Tag Archives: The Michael J. Fox Show

Fall 2013 Review: The Michael J. Fox Show

16 Oct

Michael J Fox

The Michael J. Fox Show tells the tale of Mike Henry, a legendary New York local television newsman who retired due to Parkinson’s disease with the added benefit of spending more time with his family. He misses work and his family is getting sick of him being around all the time, waking them up early and bothering them in other ways. Thus, his wife and his old producer conspire to convince him to come back to work.

His family consists of his loving wife, Annie (Breaking Bad’s Marie, Betsy Brandt), his Cornell drop out college aged son, Ian, his teenage daughter Eve, his youngest son Graham, and his sister Leigh.  Characters at work include his veteran producer Harris (The Wire’s Wendell Pierce, better known as Bunk), and his new young, nervous, segment producer Kay.  The characters are not cookie cutter outside of the extremely obnoxious Aunt Leigh, who is the feisty single middle-aged women constantly striving to act and look younger.  She could get real tired real fast; I wanted her to go away in just about every scene she was in.

In a lot of ways, the Michael J. Fox Show is admirable.  It starts with the classic family sitcom model which reigned supreme on television from the 1950s to the 1990s and largely updates it to get with the 21st century.  There’s no laugh track, the dialogue is quick without those awful long sitcom pauses, and the characters, the aunt aside, are not ridiculous cartoons.  In addition, it brings the actual warmth and love that were at the heart of traditional family sitcoms, that still resonate even when everything else feels horribly dated in those shows. The family actually seem to genuinely like one another. Michael J. Fox is already a larger than life television personality that many of us feel like we saw grow up over 30 years on television, and making him a local news anchor smartly captures that angle of Fox; regular New Yorkers feel like they know Fox’s character in the same way. The show does a good job with its handling of Michael J. Fox’s Parkinson’s disease; we know it’s going to be used for good-natured humor immediately, with a handful of jokes about Fox’s condition in the first episode. Also, I’ll award the show extra points for actually being filmed in New York, which does make a difference.

Unfortunately, though, for all these positive qualities, the problem with the Michael J. Fox is a deceptively simple one. If the jokes were funny, the show would be good. I know that sounds like the most obvious diagnosis for a bad comedy ever, but it’s really not.  Most bad shows have something wrong in their DNA that goes well beyond the jokes not being funny – the structure is broken.  The cast is bad, the laugh track, the look of the show, the tone – the whole idea behind the show is broken deep within its foundation.  That’s not the case here.  The idea is solid, the characters, outside of the wacky aunt, are well-built, the acting is good, the look and feel are fine.  The jokes are read correctly and given room to breathe.  They’re just not funny jokes. Someone needs to go down this script, even keep the same overall structure, and just tweak the dialogue all over the place.

I was expecting another lazy CBS-like effort with, if not a laugh track, tired characters and tropes. The Michael J. Fox Show isn’t that which is absolutely to be praised.  Now, if it could only take that last step and be funny, there’d be a really good show here.

Will I watch it again? It was better than I thought it would be.  Still no. The blueprint is there for this to funny, but it isn’t now. It’s close but not close enough.

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Fall 2013 Previews and Predictions: NBC

13 Sep

NBC

(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)

NBC, surprisingly enough has been making slight progress over the last couple of years while people forgot to check on them because they were so far in the basement.  Their biggest new hit is reality show The Voice, but they’ll hope one of these new shows will bolster their line up.  Will they?  Let’s take a guess.

The Blacklist – 9/23

Spader is on The Blacklist

No network, aside from maybe, maybe ABC with Agents of Shield is pumping any new show this year as much as NBC is pumping The Black List.  James Spader seems perfectly cast a slimy mega-criminal who turns himself in for some mysterious reason to the government, agreeing to help them catch other mega-criminals in exchange for some sort of deal which includes that he only talks to one young female agent.  If it works, it could be the best CBS procedural in ages. In theory, he’ll help catch a new criminal every week while many a long term plot develops about why he turned himself in to begin with.

Prediction: Renewal – NBC, a network in need of a hit, has put all of its promotional muscle behind The Black List, and they claim viewers in focus groups loved it beyond belief.  Even if it’s not a huge hit, they’ll take it.

The Michael J. Fox Show – 9/26

Fox is The Michael J. Fox Show

Michael J. Fox portrays a legendary local news anchor who retires, like Fox himself, because of Parkinson’s disease, but then after driving his family and himself crazy in retirement, decides to make a return. Fox’s wife is played by Breaking Bad’s Betsy Brandt and his boss is played by The Wire’s Wendell Pierce.  Fox is a certified TV legend but the show does not look good. It doesn’t look historically bad, or worst sitcom of the year bad, it just looks generically mediocre, like a sitcom that should have existed two decades ago and not today.  It’s unfortunate because it’s hard to not root for Fox.

Prediction:  Renewal – after the Blacklist, I was almost arbitrarily deciding to pick a second NBC show for renewal, and when in doubt I go with the star power of Fox, who everyone loves, even if his show isn’t very good.

Ironside – 10/2

Underwood is Ironside

Blair Underwood will probably not channel original Ironside actor Raymond Burr too much in this remake of a ‘60s show about a detective in a wheelchair.  Ironside doesn’t play by the rules; he makes his own, and so on and so forth.  You will probably be able to watch five minutes of this show or less to realize exactly how it goes.  The superiors will be annoyed by Ironside now and then, as he’s tired of their conventional thinking and bureaucracy, but dammit, he’ll get results. The police procedural Ironside is yet another sign of NBC imitating CBS.

Prediction: 13+ – It looks pretty generic, which in this case, means I’ll take the middle ground, and go full season but not second.

Welcome to the Family – 10/3

O'Malley is Welcome to the Family

Every network has a limited amount of time and money for promotion, and every year, some shows, like The Blacklist, get promoted endlessly, while some shows, like Welcome to the Family, get more or less entirely ignored.  Mike O’Malley, who has grown on me over the years, plays the father of a recent high school graduate who gets knocked up by her high school boyfriend (a Latino, no less!), whose father O’Malley does not get along with.  The kids decide to make a go of it, meaning the families have to try to make a go of it as well.  Wacky hijinks ensue, with the potential for the occasional culture clash as a backdrop.

Prediction: 12- Maybe you’ve heard of some of these shows, but unless you pay really close attention you probably haven’t heard of this one, hence the lack of faith.

Sean Saves the World – 10/3

Hayes is Sean Saves the World

Sean Hayes juggles a judgmental mother, a teenage daughter, and a horrible boss, already before his life gets even more difficult when he gets full custody of his kid. Wacky Reno 911 actor Thomas Lennon plays his boss, while Linda Lavin plays his mom.  Was TV really missing Sean Hayes that badly? I would vastly prefer a show where Sean literally saves the world every episode; as it is, I expect very little.

Prediction: 12- – Sean Hayes doesn’t have the Michael J. Fox star power.  This show will probably be worse, and it’s definitely first to the chopping block fi they both do about the same, ratings-wise.

Dracula – 10/25

Rhys Meyers is Dracula

Jonathan Rhys Meyers, who last starred on TV as an entirely different kind of historical figure in The Tudors, stars as Dracula, who comes to London to get his revenge for a multitude of betrayals from centuries earlier.  The creator of Carnivale will serve as showrunner which probably means the show will make no sense.  This is actually a British-American joint venture, and there will be only 10 episodes in the first season, so,I’m not going to predict it because it breaks the rules, and at least until enough network shows break the rules to come up with a better system, I’m going to leave this one out.  Still, it’s a show, so I feel at least compelled to provide a preview. This is definitely one of the very few network shows this year I don’t really have a read on.  I wouldn’t count on much from it, but it actually might be good, which is more than many network shows even have from the get go.

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Snap Judgements: NBC Upfronts

13 May

I’ve made a mini-tradition of previewing and predicting the success of new fall shows towards the end of summer and beginning of fall, and I plan on continuing that, but I’m adding an even earlier take on new shows which have clips available, where I’ll look solely at the previews provided by the networks at the upfronts (fancy TV talk for place where they show off their upcoming schedule and shows) and provide some quick thoughts.  Because I’m a born pessimist, I’ll be ranking the shows to provide at least some relative positivism.  Hint:  If your show has a laugh track, it’s probably towards the bottom.

First, we’ll take a look at the mostly CBS-ification and occasional ABC-ification of NBC’s new programming.  Follow along.

6.  Sean Saves the World

Sean Hayes is a single gay dad who has to juggle work, parenting (he quite literally says “parenting” at least twice in the trailer), and his overbearing mother.  Life is rough!  He gets into zany situations trying to get home early from his hilariously brutal boss!  There’s a laugh track!  Only points are for use of Capital Cities’ Safe and Sound in the second half.

5. Ironside


Remake city! Ironside (presumably how the main character is referred to, I don’t think anyone calls him that in the trailer that I can recall) is Blair Underwood as a cop in a wheelchair who sees things differently (from his lower perspective, of course)!  Ironside is based on a late-60s and early-70s show starring Raymond Burr as a paralyzed cop.  My problem is not the fact that it’s a remake though.  I mean, boy, you know The Blacklist is nothing new, but this just hits every fucking cop show convention pitch perfectly.  He plays by his own rules, he has his own special unit to get the serious business done, and sometimes he doesn’t follow every regulation in the name of justice.  It’s in danger of being one Blair Underwood away from veering into parody.

4. The Michael J. Fox Show


Of course I like Michael J. Fox.  He seems impossible not to like.  That said, this show is far more on the traditional end of sitcoms than what normally interests me.  There’s no laugh track.  But there’s really nothing at all funny in the trailer.  It’s not insufferable like Sean Saves the World but the jokes just do not fly.  I watched it actually a second time and there must be 25 lines designed for potential laughs in the trailer and none of them work.  Points for featuring Wendell Pierce of The Wire, though, and just a note that his wife is Marie from Breaking Bad, Betsy Brandt.

3.  Dracula


Are we not done with vampires yet? True Blood and Twilight have pretty much helped eliminate all the good will for the mythical beasts in pop culture generated by Buffy by now. Anyway, I have no idea what this show is about still after watching the trailer, and me not knowing is pretty much by itself elevating it to the third spot, which may say something about the early look at NBC’s line up.  I think maybe one vampire decides to violate other vampire’s codes and somehow gets into a battle with them.  I don’t really have hope, but maybe I’m confused and everything about it is a lot more interesting.

2.  Welcome to the Family


Mike O’Malley, who is gearing up his resume for Zeljko Ivanek Hall of Fame consideration, plays a dad who is excited to have his daughter, who just graduated high school, off to college, so he can finally get some empty nest him-time with his wife.  Unfortunately, his plans, like the best of them, go awry, when it turns out his daughter his been knocked up by another high schooler, with a dad who shares a mutual enmity with O’Malley.  This is going to be awkward.  It’s a clear Modern Family clone, and looks, well, like Modern Family.

1.  The Blacklist


Hey, production value counts here.  It’s a CBS/TNT-esque darker version of White Collar starring James Spader as a dangerous criminal who works with the FBI to put other criminals away, but he’s a lot less likable, it seems than Neal from the USA show.  The banter remains though and Spader remains as deliciously slimy as ever.  As this appears procedural, I highly doubt I will ever watch more than one episode but I’m sure it’ll give me something for my dad to watch and me to ask him about for the next couple of years.

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