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.

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.

No wonder Cher looks strained at times

When I read articles that say that (Dancing With The Stars contestant) Chas Bono was “born a woman”, I can’t help but think that my, that sounds like a painful delivery. I thank goodness that my daughter was born a little girl.

Chicago Code

As I type this, the second episode of The Chicago Code is taping on my DVD recorder, so you may be watching the second one while I review the first one. And the first one started off on the wrong foot for me – because I failed to properly tape it, and I had to watch a low-frame-rate streaming version on an awkwardly-placed computer… and all this with low expectations, because it’s yet another cop show, and those have not fared well with me of late.

But but but, even with all that, it won my attention. It’s smoothly made, the production is good, there’s some well-done dialogue, and the pilot was straightforward and honest in admitting it was introducing the characters. But what really won me over was its choice of focus. But before I get to that, an aside…

Years ago, I was writing some comic book scripts that were to be drawn by the legendary Don Heck (some pages of art do exist for this project, but the planned publisher stopped paying, Don died, and the project was never and will never be completed). At that time, comics publishers were finding any excuse to launch new superhero concepts, and I stated to think what Don and I might do to exploit this situation. Don was one of the main artists of Marvel’s Silver Age, but he was always stronger at drawing guys in business suits than in supervillain suits. And that set me to thinking: superheroes always went after the murders, the robbers, the people who did physical damage via violence – surely, an important thing to stop, but meanwhile corrupt businesses and other leaders were destroying economies, causing vast pain and poverty (although those guys were pikers compared to some of the more recent players.) To a certain degree, cracking down on the street-level crime while ignoring upper-class crime a real class issue. So my thoughts were running toward somehow having superheroes go after those men in suits, perhaps have superheroes who were fighting those muggers and realize that they should go after the big folks, but have trouble figuring out how to apply their strengths to that realm. Never did anything with the idea, but…

But you could see how that sort of thinking might mean that a show where the cops focus on the big time corruption would be just my thing. And that’s what this show brings to the mix, and makes it a fresh addition to the history of cop shows.

Retired at 35

Someone else noticed that in the promos and ads for Retired at 35, they heavily promote the actors playing two major supporting characters, but don’t mention the guy who is playing the central character. It makes sense, once you see it. In this series about a 35 year old guy who moves into a retirement community to be with his parents, the central character isn’t a character – he has no motivation of his own, he merely reacts to everything that goes on around him. The show does have some actors I like, including (beyond the promoted George Segal and Jessica Walter) George Wyner, whom I’ve kept an eye on since he appeared on All in the Family over 25 years ago, and a really pretty woman in the part that calls for a pretty woman.

At heart, this show is about how funny it is that middle-aged folks are embarrassed by older folks living real lives… and the answer is, apparently, not very funny.

Watched 2, stopped taping.

Mr. Sunshine

The new sitcom Mr. Sunshine has a heck of a set of creative folks involved. In front of the camera is Matthew “Friends” Perry, Andrea “Hey, I started in the only spin-off of friends” Anders, Alison “amazingly talented actress and sexy in ways that a still photo would never carry” Janney, and Jorge “the best thing on Lost” Garcia. Behind the camera is Thomas Schlamme, the less-known player who deserves a good part of the credit for the creative successes of Sports Night and West Wing and no visible blame for the disappointment of Studio 60. Clearly, this is an ambitious show. The setting is an aggressive one – Perry is the manager of a stadium, which means it’s a setting for interesting but large and costly-to-film things to take place.

Perry is a downbeat misanthrope, balanced by the overly upbeat James “handsomest guy on Las Vegas who I somehow forgot to mention above” Leisure playing a role that would usually be covered by a petite blonde woman,  facing post-sexual tension with Anders,  an insane owner played by Janney, and various underlings. It’s a slick look at a poorly-oiled machine. The delivery is pretty constant,never pausing, in some ways like Sports Night… but unlike that show’s collection of smart characters, here the smarts almost all rest on Perry’s character, which makes him snide rather than someone talking on the level of those around him. That would be fine, if it were consistently amusing, but this was funny in fits and starts, and simply obvious and predictable at other times. There are pieces here, but it may take  some time to figure how they fit together. It shows some of the problems of the early 30Rock; with luck, it will work them out just as that show did.

Nat’s 2.5 Men fill-in plan

Last year, when Charlie Sheen went on, well, let’s say a necessary vacation, we here at the Nat’s TV towers calculated that the best way for his show to deal is to simply shoot the same episodes they had planned, only with Betty White playing the “Charlie” role.

This year, our advanced TV planning calculator comes up with a different result. This year, they should start making episodes of Two-and-a-Half Men 2040. Getting Martin Sheen to play Charlie, have Jon Cryer play Jake. The calculations still haven’t been completed on who should play Allan.

Thus, the law show shortage is solved!

Two new legal dramas debuted in this past week, and in a great example of just how diverse these things tend to be, both pilots about females who have transitioned out of the sort of law practice which made them unhappy had storylines in which the lawyers had to get a young black man from a tough background out of doing time, because any such sentence would get them kicked out of college.

Harry’s Law is built around Kathy Bates, using her patented Regular Humanness to cast her someone who has been in the business of Boring Law for too long, and wants to be in the business of Exciting Law – not just Criminal Law, but TV-Style Criminal Law. And lucky for her, the world accommodates her desire. This comes from the David E. Kelley quirky law practice factory, and the pilot is focused on bringing on our quirky team of four, and establishing the things that officially make them a quirky law practice and shoe shop. Yes, that’s right, that’s the one official “here, it’s the practice and not just the people who are quirky”; the selling of shoes has much the same purpose as the introduction of the unisex bathroom onto Ally McBeal (minus, of course, the chance for every sensitive conversation to be heard… but you do get to learn about people’s tastes in shoes!)

Bates is convincing. Nate Corddry (now apparently Nathan) shows up as the talented young lawyer who is inspired by the happingness of it all, and he’s got a good face for it. But there’s not much sense that this will take us anywhere that is formatwise different from various shows that precede it. If you liked The Practice and Boston Legal and various other things, here’s more, and on the upbeat side of things. Not the worst thing to watch, but no great discovery either.

Meanwhile, over on basic cable’s USA Network, slightly new territory is being entered into in Fairly Legal, a drama built around an ex-lawyer who still works for her late father’s law firm, but as a mediator. That presents a couple of possible major twists. One is that it gets the show out of the courtroom climax – although the show still manages to spend time in the courtroom (poor Gerald McRaney got cast as a judge who speaks mainly in exposition, to let the world know what a mediator is). The other is that the ends are to be achieved not by having one side of a case win over the other, but by reaching a mutually beneficial understanding. That suggests that the arc of the stories may well have different paths than what we’re used to.

But with all that in place, the show gets in its own way. One of the problems is that it’s about gambits to lead to a happy solution, but those gambits can be unconvincing.  There’s a point in the show where our spunky lead has to help an engaged couple across an emotional conflict, and the trick that she pulls only works because, well, the writer says it works. It is so unconvincing that her gambit would be effective, and the rather wooden way in which the characters involve state their feelings in exactly the manner that humans don’t just makes the unreality echo further.

The bigger problem is that the central character is apparently meant to be one of these abusive-to-those-around-her-but-forgivable-for-her-intent types, only they don’t give sufficient reason for forgiveness. She is dishonest, she is abusive to her assistant, she is vicious to her stepmother for no visible reason other than that the stepmother is more beautiful than she is and made the mistake of marrying her dad, she violates the law and a client’s privacy and uses the information she achieves that way to blackmail the client into following her path, she steals a man’s remains from his widow… sorry, this isn’t a Denny Crane, whose harshness had style to it, and wasn’t meant to be a hero. She’s a shmuck. Likability isn’t inherently necessary in a character, but it sure helps when they aren’t fascinating for other reasons. She’s damaged because her daddy died, and that isn’t enough to make her interesting.

If you could take these two shows and merge them, make Kathy Bates the one who turned mediator, you’d have a better show than either of them. As it is, they’ve ended up with one show that is occasionally entertaining, and one that is not.

Onion SportsDome

The Onion has succeeded well providing the fake news in print and on the Internet. But in making a foray onto TV, they faced an obvious problem – there is no shortage of fake news on TV. Between the one-two punch of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, plus “Weekend Update” and Fox News, America’s fake newshole is filled.

So they made a move that at least sounds smart at first – they went not for news news, but for sports news. Onion SportsDome is a mocking take on SportsCenter. Now, this puts me at a stark disadvantage. For one thing, I’ve never watched SportsCenter; no matter how much I might love the behind-the-scenes comedy SportsNight, I’m just not much of a sports guy, and really don’t care about ht news. And that leads to my second problem: I don’t know much of the reality they’re mocking. When the sportsDome anchors throw out a name, I don’t always even know if it’s a made-up athlete or a specific player who has certain attributes that makes the reference funny.

Even if I did know my stuff here, though, I’m not sure I’d really like the show. The delivery rhythm that the two anchors are using is a rapid, flat delivery meant to optimize information conveyed in the time available, which is not ideal for comedy. The show is not without its actual laughs; there was a sharp bit about a handicapped fighter who was being discriminated against because he had solid metal replacement hands – but even then, they didn’t know when to rein it in, offering up a bloody scene that took the effective cartoonish edge off of the humor.

So this is not for me. If you’re a sportshead, it may well be worth a try.

Off the Map

If I can’t review a show on the day it airs, I guess I can at least review it before the second episode airs.

Thinking about hospital dramas, there seems to be a basic question of what sort of hospital you use. You can go with a cutting edge medical situation, even bleeding that edge into unreality. That’s Three Rivers, Trauma, House. Amazing everyone with medical technology. Or you can go with something that seems more like a “typical” hospital, to show the real world. E/R and Chicago Hope would both seem to land there. And at the tail end, you can go with a troubled hospital, one that is about struggling to do the best one can with a bad situation: St. Elsewhere, for example. And into that last category, we can now introduce Off the Map.

Off the Map is about a primarily-American-staffed charity clinic in the sunny, shady tropical poverty land of I-don’t-think-I-noticed-where. So it’s about Doing Good, and that’s a good thing; it’s about doing what you can with insufficient materials, about working in a culture that isn’t yours, about hope smashing headlong into reality. And about good-looking people finding excuses to look good, because this is still, after all, television.

With that as the setup,you or I could pretty much plot out the first episode, and get pretty much the episode that they aired – the young hopeful doctors who aren’t used to not having equipment. The making-use-of-the-jungle-to-help. The troubled romance to introduce the serial element.

They do a reasonably good job of it. It’s watchable – but no one on it is set up as fascinating enough that you must watch it. This hits me as a show that could be visited from time to time. It probably ultimately wants to be a bit of a Gray’s Anatomy, and I’ll leave it to those who like that show to judge how well it succeeds.