Firefly, John Doe, PAX

There were four new shows premiering tonight, and at the moment I’m
only going to review two of them. The third is waiting for me on
tape, and if I hadn’t hit the record button twice, the fourth
would be waiting for me as well. As it is, you’ll have to way
until tomorrow for me to review What I Like About You,
and barring the unforeseen, next week should bring a review of the
second episode of Greetings From Tuscon.

FIREFLY is the premiere that I’ve been most looking forward
to. Creator Joss Whedon brought us something unexpectedly great with
Buffy, and while I’ve never quite warmed to the spin-off Angel,
Joss is still very much in the positive column with me. Besides, any
show created by one comics creator (Joss created the series Fray)
and produced by another (Ben Edlund, madman behind The Tick) gets
extra points from this comic creator.

The lead character is a space pilot with a heart of gold. His
crew and passengers include a hooker with a heart of gold, a mechanic
with a heart of gold, a preacher with a heart of gold, and one
other fellow made mostly of flesh. And these gold-hearted folks
fly around space and steal things. That’s right, they’re thieves.
But they give the things back if they think that it’s wrong to
steal what they discover their stealing, so it’s okay.

The planets they go between have been united for several
years now. Apparently, this is a bad thing, presumably because
the new federal forces have mean-looking outfits. But we have
to accept that they’re bad, because the lead character doesn’t
like the “Unification”, and after all he’s got a heart of
gold (although it may be stolen.)

If it wasn’t Joss Whedon creating this, then the cynical
sound of the preceding paragraphs would he heartfelt. It’s not.
Not because this introductory episode was great, but because
I know it was just set-up, and what will generate the interest
is when the characters start really interacting, and the bigger
plots emerge. After seeing choices made on Buffy that
worried me, only to have them lead to inspired material, I
adopted a motto: “Trust in Joss.”

So I can’t really recommend this series based on the first
episode, which wasn’t bad but was a bit trite. Yet I still have
high expectations for episodes to come.

To me, the new series JOHN DOE evokes the
watchable high-concept series Early Edition, the one
where God was apparently delivering tomorrow’s newspaper to
a guy who would then try to prevent the tragedies that the
paper foretold.

The title character (or, more correctly, the character who
assumes that name) is an amnesiac who can instantly answer any
question for which there is recorded data, can quickly turn
knowledge into talent (such as flying a helicopter), and yet
cannot answer anything about who he is and where he came from.
He is color blind, except apparently when he sees someone who
needs help, who shows up in color in his vision, as if god is
pointing out to him what needs doing.

At least, that seems like what’s going on. However,
if it is, then God stumbles badly in the first episode. Our
hero saves a girl who didn’t really need saving, and
because of his involvement a cop gets injured, and someone
else dies who might not have died if it wasn’t for John
Doe’s involvement.

It’s a cute concept, but if they don’t do something
interesting soon, it will get tired fast. There are
subplots focusing on the characters search to find out
what’s going on, but those are the sort of subplots that
rarely go anywhere productive, because him discovering his
background would put a big crimp in the concept.

All in all, it’s rather disposable.

I’ve gotten multiple inquiries about why I’m not
reviewing PAX shows. Quite simple: in the early days of the
network, they put out a press release criticizing the
“alternative language and lifestyles” that other channels
were putting on the airwaves, suggesting that they would be
doing that differently. Frankly, a station telling me that
they’re avoiding putting “alternative lifestyles” on the air
suits me about as well as if they were avoiding showing
blacks and Jews. I have no desire to honor them with my
viewership.

Do Over

Tonight’s sole premiere was DO OVER, a WB comedy about a
34 year old who finds himself transported back 20 years, occupying
the mind of his teenage self and able to possibly correct the
mistakes he made the first time through.

The choice was made to have the 34 year old set in approximately the
present day, which means that the teenage self is back in
1981. This turns it into a nostalgia series. While the on-going
narration evokes The Wonder Years, the focus on the various
fads of the moment brings more to mind the far lesser series
That ’80s Show, which came and quickly went away. In
some degrees this show is even worse, because while it seeks
to evoke the eighties, it does not know the decade. It mixes
elements from various parts of the eighties with things that
don’t seem eightiesish at all, ending up with a messy time setting.

(By the way, this erroneous 1980s view doesn’t end with this
episode. The “next episode” trailer showed our protagonist apparently about to
spoil the big surprise of The Empire Strikes Back at its
first showing. Problem is, by the time the movie came out, the
hardcore fans actually already knew the surprise. No, it wasn’t
the “everything is leaked on the Internet” problem we now face.
The surprise had been spoiled by the novelization of the film,
which had come out weeks before the premiere.)

The writing is not sharp, the phrases are not well-turned, and
any time you try to look at the lead character beyond the most
basic versions of his motivations, he becomes an enigma. Really,
I don’t care for the guy, and I’m not particularly rooting for
his life to come out better this time. No, I can’t recommend this
show.

But they are using folks I like in the cast. I’ve liked the
actors who played the parents in other things, and Jules Carey
(Lord Bowler of The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr.)
is always nice to see. But the real “happy to see them” portions
of the cast are two of the old Freaks and Geeks crew, who
once again find themselves acting in the early ’80s. I laughed
hard when I realized that they had cast the same guy to play the
gym teacher in this as they had in F&G, but the real
fun was seeing the protagonist’s wild female friend. I stared at
her, thinking “no, that can’t be…”, but yes, it was the same
actress who played Lindsey’s straitlaced friend on F&G.
This means not only that she is playing a very different character,
but also that two years later she is playing a girl who is two
or three years younger than the one she played before.
If only I could age like that for a couple years…

Fastlane, Cedric The Entertainer, Twilight Zone

Sometimes a show waves a little flag, shouting “here! Look! Now
you know what you’re supposed to compare us to.” Case in point:
FASTLANE, the new action cop show on Fox. With maybe ten
minutes left in the episode, the dialog all drops away, and
Phil Collins sings "In The Air Tonight" as we watch the
headlights of a low, fast car shine against curving pavement in the
night.

1984. First episode of Miami Vice. Same song, same place in
the show, same imagery. Oh, but that show was about a white Miami
undercover cop whose partner gets killed so he partners up with a black New
York cop who is on a mission to get revenge for the death of his cop brother; they
ride around in fast cars, meet sexy women, and
have exciting violent times against a heavy music background. And this
new show, its about a white Los Angeles cop who yadda-yadda-yadda.
And I do mean all the yaddas.

So it’s not striving for originality. But it is stylish, the
cars are nice, and there are some sexy bods of both genders being
revealed here. It’s not a show that you can take seriously, but it
doesn’t ask you to. It does a respectably good job of doing what
it sets out to do, and if that sounds at all nice to you then
check out an episode.

CEDRIC THE ENTERTAINER PRESENTS is a sketch comedy show
built around a popular stand-up comic. The sketches are sketchy,
often with a good nugget of an idea (“Que Hora Es?”, the Spanish
language soap opera for people who only had one semester of Spanish)
being wasted in a scattershot manner. It’s not just that the sketches
don’t have real endings (endemic to much sketch comedy), it’s that
they don’t build; they can’t find a central gag theme and repeat it
in a way that makes it funnier and funnier. Rather, they seem to be
throwing every theme-related gag in and hoping that some of them
stick. Despite the dancing girls and the Fox network, this does not
look to be the next In Living Color.

I am not one to worship at the altar of the original The Twilight
Zone. Yes, there were some fine episodes, and there were other
episodes, and there were episodes that were too long for the ideas
they contained, and there were episodes where fine performances got
them past weak concepts. The last revival of The Twilight Zone
had some standout stories that worked on all levels, and some other
stories that just seemed zone-by-numbers.

A series like the Zone doesn’t have a continuing cast or a
regular system of writer collaboration to hang its hat on. It
must rely on having a fantastic story editor and a quality
on-going production staff to constantly bring in good stories,
good casts, and good directors. Based on the first episode,
things do not bode well for the newest version of THE
TWILIGHT ZONE. You would think they would lead with their
best stories for the first episode, and if that is true, you
might as well skip this. In an hour, they spun two tales. In
the first, we see a neighborhood where they force children to
be perfect, and let us know that the mystery we are hanging on
for is what happens to the bad kids. Eventually, we learn. It
was foreshadowed, but fulfilling foreshadowing is not at the
core of a good Zone-style story. Something like that should
swing on poetic justic, or poetic injustice, and this had
neither. The second story, about Death retiring, could have
done so much more, but it was a bland exercise. And Forrest
Whitaker, who is quite good in most things, does a poor
job as host; his delivery makes the upcoming story seem
inconsequential, rather than intriguing.

Given the nature of an anthology series, there is always
hope that the next episode will be great. But hope, alas, is
a poor cousin to expectation.

Life With Bonnie, 8 Simple Rules, Push Nevada

>ABC aired two new sitcoms back to back tonight, and it was
very educational. When you watched LIFE WITH BONNIE,
starring Bonnie Hunt, you recognized that the characters in
the show know each other, have dealt with each other for
years, and all have lives outside of the limits of the
half hour you just saw.

Normally, you would not be aware of these aspects… but normally,
you would not just have watched 8 SIMPLE RULES FOR DATING MY TEENAGE
DAUGHTER, a sitcom full of characters lacking those elements.

This isn’t to say that 8SRFDMTD is bereft of positive
qualities. After all, it stars John Ritter, who has this inate
likability that glows through even weak material. In this case,
he plays a sports writer/columnist (following in the newspaper
tradition of sitcom characters such as The Odd Couple‘s Oscar
Madison, Dave’s World‘s Dave, Baby Bob‘s dad, and That
Raymond Whom Everybody Likes.) He seems to suddenly find himself
the father of a hottie teenage daughter (who looks absolutely
unrelated to anyone in the family), an unloved younger teenage
daughter, and a young boy who is no trouble at all, because one
of the central themes here is boys are easy to parent, but
girls are impossible. And it’s true, so long as your girls are
plot constructs rather than real human beings. Yup, this is
another of the recent spate of family sitcoms where the
younger generation exists merely as annoyances to their
parents.

Katey Segal is the mother, but her high-pitched vocals
which serve her well on more over-the-top material and cartoons
do not integrate with Ritter’s emphasized humanism.

8SRFDMTD has real textural problems. They’re trying
to have items that are emotional within the humorous context,
but they end up with a muddled mess. A few moments of humor
peaked through, but I don’t see this series getting better.

Life With Bonnie has a real texture: a pace so
rapid that some viewers may not be able to keep up. Don’t
worry though, it’s just fine dialog you may miss, not plot
points. Bonnie Hunt plays a morning show host with a
hectic home life and a crazed work environment. The trick
in her life is not keeping everything in control, but to
let it go out of control without quite careening over the
edge. At work and at home, she is surrounded by characters
that supply their own texture. Even her kids (8 and 10 years
old, if I have to guess) have some depth to them, and the
older one (the boy) got a chance for effective comedic delivery.

This is a show worth catching. It is, I fear, a show that
will not last long; it’s pace may be too rapid for some, and
it may have trouble maintaining the quality of the first
episode. But I would love to be proven wrong, and hope you
check it out to find out whether it’s for you.

Some reviewers are decrying this as another example of a
TV show set in a showbiz millieu, saying that people aren’t
interested in such things. And yes, they can
reel off a list of unsuccessful TV shows set in show business,
including such recent failures as Action,
Greg The Bunny, and Wednesday 9:30 (8:30 Central).
What they always avoid mentioning is the TV show settings of such
classics as The Dick Van Dyke Show and Mary Tyler
Moore, or more recent entertainment-themed successes like The Larry Sanders
Show, Cybil, and The Bernie Mac Show.

PUSH, NEVADA evokes Twin Peaks in a lot of ways.
Both shows focus on government agents whose investigations drag
them to out-of-the-way towns where the residents seem eccentric
and odd. Not, mind you, that Push is a carbon copy of TP;
the caffeinated visual style and the brooding introversion of
IRS agent Jim Proofrock are far cries from the opiated lush visual
sense and enthusiastic FBI agent Dale Cooper that marked David
Lynch’s classic of TV weirdness. But it’s hard not to draw the
parallel.

And having drawn the parallel, one can also find that this
new show does not measure up to the original in a couple obvious
ways. For one, Twin Peaks managed to be intriguing in ways
where Push is merely mysterious; watching Push,
I recognized that people were acting in ways I didn’t understand,
but it didn’t instill me with a drive to find out. Of course, in
Twin Peaks that same intrigue that drew me in ultimately
provided the biggest disappointment in the series, as it became
clear that the creative forces behind the show didn’t have
answers to offer up. They were merely good at creating a texture
that suggested there were answers to be had.

The other way in which Push doesn’t measure up to
the older show is that there isn’t a cute young lady who
is watching with me, wanting to make out during the commercials.
Now I’m married (and so is the cute young lady, albeit not to me),
and my wife didn’t choose to watch Push, much less wait
around for the ads. (Eventually, the young lady and I had to
start watching Twin Peaks off of video tape, because
while we were good at starting an extended smooch at the
beginning of the commercial break, we were not so good at
ending it when the show came back, and were missing bits.)

But even lacking extended lip-lock, Push does have
something worth watching. I think it’s the lead character,
the introverted IRS agent who knows he’s in over his head,
but doesn’t choose to let that stop him. (Then again, he may
not be a good IRS agent to start with; he didn’t seem to know
the difference between “per capita” and “per household”.
I suspect that was just due to writers who weren’t clear on
what “per capita” means, so I won’t hold it against
the character.) I want to watch this
guy at work, and will sit through all the “clues” scattered
about, the various numbers that appear, the web addresses that
pop up — some of these may be clues to what’s going on in
the show, some are clues to a viewer-solvable mystery that’s
supposed to lead to someone winning about $1,000,000 around
episode 13, and some may just be texture — merely to watch
him. We’ll see how many episodes that will hold me for.
By now, I’m cynical about such things. The show will either
never reveal its secrets, or it will make the revelation and
what it reveals will be found wanting, or even if it reveals
things in a satisfying manner, it will not be able to follow
up what it has shown. But maybe it will surprise me. (Or maybe
once it settles into it’s normal time slot, it will quickly
fall to the double-whammy competition of Will & Grace
and CSI.)

Oh, and if you want to play the game to try to win the
show’s money, and you somehow missed both the amount that
appeared on the wall of the boarding house and the web
address that was placed in the opening sequence, then going to
www.dmvf.com should get
you started!

One quick note for fellow BattleBots fans: yes, it wasn’t
on tonight, but no, it’s not gone. Look for it Saturdays.

Everwood, Monk

EVERWOOD, WB’s new Monday night series, tells the tale of a
top brain surgeon whose wife passes away, so he moves his family
from NYC to Everwood, Colorado, where he can set up a General
Practitioner practice while getting in touch with the kids in
a way that his brain surgeon gig never allowed him time to.

Now, I have a history of not liking Treat Williams in things.
He does an okay job here; it’s not the actor I dislike so much
as the character. This man abandons his life-saving practice to
go work for no pay as a GP in the Rockies. Okay, he doesn’t owe his life
to brain surgery, and certainly there’s a lot of good that a
GP working for free can do in a community that needs him.

But this middle class community doesn’t need him. They have a doctor,
whose practice has now been in the town for two generations.
That’s right, this flighty new doctor, giving away his
efforts for free, may serve to close down the practice that
has kept this town going for decades, and do we really think
that this distraught widower is stable enough that we can
count on him sticking around for the long term? No.

Of course, we have to establish the existing medical
practice as one that deserves to be shut down. So how
does the story reveal this need? By showing that they
actually require a patient with a non-emergency medical
need to make an appointment! Oh, how cruel.

But if he’s not serving the general good as a doctor,
at least our protagonist is doing the right thing as a
parent, right? Well, no. These kids (one preschooler,
one high schooler) just lost their mom. I suspect that
the last thing that they need is to have their entire
life ripped away to get transplanted in a very different
living arrangment in a town where they know nobody. But hey,
had they stayed in New York City, then the doctor might have
been able to find large numbers of people who really need
free health care, rather than real estate agents who are
saving the cost of their Blue Cross co-pay.

Judging from the pilot, there is little real joy to
this series, nor insight, nor wisdom. It’s a two-handed
grab for the heart strings, but they miss with both hands.

With tomorrow bringing us three new shows, the fall
premier season hits full steam. It will stretch out all
the way to November 28th, when ABC launches their ongoing
series version of Dinotopia, following up on the
miniseries which I managed to miss, based on a series of
books that I have not read.

Until they launch that, however, ABC is filling a hole
in their schedule with reruns. Not just reruns, but reruns
of a cable series. MONK launched this summer on
USA Network. This hour-long show has Tony Shalhoub (who
has a record of being in weak TV shows like Wings
and Stark Raving Mad, but good movies like GalaxyQuest
and Spy Kids) as a detective with Holmes-like perception
but saddled with obsessive compulsive disorder, with a nurse/personal aide
as his Watson. This is a fluffy but watchable show. The whodunnits
are strictly short-story stuff, not a lot of complex twists here,
but Shalhoub (who also produces) makes it fun to watch. It’s a
show where murder is a puzzle rather than a tragedy. The OCD is
played for laughs a fair bit, but the character himself is well
played and clearly shown as a heroic man struggling. If you like
mystery shows at all, it’s worth checking out. Given the additional
exposure generated by the network airings, I expect this one will
last at least a few seasons, and wouldn’t be surprised if it
transfered to ABC for the first run.

Family Affair, 2001 season round-up

The new version of FAMILY AFFAIR tries to send the sitcom back to
the pre-All-In-The-Family days, not only remaking an old (I won’t say
classic, there’s more to a classic than age) show, but in style of filming.
While it’s not the only show currently shot on a closed set with all the
walls in place, they also bring an older sense of camera movements, and
an older style of using music in a sitcom. (The music thing they don’t
quite have down; they’re also relying on a laugh track, but apparently
they haven’t figured out how best to layer the laughter and the music.)

This is a tricky review for me to write. This show is about a well-off
jet-setting bachelor
(Gary Cole. No, not Gary Coleman, you doof — Cole is now known
as the father on the Brady Brunch theatrical films, but I always
think of him as the lead character on Midnight Caller) who finds
himself suddenly laden with twin 6 year olds and a 16 year old girl to
raise. It aims to be a
family-oriented sitcom, something that one might sandwich either with
Seventh Heaven or ABC’s old TGIF line-up. Despite the presence of Tim
Curry in the key butler role, this is not a show that I’m apt to watch,
all cloying moppetry from the 6 year olds and all positive lessons about
how you really gotta love the kids, dang it. However, I have to
recognize that there are aspects of it that show real promise, as well
as those that show real problems. The 6 year olds are photogenic, but
not really engaging; apparently, the boy is already being replaced in
one of those odd switcheroos they pull on sitcom families. And Gary
Cole comes off a bit too bland; while he clearly doesn’t want his lifestyle
changed by adding these kids, we can’t feel that he’s losing much.

But the forcefully restrained ascerbicness of Tim Curry’s Mr. French
(which is a contrast with the simple I’m-in-over-my-head-and-distraught-but-stiffening-my-upper-lip
style I recall from the original show) has some potential, and free-spirited
sixteen year old Sigourne (“Sissy”, we are told, is what her brother and sister
were calling her when last they visited Uncle Bill 5 years ago — which
makes the six year old twins early talkers!) has the goods to be an
honest presence in this show. At this point, the set up is just a plot
situation; they will have to get character dynamics working, and I
suspect that the Mr. French/Sissy pairing is what this show will
ultimately turn on.

That is, if it gets a chance to turn at all. This show is,
after all, scheduled against Friends. The WB is giving this
new show heavy early support, presumably to capture an audience
of families who may not be comfortable with the kids watching Friends.
However, this is a year where the goals of programming against
that Thursday juggernaut should be changing. With NBC’s Thursday
anchor show apparently in its last year, this is the time to
establish the show that you hope will draw the Friends
audience next year.

This is as good a time as any to throw in some comments about
the results of last year’s season:

• Malcolm in the Middle and Nikki both experienced precipitous drops in quality;
  the latter is now gone. Frasier continued a downward drift.

• 24 had a neat format and sense of style, but ultimately that
  didn’t make up for weak and ridiculous plotting filled with hoary
  cliches. It seemed as though they hadn’t really planned out all
  24 hours, and they had to be filled with ridiculous escaped-but-caught-again
  efforts.

• The winners of the season were Scrubs (which is a must-watch
  for me) and The Bernie Mac Show (which I will admit I still
  usually skip.)

• The shows I wish had stuck around longer are Pasadena, Greg
  the Bunny, and Undeclared.