Update

Things have been quiet on the blog lately, partly because there have been no further premieres that need covering, partly because I’ve been traveling.

As the season has worn on, I can’t say I’m thrilled with the quality. At this point, there are only two new shows that I feel I’ll have missed something if I missed an episode: the interestingly textured Joan of Arcadia and the stylish, smooth, Karen Sisco, which continues to capture the best quality of Elmore Leonard and what made the film versions of Get Shorty and Out of Sight so good. It’s almost good enough to make up for Boomtown going on hiatus. Almost. And there are three new shows that continue to be watchable, but not breaking out beyond that: I’m with Her, Two and a Half Men, and Las Vegas. And below that, shows may have gotten brilliant, but I’ve not stuck around to see.

I’ll be happy when all this baseball is over, when Fox launches their new season. Of course, once again we’re getting the new Simpsons Halloween special after Halloween. Ah, the wonders of Fox!

But we are seeing some energy in existing series, I’ll admit. Frasier has recaptured much of its old glory. Two out of three Angel episodes have been worthwhile. And Scrubs, which only descends from very very goodness when some casting fool decides a Heather Locklear guest appearance is a good idea, got a laugh out of me last week so long and so hard that I had to pause the ReplayTV so that I could recover. Took me a minute. (No, not the bit with Scott Foley and the seal. The line about the effect of the lipstick. Funniest single line on TV since “James Lipton” asked “Drew Barrymore” what job she wouldn’t want to do, on a Saturday Night Live parody of Inside the Actor’s Studio.)

Boomtown going bye-bye?

NBC is taking the barely-renewed Boomtown off of its scheduled for at least three weeks, replacing it with reruns of the lackluster Law & Order:SUV. This bodes not well. This is the type of hiatus that shows often never return from.

At is best, it’s great TV, although it has been known to slip into the norms of the modern cop show. If it comes up again, do take a look. (NBC wisely used their Bravo network to run a marathon of these a while back. Let’s hope that if it is cancelled, it will at least have some life in reruns, something occasionally trotted out as “one of the good ones that got away”.)

Californians: not stupid

Unsurprisingly, the big govenorship game show was won by the hunky actor. And folks who are saying that California made an unwise decision, that I’ll agree with. But folks who are saying that Californians were stupid… well that, I’ll take issue with.

It’s all well and good to say that you shouldn’t recall the governor without more reason. I’d certainly agree with that. I voted no on the recall. But it’s understandable and reasonable for Californians to jump at the chance to unseat Davis. While he does get blamed for some things that aren’t his fault, even if you ignore those things he’s a lackluster governor, to put it gently. It should be seen as a condemnation of the whole nomination process that the Republicans could not put forth a candidate who could beat Davis is 2002. Recalling him may be an unwise precedent to set, but the act itself is not a stupid decision.

It’s all well and good to say that Arnold is a poor choice for Governor. He is. But the truth is, few of the visible candidates can be said to have been a good choice for Governor. Huffington is no better experienced than Arnold. Bustamante, carrying some of Davis’s stench, is also seen as simply more to the left than most folks want to be. McClintock has experience, but is more to the right than folks want to be. Simon had already deservedly lost to Davis. Issa seemed to want to buy a governorship on the cheap. There are a few candidates on the list that deserved more exploration (Uberoth, for example), but Arnold’s conservative economic policy but generally more liberal social views make him an understandably key candidate for the version of middle-of-the-road that we get in California.

I doubt he’ll make a good governor, but the mere fact that someone is not Arnold does not serve to make them a better governor.

The Producers

Mark Evanier has posted his review of last night’s performance of the L.A. edition of The Producers, featuring Jason Alexander in the Zero Mostel/Nathan Lane role and Martin Short in the Gene Wilder/Matthew Broderick role. Mark specifically notes that Short’s “version of Leo Bloom writhes on the floor and does ‘takes’ they probably saw in the last row of the balcony.”

Well, I can confirm that. By bizarre coincidence, I was in the last row of the balcony last night. The Lovely Lara and I celebrated our anniversary by getting the cheapest tickets we could find to this show. Back row, but dead center. And yes, we could see some of his “takes”, the most visible facial expressions of the show. We sadly missed most of the other facial details; watching the play like this was like watching a TV show on one of those little pocket TVs. You get the movement (we could even see the significant hand waves of Carmen Ghia from that vast distance), but miss much of the texture.

We had a fine time. However, my view of the individual performances were much different than his. I felt Jason Alexander nailed the part and made it his own. Short, on the other hand, seemed to be mixing his own Ed Grimley movements with an attempt to capture Gene Wilder’s vocal delivery. He does indeed pull a lot of humor out of it, but it was hard to not judge him as a weak Gene Wilder rather than a strong Martin Short.

The Mel Brooks film proves a strong base for the work, and there are some very nice musical pieces integrated into the work… and some weaker ones. The supporting performers were generally quite strong, although I was rather unconvinced that Ulla’s accent was Swedish, it seemed to be an invention all its own. It’s certainly a work I wouldn’t mind sitting through again, preferably from a closer angle, where I can get a good look at Jason Alexander’s face and at the nice long legs of some of the dancers. Although there were moments when, from that great distance, it appeared that the dancers had no pants on whatsoever. Perhaps the balcony has its advantages.

I am left wondering about how different the reaction to the story is now than it was then. The use of Nazi imagery and strong homosexual stereotypes must have been quite different when the movie was seen as a rebel work. 35 years later, we’ve long since accepted this work and thus declawed it.

But the movie is still a great piece of work, and the play is very fine as well.

Monday night notes

The first episode of Las Vegas opened with a dead body, who was not really touched on at all until the end of the episode, which also set up some reasonably serious drama about the lead character’s relationship with his family.

The second episode resolved the dead body situation, and otherwise dealt with fairly light drama.

The third episode was all pretty light. So I’m suspicious that the series was originally meant to be darker, but after the pilot was done, someone decided to lighten it up as quickly as possible.

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There was a small easter egg in tonight’s Two and a Half Men. The address of the series primary setting was given as “1167 Bonnie Meadow Drive”. Well, there is no Bonnie Meadow in Malibu… but there is one somewhere in TV Land. Rob and Laura Petrie of The Dick Van Dyke Show lived on Bonnie Meadow.

Tarzan

A couple years back, The WB launched Smallville, trying to rework the classic character Superman in a way that made it more of a relationship-themed soap opera. Despite some clumsiness in it and some repetitiveness problems, it really basically works. The emotional conflicts arise, are human, are real, and are interesting.

So you can’t blame them for trying the same thing with another classic adventure character in their new Sunday night Tarzan series. This time, it doesn’t work.

There is little of the appeal of the Tarzan mythos left in this telling, unless you have a weakness for barechested young men. Tarzan, while still having been raised in the jungle, has now been moved to New York City, where he is held in care of/held hostage by his uncle, a powerful industrialist with his own private black ops team, so secret that they dress all in black and fly in silent helicopters and yet for some reason they wear the corporate badge visibly on their outfits. Someone needs to train these guys in the ways of secrecy.

Tarzan, the scary young hostage, is drawn for inexplicable reasons to Jane, the cop, who is drawn to him as well. This, of course, arises the ire of Jane’s boyfriend, who is also a cop (and, like Jane, of dubious actual competence; Jane survives several things that should have gotten her both killed and fired.) And then there’s Jane’s pretty sister, Jane’s similarly-incompetent cop partner, their rough-talking boss, among other characters bound to get carried into the turbulent seas of the ongoing plots, which are sure to be fascinating so long as we choose to care about the characters…

…but I don’t see any reason to. They don’t have emotions that echo human ones, don’t have situations that invoke recognition.

Tarzan gets reinvented in different ways every few years. 1999 brought the animated film version which launched a TV show. Before that, it was a 1996 live-action version, which followed at least three different film and telefilm versions in the 1980s, and so on. Please, please let this one die a quick death so we can move on to the next version.

(This show did have a reference to Siegfreid And Roy early on, a bit uncomfortable because of the current situation with Roy. A lot of folks must be reviewing their reruns for S&R jokes at the moment; there are moments in The Simpsons that are a bit too dead on.)

Off to the land of Chuck Cunningham

Viewers paying close attention to Life With Bonnie may have noticed one major change: somehow, the Molloy family has shed a kid. No explanation, the daughter that they had all of the first season has simply disappeared, leaving only the son and the baby (now a toddler). The folks at the production house don’t seem to have a firm handle on this; their page for the second season of the show refers to the Molloys as having just two kids, but the picture on the page and the cast list both reflect the presence of Samantha Browne-Walters, the missing lass. Her own website doesn’t explain her absence, but her entry on a discussion board makes it clear that it was not her choice.

The cast list also reminds us that most (but, frustratingly, not all) of the characters have the same first name as the actor, which is a handy way of avoiding problems caused by someone saying the wrong name at the wrong time — a problem that would likely be exascerbated by the semi-improvisational nature of some of the scenes.

The second season is off to a rougher start than the first. Moving David’s character into the Molloy house has made it more plot-oriented and gives the show less variety. It’s hard to tell if any of the house chemistry is lost because of Samantha’s disappearance; she certainly seemed to hold up her end as needed.

Married to the Kellys

The latest addition to ABC’s revived TGIF lineup is Married to the Kelly’s, a show that is apt to drive away folks that might elsewise stick around for the fine Life With Bonnie. It stars repeat-star-of-bad-sitcoms Breckin Meyer as a New York City semi-Jew who moves into a small midwestern town so that his wife can be near her family. As a family who know each other and show concern for one another, they are of course objects of ridicule.

Not funny, not particularly well played, not any particular reason to watch it.

Abuse of the makeup lady

Over on his blog, Mark Evanier is discussing make-up ladies who have endured improper physical contact from big name stars. But he spares no thought for those of us who have been on the other end of the stick.

As some of you may know, a few years back I did some work as an “extra” on various TV and movie shoots. An “extra” is someone on screen with no lines and generally no real involvement in the story; we’re the folks who fill out crowd scenes, who are the other folks in the bar, who are anywhere where people should be without drawing attention to themselves. But in many cases, we do need to be in makeup.

On one such shoot, I needed a fair amount of makeup attention, and the makeup lady I was assigned to was a lithe and attractive lass, with a Bettie Page look to her own hair and makeup. She made the usual little friendly bits of chit chat while taking a quick look at my face and digging into her makeup kit for whatever magic powders it takes to make me look suitable for the camera. Meanwhile, I assumed the proper makeup chair position — arms on the arm rests, relaxed, ready to stay quite still to make her job easy.

Then she leaned in to apply the makeup, and, well… the place where her one leg met her other leg leaned hard against my hand at the end of the arm rest. And she did a bit of work, and then adjusted her angle to reach other parts of my face, while keeping the same point of contact, maneuvering in a slow rub at times.

Then she needed to get at the other side of my face, and much the same contact was had. And in her minutes of working on me, she managed to stay quite close and even brush her shapely chest against me a couple times.

Now, I’d been in the chair before and I’ve been in the chair since, and yes, someone applying your makeup is an inherently intimate procedure. But not intimate in this way, no. As much as I tried to explain it away, it was clear that there was something inappropriate going on. Certainly, had I been the one to initiate this manner and this degree of contact, it would been considered quite forward. And her choice to rub against me was obviously not because I had power, because of course I did not. And trust me, it was not because I was a handsome man, either before or after the makeup treatment.

Not that I’m complaining. While I was made uncomfortable, it was because of the oddness and uncertainty of the situation; the contact itself was not unwelcome. But there are others who would not have felt the same.

Run of the House

I apologize, dear readers, for having missed the sitcom Run of the House when it first aired a couple weeks back. I fear that some of you, without my review to advise you, may have watched this lacklsuter work and wasted a half hour of your lives.

A group of teen and twenty-somethings have the house to themselves on an ongoing basis as Dad is off somewhere. In the real world, any of these people would be old enough to make at least somewhat responsible decisions for themselves (my goodness, Joey Lawrence is old enough to change his name to Joseph Lawrence and thus distances himself from kiddiness). But, of course, the plot has to be the struggle for responsiblity… and as it turns out, on this episode the responsible thing to do was vandalism and petty theft.

Not a funny show. Not to be watched again.