Tag Archives: CBS

Spring 2014 Review: Friends with Better Lives

28 Apr

Friends With Better LivesHackneyed is possibly an overused word in describing bad television, but that doesn’t make it any less accurate. Lazy, half-hearted, simple, forced, these are all qualities of hackneyed writing. Friends with Better Lives has all of this in spades.

Friends with Better Lives feels as if it was written by a machine whose model was built by constant watching of second tier ‘90s sitcoms, with the morals and sensibilities for more risque, profane, and sexually open 21st century audiences. It’s all the jokes you know, except now they’re about blowjobs, and while maybe the joke was sometimes always about that, there used to be two steps removed between the act and the joke to keep in line with the morals of the time, and now it’s half a step.

Friends with Better Lives is part of the post-friends verse of making shows that star six people in their 20s and 30s, and it’s part of the sub-genre of these shows featuring people in different stages of relationships. There’s a somewhat long-time married couple that fits every married cliche  – they’ve gotten lazy, they’re no longer as fiery or passionate as they once were, but underneath, their marriage, as they realize late in the first episode, is strong. There’s the two young lovebirds, who get engaged on a whim after only dating for a few weeks. They’re head over heels and all about the sex, but a little flighty and scatter brained, making grand romantic gestures all the time, which both irritate and rouse jealousy of the old married couple. Finally, there’s a man getting divorced, and a single woman desperate to find a man, but whose pickiness and quickness to render judgment make it difficult.

You know the jokes. The married couple is in such a rut they forget their anniversary! Then, in a surprise that could have been written by a shitty TV scribe version of O. Henry, the married wife tries to spice up the marriage by coming home and giving her husband a blowjob when the lights are out, not knowing that a couple dozen of their closest friends are waiting to surprise her for a party. Oops! The jokes are loud and hammy – you can’t miss them, although you won’t be laughing.

I hate to have to waste a few sentences of this review on this (I don’t really, there’s not that much to say), but if I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times. If your show has a laugh track, it’s hard for me to take your show seriously. I don’t need to rehash every terrible aspect of the laugh track, and if you’re reading this, you probably hate them as much (or close, at least) as I do, but if networks keep putting them in shows, I’m going to keep commenting on them.  This laugh track was particularly bad, if it’s still possible to grade the relative bad-ness of laugh tracks in this day and age. The laugh track was the single biggest factor in making me not want to watch an episode, and in a show of this quality, that says a lot.

The show doesn’t really care. This isn’t a real attempt to make a good show.  That may go for most CBS comedies but it’s no less true here.  In this day and age when there are so many channels and shows on TV, it means there are more gems than ever but still just as many rote written by the numbers shows that keep getting made because occasionally people still watch them, but usually not. Pretty easy to predict this one won’t be around for long.

Will I watch this show again? Are you kidding? No. No. Come on. You should know me better than that by now.

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Spring 2014 Review: Intelligence

7 Feb

Intelligence?

It would be easy to make some wordplay based on the title Intelligence (and the show’s lack there of, etc.). I’ll abstain however, as the show was only relatively insipid, rather than incredibly so. That’s a mild back-handed compliment but I hope the show enjoys it because it’s just about the last it will get.

Here’s how I see the making of Intelligence. Someone had a genuinely gimmicky but not terrible idea for a show premise. Once that premise moved forward into the making of an actual show, well the rest was pretty much put together by the numbers, and probably could have been done by a machine when fed as inputs every other CBS procedural from the past decade.

Here is the premise. The hottest new piece of US technology to fight the war on, well, anything, is a man, a former super top notch military man, with a microchip implant. This microchip allows the power of computers to somehow fuse with his brain, which means he can instantly access and scroll through any piece of information available on the internet or other electronic system, and more than that, he can reconstruct entire scenes, Source Code-like, combining the facts he gets from his computer with the intelligent connections and leaps of reasoning from his brain. There’s not a half-bad idea here, if someone really worked on it; the battle between man and machine has been hit upon many times before (Fox’s Almost Human, and of course the recently remade RoboCop), but that’s partly because there’s a lot to mine. Besides being cool, it’s genuinely interesting in a world where more and more human roles are being usurped by technology to figure out where the lines are.

That’s about the last interesting part of the show, sadly. The soldier is Gabriel, played by Josh Holloway, best known to TV viewers as Lost’s Sawyer, and he’s a charming but rough-around-the-edges ex-Delta Force operative who doesn’t play by the rules. The show hangs the lampshade by asking why the government would implant this one single unique chip into a guy who may kind of not always follow their orders, but then they don’t really explain why they do it.

Our way into the story is through a secret service agent named Riley assigned to protect Gabriel. In 40 minutes, she goes from thinking this new assignment is not worth her time to agreeing to undertake Gabriel’s pet project, a search for his wife, who, reports say, turned on the US, and is dead, but which he doesn’t believe.

There’s a watchable but fairly unremarkable episodic storyline that involves its share of action scenes, Riley and Gabriel bonding, and a betrayal by a government agent which doesn’t mean a lot to us since we’ve known him for about five minutes.

The characters just aren’t that interesting, nor is the dialogue. I say it over again but I say it again here; there’s a limit to how much you can tell in the first episode of a show but you can, especially in a drama, tell a certain difference between dramas that, even if they don’t ultimately work, have a certain amount of care put into them, and ones that just seem like they were produced without any real passion. This is of the later variety. There’s nothing that elevates it above a standard procedural at absolute best.

A quick shout out before we go to Riley and Gabriel’s boss, played by CSI’s Marg Helgenberger, who’s clearly moved up the government ranks since her days in Las Vegas.

Will I watch it again? No. It’s not terrible as far as procedurals go, it’s just not even trying. It doesn’t seem like anybody put a lot of thought or caring or passion into this show and it shows.

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Fall 2013 Review: We Are Men

15 Nov

WeAreMenPilot1

Here’s the premise of We Are Men. Carter, a young man with his life seemingly all together sees it all fall apart when his fiancé (Wilfred’s Fiona Gubelmann) leaves him at the altar. His heart is broken, and he’s also newly unemployed as he worked for his fiance’s father. He freaks out, naturally, and eventually moves into short-term housing where he befriends three single dudes of varying ages, who show him the zen of being single and worrying about yourself for once. The three men are: (I’ll just use their actor’s names because you’re not going to remember their characters anyway) First, Tony Shalhoub, a four-time divorcee who is a bit sleazy but seemingly manages to consistently bed women far younger than himself thanks to his charisma and confidence. Second, Jerry O’Connell, a doctor and two-time divorcee, who is engaged in a long-term settlement battle with his second ex-wife. Third, Kal Penn, the only one of the three who still pines for his ex, who left him when she caught him sleeping around.

Anyway, basically the pilot is a battle for Carter’s soul between bromance and romance. Carter is beginning to really like the guys but also desperately misses his ex. He enjoys hanging out but quickly tires of their free and easy goal-less lifestyle. Kal Penn convinces Carter to make a grand romantic gesture to get his woman back. He does, and it works, and the marriage is back on. However, the guys realize that being with his fiance is actually killing Carter’s dreams, and they come in and interrupt the second wedding, convincing Carter to abandon his fiance at the altar this time to bromance it up and focus on making himself happy.

We Are Men is a bad show for a lot of the usual reasons (bad characters, bad writing) but what struck me in particular was the portrayal of women. Carter’s fiancé really is bad for him, in the show’s world, and for certain, anybody can get stuck in a bad relationship and some people just suck. Still, no woman in this show comes off as anything more than a male trope. His fiancé is holding him back from having fun and hanging out with his friends and wants him to work for her dad rather than pursue his dream job, which O’Connell helped arrange an interview for. The strangest complaint of Carter’s is that his fiance always makes them eat at the farmers market, which absolutely mystified me.

We Are Men tries to celebrate guydom and bromance and all those wonderful men-hanging-out-together qualities that so many shows have tried to celebrate over the last few years (probably due to the success of some combination of Entourage and The Hangover, but that’s another article). While there’s nothing wrong with celebrating male friendship, and I think it’s a great theme that was overlooked before a couple of years ago, sixth degree poor man’s iterations of that theme like “We Are Men” make me feel kind of disgusted for my gender. Certainly guys have been known to bash women as a gender occasionally, and there’s nothing wrong with idly complaining to some extent to make a guy feel better after a bad date or breakup, etc. It’s also silly to harp on one episode of a twenty minute show to bemoan the show’s point of view; it’s hard to fit a world view in less than a half hour. Still, it’s not an arbitrarily chosen half hour, it’s one you know your show will be judged and chosen by. Dads writes and creators balked at accusations of sexism and racism by claiming that later episodes would make the characters more complex, and to some extent it’s fair to note that most characters feel like tropes after an episode.   But maybe don’t put that much racism in it either. I would have absolutely no problem if the first episode featured just men; there’s nothing wrong with shows for men, by men, and they could introduce women in later episodes when these characters were more fleshed out. What I do have a problem is how the limited number of women are portrayed. His fiance is portrayed as a naggy impediment to his dreams. The other female character who gets a minute is Shalhoub’s daughter, who seemed like kind of a male fantasy, as the cool, sexy chick, who gave him tips on how to hook up with women. It’s not that other shows don’t feature women mostly as merely objects for men to ogle and hope to have sex with, but for whatever reason this show felt more boorish than most.

If Entourage is the male fantasy show you dream after a booze-filled party, We Are Men is the reality when you wake up groggy in the morning, hungover. Everything that seemed so great the night before now appears kind of ugly. While hanging out with cool successful guys and sleeping with a lot of hot chicks was fun in Entourage, it was less so when you realize that those guys were kind of sketchy and leering at women feels much more uncomfortable.

Of course guys look at attractive women, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with portraying that reality but I felt really creepy watching the four guys in We Are Men ogle women from their poolside. Probably the single worst shot without which it might not have stuck out as much is when the camera follows a bikini-glad young women, and Carter, narrating, tells us, well, we’re showing you that, just because. They do this in Entourage all the time, but somehow that show seemed separated from reality in so many ways, and it was strangely easy to enjoy the fun fantastical times Entourage provided while laughing away its approach towards women.

Anyway, bad show. Also worth noting were the cameos by Alan Ruck, who has also appeared in a couple of episodes of Masters of Sex this year, who shows up as the priest officiating Carter’s wedding, and Dave Foley, who is in the show for approximate ten seconds as Carter’s dad.

Will I watch it again? I again could only watch one more even if I wanted to, but I don’t. America got one right and decided they collectively ddin’t want to see any more of this claptrap. Smart call.

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Fall 2013 Review: The Crazy Ones

23 Oct

Robin and Sarah Michelle Crazy

Robin Williams stars as Robin Williams. That’s the first and most important thing you need to know about The Crazy Ones. This is one of those shows where whether you like it or hate it will be determined by how much you like the main actor, as the show is built mostly on him simply being himself. There’s a few of these star-based sitcoms every year, that are shows essentially built around a single actor or actress. They usually star comedians, who, unlike actors who are supposed to be able to slip into a role, generally are chosen for their particular comedic style and stage personality and more or less play an exaggerated version of themselves.

Robin Williams plays Simon Roberts, a once legendarily charismatic ad-man who has lost his edge over the years, a la Robin Williams the comedian (have you seen Man of the Year or RV?). Sarah Michelle Gellar plays his more serious daughter who both loves his father and is constantly frustrated by his flights of fancy and refusal to be professional.  She’s recently been added to the name of the firm; Roberts and Roberts.  The cast is rounded out by an artist named Andrew who does just about nothing in the first episode, an assistant named Lauren who does very little, and James Wolk, Man Men’s Bob Benson, as Zachary, who seems to be a fast-talking Robin Williams protégé and gets the most to do after the two stars. While poor Gellar is frequently stuck as a nag, Wolk gets to have fun with WIlliams, and attempt to exchange what they seem to think is hilarious banter.

Speaking of Mad Men, it doesn’t help that this Wolk is there to remind me of Mad Men, the biggest and best advertising agency-based show of this era. While The Crazy Ones, a sitcom, is going for a very different tenor and vibe than Mad Men in almost every possible way, it’s hard to listen to Robin Williams pitch the clients without thinking of how inferior everything about the pitch scene is to similar scenes in Mad Men. Admittedly, that’s pretty unfair; no show is going to be Mad Men. What’s not unfair is to mention that the scenes, and the show, are not the least bit funny or really amusing.

It’s also worth noting that the episode seems kind of like a giant commercial for primary Roberts and Roberts client McDonald’s, which gets mentioned a remarkable amount of times in The Crazy Ones’ twenty two minute running time.

Honestly that’s a fairly terrible example of blatant product placement but that’s just one episode. What really bothers me is that there’s just  so much Robin Williams shtick. He does impressions, he changes voices, he’s so fucking wacky and painfully so. He’s off the wall, and it’s implied that this is part of both the success and the failure of Williams’ abilities as an ad man, and that rings true for his career as a comedian as well. Can’t he turn it off? Do people really like this? Is he talented? Well, it’s definitely a talent. That doesn’t mean it’s not incredibly annoying. I spent the entire episode feeling really bad for Sarah Michelle Gellar’s character who has to be the constant irritant to Williams, slowing down his imperfect creative mind to attempt to make him be serious. Everyone else on the show cracks up at his antics, while Gellar, like myself, was constantly frustrated, wanting him to get it together. There’s an important client there, can he act like he cares at all?

Of course, that’s what Williams is going to do. That’s what you hire him to do generally, even though his best roles in the last two decades have been the creepy dramatic persona he unveiled in One Hour Photo (I still shudder) and Insomnia. If he kept up with his dramatic acting I’d be extremely interested, but he hasn’t, and I’m not.

Will I watch it again? No. It wasn’t funny. I haven’t found Robin Williams funny since around Aladdin, and nothing changed my opinion here. More than not funny, his bits get on my nerves after a while; twenty minutes can pack a surprising amount of Robin Williams.

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Fall 2013 Review: Mom

21 Oct

Two Moms

Mom stars Anna Faris as Christy, a mom of two kids, a teenage daughter and a younger son, from two different fathers. Christy is a recovering alcoholic, who entered AA fairly recently and is desperately trying to put her life together and be a better mother to her kids than her mom was to her.  She works as a waitress at a fancy French restaurant run by a pretentious jerk of a chef named Rudy, played by French Stewart (French restaurant, French Stewart – makes sense, right). Her boss is Gabriel (Nate Corddry, who served briefly as a Daily Show correspondent at the same time as his older brother Rob), who she’s dating. Unfortunately, he’s also married to the daughter of the restaurant’s owner. At home, her teenage daughter Violet is sleeping with her idiot boyfriend Luke, while her son’s stoner dad Baxter (Matt Jones, Breaking Bad’s Badger) hangs around obnoxiously trying to spend time with her son, Roscoe. Into these already messy times, comes her mom, Bonnie, played by Allison Janney, a recovering alcoholic herself. , Bonnie taught Christy all of her bad habits, and Christy blames for her many of her problems. After being prodded by her daughter on charges of hypocrisy, Christy reluctantly tries to renew her relationship with her mother. Frustratingly, it seems like Bonnie’s prickly personality hasn’t changed a bit even though she’s kicked the booze and the drugs.

Anna Faris has long been a talented comedic actress who simply couldn’t find the right role. She starred in several movies, most of which were mediocre at best, and a television show has long seemed in the offing as a natural use of her talents. Amy Poehler is the go-to example of an actress who found her home as a TV lead, but there are others. Unfortunately, this show isn’t Faris’ Parks and Recreation and does not take full advantage of Faris’ abilities..

When I talked about the failings of The Michael J. Fox Show, I talked about how it has all the elements required to put together a solid sitcom outside from good jokes.  Mom is about two elements behind The Michael J. Fox Show on the road to sitcom glory.  It’s significantly better than the worst shows of the season, The Millers, and Dads, but it’s still significantly behind being worth watching.  Faris and Janney are talented and the show is well meaning.  The premise is a solid one as well, and there’s a lot of potential humor, pathos and characterization that could be built out of that set up, and with those actresses particularly at the heart of it.

Unfortunately it’s both not funny and not built in a style which allows it to be funny. It’s way too hammy. It has a laugh track, which you may know if you’ve ready any of my reviews, is basically a non-starter. This laugh track is particularly insufferable, as is the low moment of the episode, when CBS star Jon Cryer shows up as a diner at Christy’s restaurant, and the laughs turn to loud cheers, just to make sure you know that a fellow CBS sitcom actor should be celebrated.  This is the 21st century; I expect better.  Television is now being taken more seriously as an art form as ever before, and part of the reason why is because it’s shed things like laugh tracks and hackneyed humor with long pauses that give the audience time to catch up. All these pieces reek of the days TV was considered obviously inferior to film.

If you strip away both the jokes and the style, there’s a potentially good sitcom here. But it’s buried deep underneath the canned jokes and canned laughter, far too deep to see the light of day.

Will I watch it again? No. That a Chuck Lorre sitcom isn’t awful is a fair backhanded compliment; Mom is not awful. It’s not good enough to watch though. Try harder.

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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 Previews and Predictions: CBS

11 Sep

CBS

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

These categories are:

1.  Renewal – show gets renewed

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

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

The most watched network is up next.  CBS is looking to churn out some more winners and keep its reign going.  Which will be hits and which will be misses?  I’ll take some guesses at what people who like things that I hate will watch.

Mom – 9/23

Maybe better than Dads

Chuck Lorre, the genius behind CBS megahits Two and a Half Men and The Big Bang Theory tries to strike gold again for the eye with this sitcom starring talented-but-could-never-find-the-right-project Anna Faris and former The West Wing press secretary Allison Janney.  Faris plays a single mother battling alcoholism who moves in with her also recovering alcoholic mom in California.  It’s multi-camera, it’s got a laugh track along with everything that anyone who loves either of those other CBS shows will probably love for some reason. Breaking Bad’s Badger, Matt Jones, is in the cast, and I already feel like I will think he’s the best part of the first episode.

Prediction: Renewal – Faris should have had a TV show years ago, and as terrible as it’s probably going to be, it’s gotten a big promotional push and has the Lorre touch.

Hostages – 9/23

Hostages

TV superstar Dylan McDermott plays an FBI agent who kidnaps the family of a doctor, played by Toni Collette, to force her to assassinate the president when she does surgery on him later that week.  Hostages carries the action bona fides of executive producer Jerry Bruckheimer.  It looks intense and I have absolutely no idea how they’ll make a second season, unless they anticlimactically stretch everything out for way too long.  It might be better than a typical CBS show, which is damning it with faint praise, but still, at least it’s not a procedural, which is a huge step for CBS.

Prediction: Renewal – if I made longer term predictions I’d guess this will go two seasons, like Smith, drawing some initial viewers and gradually fading away as the buzz falls away. Just put me down for renewal though, for now.

The Crazy Ones – 9/26

Robin Williams is The Crazy Ones

Robin Williams is back on TV, being Robin Williams-y to the extreme.  He plays the wacky father to Sarah Michelle Gellar’s sensible daughter, and the two are partners at an advertising agency that bears their names.  Mad Men this is not.  It’s hard to remember a time when Williams was funny, or maybe I only found him funny because I was younger and my tastes have changed.  Either way, if Williams could play his far superior creepy One Hour Photo dramatic self, a Williams-led TV show could be fun, but as he won’t, it most certainly will not be.

Prediction: 13+ – Williams is still a big name, even though so much time has passed since his movies made any money, or even since he headlined movies. Big enough for a full season pick up, but not a renewal, ratings will disappoint, but CBS will play the season through out of hope.

We Are Men – 9/30

They Are Men

TV vets Kal Penn, Tony Shalhoub, and Jerry O’Connell play veteran singles who show relative TV newcomer Chris Smith the ropes when his fiancé dumps him at the alter and he moves into a singles-friendly rental complex.  It may be another men-learning-how-to-be-men show, which we seem to get two or three of every year, but whether it is or isn’t, it looks terrible. Did Kal Penn really leave the Obama administration for this? And Tony Shalhoub, I’m not proud of you either.

Prediction: 12- As always, some people will watch it because older peoples’ TVs only get CBS, but the standards are also higher (ratings-wise, not quality-wise) and this show will not meet them.  CBS shows do fail.  Who remembers last year’s Partners?

The Millers – 10/3

We're the Millers - the TV adaptation

I believe I noted in an earlier post that Will Arnett, if The Millers fails  (which I, spoiler alert, believe it will) will have the unenviable achievement of having starred in failed sitcoms on three of the four major networks (Running Wilde on Fox and Up All Night on NBC).  Networks see him as a leading man rather than the wonderful wacky side character he played in his breakout performance in Arrested Development ,but he hasn’t delivered yet.  Arnett plays a recently divorced man whose world is turned upside down when his dad decides to leave his mom, ending a four decade marriage. This show, which, and I know this sounds like a refrain on this CBS page, but it’s still true, looks terrible, It also has more wasted talent than Arnett, with Emmy winner Margo Martindale, Beau Bridges, Curb Your Enthusiasm funnyman JB Smoove and Glee’s Jayma Mays.

Prediction: 12- Arnett’s presence would almost be enough for me to pick cancellation in and of itself (Yes, I know Up All Night technically went two seasons, but that’s a fluke at best) but the show selling itself in the trailer on a Martindale fart joke, well, that sealed the deal.

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Reviewing My Fall 2012 Predictions

22 Jul

Who remembers this one?

Many months ago, last September, I predicted the success of every new broadcast network series.  Unfortunately for me, I feel that predictions are cop outs unless they’re reassessed later on.  Let’s take a look back, and see what went right, and mostly what went wrong, with some hindsight thoughts about why I picked the shows, or whether I regret the picks.  These picks were made before I saw the first episodes, so they were primarily based on some combination of network, trailers, descriptions, promotion, general buzz, and some good old fashioned gut feeling.

I originally predicted one of three outcomes for every new series – 13 or less episodes (13-), 14 or more, but not renewed (14+), or Renewal.  We’ll break it down by network.  Links to my original predictions will be attached to each network name.

ABC

ABC

666 Park Avenue

My pick: 13-

Reality: 13-

It’s nice to start with a correct pick!  This is probably why I chose to go through the networks in alphabetical order.  This was a guess; I would have said I was less than 50% confident in this outcome.

Last Resort

My pick: 14+

Reality: 13-

Last Resort had a good premise, a strong cast, a heralded creator in Shawn Ryan, and was one of the best, if not the best, fall network debut.  I hoped my guess was conservative, but it wasn’t.  I don’t think this was a terrible pick.

The Neighbors

My pick: 14+

Reality: Renewal

Honestly, I think I was generous and this should have been a 13- call.  In the biggest “Huh?” decision of this year, The Neighbors was renewed.  This is one of those times where I insist I was right and ABC was wrong.  Sometimes reality gets it wrong.

Nashville

My pick: Renewal

Reality: Renewal

I felt pretty good about this pick.  There are a couple of series every year the networks really push hard, and Nashville was one of them, plus it was actually pretty good, if not quite as good as it could have been.  I took the smart money and the smart money won.

Malibu

My pick: 13-

Reality: 14+

This one actually got a small additional episode pick up before being cancelled.  In a post-Last Man Standing world, you can’t doubt any ABC comedy no matter how lousy, but I’m not too annoyed with myself here.  Acceptable loss.

CBS

CBS

Made in Jersey

My pick: 13-

Reality: 13-

Probably the easiest single pick of the year.  It’s CBS, so you never know what will get some eyeballs, but that also means the standards for expected number of viewers was high.  No drama seems as obviously cancellable as Made in Jersey this year.

Partners

My pick: 14+

Reality: 13-

Was I delusional?  What planet was I living on that I didn’t immediately give this 13-?  To be fair, I hadn’t seen the awful pilot at that point, but come on.  I think I overrated the CBS effect, because I can’t think of another explanation.

Vegas

My pick: Renewal

Reality: 14+

This one was cancelled, but I’m still happy with my call.  Although it isn’t horseshoes or hand grenades, so coming close doesn’t really count, this show could have been renewed, and I feel perfectly fine with my prediction.

Elementary

My pick: Renewal

Reality: Renewal

If I had seen the pilot I would have been even more confident, and I’m not sure how obvious this was as a hit before the year started.  I think this was a smart pick, but not as crazily obvious as it seems now by any means.

CW

CW

Emily Owens, M.D.

My pick: Renewal

Reality: 13-

So I screwed up the CW bad, real bad, and two out of three picks I actually feel bad about.  I wouldn’t have picked renewal if this was on any other network but the CW, and thinking back I understand my logic that this fit their brand real well (the somewhat similar Hart of Dixie is going into a third season next fall) but I still should have erred away from renewal.

Arrow

My pick: 14+

Reality: Renewal

For what it’s worth, I didn’t think it was going to get quickly cancelled, but I blame myself for underrating the superhero appeal from a network that broadcast 10 seasons of Smallville.  If I judged this after the pilot, I’d like to think I would have changed my mind but I can’t be sure.

Beauty and the Beast

My pick: 14+

Reality: Renewal

The only pierce of my 0-for-3 CW record I’m not particularly ashamed of.  It wasn’t very good, and definitely seemed third in the pecking order to me after Emily Owens and Arrow and I figured the network wouldn’t renew three shows.  Not a crazy guess.

Fox

Fox

The Mindy Project

My pick: Renewal

Reality: Renewal

The comedy equivalent of Nashville.  Lots of buzz, general critical like, if not quite love, and push from the network.  A smart bet, and a correct one.

Ben and Kate

My pick: Renewal

Reality: 14+

I’m not angry about this pick, only the fact that Ben and Kate wasn’t given more of a chance.  It was probably better than Mindy, and though I’m glad at least one of them was picked up, this is the show I’m probably most bummed about not getting a second season this year.

The Mob Doctor

My pick: 13-

Reality: 13-

One of the easier guesses for 13-.  Not a ton of promotion, everything just reeked of not trying that hard and not caring very much about this wholly mediocre show.

NBC

NBC

Go On

My pick: 14+

Reality: 14+

Hey there, I nailed this one exactly.  I bet on Perry’s star and heavy promotion extending the series, but attention fading later on, and that’s exactly what happened.  It got okay but not great reviews, and it wasn’t enough even on NBC.

Animal Practice

My pick: 13-

Reality: 13-

Probably the easiest comedy call of the year.  Come on, did anyone actually think this was going to last?

Chicago Fire

My pick: Renewal

Reality: Renewal

My best arbitrarily guess of the year.  I had no idea what to make of this show and it was a little bit of an under-the-radar surprise for NBC.  If only Omar Epps could star in a show on CBS, all three initial House assistants could be starring in shows on Fox’s rivals (Jesse Spencer here, Jennifer Morrison on ABC’s Once Upon a Time).

Guys With Kids

My pick: 13-

Reality: 14+

Until I just looked this up, I didn’t realize this got a small additional episode order.  Why, I’m not sure, it’s produced by Jimmy Fallon and was advertised as such and that’s the only reason I could imagine this lousy show having a chance.

The New Normal

My pick: Renewal

Reality: 14+

I’m fine with getting this one wrong.  Ryan Murphy’s been hot of late with Glee and American Horror Story, and considering NBC renewed Smash, I thought the buzz and hot start might be enough to carry the show to another season even with a sharp decline in interest.  Oh well.

Revolution:

My pick: Renewal

Reality: Renewal

I screwed up Terra Nova last year, but NBC, like Fox for that show, put a lot of money, time and promotion into this show, and it actually got surprisingly good initial ratings even as the show got worse.  A pleasant surprise for NBC, that, like Smash, last year, I could easily see fading and being cancelled after its second season.

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Summer 2013 Review: Under the Dome

3 Jul

Dome-tastic

Under the Dome is an extremely literal title.  The main characters, primarily the residents of the small (presumably New England, since it’s written by Stephen King, but not specified that I can recall) town Chester’s Mill, along with some people who were passing through, are completely trapped from the outside world under a giant mysterious dome.  So far, we know nothing can go through the dome, including sound, and citizens haven’t yet found a way to contact anyone outside the dome.  The only method of communication is through sight on either side of the dome.

So that’s our big premise, taken from a recent Stephen King novel of the same name.  That’s by far the most important part of the first episode.  The second task of the pilot is to get a passing look at who we can guess will be our major characters.  Here they are in short.  First, you’ve got chief of police veteran Duke (Jeff Fahey, pilot Lapidus on Lost), and his younger chief deputy Linda, engaged to a firefighter outside of the dome.  Due to poor timing, many of the town’s police were out of town participating in a parade.  There’s “Big Jim” Rennie, car salesman and town council member (played by Dean Norris, Hank from Breaking Bad).  Big Jim and Duke have a tet a tet most of the way through the episode and appear to be keeping some sort of secret from most of the town involving bringing in lots of propane.

There’s a pair of erstwhile summer lovers, teenagers Junior and Angie.  What was a fun little fling goes bad when Angie doesn’t reciprocate Junior’s love, and Junior turns out to be some sort of psycho and kidnaps Angie and locks her away in a fallout shelter.  Joe, a high schooler, is Angie’s younger brother.  They’re both parentless for the duration of the dome.

There’s a Barbie, an ex-military out of towner who was looking shady at the beginning and could be either good or bad.  He appears to have been on some sort of mission that involved needing a gun and looks a little like Jeremy Renner.  He’s staying with local journalist Julia for the time being whose husband is missing and/or dead and/or having an affair.

Phil is a local radio DJ, and Dodee is his engineer at the station.  Alice and Carolyn are parents just passing through en route to drop off their troubled, rebellious daughter Mackenzie at camp, before they get trapped (if only they hadn’t stopped at that one gas station).

Those are from what I could suss out the major characters, though there may be more introduced later, and some of the characters I described may turn out to be more minor than I could have figured from the premiere.

There are two major fronts then to work with in Under the Dome.  There’s the question behind what the dome actually it is, how the characters find that out, if they can communicate outside the dome, get anything in, etc.

Then, what will probably occupy more time, is how everybody deals with the situation that arises when the characters realize they’re cut off from the rest of the world.  Separating all the characters from the rest of society under the dome should give us a set up for the classic science fiction situation of an external futuristic (or supernatural) power forcing humans into difficult and unusual situations.  They’ll have to decide whether to work together or compete and act outside of the ways they do every day, revealing their true natures. Do people look out for each other and help to store food for the good of the whole town?  Do they form gangs and compete and engage in violence?   It’s a classic Lord of the Flies scenario, and the dome is their island.

As I’ve said time and again, I’m a sucker for high concept serial science fiction shows.  I know by now better than to get too excited from a mere one or two episodes of a series.  Big sci-fi series like these so often disappoint, and they’re a thousand times easier to begin than to end (or to, well, middle, for that matter).  It’s not particularly difficult to think of a wacky situation and create a cast of characters; it’s much harder to flesh out those characters with realistic and believable motivations and create a plot that obeys the rules set out by the show, and is compelling, well-paced, and not anti-climactic.

This has the building blocks.  The reason it’s intriguing is solely the future possibilities but it’s hard to ask for too much more out of a first episode.  There’s nothing about the writing or the characters or the film work that stands out, but I’m affirmatively intrigued due largely to the plot, and with pilots, if the plot is compelling enough that can be enough, especially for sci-fi or fantasy.

Will I watch the next episode?  Yes.  It’s on CBS.  I can’t remember the last show I’ve watched a second episode of on CBS.  I’ve repeatedly faced let downs with these types of shows; I watched multiple episodes of Revolution which I regretted quickly, as well as Terra Nova.  I’m probably never going to learn completely.  All I can do is know my own biases and prepare myself for the likely disappointment.  In its favor, this at least this has some source material by a credible writer to work with, and is created by Brian K. Vaughan, a comic writer whose work I’ve enjoyed.

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