Just watched a second episode of Corner Gas (actually, apparently just watched the first episode), and confirmed my beliefs. This show is a lot of fun, very witty. This one looks like a keeper (and Mrs. Nat’s TV likes it, to boot!) And the keen thing is that there are already more than 60 episodes out there, so this will not be disappearing soon. Even if WGN axes it for some reason, it’s easily available on DVD from Canadian sources, and that’s Region 1, naturally.
Happy happy happy.
The new season got off to a bad start tonight as Fox aired the first new fiction series, K-Ville, an over-the-top cop drama set in the slowly-recovering city of New Orleans.
Now, New Orleans was the sort of flashy city that one could put an old, over-the-top 1970s cop show, with casinos and mystics and various forms of cultural richness. Take a look at, say, the Chief Wiggum storyline on “The Simpsons Spin-off Showcase”, or the backdoor Las Vegas: New Orleans pilot, to see the sort of thing I mean.
Problem is that New Orleans now is not quaintly quirky, it is horribly, tragically troubled. K-Ville tries to have it both ways, acting like it takes the situation in the city seriously while adding cartoonishly-evil scheming villains doing ridiculous things for ridiculous motivations. This denigrates the real, base-level human problems at hand. It tries to treat its subject as dark and serious, but there is no depth to the seriousness. Tawdry exploitation of real tragedy. And not even fun tawdry exploitation. (Lucky for me, I can cleanse my pallet with the season closer of Saving Grace, which opens with Holly Hunter having fun while tied butt-nekkid to a bed. Tawdry exploitation, yes, but with fun in place. Now that scene is over, and we’re on to things that we’re supposed to take seriously… but at least I got my moment!)
Well, the new US season of prime time fiction shows hasn’t quite launched yet (new ones start this week), but I’ve already got something for you Nat’s TV readers to check out. It’s not so much a new show as new to us — the Canadian sitcom Corner Gas, which is now airing on superstation WGN.
This is a gentle, amiable sitcom set amongst the friendly characters in a small Saskatchewan town. The folks who work at the local gas station, the lovely new-to-the-area gal at the adjacent shop, the various people coming through their lives. It has the genteel feel of a Northern Exposure or Ballykissangel (or, for you young folks going through lesser works, Men in Trees) without the aggressive quirkiness, because this isn’t a fish-out-of-water comedy. There’s an outsider, and she’s used well, but she isn’t the center. It’s a comfortable fish in water comedy.
That doesn’t tell you much about it. But I will tell you this: I’ve only caught one episode so far (not the first episode), and it got me laughing several times with it’s smart wit. Funny things being delivered in not-too-obvious, not-too-hammering manner made this a pleasant thing to watch.
It looks to me like they’re airing the first episode on Monday night. I’ll try to catch that (although it’s airing against a new launch which I’ll need to record… looks like I’ll have to actually set the clock on the VCR again!)
One warning: WGN runs a fair amount of sports, which means you can’t count on other things actually airing as promised. I’ve only watched one episode, but I recorded two; the other one lost its first five minutes to a baseball game. Sigh.
Those lucky Russians! The Russian refilming of The Nanny episodes proved so popular that they got the original show’s writers to create another 25 episodes for them to adapt!
(C’mon, TV Land — I know we can’t refilm them, but how much could it cost to get the original US cast to redub the dialog on these?)
Finding an upcoming movie review that says Kene Holliday [...] his performance here is one of the year’s best. I mean… Kene Holliday? Yeah, yeah, I know he was a regular on Matlock, but the last time I recall him getting significant attention was back when he was the star of Carter Country, a sitcom which some of the younger readers here likely never encountered; it debuted two weeks short of 30 years ago today, and while it lasted multiple seasons it seems to have disappeared from the public consciousness (aside, perhaps, the TVarati occasionally quoting Richard Paul’s catchphrase “handleithandleit!” and noting the existence of an actor named Guich Koock.) Kene’s screen output of this century consists primarily of two single-episode TV series appearances.
So to me, this is not simply a matter of someone with pleasant screen presence having a success. It’s just another example that being a “has been” doesn’t mean one is “washed up”; a has been may be again, the best may be yet to come, and while it isn’t the only thing that matters, in the long run talent does matter. So yeah, that makes me happy.
