Tag Archives: American Crime

Reviewing My 2014-15 Predictions: ABC

11 May

ABC

Well, there’s no point in making predictions if you’re not willing to revisit them later and see just how wrong you were. Now that the final decisions are in, let’s review how I did.

ABC next. My fall predictions are here and my spring predictions are here, and in short, every show gets one of three predictions: that it will air 12 episodes or fewer, 13 episodes or more, or be renewed.

Forever

Prediction: 12-

Reality: 13+

Forever seemed like an instant failure to me, as a supernatural procedural starring a unpronounceable Welshman, but then it was actually decently successful and seemed on pace for renewal. Ultimately, it landed on the borderline and ABC went with a thumbs down. I’m fine with my guess here.

Black-ish

Prediction: Renewal

Reality: Renewal

 

This and the following show seemed like ABC’s two buzziest and most widely promoted shows, both did very well, meeting or surpassing expectations and will be coming back.

How to Get Away With Murder

Prediction: Renewal

Reality: Renewal

Like Black-ish above, except probably even more anticipated because it’s from ABC overlord Shonda Rhimes. I felt best about this renewal out of all Fall network shows.

Selfie

Prediction: 13+

Reality: 12-

This certainly seemed like a failure, and looking back I’m not sure why I thought it would even last a full season. Probably my personal fandom of John Cho and Karen Gillan helped, along with a prominent billboard near my apartment, but I should have gotten this right.

Manhattan Love Story

Prediction: 12-

Reality: 12-

This was the first cancellation of the year, which I should really pick as a special category next year. This seemed like a pretty obvious dead on arrival sitcom. One of the easier calls.

Cristela

Prediction; 12-

Reality: 13+

Buried on Friday night, next to a Tim Allen show that it seemed to have very little in common with, and starting fairly late in the fall, this seemed destined to fail. Cristela came out to surprisingly (to me, anyway) mildly positive reviews however, and did better than expected, which still wasn’t quite enough for a second season. Points for beating my expectations, though.

Spring:

Galavant:

Prediction: 12-

Reality: Renewal

Galavant is a fit with ABC’s family friendly lineup, and it’s silly fairy tale like Once Upon a Time, but seriously, a comedy musical? That seemed ill-fated for sure. I was wrong, but I don’t feel bad about this pick.

Marvel’s Agent Carter:

Prediction: Renewal

Reality: Renewal

I should have mentioned this above, but in what has to be an incredible rarity if not an actual first, EVERY spring ABC show was renewed. That’s insane and incredibly unlikely and I’m still stunned. Marvel’s Agent Carter, as part of the Marvel Universe, on a network owned by the same people who own Marvel, seemed about as close to a slam dunk as there is, and though it actually ended up being a pretty close call, it made it.

Fresh Off the Boat

Prediction: 12-

Reality: Renewal

In hindsight, this seems like a perfect fit on ABC and makes total sense as a renewal. At the time, I was troubled by its time slot, away from the ABC comedies it was most similar to, and from some of the not entirely positive articles about how disenchanted Eddie Huang, on whom the show is based, had been by the process.

Secrets and Lies

Prediction: 12-

Reality: Renewal

This one still seems like a 12- to me. I can’t believe it got renewed. Before I rechecked to write this, I could have sworn it was cancelled. ABC executives must have really been feeling lucky and didn’t want this to throw off their string of successes.

American Crime

Prediction: Renewal

Reality: Renewal

This was an IMPORTANT show, with a couple of noteworthy actors, and though it ended up being borderline in terms of being picked up, I erred on the side that if it was borderline, ABC would pick it up for the PRESTIGE, and I was right.

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Spring 2015 Review: American Crime

13 Mar

American Crime

American Crime is a deadly serious drama which uses a tragic murder as a window through which it attempts to show a broad picture of America how it really is, unvarnished and unfiltered. Through a diverse cast of characters affected by and associated with this event, American Crime tries to cut through a broad spectrum of race and class, a tall task indeed. In doing so American Crime, takes part in a long tradition of cultural investigation of race and class issues through crime. The upside to this attempt is Traffic, the downside is Crash, and American Crime ends up somewhere between those two pillars.

American Crime begins right after a young man, a vet, was murdered and his wife raped and left for dead (she’s in critical condition). His father, Russ, is called in by the police, identifies the body, and then reaches out to his ex-wife, Barb. Barb, we learn, apparently raised their kids while Russ gambled the family’s money away and then left, although he forged a better relationship with his sons later in life. We see a lot of the parents grieving together and feeling with one another. When they feel like the policemen aren’t doing their job, they talk to a reporter to try to get the word out and keep the case in the news. Barb takes the opportunity to be casually racist when the killer is suspected to possibly be Hispanic.

Nearby, there’s a single Latino father, trying to raise his two children the right way in a neighborhood bereft with gangs, which has become that much more difficult after the death of his beloved wife. His son, who seems to be the apple of his eye, borrowed a car from their garage (the dad is a mechanic), and without permission loaned it out to a shady gang-related dude for what seemed like some easy cash. This comes back to bite the son when that dude is suspected of having murdered the aforementioned dead vet.

There’s also a third plot strand based around a couple of drug-addled lovers. I frankly have absolutely no idea how this is related to the rest of the show and I’m not sure if I’m missing something or it simply won’t be explained until a later episode.

Considering the on-the-nose potential of taking on race and class in this manner, the content itself is generally not as heavy handed as it could be, though it definitely could a defter touch at times.  The filming style as well is occasionally too much; there are strange and awkward cuts which feel unnecessarily arty; as if the director is really trying to let us know that this is serious stuff. And it is.

For the most part, American Crime isn’t a particularly fun show.  This is the fine line shows like American Crime walk. Like all deadly serious prestige dramas, it can feel like a slog if everything isn’t running on all cylinders. There’s certainly room for extremely serious television, but the less fun it is to watch, the more meritorious it best be in other ways to compensate. There could be some real merit here but I’m also not sure there was enough going on to compensate for how much I looked at my watch as the show was passing. As difficult as attempting to talk about race and class is, it’s certainly a worthy goal, and it’s possible American Crime may have the ability to add something productive to the conversation, but maybe at the expense of being an hour of television anyone wants to watch. The one source of drive for the show could be following the mystery, but it almost feels peripheral in the first episode to all the issues happening.

Will I watch it again? I don’t know. It certainly wasn’t bad, but it also didn’t leave me wanting to immediately watch another episode. Maybe if I don’t forget about it, I’ll come back when my TV week gets less crowded, and that lack of enthusiasm but minor interest is about accurate to how I feel about the show.

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Spring Previews and Predictions: ABC

5 Jan

ABC

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

These categories are:

  1. Renewal – show gets renewed
  2. 13+ – the show gets thirteen or more episodes, but not renewed
  3. 12- – the show is cancelled before 13

Additional note: Since more and more series on network TV are following cable models with set orders for shorter seasons, and mid-season replacements tend to have shorter seasons in particular, I’ll note any planned limited runs in my prediction section for each show)

Galavant – 1/4/15

Galavant

Galavant is a musical fairly tale comedy. If those words scare you as much as they do me, you’d think we were in for a bumpy ride. To be fair, this is the second example of the genre in a couple of months behind the admittedly less comic and generally well-reviewed Into the Woods film. This looks much, much sillier, and partly because of that, possibly much harder to stomach. It feels very Disney and the songs are impressively co-written by Disney legend Alan Menken. If it’s good, it could be cute, but if it’s bad, it could be very, very bad.

Prediction: 12- Galavant is designed as an eight episode limited series. While I’m sure if the series is somehow a hit, ABC will connive a way to make more in the future, if it’s anything but, it will be merely a zany miniseries airing with little to lose in January before the year really gets going. Musical comedy as a genre often walks a dangerous line between cute and funny and just plain awful, and while this is a logical family-friendly fairy tale companion piece for Once Upon a Time, I’ll take the conservative bet that it doesn’t earn another go around.

Agent Carter – 1/6/15

Agent Carter

Comics have taken over the movies, and now they’re on their way to taking over television. Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. has proven so far to be a mild, if relatively disappointing by Marvel’s high standards, success for ABC, so it’s only logical that the network under the same parent company (Disney) as Marvel makes another effort in that direction, pulling another show out of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. This time it’s a limited eight-episode run based on Peggy Carter, an agent with the Strategic Scientific Reserve from the Captain America movies. Agent Carter takes place in the 1940s and features Carter on a super secret mission recovering weapons stolen from Howard Stark, Tony’s dad. She’ll work with Stark’s butler Edwin Jarvis, the inspiration for Tony’s computer of the same name. It’s full of comic-book action-espionage, and though I couldn’t wager how good or not so good it’ll be, it probably won’t be awful and anyone who is familiar with Marvel products can probably hazard some idea of the appealing-but-safe tone the show will take.

Prediction: Renewal* – Another limited series, but since everything Marvel touches seems to turn to gold these days, I’ll take the upside. Even though I don’t necessarily think it’ll be a smash, it hardly needs to be to be a success on network TV these days. The biggest obstacle may be unwillingness by Marvel or Atwell to return for more episodes.

Fresh Off the Boat – 2/10/15

Fresh Off the Boat

First, before I say anything else, it’s worthwhile mentioning how rare and how welcome a sitcom about an Asian-American family is. Fresh Off the Boat is an ethnic family fish-out-of-water situation.  An Asian-American family is moving from multi-cultural Washington D.C., where they have friends and family to white=bread Orlando where the father just purchased an American Outback Steakhouse/Boulder Creek-type restaurant. Everyone struggles to fit in, driving each other crazy but ultimately loving one another, and hijinks ensue.

Prediction: 12- I don’t feel strongly, but the trailer didn’t particularly impress and it’s strangely slotted on Tuesday next to Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., with which it seems to have little in common. Wednesday is ABC’s big family comedy block, and sensibly fall newbie Black-ish is getting a coveted spot there; the Tuesday spot and general lack of promotion give me little faith in Fresh Off the Boat.

Secrets & Lies – 3/1/15

Secrets and Lies

A young boy is murdered. I had thought at the beginning of the trailer that this would be a classic season-long whodunit, but to my pleasant surprise, the show seems to skirt around the mystery and have a slightly different focus.  Ryan Phillippe plays the man who discovers the boy’s body, who is the prime suspect of the investigation. The show seems to focus on Phillippe and how he is hounded by the press, the locals, and the cops, while he denies any involvement. I’m not sure how long something like this can last, and it probably won’t be too different because it’s on broadcast TV, but it’s not a terrible idea, which is something. It’s based on an Australian show of the same name.

Predicton: 12- Midseaosn guesses are much harder than fall guesses. Between this show and American Crime which follows I simply have absolutely no idea.

American Crime – 3/5/15

American Crime

Timothy Hutton is finished applying Leverage and back into play as a grieving father in this attempt from ABC to catch on to the wonderful seasonal anthology wave (True Detective, American Horror Story) taking TV by storm. Hutton’s son’s death sets the story in motion, which prominently features both the grieving parents and the investigation into the son’s death. This does not appear to be a methodical season long whodunit in the style of The Killing or Broadchurch, but rather a faster-paced suspense oriented tale slowly unlocking a deeper mystery, while traversing the complexities of the American legal system.  Oh, and also, race is a major issue, which likely means, since it’s a network TV show, it will be poorly handled, although the show is created by the writer of 12 Years a Slave, so there’s hope. I love the seasonal anthology trend, so, why not.

Prediction: Renewal – I have absolutely zero confidence in this prediction. It’s got a couple of strong TV names, with Timothy Hutton and Felicity Huffman, and it looks like it might try to be important which could help it or backfire. I’m flipping imaginary coins here people.

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