Saturday Night Short

Over the past few months, we’ve discovered On Demand, the service on our Time-Warner Cable that gives us access to recent shows. (While we’ve had T-W for years, we only got the cable box hooked up once we got the big screen HD TV last year, and even then we didn’t pay much attention to it, focusing on our non-HD ReplayTV. I’d assumed that On Demand was just for paid material.)

So tonight, I went to watch this week’s Saturday Night Live, and found it a bit odd going. There was no monologue. Guest host Justin Beiber didn’t show up until midway through the second sketch. “Weekend Update” came very early in the show, and then I realized that we hadn’t gotten the musical performance that usually comes before the fake news. So I paused the show to see the rnning length… this eighty-five minute show was clocking in at 49 minutes. By the time I hit the end, I realized that not only were both of the usual two musical performances missing, but that the host thanked a special guest star who I had not seen.

I haven’t yet checked if this abridged edition is standard for SNL On Demand, or whether there was something special going on in this case (perhaps Bieber has some exclusive agreement for video of musical performances?) But frankly, with a lot of the episodes I’d be happy to get to “Weekend Update” faster.

the elusive Animal Practice

If anyone out there is a fan of Animal Practice (I’m not), it’s cancellation seems to have been moved up a week, due to some Monday stuff being rescheduled for tonight in the wake of Sandy. However, it looks like the episode which was supposed to air tonight is available online here.

A major change in review policy

A while back, I stated that it was no longer my goal to review every new primetime network fiction show… although I’ve kept pretty close to that at times. Now, I’m going to switch my policy more radically:

No more bad reviews.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to start giving bad shows good reviews. And if I see a bad show and see something insightful to say, I shall. But for a number of reasons, this blog won’t be the home for such depression and snark in the future. I do hope to keep recommending good shows, as they appear.

Goon… oh, wait, I think there’s a space in there

The new Matthew Perry series Go On aired right after The New Normal, and it showed some key factor that makes a real difference in a sitcom, because even though it was rarely actually funny, I didn’t hate watching it. It had characters that even though they were down, I didn’t hate spending time with, because they had some charm rather than merely being obnoxious. I could watch it because there were characters with abnormalities on the surface but had some real humanity beneath, rather than the other way ’round. It made me feel that even though the series has a downbeat theme, if I spent more time with the characters I’d want to spend even more with them, rather than run screaming.

This is at base a “therapy group” series, which puts it in a tradition with Dear John and, ummm, I guess Anger Management. Okay, perhaps that’s not so long a tradition. Perry’s character is a sportscaster recovering from the loss of his wife. He’s acting like a man on the edge (and looking, for some reason, like a man who stood up in a Popemobile that was running at high speed and missing its windshield.) He’s thrown into a group for those suffering from loss, some big and some small, and immediately with the force of his personality shows that he can have an impact on the group… and, with a little more digging, shows that the group may be needed to have an impact on him, no matter how much he resists.

Perry does a good job playing a man with inner stress… which, let’s face it, is what he played on Friends and Mr. Sunshine as well. The supporting casts has some faces I like, such as John Cho (Harold of and Kumar fame) and Tyler James Williams (the Chris whom Everybody Hates). There are some characters who are supposed to be a mite annoying, somewhat nasty or loserlike in their dealing with loss, and I hope the writers keep the balance from leaning too much toward them.

And in twenty minutes, I get to watch another episode, because last night’s premiere was not the premiere, it was a “preview”, with a blantantly first episode that will not be rerun tonight for the premiere.

The New Abysmal

The New Normal is a series about a gay couple having a baby. One character is an officially announced bigot; everyone else seems worth being bigoted against. The basic problem with this sitcom is not the situation… it’s that its not funny, not for a moment. And it’s not even the sort of not-funny that seems to grab an audience at times. This spares me from having to write a longer review that justifies my distaste; I’m confident that this one will soon be gone.

I’m so glad that we have good, successful shows with gay characters on now, so that we can afford to let the crap die without people saying “look, no one will watch homosexuals on network.”

Political Animals

Just watched the premiere of the USA Network miniseries Political Animals. Reckoned it might be some form of good – Sigourney Weaver doing TV is something that carries some weight.

Weaver plays a very thinly veiled Hillary Clinton. I mean, very; it’s like this started as a piece of Hillary fan fiction. She’s the wife of the two-term philandering 42nd President of the United States who runs for president herself years later, loses the primary, but ends up working as Secretary of State for the man who defeated her. VERY. They could’ve named her Clillary Hinton and still been no less subtle.

Within this context, she deals with family secrets, with journalists digging for those secrets, and with international gamesmanship. It’s watchable, the parts are well played, but it fails to be convincing. This is neither racy enough to be a guilty pleasure (although there are various scenes of sex that go beyond what one would find on the broadcast channels) nor insightful enough to be a serious drama. Its world of journalism is focused one women who are far too concerned with proper use of the term “bitch”, and where conflicts apparently arise because Carla Gugino isn’t the sexy one. (Carla’s the good-gal journalist in this, the one who holds back reporting a story so she can use it as blackmail; actually reporting the story is something left to the bad-gal journalist. The script is focused enough on the women in power as dealing with the carelessness and abuse of the men around them that I’m left wondering if this was crafted with Lifetime in mind. Add in some ugly gay stereotyping and we’re left with… watching Sigourney do her thing. Which is of value, of course, but while I’ll be DVRing the upcoming episodes, I would not be surprised if I forrgo actually watching them.

The newest shows from A-Bitch-C

I’m playing catch-up again. With GCB, I have a slight excuse. I did catch it right away, but I wanted to take the time to give it a more than a quickie review. (That fell by the side.) This is a lighthearted girlfest show, like Desperate Housewives without mixing in the occasional darker overtone (yet). Set in upperclass Texas, it focuses on someone who appears to have been the one person Destructive Cool Kids clique, who now returns to her hometown after a shameful life collapse, an improved woman brought low. There, she is dealing closely with the highly-successful former victims of her high school activities. This is all broadly played, quite silly…. but done with a sense of fun. The balance is interesting; as much as we have a likable (and purty) protagonist, there is the sense that all the cheap mean things that she is now being faced with from her social circle, she actually deserves. And as much as the various characters use their church in inapprropriate ways, there is a sense for some that their Christianity is quite genuine and is used often for good intent, if often with laughable imprecision. There seems a genuine effort not to demean belief in the midst of demeaning the characters.

This is one of the shows where the casting people like me. Kristen Chenowith as the self-obsessed holier-than-thou little powerhouse? The still quite lovely Annie Potts as our protagonist’s mom (she’s had my attention since 1978′s Corvette Summer)? Throw in a little Bruce Boxleitner and Tom Everett Scott? Oh, yes! And the people who I didn’t know before this? They’re quite good too.

But it’s sloppy at times. There’s running storylines, and then there are asides for an episode that work against that (our lead is desperate, taking what most would consider a low job to make some money…. but then, for one episode they want her doing something different for a storyline, so suddenly she has a second job, a much better one. And even if it doesn’t last… doesn’t that mess with where they’re going?) So there’s a real question of whether they have anything planned… not that they need to, for this silliness, but it seems like they want to. Anyway, this seems designed to fill the Desperate Housewives hole that is opening up with the coming end to that series, and it should do well in that role.

And the other member of the B-Team, The B in Apartment 23? Expected to hate it, and failed to. This show was played as something all about how bad the bad girl is, and yes, that’s an element, but she’s the situation, not the central character, and even she’s more than what was suggested. The central character is her new roommate, who is learning that the world is rough but stepping up quickly to play her part in it. The descriptor for this show may seem quite similar to Two Broke Girls, but the texture is different, and a good bit superior. Points go to James Van Der Beek, for filling the role that Jennifer Grey pioneered in It’s Like You Know, the celebrity playing themselves as evil, slutty, and self-obsessed (and he looks good doing it.) Worth checking out, even if you wrote it off from the ads.

Alcatraz and The Firm

The two new shows, Alcatraz and The Firm, both seem to be trying to address the same problem. There is some attraction to running a “big story” or “big mystery” drama, to keep the viewer hooked, a la Lost. However, it’s hard to convince people it’s worth watching if they’re unsure if the full story will ever be told… and even if you keep the show running successfully, the big story does poorly in syndication, which is more built toward people catching an episode here, an episode there.

So both of them set up their big story, but work very hard in their first hours to make it clear that A Story Will Be Told Each Episode. In the case of Alcatraz, the basic pitch is that 300 prisoners who mysteriously disappeared from the famed prison 50 years ago are reappearing, unaged, one at a time, and committing crimes. As such, each episode  is about how the investigative team goes after one bad guy, basic cop drama, and then running in the background is the Big Mystery of What’s Going On.  The setup is pretty goofy even just beyond the inherent science fiction of it, with the team being pulled together in some unlikely ways (hey, cop, we’re trying to get you on the team by tricking you into being interested. And who do you want for your sidekick? A graphic novelist? Of course!) I’m unsure of how much I can invest in the “find the killer” plots – I’m growing weary of serial killer fiction – but there are a couple characters that I like, most particularly Jorge Garcia. I may watch more.

The Firm is a sequel to the Grisham novel and the movie based thereon, which means that the lead is about to get himself involved with another complexly corrupt law firm. I mean, it’s Jack Bauer syndrome, life repeating itself in intense and exciting ways, showing that one has learned from his mistakes and, in the words of Peter Cook, “can repeat them exactly”. Within this framework, they have the room for the legal case of the week, generic law show stuff.

The look of the work is good, but the writing is less so. The legal case in the pilot had our hero – how we are supposed to think of in that manner, not just as a protagonist – ultimately working against the interests of his client, and doing so without consulting with the client.

Not sure either is a keeper. The Firm seems less clunky, but ultimately less attractive.

How I Found The Finder

The Finder is one of those series focused on One Person With Special Abilities And Quirks, and The Team Around Them. These can be very good, like House in its glory days, or simply entertaining, as The Mentalist sometimes becomes. The Finder specializes in finding things, his talent is being able to get a sense of the details of the situation that must’ve occurred to reach the situation he sees. His team’s special ability is to spend their lives explaining their backstory to anyone who happens by.

Okay, okay, it was a pilot episode, and yes, it needed to introduce the characters. But that means establishing who they are… if you have a series, you have plenty of time to reveal why.

There was something about the pilot, with a desperate man showing up needing his father found, with travel to distant places, with the structure of his crew around him (and not just with his main business handler being a large black man – in this case, Michael Clark Duncan – although that’s certainly part of it) that made it feel like it wated to be Human Target… which is silly, considering HT‘s short run. If somehow that is their goal, it fails. This felt awkward, pointlessly self-important, and not particularly convincing or entertaining.

The two new legend shows

Playing catch-up here: two new shows are built around fairy tales. It took me a while to catch up with them. Grimm is the more the kind of thing I like; in a lot of ways, it’s a lot like Buffy, with a member of a secret line of monster-stoppers doing battle with legendary monsters, with the hero knowing little about his lineage, and learning as he goes. Okay, it’s really, really like Buffy, if you don’t expect cute girls (it’s a very male series) and fun.

Once Upon a Time is less the kind of thing that I like, but I like it better. This is more a mythology story, spinning a backstory about a land of fairy tale characters and how they became trapped in a more humdrum real world. The writing is occasionally clever, the production value is high (lots of actors from things I’ve liked), and some of the women (it’s a very female series) are quite pleasant to watch. Still, a lot of manufactured darkness that don’t tie into real human emotion. It’s not great, and as with many a big mythology series, one suspects that it will never really get to telling the whole story… or if it does, it will be disappointing. I think I’ll stick with this one a while longer, allow it a chance to breathe and perhaps grow on me.