You’ve really lost a Supreme Court case when the ruling is five to four – but not on whether you’ve lost, but on which reason you’ve lost.
Actual quote from this past Monday’s episode of Castle
“Do you play chess, Mr. Castle? There are times when a well-placed pawn is more powerful than a king.”
Well… yes. Because in chess, the king is not strong; in fact, it’s your weakness.
Alcatraz and The Firm
The two new shows, Alcatraz and The Firm, both seem to be trying to address the same problem. There is some attraction to running a “big story” or “big mystery” drama, to keep the viewer hooked, a la Lost. However, it’s hard to convince people it’s worth watching if they’re unsure if the full story will ever be told… and even if you keep the show running successfully, the big story does poorly in syndication, which is more built toward people catching an episode here, an episode there.
So both of them set up their big story, but work very hard in their first hours to make it clear that A Story Will Be Told Each Episode. In the case of Alcatraz, the basic pitch is that 300 prisoners who mysteriously disappeared from the famed prison 50 years ago are reappearing, unaged, one at a time, and committing crimes. As such, each episode is about how the investigative team goes after one bad guy, basic cop drama, and then running in the background is the Big Mystery of What’s Going On. The setup is pretty goofy even just beyond the inherent science fiction of it, with the team being pulled together in some unlikely ways (hey, cop, we’re trying to get you on the team by tricking you into being interested. And who do you want for your sidekick? A graphic novelist? Of course!) I’m unsure of how much I can invest in the “find the killer” plots – I’m growing weary of serial killer fiction – but there are a couple characters that I like, most particularly Jorge Garcia. I may watch more.
The Firm is a sequel to the Grisham novel and the movie based thereon, which means that the lead is about to get himself involved with another complexly corrupt law firm. I mean, it’s Jack Bauer syndrome, life repeating itself in intense and exciting ways, showing that one has learned from his mistakes and, in the words of Peter Cook, “can repeat them exactly”. Within this framework, they have the room for the legal case of the week, generic law show stuff.
The look of the work is good, but the writing is less so. The legal case in the pilot had our hero – how we are supposed to think of in that manner, not just as a protagonist – ultimately working against the interests of his client, and doing so without consulting with the client.
Not sure either is a keeper. The Firm seems less clunky, but ultimately less attractive.
The Next Generation
For a while in my youth, my favorite TV show was Speed Racer. I would grow up to do a bit of work on the Speed Racer comic books (really, it was my first work in the field).
This week, the show my two kids, 7 and 2, have been eager for is Speed Racer: The Next Generation. And despite the visual awkwardness of this part cheap CGI, part badly flat animated series, and working through a long-term storyline that I’m not sure pays off enough along the way (from Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmioti, who have writ some good comic books), it’s still very heartening to see them enjoy this echo of what Daddy loved.
How I Found The Finder
The Finder is one of those series focused on One Person With Special Abilities And Quirks, and The Team Around Them. These can be very good, like House in its glory days, or simply entertaining, as The Mentalist sometimes becomes. The Finder specializes in finding things, his talent is being able to get a sense of the details of the situation that must’ve occurred to reach the situation he sees. His team’s special ability is to spend their lives explaining their backstory to anyone who happens by.
Okay, okay, it was a pilot episode, and yes, it needed to introduce the characters. But that means establishing who they are… if you have a series, you have plenty of time to reveal why.
There was something about the pilot, with a desperate man showing up needing his father found, with travel to distant places, with the structure of his crew around him (and not just with his main business handler being a large black man – in this case, Michael Clark Duncan – although that’s certainly part of it) that made it feel like it wated to be Human Target… which is silly, considering HT‘s short run. If somehow that is their goal, it fails. This felt awkward, pointlessly self-important, and not particularly convincing or entertaining.
Lo-way Robbery
The new sitcom Rob, about a an older, short, obsessive-compulsive clueless shmuck who by plot convenience manages to get a beautiful younger Latina to fall in love with him, only to find that her plentiful family does not fail to notice his shmuckiness, is based on one thing: people saying and doing things that people would never ever say nor do, because it serves sitcom comedy. It is deeply and inherently dreadful. Not a second felt real. I shall delete it from my ReplayTV, and it shall not darken this living room again.
Workin’ Git
The new sitcom Work It, about two men who have to pass as women in order to get jobs, got some well-publicized criticism from members of the transgender community for what they see as using the very real trials that they go through as a source for laughs.
Well, they needn’t have worried. No one will be laughing at this. It’s seventeen kinds of awkward, none of them are funny.
You know, I do sometimes have concerns about what message a show is sending, but I will forgive much for actual humor – and “crossdressing in order to secure a job” actually has a good track record in such things as Some Like It Hot and Tootsie (although being on TV, people are more likely to call the parallel to the crossdressing-for-a-cheap-apartment Bosom Buddies). Luckily, I am not faced with any moral dilemma here.
The Odd Triple
Nick at NIte has been having some success by forming new sitcoms with pleasantly-remembered talent from successful shows. The latest follows a familiar path, when a newly-divorced domestic man becomes the roommate of a divorced couch lump and a divorced playa. The difference from The Odd Couple is not so much in the count, but in the lack of any existing emotional connection between the character… and the proves to be deadly. The characters are quickly acting as if they care for one another, but it doesn’t work, doesn’t sell. These don’t seem to be characters built out of empathy, so relying on them to support one another emotionally just doesn’t work.
One of the tricky things is that Nick is targetting this (and all their series) at people who have seen a lot of sitcoms… which costs them, because when they use all the standard rhythms, it’s stuff we’ve seen before. It’s not a surprised, not funny. The true sitcom buff needs something challenging, and Nick is generally not delivering. Leave the same-old-structures to The Disney Channel, where they face an audience who has not yet figured them out.
My thoughts on unbundling cable channels
…have landed a bit of writing on one of the most heavily read blogs, albeit anonymously. On Andrew Sullivan’s The Dish blog over at Newsweek’s The Daily Beast, I’m the first reader talking about someone’s belief that cable bundles need to be unbundled.
–Nat Gertler, secret famous guy
I’d rather watch I Ate My Teenage Daughter
Fox’s new sitcom I Hate My Teenage Daughter features two soullessly obnoxious teen girls, their soulfully obnoxious mothers, their clueless, obnoxious dads,and so forth, and none of them travel far from stereotypes. The ratio of obnoxia to humor is hella high. Skip. skip, skip.
