Charlie’s Angels

The original Charlie’s Angels was about three capable women (at a time) who strengths had been overlooked due to their femininity, who were hired by a warm-voiced mystery man and aided by his capable-but-unhip assistant.

It would be hard to get this concept to work today simply because of the advances, incomplete though they may be, in the women’s place in America since the 1970s. (I had some interesting discussions with respected creative folks recently about how we would rework Remington Steele, if given the chance, to work in the new era due to similar problems.)

So for the new version, instead of their perceived Achilles heel being their gender, it’s their backgrounds; they’ve each done something wrong. Which would be fine if this were about redemption, but it’s not; it’s about people who were basically good still being good… so they’re all good looking females because…? Oh, and Bosley’s also got the same kind of past, and now he’s all hip and one of the agents, but he’s clearly separate from the female crew, because… umm… And Charlie himself is hard, cold, and robotic, so everyone follows him because… ummmm….

Look, I don’t have some great nostalgic love for the original show; I must’ve seen a few episodes back in the day, because I did have a “favorite Angel” (Kate Jackson, the smart one, and maybe it was slightly groundbreaking to have someone sexy in their smartness.) But I’m not going to declare this some sort of violation of something sacred. But it’s mix of melodramatic darkness and ligthhearted goofiness doesn’t gel. There are a few cute moments, but nothing that leaves me needing to watch more… not even Minka Kelly. And I like me some Minka Kelly; with a track record of Friday Night Lights and Parenthood, she comes with many fine associations, and she is still purty, but cannot conquer the material.

It’s

Revenge

ABC’s new Revenge is a mixture of an over-the-top very-upper-class-oriented soap (of the Dynasty tradition), and a “what was the reason for the events of years ago which drive this?” mystery.

I don’t like the the former genre, and I’ve learned not to trust shows in the second genre to stick around long enough to answer the question.

Not for me.

The Playboy Club

It was very easy to look at the ads for both The Playboy Club and the upcoming Pan-Am and think they were both supposed to be network versions of Mad Men, looking at 1960s worlds which involved putting a polished, friendly surface over the darker world within.

But in the case of The Playboy Club, that assumption would be wrong. Well, not quite wrong – it does want to be Mad Men, or at least to have its Don Draper, the dark-haired slick respected voracious ladies man whose surface hides the truth. But it doesn’t just want to be Mad Men. It also wants to be some more tawdry drama; it opens with a Bunny (i.e., one of the costumed female staff of the Playboy Club, for those to young to know the terminology) killing an attacker, who turns out to be the head of an organized crime family, who turn out to have strong political ties to… oh it doesn’t matter, you get the picture. That ain’t Mad Men, it’s some nighttime soap. And then there’s the links to social and political issues that would really come into full thrust in the following decade or so, seen in scenes about the Mattachine Society, which makes it seem like they want to do Homefront, and it’s all too much of everything and not enough of anything, and the characters are given complexity of situation rather than signs of depth of character, and even with pretty gals in revealing outfits I’m not left wanting to see more of it.

(It does have David Krumholtz in it… but for a minute or two, I had to make sure that my brain was clear, that it really was David Krumholtz and not Max Casella, who seems to mainly exist in period pieces.)

The Secret Circle

That run of “Every premiere is better than the last”? It’s over. Ah well.

The Secret Garden tells the tale of a teen whose mother dies, sending her to live in the family’s ancestral home town with her grandmother… only to discover that she is a witch, that she gains powers when with pretty teens from five other magical families.

There are series that are designed to entertain me, and there are series that are designed to entertain people who aren’t me. This is the first series I’ve seen that seems designed primarily to inspire a million teenage girls to write occasionally-explicit fan fiction. Mary Sue: The Series.

Free Agents

This is the third new series I’ve seen this season, and each one has qualified as “the best new show I’ve seen so far”! If this keeps up, the thirty-something show is going to great… I mean Terriers great. (Oh, I miss Terriers.)

Free Agents is a single-camera sitcom of reasonably sophisticated tone focusing on Hank Azaria as a recently divorced man who is trying to find his way back into the world of romance, leaning in awkward and human ways on a coworker who is trying to find her way back in herself, in the wake of the death of her fiancé. The delivery, while not striving for the level of realism, is not as broad and overstated as a typical three-camera effort would be, and this serve Azaria well, although it may be that some of the supporting characters are too broad for its tone.

And for those of us who see the world through a Buffy-shaped lens, it’s worth noting that not only does this show have Anthony Stewart Head in it, but the first episode had a reference to Sarah Michelle Gellar. The world is built for us!

Up All Night

Some things, we like to watch because they reflect our life.

In the case of Up All Night, I’m having the opposite reaction. As someone who gets awakened at 5-something each morning by a 2 year old, a series that’s built around the fact that a couple gets little sleep because of their kid does not prove to be a source of comedy. It’s a source of frustration. The humor just rubs it in. Will Arnett does an acceptable job playing an acceptable person, which is a nice switch from the slimy sorts he’s played so often.

A lot of attention is going to Maya Rudolph, who played Oprah on SNL, doing basically the same character here. She does it well – Maya has proven herself a strong actress – but as with much of this show, it’s more convincing than it is funny.

Anyway, I’m not the one to judge this show; it would be watchable if it were not in too painful a realm for me. I’m to sleep-deprived to laugh at this.

Ringer

One problem with using known actors in a role is that they carry with them certain baggage. This can be particularly troublesome with an actor who is very tied in the mind with a single part. The new CW series Ringer (apparently the first to launch this season… and really, this is about the only time of year that I notice that The CW exists) starts with a scene of Sarah Michelle Gellar running from a masked thug who is after her… and the mind cannot help but assume that at some point, she’s going to pull out a pointy wooden stick and stake the fiend. But this is not Buffy. Later in the tale, we get Nestor Carbonell, and we cannot trust that singularly good-lookin’ dude because we just know he’s part of a conspiracy, thanks to Lost.

The concept is one with possibilities. Gellar plays a woman on the run from both the law and criminals, who takes advantage of her twin sister’s apparent suicide to take her place in life… and there are intrigues in both the life she left and the life she’s taking over. I know if I had to step into a life I didn’t know very well and not let my ignorance show, I’d bollix it all up.

But pulling this off is going to take attention to detail… and this is someplace where the writers slip up so badly once that they lose a lot of trust in my eyes. Let’s wave a SPOILER ALERT flag here – if you’ve not yet seen the pilot (they’re running it twice more this week), you may want to skip the rest of the message.

Late in the episode, the substitute sister gets a phone call intended for the real sister – it’s from her doctor, letting her know that yes, she’s indeed pregnant. Now, we’ll skip the part where this is several days after the apparent death of the real sister, pregnancy results seldom take that long. The fake sister gets this information, and in the next scene, the real sister’s husband and friends know that she is pregnant. Who told? Well, it wouldn’t be the doctor, as doctors have ethical and legal requirements, and folks who are only 4 weeks pregnant often want to keep that info quiet anyway. So it must’ve been… the fake sister. Which makes no farging sense because it’s not the fake sister who is pregnant, the pregnant woman is gone, so by telling people she’s pregnant she’s needlessly complicating her life. What’s she going to do, fake being pregnant in order to live up to the assumptions of people who didn’t know she was pregnant until she told them?

The rest of the episode was straightforward, unamazing and occasionally cliche, but not actively bad. But boy, that moment hit with a thud. Not a must see, and I’d be wary of expecting it to survive…but then I see that The CW has an ad for the second season of their Nikita series, which I had no idea was still around. So a series may be able to survive quietly on this less visible network.

ADDED 9-15: Someone elsewhere pointed out that I missed a visual – something I do far too often with the oft-distracted way  I watch TV these days – of the husband overhearing the call… voiding the point of most of this post. Sigh.