Tag Archives: Matthew Fox

Power Rankings: Party of Five

15 Aug

’90s  teen drama Party of Five on the agenda this week:

(Power Rankings sum up:  Each week, we’ll pick a television show and rank the actors/actresses/contestants/correspondents/etc. based on what they’ve doneafter the series ended (unless we’re ranking a current series, in which case we’ll have to bend the rules).  Preference will be given to more recent work, but if the work was a long time ago, but much more important/relevant, that will be factored in as well)

  1. Matthew Fox (as Charlie Salinger) – It’s fair to make it a close call between the first two, but there’s a one word answer for why Fox takes home the title:  Lost.  Simple, yes, but important as well – it’s just one TV show, but Jack was the first amongst equals in the ensemble cast, and though that’s really the only major project Fox was working on for years, it’s far more significant, culturally relevant, and memorable, horrible ending or not, than anything our second place finisher has come home with.  Honestly, that’s just about it – it’s just a really big one, but I should at least mention his role in colossal flop Speed Racer, short-lived pre-Lost UPN series Haunted, and in, what I suppose might be his largest movie role, We Are Marshall.
  1. Jennifer Love Hewitt (as Sarah Reeves Marin) – While Matthew Fox would wait a solid four years from the end of the Party of Five for the role that would make his career, Hewitt was the breakout star almost immediately, and her career has pretty much gone downhill from there.  Arguably her two best remembered film roles happened while she was still on Party of Five, with I Know What You Did Last Summer and Can’t Hardly Wait.  At the time same time as the last season of Party of Five was airing, Hewitt got her shot at a spin-off with Time of Your Life, co-starring Jennifer Garner, which failed after a single season.  From there, feature film pickings have been relatively slim, with two Garfield movies and The Tuxedo, and a whole lot of made-for-tv movies.  She lasted a hard-to-believe five seasons starring in her own show, Ghost Whisperer, which reruns on PAX constantly.  Does she have more on her resume than Fox?  Certainly.  That said, all combined, I still don’t think it equals one Lost.  And this is including her musical career, topped by single How Do I Deal which peaked at 59 on the Hot 100.
  1. Scott Wolf (as Bailey Salinger)– Never with the starpower of either of the first two actors on the list, Wolf has nevertheless put together a workmanlike career of appearing in the main cast of relatively unsuccessful but at least vaguely remembered shows.  First, four years after the end of Party of Five’s run, he joined the cast of the third and fourth season of Treat Williams-led drama Everwood.  Next, he was in the main cast of the ambitious but ultimately unsuccessful The Nine (constantly confused by me with other failed pilot that year Six Degrees).  Most recently, just these past two years he was a key member of ABC’s ‘80s Sci-fi reboot, V.  Nothing spectacular, but steady, solid work.
  1. Neve Campbell (as Julia Salinger)-  talk about Jennifer Love Hewitt, squared – Campbell was as big as Hewitt at the time of the show, starring in Scream, the movie that inspired Hewitt’s hit, I Know What You Did Last Summer, along with Wild Things, The Craft, and Scream 2, all before the end of Party of Five’s run.  At that time, Campbell’s theatrical career took off in the wrong direction, but she still had some things going on, as she appeared in Scream 3, as well as the small-budget but well reviewed Panic, in 2000, and The Company in 2003.  After that, well, it’s a lot of TV movies, and projects you’ve definitely never heard of, rescued only by the resurrection of the Scream franchise and a main cast role in an extremely short-lived NBC series in 2009 I don’t remember existing called The Philanthropist.
  1. Scott Grimes (as Will McCorkle) – So here’s where it gets interesting – I wasn’t even necessarily planning on ranking Grimes – he was only a main cast member for half the seasons of the show, and frankly, I had, unfairly, it turns out, figured that he hadn’t really done much else.  Turns out he put out quite the nice little career.  He played a main character in ER for its final six years, from 2003 until 2009.  He also voices Steve Smith in American Dad, which has now run for six years itself.  He played a supporting role in Band of Brothers as well, appearing in every episode.  Oh, and he charted two top 40 adult contemporary singles in 2005, and appeared as a killer in a fifth season Dexter episode.  Not shabby at all.
  1. Lacey Chabert (as Claudia Salinger) – She’s got one very prominent movie role, as one of the Plastics in 2004’s Mean Girls, and she appeared in Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, and, well, Daddy Day Care, and a bunch of things even worse than that.  That said, voice roles keep her a little more occupied.  She played Meg during the first season of Family Guy, before being replaced by Mila Kunis.  She voiced one of the Wild Thornberrys for that show’s six year run, and in the feature film and she voiced Gwen Stacy in two seasons of a recent Spider-man kids show.  Not great work by any means, but work, and pretty good for the sixth most accomplished cast member in Party of Five.
  1. Paula Devicq (as Kirsten Bennett Thomas Sallinger) – We start getting closer to scrub territory.   She was in the one season produced of the A&E Sidney Lumet created legal drama called100 Centre Street, starring Alan Arkin.  She was in six episodes of Rescue Me.  And she was in the pilot of the Dylan McDermott led TNT miniseries The Grid (of which I own a T-shirt, my favorite random pop culture shirt).  Wikipedia also describes her as “starring” in the upcoming Richard Gere movie Abritrage, and their definition of starring apparently now includes being the eleventh cast member listed on IMDB.  Moving on.
  1. Jeremy London (as Griffin Chase Holbrook) – he was a regular in two seasons of 7th Heaven, and according to wikipedia, he seems to be killing it in a whole bunch of TV movies that don’t even have their own entries.

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Power Rankings: That ’70s Show

8 Aug

Considering the utter mediocrity of this show, it’s astounding how successful some of the cast members have been after its end.

  1. Ashton Kutcher (as Michael Kelso) – this choice was by no means obvious. I think the first two are pretty clearly the first two, but the order is not clear at all.  A couple of years ago, I think it would have been a runaway, but the second place finisher has made it a race.  Ashton Kutcher’s movie career, in which he’s starred in a number of movies, but has largely been more famous than successful, may or may not be enough.  However, the fact that he’s the new star of Two and Half Men, combined with his past, but still noteworthy work on Punk’d, and his other production work with Beauty at the Geek keeps him at the top (Actually, I looked again at how some his movies did, and they were more successful than I thought – While Killers kind of bombed, What Happens in Vegas and No Strings Attached, although tepidly reviewed at best, made a ton of money – Ashton is a clearer #1 than I realized).
  1. Mila Kunis (as Jackie Burkhart) – she came so close to taking the top spot for me, but I thought she didn’t quite have the body of work.  That said, she’s been on the rise the past couple of years, highlighted by her performance in The Black Swan.  While she wasn’t the lead, she was highly acclaimed as the second star in one of the most talked about films of the year.  She also appears this summer in Friends with Benefits, the direct copycat to Ashton Kutcher’s earlier-this-year No Strings Attached, which featured Kunis’ Black Swan co-star Natalie Portman,  so the first two spots have more in common than That ‘70s Show (their characters also dated on That ’70s Show for most of the first four seasons). Perhaps the relative success of the two films will give us a more concrete judgment.  Forgetting Sarah Marshall was her first big, successful movie role, and afterwards she had a couple of fallow years, but has rebounded in a big way.  Bonus points for being the voice of Meg Griffin (yes, I know, it’s Meg, but still) in Family Guy almost since its inception (replacing Lacey Chabert).
  1.  Topher Grace (as Eric Forman) – there’s a big of a dropoff after the first two.  Grace keeps trying to force his way into starring roles, but every time he makes progress, he seems to take a step back.  Way back during the run of That ’70s Show, he starred in the light Win a Date With Tad Hamilton! and the significantly darker In Good Company.  After that there was a break until he filmed his role as Venom in Spiderman 3, which came out after the last season of That 70s Show, in which he showed up only in the finale.  From there, he’s had one of the fifty bajillion roles in Valentine’s Day (alongside showmate Kutcher), and starred in the retro-’80s flop Take Me Home Tonight.  He’ll be costarring with Richard Gere in a political spy thriller as his next chance.
  1. Laura Prepon (as Donna Pinciotti) – Propon’s work has pretty much been relegated to the small screen, with guest star appearances here and there, including most notably for me, a three episode stint in How I Met Your Mother as Ted’s college ex-girlfriend.  She apparently starred as one of the main cast in the one season October Road, which I vaguely remember (but may just be thinking of space movie October Sky or one-hit wonder Blue October) and was about a 30-year old who went off to Europe for a trip, ended up staying there a decade, and is just coming home to deal with his old hood.  Prepon is getting her biggest opportunity in years with the starring role in the new sitcom based on Chelsea Handler’s life, named after her best-selling autobiography, Are You There Vodka, It’s Me Chelsea.
  1. Kurtwood Smith (as Red Forman)– the actor who came into the show with the most renown (a lot easier when you’ve had thirty or so more years to work with) has had a relatively decent amount of work, mostly in television.  He starred as the father in the American clone of British Worst Week, which actually lasted its whole one season run on the air.  He was a major character in 24’s second to last season as a liberal senator, and he starred in the short-lived 2011 series Chaos, as the director of a bunch of rogue CIA spies.  He also appeared in two of the best episodes of personal favorite Childrens Hospital.
  1. Wilmer Valderama (as Fez) – he’s had a little bit of work – in 2006, he was one of many characters in the not incredibly successful Richard Linklater attempt to make a fictionalized version of Eric Schlosser’s classic tale of the tragedy of our food system Fast Food Nation (right up there with Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma) .  For two years, he hosted MTV insult-fest Yo Momma! In 2008, he was in a crime drama called Columbus Day with Val Kilmer which did not actually make it to theaters, and sounds more like it should be the sixth sequel in the Valentine’s Day franchise.  In 2011, he was the fifth lead in Tom Hanks-Julia Roberts kind-of-flop-but-at-least-it-didn’t-cost-that-much Larry Crowne.  Yeah, we’ve fallen a long way from the top two.
  1. Deborah Jo Rupp (as Kitty Forman)– and the entries get shorter yet.  Rupp worked plenty in the years before That ‘70s Show, with key roles in Friends and Seinfeld in the ‘90s.  Afterwards?  Well, she was in an SVU episode (who wasn’t?), she played Jay Baruchel’s mom in She’s Out of My League, and she was the mom in Better Than You, a sitcom I don’t remember at all existing which ran this past television season on ABC before being cancelled.
  1. Danny Masterson (as Steven Hyde) – he was in Jim Carrey vehicle Yes Man, and an episode of well-reviewed Fox sitcom Raising Hope.  He’s also way into DJing, and DJed sets at Lollapalooza the last three years.  That’s kind of cool.
  1. Josh Meyers (as Randy Pearson) – his older bro is SNL head writer Seth Meyers.  He appears in The Pee Wee Herman show on Broadway.  That’s also kind of cool.
  1. Don Stark (as Bob Pinciotti) – it’s pretty slim pickings here, and I consider it a courtesy for me just to list him.  He has been in single episodes of Supernatural and Dirty Sexy Money and a couple of episodes of Disney web series Cory and Lucas for the Win.

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