Rubicon, the new AMC series just previewed, is a well cast, well photographed series that seems to be trying to tap into a whole Davinci Code vibe, with some mysterious forces encoding mysterious information in pointlessly mysterious ways, considering all the way there are to convey information these days. It’s a Big Mystery series, full of all these little clues, demanding attention to detail.
Which is a problem, because… well, the crossword puzzles. There are datapoints being hidden in crossword puzzles of the major newspapers. And we see the crossword puzzles. And they aren’t… they don’t look like any crossword puzzle that you’d find in a major US newspaper. They aren’t symmetrical, and more importantly, they have words that are in an across word, but not a down one. And no, these aren’t the British style puzzles, either.neither in format nor clues. They’re just… wrong. And by golly, this isn’t just in the text of the episode, there’s even a stylized graphic one shown in the opening credits. (And really, a proper-looking crossword puzzle is not hard to slam together, particularly since you don’t need to show all the clues and have something that works in full detail. You just need a good-looking grid with the right number of squares for whatever clue you’re hiding there. But even if you need a full puzzle with a certain word hidden in it, that can be put together quite quickly, in a few hours even with clues, really, if you’re not worried about what level of difficulty the clues are.
So what we have here is a series that asks you to pay attention, but then shows you that they haven’t bothered doing so themselves.
Skip it
Don’t cross this Rubicon, because they don’t double-cross
Miami Medical
If you could take Miami Medical back 20 years and show it then, you’d probably have a hit show. Because then it might all seem fresh. By now, a bunch of brash young folks working in an emergency room, just caring too darn much, might seem fresh. So too might be the radical, possibly crazy older doctor who has been through things he’d rather not talk about. Or the desperate search to find radical ways of doing surgery rather than doing the obvious (although in the episode I watched, it seemed to me that what they ended up doing seemed the obvious default thing.)
Really, this is Generic Doctor Show #37. If they gave it a catchy name like Law & Order: E/R, it might have a reason to survive. But without that branding, it’s just another hunk of TV.
Two-and-a-Half “Men”
If I were in charge of Two-and-a-Half Men right now, still needing to film the sweeps months episodes of the highest-rated sitcom on TV, and my lead actor in rehab, what would I do? Would I try to write around his character? No. Would I put the show on hiatus? No. Would I give up on him and write his character out… well, maybe, given some of the specifics of his problem (it’s hard watching him being callous about women these days, seems less like comedy.) Would I permanently recast the role? No.
I’d temporarily recast the role. Take the same scripts he would’ve done, and use a stand-in.
Betty White.
Tell me you wouldn’t watch that/
Human Target
Now, I have to admit that I wanted Human Target to be good, for reasons that have nothing to do with my desires to watch. Y’see, the character is based on a 1970s comic book feature, co-created by a pal of mine, Len Wein (note: I’m not trying to pass him off as a lends-me-money-and-crashes-on-my-couch pal, more of a run-into-each-other-locally-and-say-hi pal.) Now, this is not a rarity for Len; odds are good that if you see some 1970s comic book concept making it to the screen, Len had a hand in it (as with Swamp Thing and Wolverine). And in the case of Human Target, he created it for a publisher that is fairly good about rewarding their creators for other-media use of their work. So for Len, I wish a success, and while a good work doesn’t guarantee this, it makes it more likely.
The good news is, it’s good. Last might’s pilot showed a lot of promise. It’s about Christopher Chance, an extreme-situation bodyguard with detective chops (among a wide range of other abilities). Played by Mark Valley of Boston Legal, he has a support team made up of Chi McBride from Boston Public and Jack Earle Haley from Watchmen (which was neither based in Boston nor developed on David E. Kelley… but it was based on a comic book series edited by Len Wein). The pilot was a real action show, largely making good use of a setting – a high-speed train – to make different chases, fights, and escapes. It’s unabashed about being an action show. There’s little sense that it’s going to turn into a truly serial drama; it looks like it will instead make the most of making each episode its own adventure (of course, sometimes pilots mislead.) The ultra-able Chance is well played and worth paying attention to, able to mix playing cool with handling the rough stuff. The action was taken more seriously than the mystery portion of the episode. Everything was well-handled, well-shot. The action played a lot better than some of the action in major movies, because they’re willing to hold their show or at least show you the set-up so you understand who is where relative to one another.
Well worth a watch (if you can find it: the pilot aired on Sunday at 8, the next episode will air Wednesday at 9, and then after that it moves to Wednesday at 8.)
The fluidity of news
Sometimes the need for the news to say something outraces the actual existence of the news having something to say.
When first reported, the assassination in Pakistan yesterday was done by explosion. Then it was reported that she was killed by being hit by bullets before the explosion. So I get up this morning and see a CNN.com link saying she was killed by shrapnel… but by the time my click on the link went through, the headline and article are saying that there was no shrapnel in her body, she was killed by the sunroof.
Meanwhile, in the case of the killed by a tiger on Christmas Day in San Francisco (and there is a description of a death that would have seemed unlikely to have been heard a week ago), we’ve gone from not having the event reported on the actual day it happened to the individual simply having been attacked to suggestions that he was dangling his leg in the tiger pit to statements suggesting that they were taunting the tiger to learning that while, yes, he was taunting the tiger, it was after the tiger had already escaped and was mauling someone and this brave young man was trying to save the existing victim.
Add in all the things that are inherently non-information, and the constant flow of news seems ever more pointless.
Veering a little away from the original topic: I want a good news filter. One that can rank news on this scale:
- Something major happened.
- Someone with actual power is in efforts to make something happen.
- Someone of actual power made a statement that could impact something actually happening.
- Someone of power made a statement defending their past acts.
- Someone of power made a statement about someone else of power.
- Someone of power made a statement about someone else without real power.
- Someone without real power made a statement about something.
Most days, I wouldn’t set my filter to show me anything lower than a 3. Beyond that, it’s just mostly entertainment value at best.
Spoiler alert: Scrubs and House
Okay, don’t read this if you’re waiting to see this week’s House or the episode of Scrubs from about a week-and-a-half back.
But if you’ve already seen both this week’s House and the episode of Scrubs from about a week-and-a-half back, then you know what I’m going to say.
Sometimes, to shows do the same story by coincidence… but with medical stories, I’m guessing that both simply stole from some real case recently written up in the literature, a case in where someone had an illness that sure looked like Lyme disease, but the lack of a visible bite rash and some other distracting information kept the bite under the hair from being detected. Even given that, it’s odd to see that same thing be the key story element on two shows that are about as different as you can get while fitting the “medical show” label. Still, it was like watching a rerun in some way. (But well worth it, in that I’m enjoying House this year far more than Scrubs.)
Changing John McWhorter's tune
John McWhorter is a pundit who gets his word out a fair amount — at times perhaps more because he’s a well-spoken black guy speaking outside of the commonly believed black common stance than because he’s actually speaking within his specialty; he’s a linguistic guy by background. (And please note that I’m not holding anything against John; he seems to be speaking earnestly, and even though I often disagree with him or find his logic less than complete and compelling, he’s certainly not one of today’s shrill and unreasonable voices.)
Anyway, that’s all context. He was on public radio tonight talking about how folks shouldn’t react so much to the recent use of nooses, and when one caller made the ridiculous suggestion that McWhorter might feel the same way if black folks were actually found hanging from them, McWhorter noted that in the face of a changing situation, he’s quite capable of changing his tune and frequently has.
And that made me grin. Because, you see, I used to change his tune.
And I mean that literally. Mr. McWhorter and I attended college together. And one day, in the college library, I discovered something. He was doing some work in a room that I was passing through whilst I was humming a tune… and when I passed back through that room, he was whistling that tune. So I hummed a different tune, came back through a few minutes later, and he had picked up that one as well. I’m pretty sure he wasn’t aware of it, and it just seemed to me an interesting case of the way things run below the consciousness, and the way music hits us internally.
I think I did that to him one more time that day, and a few more times after. Cheap amusement, I know.
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.”
