Women’s Murder Club, about a gagglet of friends who relevantly get involved in solving crimes together (cop, lawyer, and coroner, so it’s not like it’s illegitimate for any one of them). This isn’t quite a natural combination, so it feels more “mystery” than “procedural”, but really, the thing that will makes this work or not work is how interesting the gals are and how they interact. However, this is a dark series and they’re not playing them as quirky character types, so at best we’ll have a slow dramatic build.
What I saw in the first one was neither enough to make me go “ooh, gotta see more of that!” nor “egads, can never watch that again” (although the introduction of what looks like an ongoing serial killer storyline suggests that it will be more gruesome than great.)
Clubs Murder Women, too
Life is Wild
If I were a 13 year old girl, I would probably watch The CW’s Life is Wild. Family drama as a combined family move from The Big City to help run an African lodge; wild animals; hunky boys. If the dialog isn’t particularly scintillating and the theme is ultimately going to be Family Pulls Together (even though they aren’t that far apart), so be it. Wouldn’t seem out of place on ABC Family. Would seem out of place on my ReplayTV.
But all the 13 year old girls who read this blog should give it a try!
Is this why they're giving the arrow-slinger a second shot?
Just after having posted my previous comment, I stop by writer Mark Evanier’s blog and am reminded of the looming TV writers’ strike. Suddenly, I’m wondering if this is why Cupid is being revived — whether it’s so that, if a strike does happen, ABC has a “new” series with most of a season’s worth of good scripts (okay, I don’t remember if they were all good) on hand so they can keep making new shows without writers. Previous WGA strikes brought us other show revivals, such as The New Odd Couple and Mission: Impossible, although those two were obviously of shows that had been more successful the first time ’round and had many more episodes which could be cherry-picked for remaking.
It also gets me thinking about what else I’d be looking at doing if I were a network programmer facing an empty slate. Would I try rerunning cable originals like The Closer or Damages or those cable-original Law’n'Order: Whichever episodes? Would I pull “TV-as-a-museum” stunts and run, say, a night of the classic CBS sitcom line-up of the 1970s, or episodes of the original British The Office? Could I contractually get away with funding BBC productions for immediate rerun in the States (“Hey, Mr. Whedon, about that Buffy spin-off Ripper that you’ve been planning…”)?
But on the off chance that the networks are coming to my blog looking for ideas, I’d just like to remind them: there are twenty-five The Nanny scripts begging to be filmed!
Cupid returns
So I’ve been thinking that the rise of Jeremy Piven’s star and the cult success of Veronica Mars (by creator Rob Thomas) might finally get us a DVD set of the partial-season-running Cupid, an enjoyable light drama about a guy who may (or may not) be Cupid and his efforts to bring people together.
But I didn’t expect ABC to revive the series. Yes, there have been series seen originally as failures brought back to life successfully (think Star Trek: the Next Generation or Battlestar Galactica), but those are things that were much more visible than Cupid ever was. I doubt the new version is relying on the existing fan base the way those other series did. It will be interesting to see if they can pull this together; it’s really no less likely a success than other things being launched, and in a textural way it was a series more of today than of its day. Here’s hoping that, with whoever they cast in the lead, it is as magic as it was, and more successful as well.
Link via Lyle.
Chased away
It wasn’t that surprising to see Chevy Chase doing a piece on tonight’s SNL. Short appearances by old stars are common. The length of the appearance was a bit of a shocker. More interesting, perhaps, is rather than have Chevy come to the Update desk as might normally be done, he had his own set — where the notoriously difficult to work with actor was on-stage with no one.
Floweringshoving 101
At the Comic-Con International San Diego this year, they were giving out a free Pushing Daisies comic book, promoting the new TV series. I took one and didn’t acually read it — but it wasn’t until I watched the pilot that I recognized that it was an apt choice of promotion. Pushing Daisies feels lie a good independent humor comic book or graphic novel (say, Halo & Sprocket or Banana Sunday), embracing a silly concept but bringing a solid stylistic approach and a complete worldview to it.
It’s the tale of a piemaker with the power to raise the dead for a brief period. Chi Mc”Desmond Pfeiffer”Bride plays a detective pal who helps exploit this power for profit, asking questions of the murdered to help earn rewards. And then there’s the love interest with the problematic twist . Simple tools, used well.
They even echo comics by using omniscient narration (something almost never done on TV otherwise, although getting ever rarer in comics as well.) Frankly, the narration was overdone at the beginning, to annoying effect, but by the end of the pilot (titled “pie-lette”, not meaningful enough a title to really qualify as a pun), either they’d lightened up on it or I’d become accustomed to it.
One of my friends was raving over having a bunch of Broadway musical stars in a TV show (it’s not, I should note, a musical series, although I wouldn’t be surprised if they exploited that possibility at some point; it would work stylistically in the show.) What I found interesting is how the local advertisers exploited this — the show had ads for the local performances of Avenue Q (which Mrs. Nat’s TV and I considered going to see tomorrow for our anniversary) and Wicked (which we are going to see instead.) This isn’t a market where plays are usually advertised during major network prime time.
Anyway, Pushing Daisies gets a real recommendation based on the pilot, but I’ll be curious to see how well they can keep it going (particularly since I assume the big time Hollywood director of episode 1 won’t be sticking around.) Whoops — just checked IMDB, and they list Big Time Hollywood Director (Barry Sonnenfeld of Men In Black and Get Short, as well as Wild Wild West in which I starred. Well, I think my bald spot is recognizable in one shot) as doing at least three episodes. More reason for hope!
Passing the baton to a younger generation
I don’t feel like reviewing Carpoolers for some reason, other than noting that like some other Bruce McCulloch comedy, it feels like he’s writing from a “laugh at them” rather than a “laugh at us” angle, and that it might be funny if they just started abbreviating “carpool” as just “carp”.
So instead of posting a proper review of my own, I thought I’d post a copy here of what I posted last night on my almost-three-year-old daughter’s blog:
Allison’s review of movies.
- Meet the Robinsons: Good, but a little scary.
- Ratatouille: Good, but a little scary.
- The Simpsons Movie: Good, but a little scary.
- Hairspray: Good, but a little scary.
Tonight, Allison was coming downstairs for her “midnight snack”, so I immediately paused the TV pilot I was watching. “What were you watching, Daddy?”
“It’s called Carpoolers. It’s a show about guys who drive to work together.”
“It’s a good show,” she immediately explained to me, “but a little scary.”
Still kickin' butt
It’s always a risk, coming back for another season of a good hit show. The folks on the other side of the camera have a chance to move on to make The Next Thing, and what you come back to can be a bad echo of what was working. Or the same folks can be behidn the scenes, and will have run through all they had to say, and thus have run dry.
With the second episode the season, House just showed that that was not a problem. It was both a typical and atypical episode; typical in that it took a tough-to-diagnose problem and ran it through a wide range of interesting and unlikely approaches. In fact, this aspect was ever-so-much-moreso than normal, for the same reason the episode was atypical: House was working with a huge cast of potential assistants, peppering him with that many more ideas. And with the idea that some of these folks might end up permanent, they did some smart casting — there were a number of recognizable actors in the batch. Not big names, generally it’s “hey, it’s that guy!” types… but folks recognizable enough that you could believe they might be added to the cast.
Anyway, it was one of the top three episodes of this quality series, and that’s a good sign.
Wallace and Gromit return
A new half hour next year! In this household, the existing three specials are on regular rotation — the wee lass keeps asking for them.
Aliens and Vampires and Cavemen in America
- Aliens in America is the case of not only a reasonably good show, but one that is in the right time-slot. This is a sitcom of a whitebread American family who take in a Pakistani exchange student. Both the focus on awkward schoolkids and the well-intentioned pro-human tone of the whole show make it a good pairing for Everybody Hates Chris (although there is the question of whether the black sitcom has become a demographic blocker that this will not be able to escape.) Some will probably sneer at the “political correctness” of having a a likable muslim exchange student, but what it is really about is being an outsider, and the focus of that is not the exchange student — it’s the family’s son. Worth checking out.
- There is the thought that the vampire detective series Moonlight wants to capture the Buffy audience (given the vampire theme) or the Vermoica Mars audience (given the casting of VM’s old boyfriend as an ancient, young-looking powerful vamp, and the VM-linked inclusion of a reference to Hearst College). That thought would be in error. Both those series mixed a sense of wit in with their serious side. While this show isn’t as relentlessly dark as Bionic Woman or Journeyman. the detective stuff in the pilot wasn’t that interesting, and while clearly this will be a Larger Story series, there’s not enough in the pilot to drag me in. They smartly start out by laying out the Rules Of Vampirism in their continuity (basically, long-lived blood-drinkers without most of the traditional supernatural trappings). If you’re the sort of person who regularly invests themselves in smart genre shows, this is worth checking out – it isn’t that smart starting out, but it may grow with time. When I was younger, I might’ve followed this for a while. I am no longer younger.
- The best thing about Cavemen is that now, when I tell people that Baby Bob is the best sitcom ever based on a series of TV commercials, it won’t be meaningless. The scary thing is that Baby Bob is far and away the best sitcom ever based on a series of TV commercials.
