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Spring 2013 Review: Family Tools

8 May

Family Tools!Well, when season finales for all your favorite network shows are airing, you know it’s time to burn off the shows that at some point were meant to air as midseason replacements but were later chosen to simply die off quickly and quietly in the months of April and May (shows like Bent and Best Friends Forever were featured in this role last year).  Family Tools, which will not be on the air long, fits the bill, and stars the official new king of the quickly cancelled comedy, Kyle Bornheimer.  Bornheimer, who stars in Family Tools as Jack, a wanna-be do-gooder screw up who can’t find a career and takes over his ailing father’s handyman business, is being featured in what is remarkably his fourth new show since 2008.  The other three are Worst Week, Perfect Couples, and Romantically Challenged, though I remember him best as asshole Ken Marino rival Mark Delfino in the high school reunion episode of Party Down.

There’s a surprising amount of star power in this mediocre sitcom which has no chance of being successful.  Bornheimer’s dad is played by the legendary JK Simmons, who you will have to torture me before I say a bad word about, and his aunt, Simmons’ sister, is played by Leah Remini of The King of Queens fame.  When Simmons has a heart attack, Remini makes him cede his business to his clueless son, who means well but has absolutely no idea what he’s doing.  The son has to contend with a co-worker who half asses it, his slightly off 15-year old cousin who he must share a basement with, and his co-worker’s attractive sister who works at the hardware store and flirts with him constantly (I guess not so much contend with that last one).

Even if I hadn’t known Family Tools was an ABC show, I would have guessed as much, as it totally vibes with the ABC house style.  It stars a wacky family, it’s got some narration, and at least the first episode ends with a heartwarming moment that let’s you know that theirs is a crazy family, but it’s their crazy family and they love each other through the craziness.  It has that ABC mix between being a CBS-style traditional sitcom on one-hand and an NBC-style (well, not for much longer after the CBS-ification of NBC, but you know) edgy new sitcom on the other.  It’s single camera and with no laugh track, but even within the first scene there’s lots of classic old-school humor. JK Simmons’ dad is a familiar father figure who displays his feelings through actions rather than words; he shows his son at the end of the pilot that he’s glad he’s home by fixing up his bedroom rather than by telling him.  It’s suitably wacky as these ABC shows are; the characters are Characters.  The humor is generic, but Bornheimer does a pretty good job with what he gets and I may have even smiled once or twice.  Let’s not mistake that for me saying it’s good, or above average, but it’s somewhere in the vicinity of solidly mediocre. The actors are trying their best to execute fairly by the numbers material that mostly isn’t crazily dumbed down but isn’t the height of wit either. It’s just, well, not noteworthy in any way.  It exists to be forgotten.  I can totally imagine this and other recent throwaway ABC comedy How to Live with Your Parents for the Rest of Your Life coming out of the same ABC sitcom factory, off the conveyor belts produced by the assembly line they house there.

Will I watch again?  No.  It’s not like it’s going to be on for long anyway.  But it’s thoroughly mediocre.  I think I mean that as almost a compliment, considering what I was expecting, but it cuts both ways.  It didn’t make me cringe (with the one exception of JK Simmons calling being emotional “fruit loops”), but I’ll have forgotten it within an hour after writing this.  Maybe poor Bornheimer will finally get a better vehicle one day.

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Spring 2013 Review: Banshee

3 May

Banshee

I’ve been saying for a while now that soon all good shows will be on cable, and after watching Rectify and now Banshee on channels not known for their original programming, I think we may be getting closer and closer to this time.   I tend to come into cable shows with a little bit less knowledge than I have coming into broadcast shows, and that can be a treat sometimes.  I did see that Banshee is co-created by Jonathan Tropper, a novelist who I enjoy, so I was at least looking forward to the show based on that information.

After a super stylish chase sequence through New York City, it takes a little bit of time to figure out exactly what Banshee is about, but here’s the basics.  A con gets out of prison after fifteen years for participating in a diamond heist of a very prominent and dangerous criminal.  He seeks out the woman with whom he stole the diamonds, who did not get caught, and it turns out she’s living under a different name with two kids, married to a local small town central Pennsylvania district attorney.  She also doesn’t have the diamonds, she claims, because she was robbed when she tried to fence them.  Through a strange series of circumstances best learned through viewing, the protagonist has an opportunity to impersonate the new sheriff, who is coming to town all the way from Oregon because the mayor is worried about a more local sheriff being corrupted by the local man-who-runs-town figure.  This figure basically has his finger in every sinister soup going on throughout the county, and the young mayor is determined to actually stop him.  That’s more or less where we stand after one episode, with our primary outlaw now acting as law enforcement, while the overlord he originally stole from is still after him, while he has to concern himself with the local overlord, and hopefully figure out what ever happened to his girl and his diamonds.

The first show Banshee recalled to mind was Sons of Anarchy, as both are shows where sex and violence are on prominent display in a stylized manner, and outlaw protagonists in small towns where they’re a big deal battle up against other organized crime figures.  The towns are small enough that they live in their own bubbles where local power brokers can have an undue amount of influence.  While Sons of Anarchy feels country rock, Banshee feels industrial, and while this most obviously applies to the music, it also applies to the general feel.  Sons of  Anarchy is grindhouse rough and dirty, while Banshee is flashy and stylish.  Like Sons, Banshee seems like it may also be about at an attempt by a career criminal to walk some sort of moral middle ground (the main character was a theif, which is always the most redeemable of all serious criminals), but we don’t know how that will go just yet. It’s got some very unnecessary skinemax soft-core which maybe was demanded by the network, but at it’s heart its a very interesting concept which looks good, had some very fine action scenes, and definitely kept me on the edge of my seat.  It looks pretty, and it seems cool, and I mean that not just in the generic sense of “good” but in the sense of cool, edgy, hip, smooth, and I’m honestly not sure whether it’s trying to be a really interesting series or just a really aesthetically appealing and suspenseful one, but either way, there’s room on TV for it if it keeps up.  As a drama, there’s plenty of room for it to sink fast, but for some reason, maybe misguided, I’m at least optimistic that it should be a fun ride.

Will I watch it again?  Yes, I will.  It’s not quite in the Rectify or The Americans territory from the pilot, but sometimes the flash gets you.  It passed the test of once I finished one episode, I immediately wanted to see the second, which is definitely a large part of what a good pilot should do.  As alluded to above, it’s definitely yet another example of acable drama seeming a cut above the network variety.  This isn’t necessarily groundbreaking television, but it’s not exactly like every other show on TV, and it s seems to already have a sense of its own style, and I like it.

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Spring 2013 Review: Rectify

29 Apr

Rectify ItHoly shit, a show about something different.  And it’s good!  Rectify is the story of a man exonerated from death row twenty years after being convicted of murdering a woman, when he was in high school.  Daniel was convicted, sentenced to die, and thanks to some new DNA evidence and the dogged work of his family and attorney, he’s being set free.  Twenty years in prison, in solitary confinement without even a window is a long time, and the adjustment is obviously difficult both for Daniel, and for his family, who have lived the past two decades without him and aren’t sure how to reintegrate him back into the family even though they want to, or at least some of the family does.  The family includes his mother, who is happy but doesn’t know how to behave, his sister, who is most enthusiastic and did most of the leg work, and his brother, now a teenager who is trying his best to get to know the brother he’s never met.  It always includes the step-dad his mom is married to now, his step brother, who isn’t a big fan of Daniel, and more relevantly, is concerned  his notoriety will sink the family business, an independent tire store started by Daniel’s real dad, and his step brother’s wife, who is religious, innocent, and more enamored with Daniel than her husband.  These difficulties  are compounded by the fact that this is the small town south (Georgia) and everyone knows everyone and a large number of those people, fancy schmancy legal terms or not, still think he did it and that he’s guilty as sin.  They’ll go through any trouble to make his life hell on Earth if he can’t be put into hell underground.

Now, just in case you worry it’s too focused on simply human emotions and the difficulty of people relating with one another, there’s a nice little intrigue plot to keep those who need a little suspense in their TV humming right along. Some prominent politicians are convinced of his guilt and also don’t like even the possibility of admitting they were wrong and put the wrong man behind bars and on death row for 20 years.  They want him back in jail with a retrial.  Additionally, although we don’t know for sure whether Daniel did or didn’t do it, people who may have actually been responsible for something then, are not thrilled that he’s out on the street again, throwing the events of the night in question, into, well, question.

The small town south is having its moment in the media, led by Winter’s Bone and Justified, but with others, like the recent movie Mud, coming up as well.  As I’ve written about Justified before, this culture is simply an interesting vantage point for me, as a big city/suburban northeasterner, as something that I’ve never been exposed to.  While Rectify doesn’t feature the organized crime angle of the first two southern comparisons, it does place a large forcus on the way things change but stay the same in the small town, and that way that people are harassed for things that their family did now, or decades ago.  As god of all small town southern writers William Faulkner once said, “The past is never dead.  It’s not even past.”  The small town community leaders are determined to sew up their legacies by making sure Daniel doesn’t spent a second longer than he has to after prison.

Daniel’s difficulty in coping with life outside initially is both confounding and understandable from the point of view of the people closest to him.  He’s harassed for not seeming excited enough about his innocence, and his family treat him hesitantly.  He’s unfailingly polite but mysterious and terse.  Every experience is so new and vivid to him, no matter how simple, sitting down on the grass, or staring into the sky.  It can sometimes be slightly difficult to watch, but never cringeworthy.

This is almost certainly the best pilot I’ve seen so far in 2013, and since I’m updating this part of the review after I just watched two more episodes, probably has a slight lead on The Americans to be my favorite new show of the spring season.

Will I watch it again?  Yes, I will.  In fact, I already have by the time this is posted, so this is even surer than most.  If you can figure out where the hell the Sundance channel is on your TV, you should absolutely watch it; there are only six episodes this season, and it’s new, seriously interesting and different TV, which is something I, for one, can never get enough of.

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Spring 2013 Review: Cult

24 Apr

Cult members

Warning:  I am going to use the word Cult in this review more than I ever have before, and hopefully more than I ever will again.  Let’s go.  Cult.

Everyone knows TV shows, like movies, come in twos, and Cult shares a lot of territory with Fox show The Following.  While The Following is created by Kevin Williamson, Cult shares some of the meta aspects that were the hallmarks of Williamson’s first big hit Scream.  The Cult’s meta-ness lies in that it’s a show about a cult based on a scripted tv show about a cult called Cult.  I thought originally Cult was going to have some of the cheeky meta sense of humor that Scream has, but it really doesn’t. For a show that’s so meta, there’s really almost no sense of winking irony at all.

The Following is about a crazy serial killer/cult leader who organizes a shadowy US-wide network of disciples posing as ordinary people in every walk of life who would do anything no matter how gruesome or despicable at a whim for their leader.  Cult is about a cult which features a wide network of disciples posing as ordinary people in every walk of life who would do anything no matter how gruesome or despicable at a whim for their leader.  In Cult, however, the added hook is, as previously mentioned, there’s a popular cult (yes, I know) television show named Cult, about a cult, and which many fans are completely obsessed with, looking for hidden clues and messages throughout repeated viewings of each episode of the show.  The real life cult is super secret and is based on and through the show, somehow involving its creators, presumably, and by way of these messages being submitted through the show.

The added level here that The Following lacks is that of a conspiracy drama (which is shares more with fellow cancelled show Zero Hour).  While the cult in the Following is out in the open, this one is deep underground; no one believes in it, and anyone who claims they do appears crazy, even as bodies apparently turn up regularly and people are abducted.  Our main character is a sensible ex-prominent journalist (apparently he Jayson Blair-ed it, but for noble reasons) whose off-the-rails brother goes missing after trying to convince the main character of his crazy conspiracy theory involving a cult around Cult.  The key conversation comes at a diner where sinister music and camera shots make it appear everyone around them is an shady cult member, watching and listening (a la Homer on The Simpsons, “But listen to the music! He’s evil!”) The main character, with the help of a production assistant (or something, I don’t know what her job is on the show but it’s apparently not that important because she can leave for long stretches of time) on the show investigate the brother’s disappearance and find a disturbing amount of clues leading to the show Cult, and when he finally runs into the person his brother told him to ever contact if he got into trouble, she, dressed as a Cult character, kills herself, saying the magic words from Cult that people says on the show when they kill themselves.

He eventually finds a disc which, when he puts it in his computer, will put him on Cult’s radar, letting them steal his information and become a target, but may also be the only way to ever see his brother again, so he takes the leap.  The detective who searches both his brother’s apartment and shows up after the woman commits suicide is ridiculously accusing of him and just a general mean person, but this may be all explained by the fact that we see a Cult tattoo on her at the end of the episode.  She’s in on it!

Basically, if you’re watching this show, it’s for the conspiracy.  The writing isn’t anything to, er, write home about, and as mentioned before, there’s a surprising lack of humor or irony considering how meta the concept is.  The film-work isn’t particularly expert and I doubt it’s going to be a ton of sense if you think too hard about it.  It’s a pure thrill ride, and it’s not exactly thrilling enough to reach the levels it needs to, but it could be a lot worse too.  I’m at least mildly intrigued, though not a whole lot more.  It’s the kind of absurd idea a couple of people on controlled substances could arrive at late at night (“what about this! a cult based on a cult show about cults!”) that doesn’t sound as good in the morning but doesn’t sound half bad either.

Will I watch it again?  No.  It’s not really that bad, all the issues listed before considered.  It’s already cancelled for one, so the story is probably not going to resolve.  The premise is not wholly uninspired.  It wasn’t incredibly gripping, but if someone told me I had to watch all of Cult, I wouldn’t hate them for it.  Honestly, I probably wouldn’t have watched another one, but I might have at least thought about it for more than a second if the show wasn’t cancelled.  The possibility of a good edge-of-your-seat plot, while rarely realized, can make up for a lot of sins.

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Spring 2013 Review: Bates Motel

19 Apr

Norman and Norma

Bates Motel reminds me of fellow new show Hannibal in some ways.  It’s an earlier time in a story we all know well; in Hannibal, we know Hannibal Lecter will get caught as a cannibalistic serial killer, while Bates Motel tells the story of the teenage life of Norman Bates, who we know will go on to become a psychotic serial killer later in his life, and interact with and dress up as his deceased mother.  Knowing where the story leads is both limiting and empowering; it means that to some extent, the audience knows how the story ends, and there’s really nothing the creators can do about that, but there’s a lot of leeway in how they get there.  The writers can always place winking clues to where we know the story leads.  Like in Hannibal, Bates Motel takes place in modern times rather than around when the story originally took place.

Unlike Hannibal, in which the villain, Lecter, is already well into his serial killing ways when the show begins, Bates Motel features a normal-ish Normal who while facing some very serious issues and badly in need of a psychologist, doesn’t appear to have seriously contemplated killing anybody quite yet.  Like the Star Wars prequels, Bates Motel attempts to take an incredibly famous villain and explain how he got from being a regular person to an evil, or crazy, killer.

In the opening scene, Bates’ father dies.  We then flash forwards to six months later, where Bates’ mom, Norma (Vera Farmiga), is driving him to their new home, a motel, which they will now run, and is destined to be the fabled Bates Motel.  Norman is already a little bit of a weirdo, and it seems like that’s due mostly do his super controlling, passive aggressive and seriously fucked up mother.  His mom keeps moving him around and is pretty much the only person he communicates with on a regular basis, and she seems to do her best to ensure that he doesn’t develop any other relationships.  Some girls who live nearby want to hang out with Norman, but his mom keeps trying to prevent it, and she tries to caution Norman against joining the track team, which his adviser recommends.  It’s a field day for looking out for potential signs of what could drive him bonkers, from the behavior of his mother, to his behavior with the girls at school, but since this is a TV show without a set number of episodes it’s going to take a while to get to crazy Norman presumably.

The show also has sort of an American Horror Story feel.  In the first episode, a creepy and irate W. Earl Brown (Dan Dority from Deadwood) comes up to the motel and reams them out, explaining that the motel was built by his family and is, and will always be, his.  He pops up again later on, invading the motel at night, tying up and raping Norma, until Norman, arriving late because he had snuck out and was at a party, hits him over the head.  When he comes to, Norma stabs him to death out of rage, and insisting that no one would ever stay at the motel if this went public, convinces her son to help her wrap up the body and dispose of it.  Mother of the year, right?  Later the police, led by a sheriff played by Drug of Nation favorite Nestor Carbonell wonder by the motel randomly, and almost walk into the body, hidden in a bathtub, before it’s disposed of.  Norman finds some creepy and strange notebook under some carpeting him and his mother are pulling up.  Also, in the last couple of seconds, there’s a mysterious flash to some person being held capture and injected with something without any way to put that scene into any context.

As mentioned before, there’s a limiting factor to knowing the kid is going to grow up to become a serial killer, but there’s certainly room for an interesting journey getting there.  I enjoyed the episode more than I thought I would.  It was sometimes a little bit difficult to watch the way poor Norman is treated by his mother, who seems like the real villain of the series so far.  It definitely combines a potential high school show with a horror show, which is an interesting combination, and I’m honestly just curious in what direction the show leads, because I don’t think it’s obvious, in terms of what aspects the show focuses on, or how gory versus psychological it gets.

Will I watch it again?  I’ll say yes, because I think it’s worth a second episode, but it’s far enough down on my queue that I can’t be sure I actually will.  It’s jumped above The Following on shows I had said I would watch again but don’t feel like immediately watching (admittedly influenced by the fact that everyone I’ve talked to says The Following gets way worse).  I liked it overall, but I didn’t feel, like when I watched Americans, that it had the potential to be great, or like with Hannibal, that I immediately wanted to watch the next episode.

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Spring 2013 Review: Red Widow

15 Apr

Guess which one is the Red Widow

 

Red Widow begins with a super double episode to really attempt to hook us in.  Red Widow herself, Marta Walraven, lives in a swanky Bay Area house with her husband Evan and three children, a older high school boy, a younger high school girl, and a 10 year old or so boy.  Her father, and her family in general have some sort of Eastern European mob ties, and her husband Evan, who wears his long hair like a cool European soccer star, joined the family business, mobstering, when they were married, working with her brother, Irwin, and a third friend named Mike.  They mostly participated in light mobstering, namely importing and exporting pot (ie the good drug).  Marta knew, but she was busy housewiving it up and raising three kids, and in the near term, helping her sister on her wedding.

This is all going swimmingly until Irwin decides their middle-brow marijuana business just isn’t making the grade anymore.  He recklessly rips off 85 kilograms (“keys” in drug lingo) of cocaine from reputed super druglord Schiller, killing a couple of Schiller’s guys on the boat where the coke was stored, in the process.  We know this is bad news right away because, before Irwin kills one of the dudes on board the ship, the dude warns Irwin that if he goes forward, him and his family and his family’s family and so forth will die in revenge for the theft. Evan is not at all happy to hear that Irwin risked everyone’s lives by stealing from Schiller and is now terrified.

After her youngest son finds Evan’s gun, and threatens someone at school with it, getting expelled in the process, Marta demands that Evan leave the business now, but he warns her the only we he can is to leave everyone and everything they know behind completely, like completely completely.  Fine, she says.  She’s got three kids to protect, dammit. That night is her sister’s wedding, and everyone’s there.  Irwin goes to unload the coke and gets arrested by the FBI.  Mike and Evan have a fight.  Evan is murdered the next morning, which was only a matter of when, because otherwise the Red Widow show name would be incredibly misleading.  We suspect Schiller was involved because of his threats. Before the body is cold in the ground we find out that Evan had made a deal with the FBI.  When he promised to keep them safe if they left everything behind, it’s because he got them witness protection in return for dropping a dime on everyone.  Marta’s son is not impressed; those are family criminals he was turning on, and even if a deadly mobster was out to kill them, Mom would have found another way.

Marta’s bro lets her know that now she has to take on the debt (thus turning her into the RED WIDOW), and return the cocaine to Schilller to try to save her family.  This once lowly housewife must now take on the duty of navigating the mob while still protecting her children.  Schiller (Goran Visnjic of ER) is an enigmatic mega-gangster who lets her know with constant bits of cryptic wisdom that she will have to help him get some shipments through the port, and perhaps by helping him, he will deign to let her and her children live. She has ol’ Mike teach her the biz, and starts to slip into the world of illegal activity, trying to convince the right people to take bribes to get the shipment through.  She’s concerned she could get caught and have her kids go to jail, but she sees no other way. She tensely awaits the call from Schiller with the details of her job, at the end, she gets it.  Here’s the time and place.  The game is afoot.

Honestly, it’s a pretty mediocre action show.  Red Widow is not that interesting and not that captivating.  The plot in general could be interesting, but there’s no reason to think it will be.  It’s not awful.  It goes.  If it was a movie, you’d watch it on a plane and feel like you hadn’t wasted your time, since you were going to be on the plane anyway, but you certainly wouldn’t see it in theaters.  There’s less a lot to say bad about it, than nothing to say good about it.  It’s got some sub par or at most par action and suspense scenes; you could do a lot worse, but you can also do a lot better.

Also –  why is she a Red Widow?  The widow part is obvious.  I assume the Red is in reference to Russia.  She’s clearly supposed to be eastern European, though it wasn’t clearly whether Russian or not.  Red, I had thought, referred to communism, so I don’t know that post-Commie Russia would be red.  Is the red a reference to something else?

Will I watch it again?  No.  I try to really think about why I like or don’t like a show, but I also try to give some credence to my immediate visceral reaction, sometimes compared against other shows I’ve watched.  I watched Hannibal recently and wanted to watch a second episode immediately after I finished the first.  I finished Red Widow, and I didn’t feel like I wasted my time, but I was closer to being glad it was over (being a double episode doesn’t help) than wanting to put on the next.

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Spring 2013 Review: Hannibal

10 Apr

Hannibal

I initially thought Hannibal was on cable, instead of NBC, and although I’m not sure why I thought that, after watching the show, it makes a lot of sense that I would think it.  It feels like a cable show.  In fact, in a highly unusual arrangement (and perhaps an auger of the future), NBC has agreed to continue to air seasons of 13 episodes if the show is successful, which has become the default cable format.

The show was created by cult TV veteran Bryan Fuller, who has been behind Dead Like Me, Wonderfalls, Pushing Daisies, and Mockingbird Lane, none of which I have seen, and none of which has been particularly successful, but most of which have dedicated small followings.  Unlike what I know about those shows though, nothing about this show feels particularly cult-y, and I mean that in neither a bad or good way.  Rather than dissect that further though, let’s get into the meat of the show.

The title Hannibal in question is Hannibal Lecter, and thus this is a story that just about anyone who’s been around pop culture for the past 25 years knows pretty well.  Lecter, we know, is a famously cunning and psychopathic cannibal who, while in captivity, helps Jodie Foster’s Clarice Starling solve a major serial killer case in Silence of the Lambs.

Hannibal takes place well before Lecter has been captured.  The show stars Hugh Dancy as Will Graham, a character we know from the mediocre Silence of the Lambs prequel Red Dragon, where he was played by Ed Norton.  Here, Will Graham is a veritable super analyst, who has remarkable observational abilities, and more importantly a type of perfect empathy which allows him to relate and take the vantage point of even the most psychotic killers.  His abilities have the negative side effect of making him particularly vulnerable to being mentally destabilized, and Dancy does a very good job of seeming on edge the entire episode. We learn he is not a full FBI agent because he couldn’t pass some sort of stability tests but he is lecturing and helping out with random assignments.

His boss is Jack Crawford, head of FBI Behavioral Sciences, played by Lawrence Fishbourne here, and by Scott Glenn in Silence of the Lambs.  Crawford convinces Graham to take some time to help him out with finding serial killers, even if it means subjecting his psyche to serious angst.  Crawford is the level-headed boss who may not have the intuitive smarts of Graham but knows how to manage and direct people, and he’ll probably have a lot on his hands this season overseeing Graham, and the third member of our key trifecta.

This third member is none other than Hannibal Lecter himself.  Lecter is a renowned psychiatrist, as well as a brilliant psyopath,and  is brought in by Crawford to help develop psychological profiles on cases, including one in the pilot involving a cannibal who is kidnapping college aged girls and killing them.

The show’s critical dynamic is the tete a tete between Graham and Lecter.  Graham knows how to see into the mind of criminals, but only at great vulnerability to his own psyche. Lecter, who, without emotions, can’t be emotionally manipulated himself, knows how to push Graham’s buttons, and how to unnerve him. In this first episode, soon after it is discovered that the killer they’re tracking is a cannibal, there’s another killing that seems to fit the profile.  Graham immediately recognizes the work as that of a copy cat, and describes the killer as an intelligent psychopath who will show no pattern, has no feeling, and will likely never be caught.  Only we, the viewers, know that Lecter in fact committed this crime, and that Graham, unbeknownst to himself, is profiling Lecter perfectly (well, except for the never being caught part).  Lecter toys with Graham, but it seems to possibly be at least partly out of respect.  In fact, whether it was Lecter’s intention or not, it was seeing the incredibly wrong copy cat crime scene that allowed Graham to figure out the correct profile for the killer.

We also have to suffer through knowing Hannibal is super evil while the characters keep bringing him on board to help them on investigations, placing him in an ideal position to sabotage their cases. In the first episode, he warns their killer, right before they get to him, giving him a chance to kill his wife and severely injure his daughter.

Hannibal has a lot of procedural aspects.  I would guess, without knowing for sure as I’ve only seen the first episode, that each episode at least initially will involve the investigation of a new serial killer.  I was drawn in more than I usually am by procedurals.  Part of this was perhaps due to the high stakes of psychopathic serial killers, and part may have been due to the cinematic qualities of the pilot. One episode felt more like a suspense film than, say, a CSI episode , and the thirteen episode format might help protect that per episode special-ness more than a longer traditional network format.  I think a successful Hannibal can share aspects of two of my favorite current shows, Sherlock and Justified.  Sherlock has the same case per episode format with a more cinematic feel (it helps that Sherlock episodes are double length) and the same genius investigator type in the lead.  Hannibal looks like what Sherlock might be like if Sherlock and Moriarty were working side by side before they were official arch enemies.   Justified began as a rough procedural but morphed in a more and more serial show. The extended arcs made it significantly better but even the individual procedural episodes were a notch above the average, due to the strong character profiles and style built into the show.

The show is a little gimmicky in the way it shows Graham thinking about crime scenes, as he imagines himself as the criminal, and has him covered and blood and guts as he figures out how the criminal acted.  I normally don’t care for this type of gimmickry, but for whatever reason, it really didn’t bother me here.  Also, Gillian Anderson appears as Graham’s therapist, who tries to warn Crawford off from putting Graham too close to the edge.

Will I watch it again?  Yes.  Again, I normally stray from procedurals, but, if this is in at least part a procedural, it’s certainly not a typical one.   The Lecter – Graham relationship is electric right off the bat, and from the extra-curricular notes I’ve read by Fuller, I think he’ll do well to move the plot along during the seasons, rather than than have Lecter and Graham’s relationship in a perpetual status quo, which is a good thing.  It’s often hard to move a show along when you have something good in the present, because you risk having something worse in the future, but staying in the same place can often be just as bad.  My visceral reaction to finishing the first episode was to want to immediately put on the second, and while that doesn’t always bode well for the long term, it’s always a good sign for a pilot.

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Spring 2013 Review: How To Live With Your Parents (For the Rest of Your Life)

5 Apr

Instructional program on living with one's parents for the foreseeable future

How To Live With Your Parents (For the Rest of Your Life) (yes, that title is a ridiculously too long mouthful, like this comment) is clearly trying its best to be a Modern Family clone.  This actually makes perfect sense, as Modern Family is one of the most successful comedies on TV, and probably the single most if one combines critical and commercial appeal. I’m only surprised I haven’t seen more Modern Family take offs, to be honest.  How To Live With Your Parents (the relatively short name I’ll use from now on) oozes wanna be Modern Family, and it is not at all a coincidence that ABC has been airing it immediately before that show.

The basic backbones of Modern Family (besides the specific actors and writers and all that) are a quirky family with a sense of comedy that tries to strike a middle ground between more traditional family sitcoms (think Everybody Loves Raymond as the most recent of this model) and new-fangled comedy that young people like (e.g.The Office).  It’s all based around a family which is wacky and somewhat non-traditional but extremely functional, and the message is often more or less that the characters’ families drive them completely crazy but they love them dearly and, at the end of the day, they couldn’t imagine being with anyone else.  Structurally, it’s fairly light and cute, but attempts to be moving and heartwarming, with occasional narration (on Modern Family, mostly at the end of the episodes, but there’s talking to the camera which can be similar to narration).  Again, mixing the young and old, the family is not a classic American nuclear family, a la, say, Everybody Loves Raymond, or the trillions of family sitcoms before, but shares the sense of love and togetherness from those programs, with the wackiness but not absurdity or sense of despair from classic dysfunctional family sitcoms like Married with Children and Roseanne.

Basically, How To Live With Your Parents checks off every one of these boxes.  The main character and narrator is Polly, played by sitcom veteran Sarah Chalke (Scrubs, but also Roseanne, How I Met Your Mother, and Mad Love).  Polly divorced her husband recently and, not having any money or a job, moved back home with her mother and stepfather.  She brought along her young daughter Natalie.  Her mom (Elizabeth Perkins from Weeds) is a Character, a mother with absolutely no filter or sense of appropriateness who is way more comfortable talking about sex than her daughter is (a more and more common TV trope, a reverse of the traditional mother who is incredibly uncomfortable talking about sex (again, see Doris Roberts, Everybody Loves Raymond), often combined with a daughter who is relatively repressed and/or anal).  Her stepdad (Brad Garrett) is also a Character, albeit less so than her mother, and constantly bemoans the loss of one of his testicles from testicular cancer.  Added to this pool is her ex-husband who is a well-meaning dreamer/idiot, very much in the Andy from Parks and Recreation mode, who loves Polly’s family and tries to stay in her life however possible, no matter how much of a bad idea it might be.

She now works at a local coffee establishment and I can’t tell yet whether her co-workers there are characters or not.  Polly helpfully gives us the what’s what within this debut episode by using cutesy white text on screen to point out certain facets of her life she’s explaining, along with frequent flashbacks showing off the crazy in her family.

In the first episode she goes on her first date in ages, and, although terrified, asks her parents to babysit her kid for the night (she’s a classic super nervous mother, with a strict routine and specific rules, while her parents threaten to go all willy nilly Parental Control on her daughter).  Basically, both her date and her parents babysitting end up being semi-disasters, but lessons are learned, things work out in an incredibly heartwarming fashion, and it turns out she’s really grateful to have this zany but loving family even though they’re super insane and drive her completely bonkers.

Will I watch it again?  No.  Did I mention it’s actually not funny at all?  I should probably do that.  It wasn’t offensive; it was more modern than just about any CBS comedy but it was hardly breaking new ground either.  That said, it wasn’t actually funny at all.  The laugh lines and jokes just did not work.  I mean, I could see what the humor was supposed to be, and which lines where supposed to make me laugh but yeah, did not take.  I don’t watch Modern Family, so even if it worked, it’s not incredibly likely I would watch it, but it wasn’t a very difficult decision.  It’s much more heartwarming than it is funny.

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End of Season Report: Season 3 of The Walking Dead

1 Apr

The Big Four

The end of Walking Dead season 3 was okay overall; the finale was frustrating in some ways but not terrible.   I’m going to spend most of this entry talking about two problematic points, so I want to get it out of the way early that I thought the season was pretty solid overall, and much better than the second season.

In fact, I’ll talk first about the aspects I liked in the finale.  Andrea dying; hooray.  We had gotten everything we were going to get out of this character and her internal struggles, and I liked how the show took a situation in which often in TV the character would make it out alive after a close call, and had her not make it instead.  It was a solid death scene all around.  Second, I like the situation Carl put his father in, shooting a man about to hand over his weapon. Our first instinct is to side with Rick, and I think with good reason, but it’s understandable why Carl doesn’t feel that way, and I like when situations like these put Rick, our protagonist, back on difficult footing.  Rick, not surprisingly, has generally been the strongest character in the show, and it’s constant challenges like these, that keep his character moving and evolving.

Now, the finale’s one major misstep: the extremely anticlimactic temporary ending to the Governor.  There’s no huge battle, nor is he finished; he lost for now, but they’re keeping him alive so he can do harm later.  This was a bad call, following bad calls tv shows have made time and again.  As often happens, TV writers believe they’ve stumbled onto a genius villain who is charismatic and whom the audience loves to hate.  While maybe at one time they planned to kill him or her, they decide this villain is too good to lose, and then have to keep finding unlikely and implausible ways in the story for the villain to not be killed or jailed by the protagonists. My two best examples for this are Sylar in Heroes and Ben in Lost (many would disagree with me there, but they’re wrong, why any character listened to Ben in the last two or three seasons is ridiculous), and there are many others.  Characters like this are not built to last; once you try to extend them, you ruin the great moment they added.  These villains are not complex enough to keep around for season after season.  Just kill ’em off and be done with it rather than ruin the characters and screw with the show.

I also want to talk a little bit about my disappointment in the promise of the Governor as a villain.  First, though, a diversionary explanation before we get back to Walking Dead.  For purposes of this entry, I’m gong to divide all villains in all forms of media into two major types.  There’s the more or less irredeemably evil villain; think Emperor Palpatine from Star Wars, or even more extreme, Sauron from Lord of the Rings, who is essentially the embodiment of evil and corporeal only as a giant eye.  The second type is a villain who has some level of plausible and understandable motivation.  Rarely is this enough to actually root for the villain, but there’s some definable reason why he or her is antagonizing our protagonists that make some level of sense beyond just that he or she is a bad guy or girl.  One of the best examples of this type is Stringer Bell and Avon Barksdale in The Wire; they’re drug dealers, but we understand to an extent that it’s just business in the world they’re in.

There’s absolutely nothing intrinsically wrong with the pure evil type of villain, and many of our most memorable villains lie in that category.  The Emperor was one. A more recent example is The Joker in Dark Knight.  He’s at heart just a crazy person; there’s no real rationale for his actions, but within the movie, that’s not called for, and he’s fantastic at being crazy.

That said, it’s harder to create the second type of villain.  It’s easy to say someone’s just evil as a reason, and often attempts at creating the second type descend into crazy/evil instead because the reason simple isn’t close to being plausible.    It’s not often easy to find real plausible reasons for someone the audience is largely supposed to be rooting against to be doing whatever bad thing he’s doing.

Getting to how this is related to The Walking Dead, the Governor was a villain who had potential to be in the second category, but eventually moved clearly to the first, and that’s kind of a shame.  There’s another potential telling of the battle between Rick’s gang and the Governor where the Governor is harsh, and maybe even a bit eccentric, but due to a history which has led him to believe that this is the only way he can keep his people alive.  Watching the show, I believed we were headed in that direction, possibly with a big explanatory episode, showing the Governor’s past in flashbacks, or having him issue a long monologue to Andrea or Milton or Rick explaining why he acts the way he does, at least to some extent.  There’s pretty much no way to make him the good guy, but there’s definitely room, in a world where undead savages threaten to overrun everyone without united action, and thirst and starvation and shelte, are serious concerns as well, to come up with reasons why strict top-down control and stern punishment would be one route towards survival.

Walking Dead doesn’t go this route, though.  In fact, it slowly moves in the opposite direction.  The Governor is most understandable very early on, but this breaks quickly when his men fire on some armed service personnel for no apparent reason.  I was waiting for some sort of explanation, either why these men posed a thread, or even just saying that in this cold hard landscape, the town needed the resources more.  But it was just a shitty thing to do, and that was that I suppose.  Moving forward from there, the governor got more and more deranged and unreasonable, making you wonder eventually how he was such a competent leader to begin with.  Soon, it was torture, and he basically ended his run for now with the totally batshit insane killing of all his own people, which, if he hadn’t already been well set into my first category above (which he had), those couple of minutes would have done it in and of itself in any circumstance.

Again, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with evil/crazy villains, as long as we’re not supposed to have any pathos for them.  Still, when you have a chance to contract a plausible, rational villain and it fits perfectly into the story, you almost always should take it, and The Walking Dead missed a big opportunity here.

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Spring 2013 Review: Zero Hour

29 Mar

Zero Hour

Zero Hour may be extremely cancelled, but that doesn’t mean we won’t be honoring its memory with a review.

A show whose first scenes lets us know that it involves a church conspiracy and Nazi mysticism, Zero Hour would probably have been better off coming out a couple years ago in the heyday of Da Vinci Code fever.

The show begins in Nazi Germany where two ostensibly non-Nazis are concerned about the Nazis’ supernatural progress on some experiments.  Namely, the Nazis have developed a way to create a child without conception, and we see this child, which has super evil zombie eyes.  The two men gasp in horror after seeing the baby, giving themselves away, and causing Nazis to chase after them, eventually leading back to their church.  At this church a group of gathered parishioners decide that they all must sacrifice whatever needs sacrificing to protect some secret object buried beneath the church.  The Nazis raid the church, killing many, but not in time to get the object, which is, to our knowledge, now secure and hidden away.

In our present time, Anthony Edwards, playing magazine publisher (of the illustrious Modern Skeptic magazine) Hank Galliston, browses a flea market with his wife Laila, in Brooklyn, before heading to work.  Within a couple of minutes of arriving, he gets a call from his wife, who runs a clock store in Brooklyn (Time to Go, it’s called – Five other suggested time phrase store names:  Time Flies, A Time to Remember, Time Enough at Last, Time to Get a Watch, Time of Your Life).  There’s someone in the store, and within seconds, she’s attacked and kidnapped.  We soon learn from an FBI officer that Laila was in fact taken by a super villainous major criminal named White Vincent (Michael Nyqvist, veteran Swedish actor who played the villain in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, and has the look to be playing US villains for at least a decade). Hank soon realizes that this came after his wife his purchased a clock, and after inspecting the clock, finds a diamond with secret writing all over it.

Upon finding that the diamond contains all this information, Hank and his two quirky and energetic young helpers (reporters at the magazine who clearly love Hank) are off to the races.  They don’t recognize the language, so they ask Hank’s old friend, a priest played by the always wonderful Charles S. Dutton, who tells them the language is an old one (I’m pretty sure he describes it as demonic, but that seems ridiculous to me) which hadn’t been used in centuries as far as the world knows.  Hank and co. are spiriting around to figure out its meaning, when Hanks gets a call from the kidnapper; bring him the clock, Vincent says, or the woman gets it.

Hank’s now set up a complicated swap with Mr. Vincent, alerting the FBI to obtain their help, but not telling them the whole story with the clock and the diamond and whatnot.  In particular, he works with agent Beck Riley who keeps hounding him and whom, being a shady Fed, he doesn’t completely trust.  Hank entrusts the diamond to the priest in case the meet goes awry.  Unfortunately, it turns out the whole operation was a set up, and that Vincent knew the priest had the diamond the whole time, and obtains it while seriously injuring Dutton in the process.

Hank and his helpers are distraught, but not ready to give up, especially after his helpers give him a big pep talk.  They still have pictures of the map from the diamond and the clock.  Hank and agent Riley travel north to where they  believe the map was marked, and the helpers head out to meet the maker of the clock in Switzerland (Modern Skeptic has quite the travel budget).  Hank and Riley find they’re on Vincent’s trail (A V.I.L.E. henchmen has been seen, is what would have been said when they arrived, if they were in the Carmen San Diego universe) and find the spot, which is filled with Nazi paraphernalia and a number of dead bodies.

The helpers find out even more important information; the clock maker tells them that the spot on the map was a person, not a place, and that the clocks are given to 12 people deemed new apostles by the crazy church conspiracy in Nazi times to protect the world from the Nazis.  Now that the Nazi villains are back at it, somehow, if they find whatever this object is THE WHOLE WORLD IS IN DANGER.  The apocalyptic speech from the clockmaker going for a couple of minutes, but essentially, bum bum bum, end of episode.  Hank’s wife hardly seems relevant when the whole world is at stake, no?

As a lover of Indiana Jones, and a liker of Hellboy, I’m a sucker for Nazi mystical conspiracies, but Zero Hour seems pretty half-hearted.  It seems like someone spent an airplane ride coming up with the conspiracy storyline without really diving into it in detail or putting in a lot of thought.  It seems a little bit like a generic conspiracy hodgepodge (Nazis?  Check.  Church?  Check.  End of the world?  Check.); from one episode it doesn’t seem like the kind of care was put into it that immediately attracts a viewer in these days of so many captivating and well-crafted tv shows.

That said, I’m still a sucker for conspiracies, and they can be entertaining and stupid at the same time sometimes, as long as they’re internally consistent and don’t get too serious on the serious vs. fun scale (e.g. Lost).  Still, even if this was not already cancelled, I’d bet against it.  I wasn’t hooked from the first episode.  To compare to recent conspiracy-style shows, last fall’s Last Resort was more captivating after it’s first episode, and Rubicon, whose conspiracy ended up being somewhat equally mish-moshy and generic but had a really cool stylistic sense right off the bat.  Lost, which still makes me angry every time I think of it to this day, had a fantastic pilot episode.  Zero Hour didn’t deliver that punch that makes you want to watch the second episode immediately after finishing the first.  And considering the show was pretty much all about plot; the characters didn’t seem like much to think of, the style was not noteworthy, and the dialogue wasn’t first right, getting the viewer interested in the plot fast, is pretty important.

Will I watch it again?  No.  It’s way cancelled; the first episode got nearly Do No Harm-level ratings.  Not that I would have anyway.  There is a possibility of an interesting conspiracy show here, but I’d render that possibility as pretty unlikely.

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