Tag Archives: Summer 2013 TV Season

Summer 2013 Review: Mistresses

7 Jun

The four mistressesMy first impression of the show was, wow, there’s trashy, and then there’s Mistresses.  Within thirty seconds in the show’s first episode, three of the four primary female characters are having sex (obviously there’s no nudity; this is a network show).  The credit sequence which appeared shortly after revealed that Mistresses was adapted from a foreign series, and I immediately assumed it was adapted from a British series, because this species of trash reeks of the United Kingdom, and I was correct.  I’ve never actually watched any of those trashy British soaps (Footballers’ Wives comes to mind, but I’m sure there’s tons more) but this seems like an Americanized version of what I think those shows are like.  You can tell it’s attempting to be provocative by the very name Mistresses, implying our main characters will be occupying the socially taboo position of sleeping with married gentlemen.

However, it’s not really as provocative as it seems to want you to think it is.  That opening scene is pretty much the last sex you get in the entire episode, as it gets all drama-y and soap-y.  Four women, in different stages of relationships, are all dealing with men, or the lack there of, and life in general.  Alyssa Milano’s Savannah is a high-powered lawyer who is having serious problems with her chef husband due to their inability to conceive, particularly when it turns out that it’s because of him rather than her.  Her younger free-spirited sister, the only actual mistress in the series’ present time, is a real estate agent sleeping around with her boss.  She faces a dilemma when the boss/lover offers to buy her a house when her lease is up.  Karen (Lost’s Yunjin Kim) is a psychologist, who spent a time as a mistress when she recently had a tempestuous affair with a patient who was dying.  At the funeral, which occurs soon after the opening credits, the dead man’s son comes to her and tells her that he suspects his dad was having an affair.  Oops.  The fourth character is April, a single mom who is still dealing with the death of her husband three years ago and is having difficulty trying to return to the dating world.  She’s taken aback at the end of the episode, when another woman brings to her door a young child which the woman claims is April’s ex-husband’s.

Like so many female-centered shows in the past decade, it’s definitely a show consciously taking place in the post-Sex and the City world, where four women support each other, work hard towards career goals, and gossip openly and proudly about each other’s sex lives.  It’s certainly trashier than the Sex and the City, but, as mentioned above, the first three minutes of the show offer a misleadingly trashy view of what’s to be expected.  Instead, it’s a soupy personal drama about the four women and it’s not particularly interesting.  There are light moments but there really isn’t any humor, or attempts at humor. It’s just a soap, and without any interesting hook or fun conspiracies to keep the plot humming along like Revenge.  It’s just women doing jobs and getting into relationship problems, and life. It’s hardly awful; it’s just incredible mundane.  There’s absolutely nothing that pulls you in and I’ll be surprised if I can remember anything other than that Alyssa Milano and Sun from Lost starred in it in six months.  It’s not that stories about people can’t be good in and of itself, or that soaps can’t be, but you need excellent writing, or humor, or a really enjoyable sense of fun, none of which Mistresses have.

Will I watch it again? No.  I knew more or less right away that there was no chance of me watching another episode, and nothing in the remainder of the episode changed that initial reaction.  I do think doubling down on maximum trashiness would have been preferable to just generic drama.

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Summer 2013 Review: The Goodwin Games

31 May

Goodwin Games The Goodwin Games, which is being released at a time of year which virtually ensures the show will be cancelled shortly, is a Fox series from How I Met Your Mother creators Craig Thomas and Carter Bays.  How I Met Your Mother relies on a storytelling gimmick, but a gimmick that, while dictating the way the story is told, doesn’t necessarily materially affect every episode.  The Goodwin Games’s gimmick is far more high concept and integral to the show.  The Goodwin patriarch, Benjamin (played by Beau Bridges) whose death leads to the events of the show, was an eccentric single parent who alienated his children over time through his strange parenting style.  He attempts to make up for his failings in life after his death through an extensive series of video tapes which catalog what amounts to a kind of hyper-complicated scavenger hunt for his fortune, which unbeknownst to his kids, is over $20 million.

The kids are three.  First, Scott Foley plays go-getter Henry who is a very busy surgeon who makes time to give back to the community and has a fiancé.  He’s brash, arrogant, patronizing and kind of a dick, but very successful, and his biggest crime seems to have been leaving a long-term girlfriend that his siblings loved from his hometown.  Middle child Chloe is a popular girl in high school turned wanna-be actress played by Becki Newton who seems to be relatively care free and possibly their father’s favorite, as her knowledge of Morse code wins her prizes from him in the past and present.  TJ Miller plays the youngest, idiot screw up Jimmy, who means well but has been in and out of jail due to a compulsion for thievery.  He has a daughter whom he loves, and who loves him, and who he sneaks up into her to see behind her mom’s back.  They’re all called back to their quaint New Hampshire hometown for the funeral, and they are invited for a reading of their dad’s will, which is a video tape.  This video tape provides the rules for the titular games; the three of them, and a random dude, will compete in a game of Trivial Pursuit for his millions.  Unfortunately, this family has a reputation for not being able to finish a game of Trivial Pursuit without breaking out into a game-ending fight, and this ensues doubly when they discover the game is a special edition composed of questions about themselves.  When everyone except Chloe forfeits, the proper video of their dad says they’ve all lost, but after they decide to finish the game out for dad at the local watering hole, someone at the bar passes them a card that lets them know the game is not just over (that would have been a really short series otherwise).  Apparently half the people in this town are in on The Goodwin Games.  The three kids leave the pilot episode reinvigorated, ready to play their dad’s game, and find out the first requirement is that they all move home.

It’s hard to tell if this was simply in my head the whole time because I knew who the creators were, but similarities with How I Met Your Mother were abound.  The humor was wacky, the dialogue was crisp, and it was all told with an undercurrent of sentimentality which has always been my primary hang up with How I Met Your Mother (in the early seasons, when the show was funny).  I don’t think the pilot for The Goodwin Games was particularly funny, but I could imagine how it could be, and some lines hit, or at least make me slightly smile.  It will never exactly be my cup of tea, but there’s a level of craftsmanship there that I can recognize when How I Met Your Mother is working, and I can imagine The Goodwin Games having the same.  It’s not even there yet, but as I’ve said often, a lot of watching a comedy pilot is not judging what it is, since very few comedy pilots are very funny, but trying to judge what it has the potential to be.  That said, while I think this could be very decent, I think there’s also very low probability it could ever be great, and unlikely very good, though I suppose decent is still a pretty good get for a comedy these days.

Will I watch it again? No.  It’s probably going to be cancelled because of when it’s airing, but even beyond that, as much as I hate to hold old shows by the creators against a new one, it’s hard not to.  I have a like-hate relationship with How I Met Your Mother that’s veered towards hate over the years, and since I’m long done with that show, unless Goodwin Games really knocked it out of the park, it would have been pretty hard to get me on board.  It wasn’t bad, it was kind of cute, but my standard was higher for this one.

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Summer 2013 Review: Family Tree

27 May

Family Tree

Family Tree is a new HBO show from Chris Guest, the man behind cult mockumentary style films Best in Show, A Mighty Wind, Waiting for Guffman, and For Your Consideration, as well as his most famous but most different from the others, This is Spinal Tap, which came several years before the rest.  Many directors and writers have recurring elements and favored actors and actresses, but Guest is much more consistent than most in both of these matters.  Basically all of his films, and this TV show, are satirical documentaries, with people talking to the camera, and a high rate of overall silliness and bizarre characters, just taking on different subjects – a reunion concert of folk bands, a film festival, and a dog show, for example.  In addition, he’s developed a full repository of actors who appear in all of his films; Michael McKean, Ed Begley Jr, Catherine O’Hara, John Michael Higgins, Fred Willard, and others.

Family Tree is also co-produced by the BBC so we know that Britain or British people will be involved somehow, and indeed England is where we begin.  The premise of Family Tree, advertisements and trailers have told me,  is that it’s about a young Englishman searching for and discovering his crazy family, full of Christopher Guest players, in Los Angeles.  However, I would never have known that from the first episode which doesn’t even get out of Britain.  Family Tree is the only show I can think of which doesn’t actually get up to its ostensible premise in the first episode.

What does happen is this.  Chris O’Dowd (Kristen Wiig’s love interest in Bridesmaids) plays a young man who has been kind of depressed of late, having lost his job and his girlfriend in the past few months. He and his sister meet his dad for dinner, where he finds an old photograph in a chest left by a deceased family member as part of a shabby inheritance.  He begins to investigate the photo, taking it to an old expert on these things who lets him know that the photo is not of his relative, but rather was taken by his relative.  That’s where we end up. Presumably that somehow leads to his eventual family history trip stateside as he continues to learn more information.

What this does contain is many classic Christopher Guest elements.  Every single character, with the exception of our straight man, played by O’Dowd, is extremely bizarre and quirky.  His sister is a ventriloquist who must carry around a monkey puppet at all times to ensure her continuing mental stability; we see a quick scene of her working at a bank with the monkey.  Their dad, portrayed by Michael McKean is a very strange dude who retired to begin his life’s work of creating a great invention.  All he has so far is a shoehorn attached to a fan which keeps your shoes cool on a hot day before you put them on.  The man to whom O’Down is directed to bring his photograph for research purposes is a very odd older gentleman with his own distinctive strange mannerisms, and he creates landmarks in a bottle, which he considers vastly superior and more interesting to ships in a bottle. O’Dowd watches ten seconds of a fake TV show Tudors rip-off, The Plantagenets.  Even the minor characters are a bit off.  O’Down is set up on a date with a seemingly nice girl who seems to believe the Loch Ness monster is real.

It wasn’t mostly laugh out loud funny, though there were a couple of solid moments, but I did enjoy the experience overall.  If you like Christopher Guest movies, you’ll probably like it, if you don’t, there’s a good chance you won’t.  Chris O’Dowd is an extremely likable straight man, and I think his presence may increase the chance of people liking the show who don’t like Christopher Guest movies, as those sometimes don’t even have any normal characters to center them.  It wasn’t quite as exciting as I was expecting right off the bat, but it’s a promising enough beginning.  It doesn’t promise at this juncture to be an overall classic but it seems like some solid programming.

Will I watch it again? Yes, but at least as much based on the track record of the people involved in the show than on the quality of the episode alone.  That’s not to say it was bad; rather it felt more incomplete than nearly any other show I can remember watching.  More than most pilots, this felt like the first half hour of a movie, or at least a miniseries, rather than a self-contained episode pitching a premise for an ongoing series.  I look forward to revisiting the whole when it’s all done and seeing how it stacks up.

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