Plane Ketchup: Rookie Blue

Life’s been busy, and I’ve fallen behind in my first-episode watching… and even moreso, with blogging my reactions. So now I’m plane ketchup… er, playin’ catch-up.

Now, I’ve not seen a lot of Grey’s Anatomy, but I did see the first few… well, certainly the first one. And I recall that centered on a good-looking new doctor on her first day at a hospital, and how she was following in the footsteps of mother who had been great in the same job, and when she goes to visit that mother, we see that the parent has fallen, no longer has her abilities. So when the new cop series Rookie Blue is announced as coming from the folks who brought us Grey’s, it should come as little surprise that the first episode focuses on a new female cop who is following in the footsteps of her father, who was once respected in the field, but when she goes to see him at the end we see that he has now fallen, no longer has his abilities. This is the Grey’s Anatomy of cop shows – the crew of young, pretty faces, a female-heavy mix who seem ready to share the magic of life together, the obvious set-ups for romance and the conflicts that arrive, and so forth.

Having said that, there are some smooth things in the first episode. If one accepts the rather-more-exciting-than-reality life of a cop as presented in our central characters first day, they display it with aplomb and sense of character. When she’s dealing with facing down a young troubled kid gun-to-gun on the first day, or chasing after crooks who simply aren’t paying her respect, it’s cheese, but it’s watchable cheese., it may not feel realistic but it can keep your attention. It probably won’t be cheese I’ll continue to watch, but I’ll certainly understand when and if others do.

Scoundrels

Scoundrels is an hourlong comedic drama about a family of crooks, whose lives of crime kind of, sort of, almost owrk, but not quite.

I don’t feel passionate enough about this in one direction or another to write a fuller review. The lovable rogues aren’t that lovable, the plot complications don’t make sense, the cops and other criminals don’t act quite like human beings but merely like characters of conveience for whatever the writers think they’re doing. Skippable, and I expect I’ll continue doing so.

Time does not ruin all things

I was just Netflix-on-demanding an episode of Kate & Allie in which Kate helps out at a public access cable channel staffed by Andrea Martin (an obvious choice, given her SCTV background), Bill Cobbs, and Grant Shaud. It looked like it might be a backdoor pilot… and you know, if now, a mere 24 years later, some ABC exec finally got around to saying “yes”, it would probably still be a very workable concept with that fine cast.

Don’t cross this Rubicon, because they don’t double-cross

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

Hot in Cleveland

Ever go back to watch the first episode of a sitcom, and discover that the characters there seem more like fully-rounded human characters rather than sitcom beasts, because the writers had not yet discovered the three tics apiece that they were going to build the characters around? Well, I’m hoping for the opposite to happen with Hot in Cleveland, TV Land’s entry into the original sitcom world. There are some things in the show that make me really want to like it, but the pilot (which can be viewed online here through July 10th) is so much about The Primary Tics That Define Our Characters that they have no room to be human, yet.

The concept behind the show is at least somewhat awkward; it’s about how three past-their-prime gals from LA accidentally find themselves in Cleveland, only to discover that they shine in the city’s lesser standard of beauty. This is, of course, insulting to both cities, to women, and to men, but we’ll let that go as a sitcom setup (I’d be shocked if this concept wasn’t originally sold as “the Sex And The City gals meet The Drew Carey Show“). But once you get past that, you have something workable – three women out of their element who find the difference advantageous. Things can be done here.

But what really makes me want to like this is the cast. Central is Valerie Bertinelli, and I’ll admit that my affection for her owes as much to her being a key early TV crush thirty-mumble years ago as it does to her comedic talents. She is cast as a writer. Wendie Malick (whose early appearances on Kate & Allie I’ve been watching lately – they weren’t using her as a funny person, which was necessary for her role but seems a shame based on her later achievements) is a diva from a recently-cancelled soap opera who lives within the fading echoes of her own fame… in other words, a character not that removed from the aging supermodel that made her the comedic standout on Just Shoot Me. Jane Leeves, who has pleased me since she played Blue on the syndicated sitcom Throb (from that interesting period when they were doing syndicated original sitcoms) is a salon owner… and in Cleveland, they meet up with the caretaker of their new house, played by Betty White (who my love for arises mostly from Sue Ann Niven on Mary Tyler Moore and from The Betty White Show; she did a fine job on Golden Girls, of course, but that show doesn’t have the place in my heart that it does for others.)

Actually, come to think of it, Golden Girls is an interesting show to mention here, as it was at heart about three women peers facing the same challenge (in that case, aging) from different perspective together, with one older truth-talker added in. Hot in Cleveland can be described similarly, only the challenge is the sudden relief from aging, or at least the judgment thereof; that is obviously a narrower and less universal topic, but angled right, there may be much comedy to explore. The pilot of the show isn’t up to it; it looks at times like a scratch pilot, like something where little money was risked on the production, that it was just something filmed to give executives enough information to decide whether to spend money on actual episodes. (Much of that effect comes from the camera work and editing; I’m not an expert TV maker who can tell you why the moment-to-moment cuts seemed awkward and jarring, but I’m enough of a TV watcher to tell you that they were.) And the actresses had not yet built any chemistry together, nor was there a sense of particular character relationships; the characters are defined by who they are, not yet by how they react to each other.  So there is plenty of need for growth, but there is clear room for that growth; this is not a good sitcom yet, being very obvious, but it is not a sitcom that cannot be made good. There is reason for hope. And the joy of the summer doldrums is that there is no reason for me to abandon it immediately.

One note for the attentive: the director of the pilot was Michael Lembeck, who has quite a respectable history as a sitcom director and some record in features – the recent Tooth Fairy being his latest – but who TV viewers really got to know when he was playing Max, Valerie Bertinelli’s brother-in-law on One Day at a Time (a pleasant performance). I hope they liked working together again!

So I have some hope

Upcoming documentary

I’m not sure why to major cable channels would pick a minor blog like mine to make such a significant announcement, but I certainly won’t stand in their way!

The one with too much rice

I had too much ground turkey in the freezer, so I let one 20-ounce package defrost for a few days. It’d been too long since I did a meatloaf anyway (except for a store-bought -pre-mixed together salty bit of ho-hum I did a month or so back.)

This one:

• The ground turkey
• Leftover rice, which didn’t look like much but really overwhelmed the small amount of meat.
• Some Trader Joe’s High Fiber Cereal
• Two eggs
• Raisins
• Left over salse from the Mexican deli where we’d gotten authentic tacos a week or earlier
• Sweet and sour sauce left over from some Trader Joe’s tempura chicken we’d had the night before, poured over the top.

The result? lackluster. A surprisingly white loaf with a vague spice heat and vague sweetness but neither winning or making an impression. Excessive rice. Food, okay food, but certainly not good food.

1) Why, dear lord, why? 2) Really, why?…

You know how friends was about a somewhat charming bunch of friends who lived nearby and generally found excusable reasons to be in each other’s apartments at various times, in ways that flowed really well if one accepted them as a tight-knit community?

Well, the new dumped-during-the-summer-months sitcom 100 Questions is like that, if one removes establishing who the characters are and why they are together in general and why they are all crowded onto a small set at a specific instant and just have it be a bunch of good-looking but not particularly likable people inhabiting a set, reusing comedy rhythms we’ve seen too many times before. It seems like the sort of thing that a good director like James Burrows might iron out the kinks of, and by golly they had James Burrows for a pilot but after he shot it they decided to strip out half the cast and try again, so his touch is gone and this thing is just a mess.

The central conceit of this is that our meant-to-be-beautiful-but-made-up-to-the-point-of-awkwardness lead female is answering a series of question for a dating service interview, and each question turns out to call for an episode-long flashback answer… thus giving it a framework much akin to, say, How I Met Your Mother only that it’s a series of individual stories being told rather than pieces of a bigger one, so the structure just seems repetitive. Perhaps if in the framing scenes, our lead lady was played by Bob Saget, that would make all the difference.

I’m trying to watch a second episode of this, to be fair… but it’s too much like work to do so, which is not fair for me. I’m scratching the rest of this off of the DVR right now.

Endings

I’m playing a bit of catch-up here, TVwise.

The ending of Lost was… well, I would say disappointing, but really it was what I realized long since it would be. It tied things up in terms of character logic, not in terms of story logic. If teh world was warped to the way I’d want it, this would’ve been some sort of fair-play whodunnit, where the ending gives you an explanation that makes everything before it make sense, some setting of triggers from which all of it understandably arose. But no. The island had power because, well, that’s just how it was. The island had a four-digited statue and ancient Egyptian influences inside because, well, they looked cool, I suppose. The only thing that got explained was the parallel storyline of the final season, and even then it was far from clear why so many of them had to suffer on SPOILER ALERT entering heaven. The long drawn out death of Jack seemed to highlight that, hey, we think having a drawn-out death would make a cool ending. All in all, the years I spent watching the show weren’t wasted, but I cannot say that the ending rewarded that investment the way that, say, Veronica Mars rewarded the viewer at the end of each of the first two seasons.

The end of FlashForward was a different situation. This was, after all, not meant to be an ending, it was meant to be a cliffhanger, for the future seasons that will now never come. And yet, it left me not wanting more. The series was smooth enough, interesting enough that I followed it for the entire run, but it was throughout much more about the mystery and the mechanics than what would intrigue me about the concept – how do people respond to knowing the future. We definitely saw moments of that, mostly very fatalistic moments (the club for those who had not seen the future, the suicide to change the future), but there are so many little ways things change (what would happen to sports gambling when someone may have been looking at the season-to-date summaries during their flashforward?), so many basic personal things. The characters weren’t interesting to watchin and of themselves; there was no equivalent of Lost‘s Sawyer, who we loved to watch, or Hurley, who we loved to love.

I was glad that early in the year I had removed my rule of watching at least one full episode of every new primetime network fiction show. All the ads for Happy Town kept making me not want to watch, as they promised nothing but bleak ugliness. And when the ads would say “but don’t be fooled by the name”, my brain would continue “…it’s really an unincorporated hamlet!” (Which is really just a riff on a Simpsons gag about Monster Island.) I accumulated episodes on my DVR while I decided whether to watch… but then I was going to upgraded my DVR with a larger hard disk, so those were about to be functionally wiped out. I did give it a ten minute try (despite the fact that the cancellation of the series had been announced by then), and it lived down to my expectations. When I saw an online discussion calling for ABC to reverse their decision about this amazing series, my beliefs in it were confirmed when a viewer said that now all he had left to watch was Criminal Minds. Goodness, they couldn’t even get me to watch that show this week and it had Tim friggin’ Curry on it.

Much that I’ve been watching this season will not be around for the fall. Lost, FlashForward, Better Off Ted, Scrubs, Dollhouse, Defying Gravity, Monk, Saving Grace, and Old Christine are gone. I thought  Friday Night Lights was burning through its last few now, but I must correct myself; it’s filming its last few now, so that’s one more season to go. This seasons did grant me some new shows that are surviving to entertain me further – Modern Family, Parenthood, Human Target – but if I’m going to keep consuming TV at the rate I have been, the fall better bring an unexpectedly large load of goodness.

Meanwhile, here’s a sign that your marketing department has not been doing as good a job as it should: the local paper announced the return of Flashpoint, the generic modern cop show from Canada, as a new series. Apparently, they hadn’t even noticed it existed.

The Odd Cop-le

One’s a dark-suit-wearing, everything-by-procedure kind of guy, while the other is a loose cannon. One’s a long-time veteran, the other is a newcomer, played by that Hanks guy. They may not play well together, but they get the job done. That, of course, the 1987 movie Dragnet as well as the new Fox series The Good Guys, which aired an early “preview” episode last night.

My first impression of the show is that it’s very full; there’s a lot packed into the episode; when my brain said the hour was about up, the show was actually nearer the halfway point. My next impression is that the general tone is very strange. It’s far from serious, it is intentionally over the top (to the degree that it will be hard to invest one’s self in the characters), and yet it’s obviously trying to have some heart, some pro-humanity core that will make it lovable. It has a lot of action that seems to be trying to be both over-the-top and invest-yourself-in-the-risk adventure. All of that just left me feeling uncertain how I was supposed to react. This may well be one where if you let yourself soak ina  few episodes, you’ll buy into its rhythms.

There’s some good casting here. Colin Hanks plays the button-down young cop with charm and intelligence, a good beleaguered acceptance of the situation he is in. Bradley Whitford plays disheveled nicely, giving him a strong contrast from the roles he played on West Wing and Studio 60 without coming across as a different actor.

I was momentarily surprised to see Nia Vardalos as a “Special Guest Star”, and for a moment there I thought it was her doing a favor (Colin’s dad and stepmom were producers on her breakout film success, My Big Fat Greek Wedding). And then I thought about the path of Ms. Vardalo’s career, and wondered who was doing who a favor… and that’s probably too ungenerous.

Overall, The Good Guys is at this point for me a befuddlement, although at least an energetic enough one that I’ll give myself another episode or two to soak in its odd mix.