot of general procedural tropes.  It’s not the most exciting or realistic or mind-blowing series.  I doubt it will ever be a must watch or be as complicated or thought-provoking as the best shows on television.  What it does have is James Spader and a fairly action packed and compelling set up.  It’s a new twist on a familiar format, and that’s not worth everything but it is worth something.  How NBC stole this show that would have fit right in at CBS I’ll never know. The mystery behind Spader gives the show more room to build in a serial fashion than most procedurals, and I actually found myself curious about these questions watching the show, which is generally a good sign.

Will I watch it again?  It’s not a priority, but I might.  It’s a procedural, a genre which is generally not my cup of tea, but there’s at least enough of a serial storyline, James Spader is great, and for its genre, it was impressive out of the gate.  Anyone who likes this type of show will like The Blacklist.

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Fall 2013 Review: Sleepy Hollow

23 Sep

Sleeeeepy Hollow

Most of what I know about the story of Sleep Hollow is that the main characters are Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman, it’s by Washington Irving, and the basics of whatever happened in the Tim Burton movie which I saw over a decade ago.  In this retelling, Ichabod Crane is a Brit fighting for the Americans under the direct command of George Washington. In the middle of a fierce battle slices the head off a mercenary with a mask in a fierce battle, severely injuring himself in the process.  He passes out, and boom, it’s a couple centuries later, there are cars, and black people are no longer slaves.  Oh, and he’s not alone. The man he cut the head off of is back as well, and killing people in the modern day much as he was two hundred years ago.  This is all I knew about the show from initial promotion, this was a series about a supernatural serial killer and a man from his time who would find him.  The next preview alerted me that it would be about much more, a conspiracy dating hundreds of years back. However, I had still greatly underestimated how quickly the scale of Sleepy Hollow would be ratcheted up and how far it would go.

Lieutenant Abby Mills is a Westchester police officer who is planning to leave in a week to join the FBI.  When she reports to what seems like a routine problem at a stable with her sheriff mentor, they find the owner dead, and the sheriff gets killed by a man with no head.  When Crane is found later by officers, and talks of working for General Washington, the police naturally suspect him of being the criminal, except for Abby, because some things Crane says ring true about his archenemy, the headless horseman. They spend a surprisingly little amount of time on the Crane-can’t-understand-new-things joke (he asks surprisingly few questions about cars or electric lights), which is probably a good thing.

Thankfully it takes us just the one episode to emerge past on of my favorite necessary early stages of a supernatural show – something strange happens and we the viewer knows its true, so we just want the characters to believe it, because it’s really boring when they keep fighting its reality forever while we know it’s true, but we need them to at least deny it for a while because that’s what anyone would actually do in real life.  Mills gets through this stage quicker for three reasons.  First, she has a prior experience with the supernatural which was uncorroborated, as she saw something super creepy which drove her sister nuts when they kids, and the sight still shook her to this day. Second, she finds a whole bunch of files her old mentor has been keeping about spooky events in the vicinity. Third, and most obviously, by the end of the episode, two other cops see the headless horseman as well, backing her story.

Sleepy Hollow reminds me of the Buffy universe.  Not tonally at all, but merely in the way that one location, Sunnydale in that show, and Sleepy Hollow here, is home to a ridiculously inordinate amount of supernatural activity, and even though it first seems crazy and hard to believe that all these supernatural events take place, in turns out half the people in the show already know about it and just don’t talk about it for whatever reason.

Also, like in Buffy, there is nothing less than the entire fate of humanity at stake right here in Sleepy Hollow, which we learn by the end of the first episode.  The headless horseman is quite literally death, one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. If he gets his head back, which has been hidden, he may start the process of getting to the actual apocalypse.  Crane, whose blood is intertwined with the horseman since they almost killed each other two hundred years ago, could be the slayer analogue, though using the Book of Revelations, which is apparently some sort of field map to what’s going on, he surmises both himself and Mills may be chosen. Oh, and also witches exist.  Apparently, Crane’s wife was one, though he didn’t know, and she sends him messages through his creams. Oh, and there’s also a big scary demon that shows up at the end and leave through a mirror, or something.

And yes, it seems like just about every other character already knows about the insanity going on.  John Cho plays a seemingly innocent cop who it turns out is working for the evil Horseman.  The local reverend appears to be a witch who is in on things, before the horseman takes him down, and it turns out Mills’ mentor, the sheriff, had been studying these unexplained phenomena for years and suspected some supernatural explanations but didn’t know how to bring it up with Mills without sounding crazy. Orlando Jones played a police captain, who we don’t know is in on it, but gives one or two super sinister looks in the episode, which led me to believe he is, though I may be reading into things too much.

The writing is nothing stand out, and the acting is absolutely fine but not remarkable. If you watch this show, it’s for the whiplash insanity of the plot going forward, and you know, that’s not a bad reason.  It’s hardly an obvious much watch but I liked it better than I initially thought I would.

The usual problem with insanity in supernatural shows is that they often start off measured, like Lost, and then veer in a more insane direction only when they realize they’re cornered and have nowhere else to go.  When that happens, it’s extremely frustrating because it seems like the show is choosing to expand its scale because they’re out of other ideas. However, If a show chooses to start of insane, well, that’s a decision made on its own terms. In Lost, the possibility was held out that there would be explanations for each of the mysteries posed over the course of the first couple of seasons. In contrast, in Buffy, there were no explanations for why the hellmouth was in Sunnydale or why demons kept wanting to seek the end of the world; it just was, and as long as you could accept that as the premise of the show, that was okay. From the beginning, Sleepy Hollow is going to be about the fate of the entire world, and how it rests on a man with no head getting his head back.  As silly as it sounds,

Will I watch it again?  Maybe? I enjoyed it more than I thought I would, and man it’s fucking crazy.  It’s not a must watch and it’s not a priority with all the new shows coming down the pipe at once, but I kind of enjoyed the sheer insanity of it, so I don’t want to rule it out.

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Fall 2013 Review: Dads

20 Sep

One DadIt’s impressive that the first two shows I’ve watched in the new fall network television series may feature both the best and worst comedy of the season.  Dads, as you may or may not have guessed, is contending for the latter category.  It’s a vile, offensive, hackneyed, and just all-around bad show, but equally if not importantly, it’s simply not funny. At all.

A clever trick bad offensive shows use to gather support is to, well, go on the offensive.  The classic approach is to claim that the reason they get absolutely miserable reviews is not because they’re not funny, but because the establishment and people in the media find them in violation of the current stuck up norms of political correctness.  Real people, they say, like it; it’s for the people, not for the critics. Dads has been taking this approach in commercials, openly acknowledging the poor reception its getting but talking to regular folks who tell other regular folks to ignore the critics.

I implore you to not let that kind of campaign fool you for a second.  I won’t say that there haven’t been reviewers who haven’t unfairly called out shows in the past for being offensive that weren’t, or were perhaps a tad too sensitive at times.  If that is ever the case though, it certainly isn’t here. There are plenty of shows that manage to be quite offensive and challenge existing norms while being both good and hilarious; It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Curb Your Enthusiasm are two that fit the bill.  Dads does not.

Dads is about two successful young entrepreneurs who run a video game company they co-founded. Seth Green plays Eli, the single womanizer, and Giovanni Ribisi plays Warner, who is married to Camilla, played by Vanessa Lachey. Warner’s dad, played by Martin Mull, already lives with him, and is ridiculously inappropriate in both his words and actions. He’s also a horribly unsuccessful businessman, having lost all his money which resulted in his having to come to his son for a place to stay.  He still carries a briefcase everywhere he goes and tries to make deals, though the business world passed him by decades ago; he refers to Chinese as Orientals.  Peter Riegert plays Eli’s dad. Riegert asks to move in with Eli at the end of the first episode, because he, like Mull, is out of money.  Both sons can’t stand their dads, who make their lives unbearable when they’re around more often than not.  I’m not sure if there’s supposed to be an undercurrent of actual love between the sons and the dads or not. The show seems to imply that deep down somewhere the sons care about the dads, at least enough to offer them a place to stay, but just about no one seems to like anybody else in this show.

I’d honestly rather not spend anymore time on any problems with the show’s offensiveness; the problems are so vast and blatant and I only want to talk about this show for so long; other people can handle those if they wish.  I’d rather spend that time on the show’s badness.  First of all, and this is just low hanging fruit, there’s a laugh track.  Seriously?  This is the time where I mention that this is executively produced by Seth MacFarlane and created by two Ted co-writers.  There’s always been a serious love for the retrograde in Family Guy, but come on. Family Guy has plenty of misses but turn on a random episode and I’d bet there’ll be three solid laughs, possibly hidden away in flashbacks and cutaways. That’s three more than Dads. To say this feels like the writers haven’t watched a sitcom in the last decade is an understatement.  The laughs the writers think they’re getting don’t work, and the laugh track would muck up any comic timing if there was any to begin with.

The central joke of the show is supposed to be that the dads are really irritating people and that these two successful sons have to put up with them, but the real joke, if you could even call it that is they are all terrible people, at least the four main characters.  The female perspective is limited to Warner’s wife, whose main role in the pilot is to have to deal with a naked Martin Mull, and Brenda Song, who works with the guys, and whose main role in the pilot is to dress up as a Japanese school girl to impress a group of Chinese businessman.  The first episode does not come particularly close to passing the Bechdel test. I keep trying to avoid coming back to how offensive it is though. Let’s try again.  The problem with the show isn’t that they seem like obnoxious people; the Always Sunny characters are obnoxious people and Sunny is great. The problem is that the central joke of the show, as I mentioned, isn’t funny.  The guys aren’t funny.  The jokes are obvious and unbelievably unsubtle, and because they’re so obvious I don’t know how they got to air without somebody at Fox or some writer on the staff pointing out how bad they were.  For example, Green and Ribisi make an unfunny joke about which of their fathers will pick up the check when they meet for lunch, since they’re both famous cheapskakes, and it’s not funny then. In case we didn’t get the point, though,  there’s an especially excruciating scene where Mull and Reigert sneeze and blow the check back and forth between one other after their meal because they both don’t want to pay, as their sons correctly predicted.

Honestly I thought I would enjoy writing about this show coming in, because I normally have some fun writing about bad shows, but this doesn’t even have the how-did-a-show-with-this-premise-get-on-TV factor like Work It or fit into every amazing obvious genre stereotype like Made in Jersey.  It’s just awful.  Avoid at all costs.

Will I watch it again?  No.  It’s a truly terrible show and I hope it gets cancelled soon to send a lesson to the networks to think twice before making something like this. It’s a shame, in particular, because it’s the only weak spot in what otherwise may be shaping up as the best night in network comedy (Fox Tuesdays) since the heyday of NBC Thursdays a couple of years back.

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Fall 2013 Review: Brooklyn Nine-Nine

18 Sep

Hanging in the Nine-Nine It’s a fantastic feeling to start the fall review season on a positive note. Andy Samberg and company had a very promising start in this new comedy from the creators of Parks and Recreation.  Samberg plays promising young police officer Jake Peralta, who is the best in his squad and making arrests, but is held back only by his immaturity and his refusal to follow any semblance of protocol.  The pilot begins with the appearance of new captain Ray Holt, a straight laced and no nonsense veteran played by Andre Braugher of Homicide, Men of a Certain Age, and the recently cancelled Last Resort. Braugher replaces Samberg’s previous captain, who had let Samberg get away with whatever he wanted.

Brooklyn Nine-Nine is funny, which is just about the highest compliment a comedy can get, especially in the first episode, which is often weighed down by the need to set up the premise and introduce the characters, leaving limited time for laughs.  Samberg, coming in to the show, is very much in a similar spot that Parks & Recreation star Amy Poehler was in coming into that show.  Samberg was a breakout Saturday Night Live performer but has been perceived largely as a wacky side character rather than as a lead. Parks & Recreation creator Michael Schur channeled Poehler’s talents and made even those of us, myself included, who had come into the show not a fan of Poehler’s work, love her as Leslie Knope. Schur and co-creator Dan Goor attempt to do the same with Samberg here, and from what I’ve seen in the first episode, I have ever reason to be optimistic. Samberg manages to tone down ever-so-slightly the ridiculous persona that he made famous on SNL and in guest appearances on Parks & Recreation, and the decision of Schur and Goor to make Samberg and his coworkers quite competent was a smart one, turning Samberg’s wackiness into a asset rather than a flaw.  The change that made Parks & Recreation turn from a so-so show to one of the best comedies of the past decade was the decision to change Amy Poehler from a Michael Scott-like semi-idiot into an extremely competent and extremely likable worker with simply more than her share of eccentricities. Based on the first episode, it seems like Brooklyn Nine-Nine is putting lessons learned from Parks & Recreation into play.

Samberg works besides some very talented colleagues. Braugher, a first-ballot television hall-of-famer in my mind, brings a surprise sense of comic timing for someone who has largely plied his trade in dramatic roles. He works well as a foil for the sillier Samberg to play off of.   Samberg’s partner is Amy Santiago, played by little-known Melissa Fumero, a young up and comer like Samberg who has the no-nonsense instincts Holt’s, She a bit less dry than Braugher and so far has mostly existed to counter Samberg as well, but she had a couple of nice comic moments. On the sillier side of the cast, is civilian administrator played by Chelsea Peretti, a comedienne who is a little over-the-top for my liking in this role.  Her ratio of converted lines that are supposed to make me laugh to laughs was the lowest of any of the main cast members.Personal favorite Joe LoTrugio plays the hard-working but minimally competent Charles Doyle, who partners and crushes on scary Rosa, played by Stephanie Beatriz. LoTruglio gets the majority of the physical humor in the pilot, and sells it better than most of the other actors probably would have.  Terry Cruz plays the bureau’s sergeant, and though he doesn’t have a lot to work with in the first episode, I’ve liked what work of his I’ve seen in the past.

Not every joke took, particularly Peretti’s, and there were a couple of false starts, but that’s to be expected in comedy, a genre in which, far more so than hour long dramas, takes chemistry and comic timing which need to grow over time to really find its rhythm.  A comedy that gets even a couple of solid laughs in the pilot is worth giving a solid try, and Brooklyn Nine-Nine got more than its fair share.  Everything about this reminds me of Parks & Recreation, and while maybe that sounds derivative, there should be pride rather than any shame in imitating one of the best comedies on television. Samberg, who in unedited form, is simply out of control, can be extremely funny when handled properly.  His wackiness naturally comes out; his robot imitation in front of Braughter in the pilot is a highlight, and some of his quick silly faces are hilarious.  What he needs is someone to impose the restraint that let the silliness stand out rather than dominate.  All the evidence so far suggests this may be the perfect setting for his talents.

Will I watch it again?  Yes.  It was funny.  It has actors I like, and I like the creators’ previous work.  It has more than enough going for it to get me to a second episode, and almost certainly a third and a fourth.  This is one of the easiest decisions I imagine I’ll face all fall.  Could it get worse, or fail to evolve and be simply mediocre? Sure.  But I’d bet strongly against it. My biggest concern is that I can already see potential emotional devastation if Brooklyn Nine-Nine faces an early demise on Fox Tuesdays (RIP Ben & Kate).

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