Kitchen Confidential is a class act. It’s got a strong cast, well directed, well photographed, and it has serious intent. The pilot wasn’t that funny, mind you, but the base for a good series has been laid.
Set in a new, trendy restaurant with a chef whose previous go-round in the big leagues put him in the fast lane in all the worst ways, it paints the restaurant world as over-the-top and filled with characters. There may be actually too many characters in the restaurant, and folks like Nicholas Brendon of Buffy and John Cho of Harold and Kumar go to White Castle don’t get much use in the pilot.
It’s a single-camera show, and while it deals in excess, it kept an emotional core through this episode. We shall see if it can take this richness and build off of it. Worth checking out, and I’ll try to give it a couple more episodes, despite the overloadd time slot.
or did you mean single “camera” show, because most shows that I watch are only on a single channel?
Yes, single camera.
There will be a lot of typos and brain-to-page transference errors likely in the days to come; writing is interupted by 10 month old Allison at a far too frequent basis. I will correct the post.
hey, I wasn’t trying to bust your chops. Nobody knows more than I do about the agony of that one typo that gets uncorrected. I did think it was a funny slip.
It just occurred to me that there have indeed been multi-channel prime-time shows on those odd occasions when a show is cancelled by one network and picked up by another. Usually it’s a case like Taxi which was cancelled after 4 seasons, I believe, and picked up for one last one by another network (I think it went from either NBC or CBS to ABC, but I’m not sure).
Of course, Buffy did her final two seasons on UPN, but there were extenuating circumstances with that particular jump.
I think probably the most notable success at jumping networks was JAG which, if I remember correctly (a dubious possibility since I never watched the show) was cancelled after one season on NBC and then hopped to CBS for about nine more.
Then there’s Veronica Mars which may have actually become the first truly multi-channel prime-time show when CBS reran four episodes this summer while UPN was also showing reruns of it. (In fact, CBS only showed four of the same episodes that UPN had also recently rerun, but it was all sort of during the same time frame within a month or so.) Naturally it helps that CBS and UPN are both owned by Viacom and so there’s a little self-serving attempt at cross-pollination involved trying to drum up viewers for VM and UPN in general, but still…
I’m sure there are other examples of multi-channel shows each with their own unique circumstances, but those are the ones that bubble up to the top o’my brain.
If one includes cable channels, there have been a number of multichannel shows, going at least as far back as Hi Honey, I’m Home!, which for the first few weeks would air on ABC so that Nick At Night could air it a few days later as “an instant rerun”. ABC also reran a season of Monk between seasons, and shows such as Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and Battlestar Galactica have had broadcast network airings to boost interest. And there have been game shows with network nighttime versions and syndicated datetime versions simultaneously.
The only production that comes to mind as having original episodes interspersed between two channels is the recently-completed Rock Star: INXS, which originally started with three airings a week on the broadcast network, and then switched two two on network and one on VH1 (where I believe the other network episodes were also rerun.)
I do want to flag a multi-channel character, however. During the huge ABC success of the mid-1970s, they had The Six Million Dollar Man which spun off The Bionic Woman. The network was doing so well that they were casting off shows which would be considered survivors elsewhere, and Bionic Woman (and Wonder Woman and something else, I think it was The Tony Randall Show) got picked up by other networks. This meant that Oscar Goldman, the boss of both the bionic folk, was a regular character on series on two different networks at once.
Yes, Monk. Of course. How could I forget as that’s how I came to find that series in the first place. A great big “DUH!” on my part.
And I do remember seeing Battlestar Galactica airing on NBC this summer. I even taped it to check it out, but later decided “Why Bother?” since I can’t see the actual series anyway.
I thought of game shows like Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, but in my mind game shows just don’t count since they’re usually day/night affairs in such instances and I was trying to think of shows limited to dual prime time slots in some way.
But I knew there’d be many more examples than just what I recalled myself. I’d have never caught the RS:INXS dual airings. Interesting curiosity, that.
As for multi-channel characters, David E. Kelley got to do a Boston Public / The Practice crossover with one or two characters from each (with relatively minor screen time involved as I recall). He may have also done it between The Practice & Ally McBeal too, but I’m not sure. Not as notable as the doubly recurring Oscar Goldman character, of course, but still concurrently multi-channel, multi-show characters.
Well, yes, there have been plenty of cross-channel one-shot crossovers. (As always, I’ll steer people to the Crossovers Master List for info on these. Not all are cross-channel, of course, but a number are. (The X-Files/Homicide crossover, for example.)
As for things like Battlestar Galactica, I know it may not be in the budget at the moment, but Netflix is quite handy for watching things that ran on extended channels and pay cable.