Category Archives: Chuck

The 2010 – 2011 Caruso Awards: Lessons What I Learned, Part The Third

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Please forgive me for that angry detour. And now, on with the complaining about bad TV.

Properly think through any second season revamps for shows that have only just avoided cancellation

V was never a good show (sorry @DarkEyeSocket). It was exactly the kind of nervous, apologetic sci-fi show churned out by a network with no real idea why they were revamping a beloved original other than that some mis-programmed spreadsheet somewhere said it was worth $Xm when actually it was worth a tin of chicken pie filling. For an alien invasion series that had a bunch of potential, V did nothing, it said nothing, its characters were inconsistent for the most part, it recycled plots over and over again, and it looked cheap. I couldn’t really hate it, though, mostly because things as time-distortingly boring as this usually only breed low, pulsating resentment.

That said, at least the showrunners seemed aware they had problems with the show; it limped into a second season with not much buzz and little critical attention, and so they needed to up their game to bring in new viewers. The first season ends with an overt act of aggression against evil alien leader Anna, which makes her lose her otherworldly shit and turn the skies red, while vowing to hunt the killer of her diabolically evil offspring. Exciting stuff (really, it was promising). So how did season two continue?

  • Anna does not get her revenge, and her “Red Rain” attack on Earth is instantly forgiven by everyone after a speech explaining that red rain is a nice thing.
  • Alien traitor Ryan vows to help Anna, then betrays her by helping resistance leader Erica.
  • He then betrays the humans by helping Anna. This is followed by another betrayal of Anna by helping Erica.
  • There are also lots of scenes of Ryan trying to sneak off, and onto, the alien mothership, pausing only to explain to people why he is sneaking off, or onto, the ship. No one seems that bothered.
  • Father Jack gets defrocked and wears a sad face for the rest of the season.
  • Jay Karnes appears. Shield fans are momentarily as excited as Firefly fans were when they saw Alan Tudyk and Morena Baccarin on the castlist for the pilot. This euphoria lasts about ten minutes.
  • Some stuff happens with Scott Wolf’s character but I wasn’t paying attention. I think he joins the Shriners? Or buys a dog?
  • Erica’s angry chip breaks because her vile teenage son has a number of tantrums related to him sucking as a person.
  • The rest of the resistance group congregates in its traditional awkward Circle of Debating to argue with her over every poorly-thought-through decision she makes from then on. This happens at least three times an episode.
  • The finale comes around after nine repetitive episodes, kills off a bunch of characters, introduces new ones, and completely changes the game in a number of ways that show great potential.
  • The show is then cancelled.

I guess what I’m saying is, if you have some radical ideas for how the show should be, introduce that shit IMMEDIATELY and don’t think you can just bluff your way through with low viewing figures. You don’t have time to be coy. The changes from season one to season two were just not dramatic enough. Look at how The Vampire Diaries stepped up its game about halfway through its first season, with an almost exponential increase in quality by the time the second season started. What looked like a tedious Twilight cash-in is now an indecently entertaining show with a modicum of justified critical respectability. That’s the model to emulate.

The other model to ignore was used by Human Target. SoC has long believed that dramatic shows with a small cast are onto a loser; you need a big cast of characters to have a wide array of storytelling possibilities to explore. Angel got really good when its core cast jumped from three to five, and the addition of Lorne in the fifth season pushed it over the top (Correction: TV writer and Angel fanatic @RowanKaiser maintains Lorne became a regular in season 4. Ooopsies!). Lost had a huge cast, and the show was able to fly off in directions no one could have predicted (especially as it wasn’t Purgatory at the end it was a Tibetan Bardo SHUT UP HATERS you just don’t understand Lost on the same deep level I do).

With a barely-serialised action show like Human Target, a huge cast wasn’t the point, but even though the first season was fun enough, three main characters (and no women) was a problem. Even at its best, it was a bit mundane, with not enough variety from week to week. Sadly, the introduction of two new (female) characters didn’t go the way I had hoped, not helped that showrunner Jonathan E. Steinberg was replaced by Chuck producer Mark Miller. As longtime readers will know, SoC is not fond of Chuck. It is the TV equivalent of mercury in the water table. It’s telling that Steinberg wrote some of the best episodes of the second season, proving he knows the show very well. Who knows why he was moved aside, but it didn’t work out.

Sadly the chemistry of Mark Valley, Jackie Earle Haley and SoC favourite Chi McBride was damaged by the introduction of Indira Varma and Janet Montgomery. Not because the actresses were bad; far from it. What was wrong was their effect on the spiky leads. Grouchy, mysterious Guerrero became an increasingly sentimental father figure for Montgomery’s Ames (an inevitable but unfortunate “arc” for a mean loner, I guess), Winston became superfluous as his position as “tetchy fusspot” was taken over by Varma’s new boss character Ilsa Pucci, and charming gadabout Christopher Chance fell for his new boss in a Moonlighting stylee.

All of those plot threads make perfect sense. They follow from what the characters were at the end of the first season and resolve their issues, more or less. Great if you only want one more season, but ruinous for a show that could have stayed on the air for a while, if it had ever learned to offer something, ANYTHING, that differentiated it from any number of crunching action shows on the air. The first season had a touch of quirk; it looked like it could go places. The second season made every character less compelling and added nothing else to make up for it. With its odd touches of character gone, the show dribbled to an ignominious end. A real shame.

So I guess the lesson I learned here is, if your show isn’t awesome enough at the end of the first season, make it more awesome, and not less awesome. I guess I’d like to see shows capitalise on the things that make them unique instead of excising them and aiming for the middle, but I think all of us already knew that. ::shrugs::

On a procedural show, a rigid format is a bonus. On a serialised show, it’s death

This is another way of saying “if you can’t break it, you’re gonna wear it out instead”. In the latest season of Dexter, our anti-hero improbably fell for Lumen, the victim of a gang of rapist murderers (::sigh:: What a delightful show) after accidentally saving her. Coming so soon after the death of his wife Rita, this plotline was introduced with the intention of bringing Dexter back from the grief he felt, though that grief was listlessly dramatised after the first episode, in which he snapped and finally killed an innocent guy (though he was a REALLY REALLY NASTY innocent guy, so it’s not like this guy mattered at all, right?).

The possibilities of this were promising, as was the show’s greater interest in using the secondary cast, especially weaselly tough guy Quinn. Could the show finally break new ground, stopping the endless loop of Serial Killer/Family Man dramatics? Sadly, no. While this season did a better job of weaving the secondary character arcs with Dexter’s, the usual flaws were abundant. In the season finale, Dexter is once more on the verge of being discovered by the police — this time his sister — but gets away with it because of her decision to just look the other way, which is conveniently made in such a way as to protect his identity. Once more Dexter has no agency in these matters, because acting to protect himself would put him in a format-ruining situation.

Even worse, his new love Lumen bolts almost immediately after the big finale due to contractual obligations and the necessity of resetting the show for next year, leaving Dexter bereft, just as he was at the start of the season. This season could have given Dexter an interesting arc, showing how his grief transforms him, curing his serial killer tendencies and turning him into a normal human being. But there’s money to be made in churning out years more of this crap, so Dexter has to walk on the spot for two more seasons (unless Showtime falls out with Michael C. Hall), thus rendering a promising idea about grief and loss into an underwhelming metaphor for how sucky it is to have a rebound relationship fall apart after a couple of months.

Part of the problem comes when a show is so wedded to its format that it cannot escape it. Dexter must remain a forensic expert working for the police, so he must never be caught and no one close to him can ever find out. He must also stay sympathetic so he can never kill an innocent (unless they’re REALLY REALLY POINTLESSLY ILLOGICALLY NASTY). Nevertheless, there has to be tension, so his secret identity is threatened until he is forced to do something that breaks his code and ooops! Someone else makes a decision that lets him off the hook. Every season ends like this. It taints every accomplishment of the show with a thick sticky veneer of pointlessness.

Look at Glee. The showrunners can add as many George Gershwin tunes and shots of the Lincoln Centre to their season finale, but it doesn’t make the tired formula any easier to digest. Even if the show didn’t have a writing staff of three, Glee has become far too reliant on a season arc that seemingly cannot change. Everything boils down to the club winning the regionals to get to the national championships, with each episode mixing up the relationships between the characters into a finite series of patterns. Who cares about Rachel and Finn? Do even Glee fans care? No one on the show has ever seemed to, so why should we?

Glee‘s three showrunners would do well to look at how Friday Night Lights transcended its similar school-year-based formula to provide seasons that felt individual. Not only did that break its formula at the end of season three — with Coach Taylor transferred to a new school – but each season felt distinct from the others either by making the Panthers lose early (season two, if the truncated arc went in the direction I think it was going), by introducing a new team with no hope of winning (season four), or taking them all the way to the top either as beloved heroes or despised underdogs (seasons one and five respectively). Glee has no interest in that. It has one story to tell, and apparently its fans are just fine with that. The rest of us crave more, though.

Avoid comedy episodes in a show that already wears its comedic moments lightly

One of the great joys of the last year has been discovering a real gem. Even with the huge amount of criticial praise thrown as The Good Wife, it still seemed like a soapy trifle, thanks to that premise and many of the trails shown on More4. How to describe the thrill of watching the show and realising it’s the most perceptive, adult, and well-constructed political dramas of our time, a West Wing without Sorkin’s blither clogging up the ethical debates and weighty interpersonal strife? With Friday Night Lights gone, The Good Wife is easily the best thing on network TV.

But it’s not all plain sailing. The show is often slyly funny, with jokes coming from character more than situation. Though Eli Gold is sometimes played for laughs, the show never goes all-out for cheap giggles, except for once. The late-season episode Foreign Affairs featured a cringe-inducing comedy sub-plot with a faceless “Hugo Chavez” appearing via teleconference, “hilariously” ranting about Courtney Love, with Fred Dalton Thompson – as himself – acting as Chavez’ lawyer in front of a star-struck Ana Gasteyer.

The effect is excruciating to watch. Maybe someone thought this would be a nice treat for the audience, or a break from the show’s usual heavy subject matter. Whoever that person is, they were wrong. The Good Wife is exactly as funny – and good-natured – as it needs to be. If you’ve mastered the tone of your show, any meddling will stick out like a sore thumb, especially as the episode ends on one of the most dramatic reveals of the season. Coming after the earlier hijinks, the big emotional scene at the end is muted.

Game of Thrones got the tone problem exactly right; by keeping the jokes to a minimum and localised mostly to Tyrion Lannister, who was then thrown into terrible situations where the contrast between his demeanour and the seriousness of his predicament gave insight into his character. The trial in the Eyrie, which sees him arrogantly acting like he has control of the situation when in fact he only prevails through good fortune and the kindness of Bronn — partially earned because of his humour — is a perfect example of the tension between humour and drama. And, just for good measure, the showrunners cut down heavily on the screentime for “comedy relief” Hodor. A very shrewd move.

Okay, there’s more to come. I know! It’s too much! Something broke in my head while I was writing this and now I can’t stop.

The 2007-2008 Caruso Awards (The Bad)

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First I hit you all up with the shiny side of my two-headed coin, compelling me to give up much love to those shows that made my heart soar this last year, but now that coin has landed on its nasty scarred side, and I am forced by my innate sense of cosmic balance to point my finger at those hours of TV that offended unto my very core. That pain, so crippling to me, must be expunged somehow, and this list is my preferred method of self-exorcism. Please indulge me while I carp.

10. Lost – Ji Yeon

It gives me zero pleasure to put an episode of Lost on this list, especially one that featured a wonderful and emotionally exhausting performance from Yunjin Kim, but there is no getting past the fact that the entire episode is based around a silly narrative trick employed merely to distract the audience enough to bring out a big shock at the end. Being well made and well acted is not enough, as rewatching this episode has shown how empty that flashback/forward trick is. While Lost has certainly messed around with the audience before, using our expectation against us as a judo wrestler uses the weight of the opponent against him/her, this episode was blatantly a big nothing wrapped in a trick bow. To add insult to injury, the other big shock of the episode was the reveal of Michael as the Kahana crewmember doing Ben’s bidding. As Harold Perrineau’s name had been in the credits all season without him appearing once, no one could possibly have been fooled.

9. Dexter – See-Through

There are many things that mystify us, but the critical and popular success of Dexter is high up on the list of most baffling events ever. Watching the second season has taken us almost a year, with each new episode annoying us so much we decide against watching any further and yet are forced to struggle on just to clear space on the Sky+ box. Sometimes all it takes to piss us off is the first couple of lines of each episode’s voiceover, which removes all subtlety from the show and in its place gives us some cringeworthy psychological drivel that could only come from the mind of someone who has done nothing but read bad crime novels their whole life. No other “quality” cable show on TV has so little respect for the audience, drowning out all thought or interpretation with a barrage of exposition, moralising, and primary-school level philosophical meanderings. Dexter is perhaps the least mysterious and most predictable character on TV, which makes following his adventures utterly tiresome.

To make things worse, though we suspect that removing that redundant voiceover would significantly improve the show, even then it would still have some of the most unappealing characters on TV. Grumpy Doakes the Grumpy Grumpy Cop, the vile worm Masuka (whose dialogue is a series of variations on, “I’d buy that for a dollar!!!”), Dexter’s relentlessly aggressive sister Debra, the hapless Secret-loving Angel, duplicious Rosie-Perez-voice-clone LaGuerta, Rita the constantly peeved girlfriend; I appreciate that there is much to be made of including unlikeable characters in a show (some of our favourites are littered with unpleasant people), but these aren’t interesting character studies. They’re just a bunch of annoying jerks, all of whom are as boring as sand. So why choose this episode? Because it introduced another show Gupta (Rita’s horrible mom, a caricature of a meddling mother), and cemented our dislike of Dexter’s Narcotics Anonymous sponsor Lila, a Manic Pixie Dream Girl with a criminal mind and an over-enunciation habit. I’ll get to her soon, time permitting.

8. Heroes – Cautionary Tales

In other internet venues, SoC contributor Masticator has plowed a lonely furrow, arguing that the second season of Heroes, which had attracted so much vitriol, was about the same as the first season, quality-wise, if a little worse for not having a stand-out episode like Company Man, which featured highly in last year’s Caruso Awards. While I’ve already railed against the show for having a very disappointing sophomore season, I’m not sure I articulated it fully. It can be summed up like this; all of the suspicions I had that the boldness of the storytelling masked a deeply stupid, derivative concept and some equally shaky execution were confirmed in the second season, which not only failed to deliver on the promise of the first season, but damaged it terribly by shooting off in different directions, none of which were particularly interesting, all the while doing very little to entertain (for a show about superheroes, no one did anything superheroic except for DL). The occasionally histrionic performances ran riot, characters died like punks for no apparent narrative or logical reason (RIP DL, the true hero!!!), allegiances changed over and over again (what the hell is Suresh thinking from scene to scene, let alone episode to episode?), and so much endless, formless, pointless dialogue poured from our TV that by the midpoint of the strike-truncated season I had completely lost the thread of what was going on.


I’m no dummy, but I honestly had no clue what was happening by the final few episodes. Motives were explained so sketchily that I felt like giving up on the whole thing numerous times. All of this is before we get to the other, well-trodden complaints about the season; Hiro’s ridiculous Japanese adventures, the wasted new characters, the similarities between the big arcs of this season and last season, the Hoirish Ghangsturrs frrrrrom Cork don’t yer know begorrah, and the inability of the showrunners to capitalise on the strengths of the cast (especially Adrian Pasdar, whose saltiness was a refreshing change from all of the portentous performances from everyone else). The badness was spread so thinly across the whole season that picking the worst episode is hard, so I’ve plumped for this one, partially because it was so memorably over the top (that over-director Greg Yaitanes again), but mostly because the gulf between the epic ambitions of the showrunners and the silly, undramatic, kinda ridiculous end product is made glaringly apparent here. It was a fun episode to watch, but it broke the show for us. Masticator may be right. The second season might not be that much worse than the first season. The problem is, as I said at the time, the first season hinted that, once it had found its footing, the show might have been brain-fodder as well as nerd-fodder. After this episode aired, I gave up that dream and figured it would be CSI: Miami with metahumans. Which is fun in its own right, but still a disappointment.

7. Doctor Who – Voyage Of The Damned

Thus far every season of the New Who has had a stinker at some point, an episode of depressing stupidity that taints the whole run. The latest season, number four, was mediocre at worst, with the Sontaran two-parter representing the season’s nadir (unless you are Masticator and have an aversion to adorable little creatures made of fat). That was merely boring, a crime that is forgivable when Who usually has so much enjoyable energy to spare. However, Who season four merely dodged a bullet; there was a truly dreadful episode aired prior to that season, and it was watched by a huge portion of the British viewing public. Russell T Davies’ Christmas special was an indulgent abomination, with the stunt-casting of the mysteriously popular Kylie, who killed every single one of her lines, being only one of a number of egregious failings. If the repeated angelic and messianic metaphors weren’t enough to wreck the show, the hammy performances were. Guest actor Clive Swift got lucky, though. His teeth-grating and florid line-readings would have been the worst thing about the entire regrettable endeavour if RTD hadn’t thought it a wizard idea to have the Queen running around Buckingham Palace in robe and slippers. It almost made me a Monarchist out of sympathy. The disastrous exercise in condescension was almost Torchwoodian in its dedication to barrel-scraping.

6. Chuck – Chuck Versus the Truth

The titling conceit on Chuck is that each week, faux-nerd Chuck is put in opposition to something. It’s a semi-comedic method of naming the episode, as mannered as Seinfeld‘s simple The [Something] titles, or Friends‘ The One With [The Something]. This episode, which I again had stern words about earlier, was the only time in the first season Chuck went up against a concept, though sadly it wasn’t the right one. Perhaps Chuck Vs. The Patience of the Audience would have been more accurate. Riddled with the usual uncertain performances, re-re-rehashed plots, poorly filmed action, and flat dialogue, this installment compounded those Chuckian standards with some egregious plot errors so glaring that the entire crew must have been asleep while filming to have not noticed it. If NBC’s cancellation of Journeyman wasn’t already galling enough, the renewal of this vapid atonal tripe is salt in the wound. Perhaps this is more entertaining than a broken TV, but surely only because Adam Baldwin is in it. Even with his talent involved, Chuck is an insult to pop culture itself.

5. Dirty Sexy Money – The Italian Banker

An expensive, major network show with a starry cast, lots of promotion, and a writing staff that included writers from Six Feet Under, Lost, and Veronica Mars, this should have been a home run, but alarms were ringing after the pilot ran on the spot for 42 minutes with no character, line of dialogue, or event generating enough energy to imprint itself on my memory. It didn’t get any better. As my previous comments have shown, the writing was pitched at a mid-afternoon soap level, with only the production values and relentless winking of the actors to differentiate it from The Bold and the Beautiful. While Ugly Betty (when operating at full power) perfectly understands how to satirise trashy soap stylings while revelling in their excesses, Dirty Sexy Money didn’t seem to have a handle on how to maintain a consistent tone. Switching from fluffy to dramatic with a grinding of narrative gears is bad enough, but there was nothing else going on to distract the viewer from this clumsiness. This episode was only marginally worse than all of the others, thanks to some startlingly bad dialogue, worn out plot threads from numerous other shows and films, and obsequious product placement for Bulgari, but the entire show was flawed from conception.

4. Ugly Betty – Giving Up The Ghost

Debate has raged between the contributors to this blog as to which Ugly Betty episode was the weakest. Masticator and Canyon have maintained that the Wicked advert called Something Wicked This Way Comes was the worst, and given that that despicable nonsense insulted Ray Bradbury with its name, I very seriously considered adding it to the list. However, the painful memories of Giving Up The Ghost are still raw, so I’ll have to plump for it. Featuring the same kinds of broad caricature, feeble dialogue, scenery-chewing performances, cliche-strewn plots, and misunderstanding of tone as your average episode of Dirty Sexy Money (a crime considering Ugly Betty usually gets the tone spot-on), it also included a career-worst guest appearance by Eliza Dushku, and brought about the necessary but frustrating separation of Wilhelmina from the Mode offices. That, in turn, split Marc from Amanda, which meant the show suddenly felt like The Venture Brothers without Brock Samson, or 30 Rock without Jack Donaghy. In one fell swoop the episode killed the funny for weeks to come, crippling the show during the latter half of the season. All of these events were overturned eventually, but the ratio of good to bad episodes was in the negative from then on.

3. Bionic Woman – Sisterhood

Oh God, where to begin? I’ve bitched about many shows here that are often good but had a bad week, or shows that might have seemed promising upon conception but never really gelled once shooting began, or shows that couldn’t back up their lofty ambitions, but Bionical Woman represents that rarity in the new Golden Age of TV; an out and out disaster from conception onwards. Nothing, and I mean nothing, about this show worked. The concept, hinting at modern self-awareness and littered with unconvincing tech-speak about such bleeding edge concepts as nanotechnology (ooooOOOOoooohhhh! So futuristical!), was still ridiculous in the way that only 70s sci fi TV can be, and all attempts to update the original show regularly misfired. With the sci fi hook malfunctioning, there was no hope for it anyway, but the poorly sketched mythology, miscasting, lacklustre action, and aversion to originality rendered it particularly dreadful. At its best the show was utterly boring. At its worst, however, it was an unmitigated and hilarious failure. This episode, featuring a regrettable guest appearance by Isaiah Washington, Katee Sackhoff chomping on drywall and furniture in a vague approximation of a tortured soul, and poor Michelle Ryan having to say, “Bring it on, bitch,” was the worst example of the whole debacle, and a comedic masterpiece to boot. Highly recommended.

2. CSI: Crime Scene Investigation – Two and a Half Deaths

As a successful show progresses, it will either stagnate or become scared of stagnation. CSI, a show that could potentially run forever with careful changes of cast, has dabbled with gimmickry to keep fresh something that doesn’t need to be fiddled with. Though some of those tricks have worked well (the Miniature Killer arc, William Friedkin directing an episode, Liev Schreiber’s guest appearance), swapping writing teams with the Two and a Half Men showrunners (Lee Aronsohn and Chuck Lorre) is a contender for the worst decision ever made in TV history. What is usually a pretty slick and intelligent piece of TV was instantly transformed into a score-settling grab-bag of cliches, weak jokes, eye-rolling performances, and petty attacks on the writers’ former employers on Roseanne and Grace Under Fire. To willfully allow your show, a successful, well-loved work that relies on atmosphere and character acting for its impact, to be hijacked by a couple of giggling twerps with chips on their shoulders and only a vague understanding of what makes CSI work better than any other procedural on TV, is an almost suicidal gesture, and a shocking fuck you aimed at the fanbase. My previous praise for the show still stands, but if anything is going to kill the show, it will be failure of nerve. Stay the course, CSI showrunners.

1. Torchwood – Something Borrowed

Regular readers will not be surprised by the presence of the ever-dire Torchwood, but as with Lost, I had a tough time deciding which episode should represent the show at the top of this list. Contenders included the season opener, with James Marsters failing to make the show’s trademark shitty dialogue work, as well as the garbled and shouty finale, and of course Meat, the hilariously misguided animal rights allegory that featured such delights as Ianto’s demented taser rampage, Owen’s “MERCY KILLING!”, and Captain Jack’s unforgettable face of empathic pain.

In the end, the right choice had to be Something Borrowed, not just because it represented sci fi at its most fat-headed and amateurish, but because it aired straight after the only episodes in the history of the show that didn’t totally suck space ass. Reset was a fun episode that showed a spark of life, and the two subsequent episodes, while not anywhere near perfect, exhibited a willingness to tinker with the format. Regrettably, in a flurry of poorly choreographed gunplay, misjudged humour, and rampant ineptitude, all of that effort was erased, and Something Borrowed returned the show to its default position of Stupidest Thing on TV Not Involving Fearne Cotton, Jimmy Carr, or Simon Cowell. Meat might have been unintentionally funnier, but this made me laugh and depressed me simultaneously. Quite a trick. It’s the sort of TV that poisons the soul, dulls the mind, and craps on the heart, and yet it is enormously, unfeasibly successful and adored. Go figger.

I think I might be able to milk this award-giving shtick out a bit further. Hey, it’s easier than thinking!

End Of Season Review – Battlestar Galactica

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Is it fair to say that sci fi fans are split into two factions over the best genre shows on TV right now? In my time reading talkbacks and comment sections online, Lost talkbacks are often invaded by hardcore Battlestar Galactica fans dissing the island-based dissertation on free will for “making it up as it goes along”, and Battlestar Galactica talkbacks feature, well, less attacks, but perhaps that’s because Lost fans are more polite. Yes, I am firmly in the former category, and so my perception is distorted by that fandom. Lost pushes all of my buttons, whereas BSG makes me angry almost as often as it makes me happy. This picture expresses the chasm between the two fanbases (at least as far as I see it).


It was not always this way. The opening mini and the first season were as good as TV gets. It was relevant, it was exciting, it was cleverly referential with regards to the original series, and it featured the most incredible effects yet shown on TV. It’s shallow of me to love the show for that, but Zoic’s effects work was simply staggering. That was merely the cherry on top of a lot of really terrific drama. I was absolutely thrilled that SciFi was making something so challenging and clever.


Over time, my opinion changed. By the end of season two we had had way too many placeholder episodes, which meant the finale crammed in several episodes’ worth of drama into an hour of TV. It was good drama, but rushed through in an unsatisfying blur of action and revelation and unconvincing fatsuits. The other sin of that season (and the subsequent season) was the amount of time spent focusing on possibly the least interesting couple on TV at the expense of a lot of other exciting avenues. Yes, no Apobuck ‘shipper am I. Or Starders, or Apoulla, or any combination.


Apollo and Starbuck bore me to tears, and we have spent way too much time watching them come up with reasons not to just start spacehumping. My least favourite Apobuck moment came when Starbuck used religion as a reason to not just bang Apollo’s grumpy brains out. We have no idea what the provisions of her religion are, as none of these details have been explained convincingly (more on that bugbear later), so this just smacked of contrivance. The main reason for their inability to just get it on (other than that they are boring, badly written teenagers who love the drama of their relationship) is that Starbuck was involved with the now “dead” Zack Adama, Lee’s brother, who looms over them and Apollo’s dad, the flat-out AWESOME Bill Adama, from “beyond the grave”.


The amount of time spent agonising over a character who is not actually on the show is dead air, and as such seems odd. Unless, of course, Zack is the final Cylon. The fact that the prequel series Caprica seems to revolve around the Adama family’s connections with the scientist who created the Cylons suggest it might be. The arrival of Zack will justify all of the attention on two boring-ass flyers at the expense of so many other more interesting relationships. How the son of a human could be a Cylon has yet to be explained, but we’re convinced it will be him (kudos to the AV Club commenter, whose name escapes me, who suggested it a few months ago). If not, why the hell are we devoting this much time to these guys? Now that they’ve reached earth together will they become Adam and Eve? Surely a show as smart as this one won’t be so stupid as to do that.


If I had problems with season two, season three tested our patience to the limit. After a very very strong opening featuring some of the most astonishing drama on any show last year, the show got into a funk, with Baltar doing something something on the Cylon Basestar, Tyrol staring at a carving for two episodes, Apollo and Starbuck getting pissed at each other, and lots of other truly dreary nonsense that I’m blotting out because those empty scenes are taking up space in my head I could use to get excited about the Watchmen trailer (shut up over-sensitive fanboys, it looks great). By then, even some top quality space explosions couldn’t keep me interested. An attempt to watch the Razor TV movie faltered in the middle of a huge battle sequence due to lack of interest (and I’ve yet to finish it). How is this possible? Usually I live for this stuff.


I thought it would take a miracle to make me give a damn about Battlestar Galactica again, but in the end something less dramatic but equally as wonderful happened; Jane Espenson wrote two episodes of the show and introduced some quality writing, something the show was sorely in need of. That’s not to say that the fourth season of BSG was instantly made flawless, because there were plenty of annoyances, longueurs, and poor performances. That’s also not to say the rest of the BSG writing team are uniformly dreadful; Ronald D. Moore, Bradley Thomson and David Weddle (and Mark Verheiden, occasionally) still do sterling work, but we still get some horrendous dialogue, cringe-making dramatic devices, and confusing expansion of the BSG mythos. If you don’t believe me about the terrible devices, consider Gaeta and his lost leg. A strangely dramatic plot-thread for a minor character, but made almost unwatchable by the conceit that, in his post-op delirium, he keeps warbling tuneless, pretentious songs reflecting that episode’s moral dilemmas. Even more improbably, anyone walking into the recovery room was obligated to comment on how lovely it was. Gah! I know you’ve been living without music for a while, but it didn’t used to sound like that. Oh well, at least it wasn’t a Dylan song.


However, even at its best (and its best is very very good), the show has lacked a spark in its writing, possibly due to budget and network pressures, or, as I sometimes suspect, the mythology of the show has been insufficiently worked out in advance. I once started a huge post about my frustration with the show, and perhaps I’ll get back to that soon. Right now, I want to go apeshit over Espenson’s expanded role on the show, which saw her get solo credit on two episodes, a step up from co-writing a season three episode with former 24 producer Anne Cofell Saunders (who has left BSG to work on Chuck). Her first episode was dismissed by some talkbackers as a placeholder, and though it didn’t feature space battles or mythos-defining weirdness, it did have words coming out of people’s mouths that didn’t sound like they were written by a robot. Or an infinite number of Grace Parks working away on an infinite number of archaic typewriters.


If I never warmed to BSG the way I warmed to Lost or Deadwood or Friday Night Lights or anything from the Mutant Enemy Factory of Awesomeness, it’s because the dialogue never came alive. Even when I was really enthusiastic about it (from the opening mini-series to about the halfway mark in season two), I wished the dialogue had some sass, or spunk, or surprise. When spoken by the show’s best actors (I’m thinking Edward James Olmos, Mary McDonell, James Callis, or Tricia Helfer) that dialogue sounded just fine, but then talented performers can transcend something flat. However, when handled by some of the less polished performers (it gives me no pleasure to aim my stinkeye at Grace Park, Katee Sackhoff, Michael Trucco, and some of the other random actors playing minor characters littering the screen), the shortcomings of the writing becomes all too apparent.


With Espenson on board, even that placeholder episode felt fresh and entertaining and relevant. Even better, her second episode, the penultimate one of this mini-season, had all of the visual wow and big drama that the talkbackers thought was lacking before, and even though she was lumbered with the kind of poorly explained dream sequence stuff that so often irks me on this show (by which I mean Laura Roslin’s visions of her death), she imbued them with humour and humanity, and avoided the purple melodrama that can often seep into these moments. I just wanted to ambush the rest of the writers with a screening of it, all the while yelling, “This is how you do it!”


Even better, the finale, written by Weddle and Thompson, was infinitely better than the dire season three finale, and though it flirted with the same Dylan nonsense that blighted that previous episode, mainly it was concerned with getting on with telling the story and blowing our minds. Which it did, with five minutes of exultation, heightened emotion, and finally a total loss of hope. As shocked as I was by the final shot of Jeremy Bentham in Lost, BSG‘s bravura pan across the leaders of the human/Cylon coalition and the desolate surface of a ruined earth might have been even more astonishing. In that moment I was relieved that I had stuck with the show even when the third season had annoyed me so much.


Of course, the ten episode mini-season wasn’t exclusively Espenson-level writing and mind-blowing reveals. The quality level still rose and fell rapidly, often within the same episode. Though I was grateful that the focus on Apollo/Starbuck, the plot that had derailed the previous season, had been dialled back, we still had her and Anders acting out their risible and dreary psycho-drama. Even knowing that she is unwittingly the number one Cylon pin-up (with both Leoben and Anders obsessed with getting into her unflattering space-pants) didn’t make it any more interesting. Having the two of them stuck on a garbage scow with the cream of the fleet (a plot device that made absolutely zero sense) was televisual torture, made worse by the histrionic performances from the entire crew.


Back with the fleet, things were sporadically interesting with patches of blurg. The Tyrol/Cally plot was resolved with Cally getting blasted out of an airlock, a turn of events that pleased us greatly. Aaron Douglas and Nicki Clyne had been lumbered with the worst kind of kitchen-sink drama, with Tyrol hiding from his shrill wife and horrible kid, a domestic situation complicated further with the revelation that he was a Cylon and their child was a human/Cylon hybrid. That fact alone created immensely important drama that changed the whole direction of the show, and…


Oh, that’s right. Their hybrid baby is seemingly nowhere near as important as Athena and Helo’s kid. Ron Moore pretty much admitted that at last year’s Comic-Con, but has yet to explain why one is important and the other is not. You’d think that the decision to make Tyrol a Cylon was a spur of the moment thing, but BSG would never just make it up as they go along, would they? That’s Lost I’m thinking of. [/bitter] That said, Tyrol’s reaction to Cally’s death was terrific, and brilliantly written by Espenson. His breakdown in the Galactica bar was a season highlight. As Tyrol was also well-served by Espenson (and Cofell Saunders) last season, it’s fair to say I only like him when she writes him. Fingers crossed we get more of that in the last ten episodes.


Baltar’s transformation into opportunistic messiah was also welcome, after he was reduced to a wibbling loser last season. Seeing him stumbling into his destiny as ineffectual self-help guru with his customary mixture of bluster and self-loathing was great fun, as was his growing influence within the fleet, as his monotheistic religion becomes more appealing to the increasingly desperate refugees. One of the aspects of BSG that has interested me the least is the slowly building focus on religion. The show has always had a religious aspect, but I tended not to pay much attention to the details of the conflicting religions of the humans and Cylons, thinking them little more than signifiers of the shows comment on contemporary tensions, but as the fourth season wore on I had the horrible feeling that I should have been paying attention all along, and we were going to get to the final stretch of the show without a proper working knowledge of the significance of all of that guff about the twelve Gods and what have you. Was I going to have to go back and rewatch the whole show to catch all of this stuff?


By the time the finale had rolled around, I felt almost certain that the Cylons and the humans are all worshipping the wrong thing, that there is a force shaping their destinies but it is not the God we think of, but some force of physics or space/time or multi-dimensional space (Roslin’s visions during FTL jumps makes me wonder about that) that is beyond comprehension, and certainly beyond the superstitious teachings of the twelve tribes and the Cylons. At least, I hope so. I find the religious plotline far more interesting as a tool to dramatise tensions between the characters than as a complex but ultimately uninteresting mythology running through the show. That way lies The Sacred Scrolls of Borzon and The Temple of Astroculite and much other silliness that doesn’t fit into this plot, though regrettably it has wandered in that direction from time to time. Thankfully the show appears to be using God as a source of conflict, which is believable and way more interesting.


Plus, as an added bonus, James Callis has been fantastic as a reluctant messiah winging it in front of an adoring following and coming up with a philosophy even more vapid than Oprah’s latest pet belief system The Secret, if that’s possible. At the end of last season he was walking around in robes looking like Future Space Jesus, which was amusing but sledgehammer subtle. At least now he just looks like a cult leader, which is pretty much what he is.


I’ve been bitching about a large proportion of the plotlines, but there were stories within the mini-season that I really liked. While I was irked by Ron Moore’s admission that Roslin’s cancer remission was another spur of the moment writing choice (a choice that AICN BSG talkbackers were in denial over, having spent three years making snotty cracks about Lost being made up on the fly), it’s given Mary McDonnell yet more chances to show off her considerable acting skills. Confession time: before BSG I couldn’t stand McDonnell at all, finding her rictus grin performances in Donnie Darko and Grand Canyon unwatchable. I could just about get over my antipathy in Sneakers, but that’s because Sneakers is the awesomest. Setec Astronomy! Yeah, that’s right, bitches.


In BSG, however, she has been uniformly magnificent. This season has provided her with some of her best acting opportunities, as Roslin’s humanity and morality get tested by the ever-worsening situation within the fleet, the continuing fallout from the occupation on New Caprica, the urge to overrule the council as they vacillate and bicker, and her wavering faith, which has caused her to misinterpret signs and omens, as well as damage her empathic connection with those around her. Best of all, she almost killed Baltar after he finally confessed to accidentally betraying humanity, before a vision of her own death showed her the error of her ways. It was an acting tour de force that made the regular PointyShouty moments look even more feeble by comparison.


If that scene amazed me, a few minutes later I blubbed like a perspective-free fanboy as Roslin was reunited with Bill Adama, and finally told him she loved him. His response, “About time”, is only beaten by Ben Linus’ emotionless, “So?” from the Lost finale. Edward James Olmos has been my favourite actor on BSG from very early on, and his stoic decision to wait for Roslin in a Raptor with only her favourite book for company was a season highlight. Of course, in the finale the breakdown he has probably been fending of for years finally happened upon finding out that his best friend, Saul Tigh, was (improbably) a Cylon all along. Olmos performed the shit out of the moment, meaning poor Jamie Bamber was forced to brace himself against the acting maelstrom next to him.


The Cylons finally achieved their full potential, having previously been mysterious monoliths of force with only hints at their inner turmoil. Slowly we’ve seen cracks emerge; Leoben’s obsession with Starbuck, D’Anna’s breakdown, the rebellions of the Six’s and Athena’s. Sadly those moments were often sidelined in order to return to yet more Apollo/Starbuck angstifying, a narrative choice that drove me to distraction. This season flirted with the same lack of focus, as a Cylon civil war broke out for thirty seconds in the middle of an episode and then went unmentioned for a couple of weeks while we got to watch Tigh hallucinate at a Six instead. It was a tad frustrating.


The other thing that has bothered me over the last couple of seasons is how the show spends less time focusing on the mechanics of the fleet, how the humans are attempting to retain their connection to their history by creating a system of government and law, and how that system is unable to cope with the demands of life on the run. As we approach the finale we’re dealing more with more “sci fi” elements, such as time looping and the possible intervention of a god-like force. Last year I was bummed out by the increased focus on prophecy (a bit of a bug-bear of mine, as it can lead to some lazy plotting in all kinds of fiction), but this season has been promising, especially as potential messiah Baltar is still pretty much the same horndog as ever, except now he has new ways to justify his sleazy behaviour.


Prophecy, when used to do little more than foreshadow future events, is a crutch for lazy writers. This half-season has hinted that there is more to the religious plot than we thought. Prophecy is still a key factor, but that wonderful final shot hints that the rails that our protagonists are running on might not be heading in the direction they expected. That’s what I’ve been waiting for since the mini-series “prequel”, so many of the reservations I’ve had over these ten episodes faded. I will still hold onto my coveted memory of the less glamorous aspects of the show, the politicking, the debates, the worrying about water or food or power. I loved that stuff almost as much as the explosions.


Funnily enough, it was that stuff that made Lost a trial to watch sometimes. I didn’t mind it all in the first season, but Robinson Crusoe-esque food gathering and water collection drama has been done before, and for the first season there was a lot of that. It was perhaps a lighter and more fun show as a result, but I only really started loving it once Desmond appeared with tales of the Dharma Initiative. BSG, on the other hand, has followed a similar arc, but my interest has dwindled the further we’ve moved from the nuts-and-bolts tales. I guess it’s because it’s more interesting to me to see how the human race would struggle to survive following mass extinction and exile on spluttering spaceships than it is to see people chasing boars through a jungle.


That increasingly dense mythology isn’t the only similarity BSG shares with Lost. We also have the exploration of the concept of fate via the sci fi trope of distorted time (if the “This has happened before, and will happen again,” line is as important as it seems), reluctant leadership (Jack and Apollo), suspicion, and, most importantly, a refusal to reduce conflict to a Manichean battle, preferring instead to show good and bad and all the infinite gradations between through a distorted lens. By now we have multiple factions within both human and Cylon camps, and now both races are having to join forces, just as the Losties and the Others are moving closer together. Of course, they’re not the only shows to explore what it’s like to live on the hazy line between right and wrong. The Sopranos, The Wire, The Shield, Mad Men, and Dexter all do it too to varying degrees of success, but it’s good to see genre TV do it while remaining genuine sci fi and not some watered down amalgam of genres or another bratty child of the late-70s space opera movies that fathered the original version of this show. Plus, we get all of that moral ambiguity and ethical curiosity while retaining the large explosions. When has Dexter ever offered a spectacle as exciting as this? When has Mad Men? And no, I’m not talking about the insanity taking hold of Don Draper’s brain.


The long and short of it is, the fourth season of BSG featured many of the annoying things that have made the trip so far such a slog, but the new focus that has come with the definite end-date has re-ignited my interest in it. When I’m feeling uncharitable, I’ll bitch about it even now. Most of the sub-plots still hold no interest for me. Anders, Gaeta, at least one version of Boomer, Starbuck, Helo and Dualla could be written out (Dualla pretty much has) and I wouldn’t even notice, unless it meant more screentime for the sorely under-used Doc Cottle or the magnificently oily Zarek, in which case I would rejoice. It can often look so dark as to be almost impossible to comprehend, though I will grant that sometimes that choice pays off. The peculiar pixellated imagery on the Cylon Rebel Baseship was a lovely touch. (This picture also features Tricia Helfer being awesome, as usual.)


The biggest variable on the show is Michael Hogan. Will he be amazing this week? Or will he make my head hurt with the growly line-readings and scenery-chomping? I think his acting ability is determined by some astrological event or something. In this season he let his inner crazy out a bit too often; the scenes featuring him and the Six he keeps hallucinating at were simultaneously creepy, incomprehensible, and moving. Still, he gets a Shades of Caruso Free Pass for his superb work during Tigh’s Al-Zawahiri period. I’ll just choose to forget subtlety-free moments like the one below in honour of those fine performances in the past.


All of that remains, and yet my interest in the show has been totally reawakened. I’m even considering rewatching it from the start in prep for the finale. That’s a lot of watching to pack in on top of The Shield and Wonderfalls and maybe Buffy and all of the other shows we were going to watch during Summer hiatus that we didn’t get around to. Not that I consider it a hardship. Roll on the final ten episodes, the spin-off show, and the follow-up movie, which is written by Jane Espenson and therefore will be awesome. You have my word on that.

Shades of Caruso Free Pass: David E. Kelley

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It’s sad to admit that within our culture there are far more perpetrators of crime against quality than there are reliable purveyors of art (and by art I mean high art or pop art or trash art or any kind of brilliance that can be considered art no matter whether it satisfies high, middle or low brow tastes). For every Lost there is a CSI: Miami, Chuck, and Torchwood. For every There Will Be Blood there is a Good Luck Chuck, The Hottie and the Nottie, and I Know Who Killed Me. For every David Foster Wallace there is a James Patterson, John Grisham, and Tom Clancy. (Confession: I’ve read a lot of his books and will probably read more, because I’m a sucker for that kind of thing, but I would never defend his writing, which is appalling.)

However, some creators whose work I am often indifferent to sometimes accidentally make something I love, and any conversation I then have about their work is often derailed as I start to defend them on just one point, ignoring the other stuff almost completely. So, in the interests of streamlining any future discussions about certain artists with one or two interesting or entertaining projects behind them, I’m introducing the Shades of Caruso Free Pass, to be awarded to any entertainer or artist who would otherwise mean nothing to me, but for one shining moment made me think they were the shit despite other crimes they have been responsible for.


David E. Kelley should just be the guy who made The Law a wacky funhouse filled with ethical debates illustrated with James “Vic Reeves lookalike” Spader and William “King of Everything” Shatner in drag, or Calista Flockhart and Lucy Lui singing a lot of karaoke, or other such frivolities. I remember liking The Practice while it was being shown on UK TV (ITV once broadcast it during primetime for five weeks and then took it off, and then BBC1 showed thirteen episodes a few years later before similarly hiding it from view), but even an ostensibly serious show like that had a couple of characters (I’m thinking of those played by Camryn Manheim and Michael Badalucco) that were sometimes the subject of jokey storylines. Other than that, though, he will probably be most famous for creating Ally McBeal.


I despised that show, as evidenced by the fact that I searched for the most absurd, photoshopped cast montage to garnish this post, and would consign it to the depths of the Marianas Trench alongside Northern Exposure and Scrubs (though I’d save the first couple of seasons as Canyon is a fan), all for the crime of being self-consciously wacky and incessantly winking at the camera at how clever and post-modern it all is. I’m a fan of the pomo, but lazy third-wall breaking tripe like this gives it a bad name. Plus, it helped kick-start the Bridget Jones klutzy-working-woman-who-needs-a-man trend that even a clueless dope of a man like me thinks is an abomination. And it’s not just me.

Sckanaday asks: What is the big threat Ally McBeal poses to old school feminists? I’m amazed at the backlash against a young, well-educated woman with choices who opts to live by her own agenda, not someone else’s! Isn’t that part of what feminism has stood for?

Ginia Bellafante: I think feminism worked long and hard to erase stereotypes of women as neurotic incompetents unconcerned with matters of public life. Ally McBeal, in my humble opinion, is helping undue [sic] that work.

Phyllis Chesler: I agree with her. And I would say that if Monica Lewinsky goes to law school and continues to behave in the same fashion, she will turn into Ally McBeal — obsessed with men and sex and love and short skirts, and not with children being beaten to death in their own homes and not with women losing child support. These are not Ally McBeal’s fantasy concerns.

Actually, my main criticism of it is that it was horribly unfunny, but I’m willing to quote some hardcore feminists discussing its embarrassing portrayal of working women to help my case against the whole horrid enterprise if need be. This is before we get into the shady rumours that Kelley encourages female cast members to lose lots of weight, which are probably just rumours, but a quick IMDb search brings up a worrying amount of news relating to eating disorders on set. I have no idea how culpable or not Kelley is, so I don’t feel comfortable passing judgement on him (it’s not like his shows are the only ones with emaciated performers in them), but it looks bad. So, when even employing the incomparable Robert Downey Jr. doesn’t make me want to see his TV shows, why give the guy a free pass?


Because Lake Placid is superb. It was on Sky Movies recently and I happily rewatched it for the billionth time, and it was while watching it that I realised it made me forget all of the negativity his work usually awakens in me. If all you know about it is that it’s a Jaws rip-off with a crocodile in it, you don’t know the half of it.


For a start it’s a very funny and genial comedy that just happens to have a big deadly animal in it, though many thought it was an unscary horror film with too many jokes, which meant some critics were unbelievably harsh about it. Once you see it as a comedy, it works much better. Director Steve Miner totally understands how best to film Kelley’s smart-ass script, making the sporadic suspense scenes work well and getting the sarcastic tone right, editing and filming the comedy scenes for maximum effect. He also does a good job of making Bill Pullman and Bridget Fonda work well together; their pissy chemistry carries a lot of the movie. If only Joss Whedon’s early screenplays had been filmed by someone so in tune with the tone of his work, the world would be a different place right now (one where Whedon gets to make whatever he wants with enormous budgets, which is a better world than this one, oh yes).


The rest of the heavy lifting is done by Oliver Platt and Brendan Gleeson, who spend the whole (very short) film bickering. They do the job well mostly because they’re hugely endearing and talented actors, with special praise to be heaped on Gleeson like an extra helping of mashed love potatoes. He’d get into any list of my all-time favourite performers just for his role in John Boorman’s underrated classic The General (also recently shown on Sky Movies), and he’s similarly great here, verbally sparring with Platt over pretty much everything (though they kind of love each other by the end). It’s as if Kelley’s favourite parts of Jaws were Richard Dreyfuss and Robert Shaw arguing and he decided to make a whole film like it. I could happily watch a 10 season series documenting them living together, Odd Couple style.

As great as they are, they’d be nothing without Kelley’s wonderful dialogue to work with. On his shows this kind of glibness riles me something fierce, but in Lake Placid it works perfectly, either because Miner is better at translating his work to the screen or because the presence of a giant murderous crocodile adds a frisson to the proceedings that undercuts the relentless sass. Even if there is a mysterious extra element that makes this work better than his other stuff, I really do love Kelley’s script anyway. He has fun with the genre, gets in quick, sets everything up elegantly, delivers a ton of laughs (plus Betty White saying cocksucker a lot), and gets out with a superhappy ending in about 80 minutes. And if that hasn’t sold you on it, check this scene out.

Giant crocodile versus deadly kodiac bear plus punching! If you still don’t want to see it, we are obviously diametrically opposed, whatever that means. So, Mr. Kelley, enjoy your free pass. Go crazy making wacky legal dramas for the rest of your career. I don’t care, because for 80 minutes, you rocked.

This Week in TV (Week 8)

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Let’s do this quick style!

Highlight of the Week:

30 Rock again conquered all with satire of the war on terror that was actually funny and integrated into the plot without being heavy-handed even for a second. It also had a hilarious guest appearance by Edie Falco as CC, a Democrat love interest for Jack, which led to much soul-searching for both of them, and a magnificent scene in which Tracy feeds Jack exclamations of love a la Cyrano De Bergerac.


Which leads me to…

Lines of the Week:

“Tell her your privates wanna give her privates a high-five!”

“Tell her her butt look like an apple and you wanna take a bite!”

“Tell her she’s got tig ol’ bitties like the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders!”

“Tell her you want her to donate her body to science and you science! Tell her, Jack!”

Scene of the Week:

As wonderful as that scene was, I might have laughed more at the Lifetime movie based on Falco’s life, called A Dog Took My Face And Gave Me A Better Face To Change The World: The Celeste Cunningham Story, starring Kristen Wiig as CC.


It was pretty accurate, but the thing that sold it was Jack’s reaction as he watches it, exhorting everyone on screen to get the gun away from the dog and getting more and more exasperated as the tragic accident occurs. The capper is Wiig sliding out of shot and saying, “I’m going to get into politics!” I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again; I could not love this show more. That’s before I realised that CC is going to be a semi-recurring character from now on, which would be brilliant news if it wasn’t for that darned strike.

Stupidest Scene of the Week:

I’ve expressed my extreme displeasure with Chuck in the past, but I have to say, last week’s episode was the strongest yet, and featured guest appearances by actors I have been very fond of in the past; Rachel Bilson, who was The O.C.‘s Summer Roberts (and has still not conquered her enunciation problems), and Kevin Weisman who played lovable technological wizard Marshall in Alias. So I like Chuck now, right?

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! Even at the height of its powers, I had a miserable time watching it. Truth serums and poison and antidotes? Really? This is the best on offer? I noticed that the episode was written by show producer Anne Cofell Saunders, who has spent years on 24. Now, that show, at its worst, features some hilariously convoluted and bad plotting, and strained dialogue devoid of jokes. At its best, it has riveting and exciting plots featuring excellent timing and suspense, and strained dialogue devoid of jokes. That dialogue never improves. As a result, this episode of Chuck featured much stronger plotting than usual, with something finally being done about Chuck and Sarah’s absurd romance, but lumbered on with zero wit and horribly contrived comic sequences featuring the criminally unfunny Buy More staff. When I say criminally, I’m not exaggerating. They should all be hogtied or keelhauled or something. Isn’t there a punishment where people are sewn into sleeping bags full of vipers? Can we do that one, please? Especially in the case of Joshua Gomez as multiverse-Gupta Morgan? I nominate him as worst character on TV. Oh God, he makes my teeth ache! Oh God! Oh God!!! ::has nervous breakdown::

::recovers from nervous breakdown:: Still, the stupidest moment of the week came when Weisman’s evil baddie character poisons Chuck’s sister, Ellie, with a deadly enhanced truth serum, which starts making her tell the truth lots and lots, but only a few hours after her exposure. As a bargaining chip, he offers an antidote to Chuck and co. in exchange for a MacGuffin of some sort. He holds up the antidote to prove it exists, and everyone sees it.


Through various hilarious shenanigans, Chuck saves Ellie but gets him and Sarah and Casey poisoned. Through the magic of contrivance, the truthiness kicks in almost instantly, leading to even more hilarious shenanigans! But they will die soon, which just ruins the humour entirely. You’re bumming me out, Cofell Saunders. Chuck is smart enough to figure out where Weisman is hiding, and our heroic avengers rush to his hideout. When there, he offers them the antidote, and they take it. Here is a screencap of this moment.


Now, unless you’re colour-blind, you might be able to spot a slight discrepancy. Here’s a hint; check out the colour of the vials. Our heroes are about to drink the liquid, but thank God! Chuck realises the vials contain something other than the antidote, and throws it away! How did he figure this out? Because the previous vial that he not only held in his hand but administered to his dying sister was green and this one os piss-yellow? No! Because villains like to offer heroes bottles of poison instead of antidotes in, and I quote, “comic books”. Okay, sorry about this, but it’s pet peeve time. In the pilot, Chuck asks Morgan if he wants to play “video games”. I don’t know any gamer who refers to them as anything other than games, just as I don’t know any comic fans who refer to them as “comic books”. Graphic novels, yes, occasionally, but never “comic books”. Yet more proof that this show is targeted at geeks and nerds but written by people who have no concept of nerd culture. Painful stuff. Oh, and they cast the immensely likeable Weisman as a nasty bad guy, thus wasting his talents.


I really have no idea why I’m still watching this.

ETA: Canyon, who was kind enough to get these Chuck screencaps for me, pointed out that Weisman’s forehead appears to have become larger, not unlike some kind of large-craniumed psychic villain out of a comic “book”. [It's not just larger; it has Frankenstein stitches down the center and bulges out at either side. Something in there is growing, and I'm worried it's not his brain. -- Canyon]

Edit again, many many months later: Upon rewatching this episode for our Caruso Awards of 2007-2008, I found out that it wasn’t actually written by Anne Cofell Saunders, but by Allison Adler. Many apologies to everyone involved for the error. What did Adler previously work on? Family Guy and Commander In Chief. Perfect pedigree for Chuck, then.

Most Inventive Plot of the Week:

Pushing Daisies returned with another strong episode, though for most of it I remained hung up on the tweeness, and the over-direction (not Sonnenfeld-bad, but annoying nonetheless), and the peculiar cleavage overload, and my anxiousness whenever Chuck gets near Ned. At the end, however, I realised how much I’d enjoyed the plot, which revolved around a polygamist dog trainer, his four wives, their perfect dog, and an evil breeder with a get-rich-quick cloning scheme.


It was so off the wall but so creative and coherent that I couldn’t help but love it. The fact that the perfect dog is a cross between four breeds, and the dog trainer had four wives, lent a pleasant symmetry to the episode. The first murder plot (featuring a dandelion powered car) was perhaps too quirky, and I was concerned that there would be similar annoying details cluttering straightforward plots in the future episodes, but this was inventive and silly and yet never implausible, in that yes, cloning dogs and killing people with poisoned coffee is outlandish but nothing was as gratuitous as a car powered by dandelions, which was too too precious. It was a joy to watch, and yet again made me kick myself for doubting the show. Even though the flaws remain, it would be a grave mistake to diss some of the cleverest writing on TV.

Most Pissed-Off Reaction of the Week:

An overworked Tami Taylor asks Tyra and Lila (whose names will confuse me until the end of time) to help organise Pantherama, the annual rally for the Dillon Pathers, and with notable imagination, they get the team to strip off in front of the whole town. This is how she and her husband react.


For some reason Lila thinks it hilarious, though we thought she’d have to rush out and do some hardcore praying. Still funny, though.

Runner-Up Most Pissed-Off Reaction of the Week:

The documentary crew following House around the hospital edit together his misanthropic quips and turn him into a lovable hero that makes Doug Ross look like Peter Benton. (Sorry, I once loved E.R. Is that a crime?)


Having his carefully constructed nastiness ruined by a bunch of filmmakers really pisses on his chips. Oh, and remember I said Michael Michele was brought in as a snarky love interest? Turns out I was wrong again. This happens a lot. Get used to it!

Question of the Week:

Which was the best love scene? Pushing Daisies‘ Ned and Chuck?


FNL‘s Matt Saracen and Magical Latina Maid Carlotta?


Ugly Betty‘s Henry and L’Amanda?


Or Reaper‘s Sock and Gladys?


Clumsiest and Most Delayed Exposition of the Week:

From the thrilling opening of the latest Heroes:


Peter Petrelli: You gotta let me go, Nathan.
Nathan Petrelli: You go, I go!
Peter: No, I’ll be okay. You can fly, I can’t.
Nathan: Whaddaya mean?
Peter: It’s taking everything within me, all my power not to explode! Let me go!
Nathan: Peter!
Peter: Raaaaaaargh! ::big ‘splodey::

Yes, it was great that the writers acknowledged the gaping plot hole in the season one finale, albeit it with the subtlety of Niki’s fist to the groin, but it would have worked better several months ago. We’ll take a couple of lines of exposition at the right moment over “emotional truth” based on contrivance and ignorance of the laws of your own universe, thank you Mr. Kring. Mind you…

Most Exciting FX Sequence of the Week / Season So Far:

…Nathan saving Peter, getting burnt to a crisp, and then saved by Peter made me want to do a circuit of the living room in its honour.


That’s the Heroes I love! Which makes it all the more painful that…

Worst, Stupidest, Most Contrived and Insulting Death of the Week:

…making sure DL doesn’t die as a result of Linderman’s bullets, but lives on, becoming an actual, honest-to-God inspirational hero, and then dying off camera to a punk with a gun just so that Niki can come to her senses and seek help is just absolute bullshit. Even Ali Larter seems to be pissed about it.


DL was one of my favourite characters, and having him die in the finale would have been bad enough, but let’s be honest here. The writers had four months of backstory to explain, and they didn’t have enough for Niki to do, so they brought back DL from the dead just so she had someone to interact with during this episode. How else were they gonna fill the 45 minutes up? Sylar was out of commission, Nathan was in a coma, Peter was in a Company cell hanging out with “Adam Monroe”, and Hiro was in Feudal Japan. Problem is, DL was supposed to be dead, so he just gets hurriedly pushed out of the story in the lamest of ways. Imagine if Daredevil was run over by a car driven by Stilt-Man’s cousin, or if Animal Man slipped in the shower. This is how stupid DL’s death is. I know it’s just a show, and I am usually able to not get too worked up about these things, but that was appallingly bad writing and a disservice to the fans. Heroes gives with one hand, and it takes away with the other. I’m not a happy bunny!

Most Intriguing Character of the Week:

Yes, we now luff Journeyman. Other than being a little humourless, we love everything about it, and this week featured a superb plot twist, where we find out that Dan Vassar’s time-travelling companion Livia is leaping forward from 1948 instead of back from 2007! Turns out their love affair was conducted during a particularly lengthy leap on her part, which begs the question, how much of their moments together were actually spent during her leaps, with her popping out of the present when his back was turned? And if Dan is leaping because of an experiment in the present, how does that affect her 59 years ago? I love that the show is full of little questions and mysteries. It’s making the loss of Lost almost bearable. Oh, did I mention that Livia is played by internet favourite Moon Bloodgood? No? Whoops!


Moon Bloodgood, ladies and gentlemen.

Most Underwritten Character of the Week:

Rather than continue with the griping about Andi and her pointlessness, it’s perhaps time to start worrying about the other main female character, Josie, played by Valarie Rae Miller. For weeks now she’s been not much more than a walking plot device, an ex-girlfriend who just happens to work in the DA’s office, allowing the Soulbusters to find out information about the criminal pasts of their foes. Until now, the most interesting thing about her is that I was sure she looked familiar, and I thought I’d gone mad and started thinking she was the black Eve Myles.


Turns out she she was in Dark Angel, as the token black lesbian (James Cameron’s randomly activating liberalism at work, I’ll wager), where she just talked about her relationships and gave off waves of dismissive “attitude”. Despite her non-lesbianness in Reaper, she’s pretty much the same woman. Prior to this week all she has done is spar with Sock, but even then her perpetually annoyed responses fare not too well in the face of Tyler Labine’s off-kilter line readings and method quirkiness. Sock desperately needed a comic foil who was more than a match for him, and if it was meant to be her, it wasn’t established strongly enough and Miller was left with little to work with. Instead, Gladys the DMV demon has become the unlikely foil, much to our delight.

That leaves the problem of what to do with Miller. This week she actually got to interact with Missy Peregrym instead of get hassled by Labine, but to my disappointment, in contravention of Bechdel’s Law,all they could do was talk about boys. With the growing viewer frustration over the lack of variety or season arcs, the showrunners would do well to spend some time fleshing out these characters (especially Josie), perhaps give them an adventure of their own, one that doesn’t involve them talking non-stop about boys.


It could be the thing that vaults the always entertaining but unadventurous show up to the next level. Oh, and I know I said I wasn’t going to go on about Andi, but right now the show is wasting Missy Peregrym even more than Miller. I’ve got Stick It on right now, and while it’s painful to see Jeff Bridges playing a tough gymnastics instructor instead of winning the Oscars he should be getting on a regular basis, it’s amazing to see how lively Peregrym is. She’s not the best actress, but she’s funny and engaging and is willing to take a beating for the film. A montage of her hitting the ground over and over again was painful to see. Why is she not being used to greater effect? Damnit, my love of Reaper is getting sorely tested over its lack of commitment to giving the female characters something interesting to do. Consider this a black mark against the show that must be addressed (I’m sure the showrunners will hop to it right now).

The “What The Hell Is He Doing On This Show” Moment of the Week:

Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water, FNL introduced a new character, played by Surfing Jesus!


I honestly thought that John From Cincinnati‘s Austin Nichols was a surfer who got given an acting gig because showrunners David Milch and Kem Nunn thought it would be easier to train surfers to act than to do it the other way around, but it seems he’s actually an actor first and a water-skiier second. The watersports world’s loss is our loss too. Actually, that’s unfair. His performance as John was infinitely better than Rebecca DeMornay’s and she’s meant to be good at that shit. He was fine in FNL with what must have been a frustrating role to play (Julie’s new crush), and at least now he doesn’t have to keep saying “I don’t know Butchie instead” fifteen times an episode. (Seems he’s actually from Austin, which explains why he’s in FNL, though not why his parents felt it necessary to name him after the town he was raised in. Did they move there because of his name? Or name him that because they wanted to live there? Actually, I don’t care really. I’m just killing time.)

Pratfall of the Week:

Betty gets haunted by her kindhearted former self this week, and is reminded of the toll her job has taken on her, a cloying plot device wonderfully usurped first by having Dream Betty walk into a door, followed by Real Betty sitting on the wrong part of a chair.


As usual, the sentimentality of the show is undercut, allowing the subsequent genuinely shocking death of Bradford to hit hard without being dulled by contrived emotion earlier. Bravo showrunners, once more!

Grin of the Week:

Not just Ray Wise, but Ray Wise while getting repeatedly smacked in the head with a baseball bat!


Runner-Up Grin of the Week:

Buddy Garity trying to charm Tami Taylor with yet another of his harebrained schemes.


Brad Leland is the king of oily charm and thwarted optimism, and is always a joy to watch, but Buddy’s decision to look after the homeless Santiago meant we could see him question his own wisdom and face up to potentially troublesome responsibility. He was even more awesome than usual, but as I’ve said before, this is the best acted drama on TV, and it’s something we take for granted by now.

This Week in TV: Week 4

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Boy, was a lot of this week TV miserable. I’m not saying it was all bad (though of course some of it was), but in the fourth week, shows either went for pathos or started to introduce darker themes. Perhaps this is something writing teams know about; three weeks of establishing the status quo, then in the fourth week, set up the big problems and season arcs.

The Office was darker than ever, to the point that it overshadowed the obvious comic highlights (the hilarious conference-room discussion about the difference between whoever and whomever that gave everyone a chance to shine, the visit to Shrute Farms). Nathan Rabin wrote an excellent review of it that hit on a lot of the good points of the show, especially the heartbreaking moment between Jim and Dwight. Having Jim and Pam become his protectors and semi-friends is perfect (Dwight probably did more to bring them together than they realise, just by being the subject of their mockery), as was his post-talk acception/rejection in the office. As for Michael’s depression, the show crossed the line between humour and horror, and then edged back again. Just.


I respect the showrunners for doing that, but while watching the show, I just felt horrible. Nice that they’re acknowledging the currently miserable lower-middle-class job situation, though. I get the feeling they’ve all been reading Joshua Ferris’ excellent novel, And Then We Came To The End, which is the tragic comedy to The Office‘s funny tragedy (or are they the other way around?). There has already been a plot about redundancy with the branch shutdown arc, but while that hung over the first couple of seasons like a dark cloud, there was no way the showrunners could go through with it without ending the show. This is a more viable way to address the uncertainty of the US job market and the stagnating economy, and again it shows how ambitious the show is. A simple sitcom about office politics this is not, but then if you watch the show you already know that.



Ugly Betty also dropped the Sword of Damocles on a relationship that appears to have been doomed from the start. Though the episode featured many hilarious moments (my favourite being Amanda’s declaration, “You were all at Studio 54 that night and I will find that Tweetie Bird if I have to search all of your asses!”), Henry finally found out that he was indeed the father of Charlie’s baby, which surely finishes that arc off, or at least deals the fatal blow. The final scene, with Henry and Betty trying to come to terms with this news, hit hard, possibly because it was coming off the back of Justin’s descent into inept machismo, and Wilhemina’s plotting to destroy Mode.

Man, writing that out makes it seem like a bunch of frothiness, but in fact it was a real downer. The events might seem trivial, but the tone of the show darkened considerably. We were not left with the usual post-Betty glow. This is not a criticism. It was still great stuff, and Oh My God! Victor Garber! +100000 points for finding a role for the long-missed Spy-Daddy.


Speaking of post-Alias TV, to a certain extent Chuck tried to get in on the miserablism with a subplot about Sarah grieving for her dead boyfriend as well as bemoaning her lost identity and spyness, but it’s not really a smart enough show to make it work (yet; it could still improve, after all). Yvonne Strahovski is possibly a better actress than it seems here; it’s not like she’s got good enough material to work with. Nevertheless, for the first time she was asked to do more than just kick women in the face while wearing a short skirt (though that did happen as well), and the moment fell flat, not because she’s not up to it, but because the show is asking us to care about a relationship between a hott female spy and an absent, dead, hott male spy partner. He’s not onscreen, and was only in the show for a couple of minutes in the first episode (mostly as a stuntman) and yet he looms over both Sarah and Chuck in a way that falls flat because we have no memory of him the way they do.


As a result, we don’t care that he upset Chuck, and we don’t care that Sarah still loves him. It’s asking us to care what the dead spy did, but to the audience he’s just that free-running guy who was nothing more than a very agile inciting incident. Perhaps the nerds in the audience can remember back to similar experiences of jock humiliation from their college days, and perhaps the female members of the audience can relate to Sarah because their boyfriend was similarly killed for trying to email secrets to someone outside the government, but that’s at a remove. The show is trying to run before it can walk. It’s a light, slightly entertaining spy show. It’s not drama. Maybe eventually, but not now. Again it made me pine for Alias, which did that stuff amazingly well, but it also made me pine for the first season of The O.C., because that also did pretty much everything right (for a while, at least). This is just landing with a dull thud every week. Thank God NBC have commissioned Bionical Woman as well. That saves it from the ignominy of being the season’s worst new show. I’ll get to that pile of crap later.

Sorry to keep comparing Chuck to Reaper, but they are vying for the same nerd audience, and while Chuck feels like the major label release by a band who have already had a critically lauded number one album on a smaller label, only to fall foul of sophomore slump, Reaper is the ambitious debut of a plucky indie band. Well, an indie band while making their first couple of singles who get signed up to release their album on a subsidiary of a different major label, like when Warner made that Sub-Pop-emulating mini-label that included Mudhoney on its roster for a while. Gah! You know what I mean!

Anyway, Reaper was, again, very entertaining, though signs of Andi becoming the show’s weak link are starting to show. What is her purpose again, other than to be the object of desire? They need to give her something to do other than be cute and unattainable. Missy Peregrym was nowhere near as dull as this when she was on Heroes. We need to see some of that fire again. Oh, and finally making The Devil more than just a trickster, and hinting at more depth to the central premise by introducing the battle between him and Sam over the contract? Excellent. Heart Ray Wise! How easy it is for that adorable smile to go very very bad.


CSI may not have had the melancholy air of the other shows, but with episode four there were set-ups for the season arc. At least I assume they were. CSI has been the classic example of how one-off procedural shows can still exist and work brilliantly in a long-form world that has seen many story-of-the-week shows deemed obsolete. Every week a new case is introduced, and at the end the case is solved (most of the time). Last season, however, saw the show bring in the excellent Miniature Killer arc, which popped in and out of the procedural, often to devastating effect (as I’ve said before, Monster in the Box might be the single best episode of CSI ever). This season, the producers have hinted that there would be something similar introduced, but if this episode is anything to go by, it won’t be a single criminal, but an ongoing case against a water-processing plant. I hope other fans are as excited about that as I am. It would be Erin Brockovich with less biker beards!

At least I hope that’s where they are going with this. The episode was filled with some really crappy deductive work by our heroes, for the first time in CSI history. They were investigating the death of a boy suffering from gynecomastia working at a water treatment plant hanging around with a scientist investigating large quantities of hermaphroditic fish swimming in a local lake, a death that could just as easily have been suicide as murder? The team don’t spot the connection straight away, and instead chase disgruntled co-workers for most of the episode. It was odd to see our heroes be inept for the first time ever. If this is the season arc, it at least explains why the show slowed down so much, and had so much exposition. If it’s set-up, then it was ponderous, but I understand. If not, then it was just a disappointing episode. Featuring an ugly and yet somewhat charming hat.


To a certain extent, that is. It also featured some great material. CSI: Miami is notoriously stupid, featuring either stock plots or outrageous melodrama in the place of actual crime scene analysis. The original show, thankfully, is proud to have science as its main focus, and this episode featured a lot of it. What with the water treatment plant investigation, Hodges pioneering a new technique and vowing to write a paper about it, and Gil’s ongoing investigation into worldwide bee population decrease (something that only hit the mainstream media a couple of weeks ago), it’s plain that the show is not shying away from giving scientists their due. Read enough paranoid books and features on Dawkins and his atheist cohorts, and you fear that science and rationalism is on the outs. CSI made me feel safe that somewhere in the mainstream, a rational outlook is still treated as beneficial. It’s also edumacational; don’t pull bee stings out of your skin as it releases the venom. You should scrape them out instead.


Best of all this week was the totally out-of-the-blue marriage proposal scene, with Gil (hilariously wearing his old woman hat over the top of his bee mask) just dropping the question into normal conversation. Often in story-of-the-week shows, the characters are merely redundant exposition devices, but this show manages to tease out tiny bits of information about its cast of characters in the most subtle ways. We know they have a backstory only because we pay attention to the details. It’s very rare that an episode will focus on their personal lives; Catherine’s family being the only recurring instance of plots based around her, but they’re almost always fascinating, especially when her sadly-deceased dad Sam Braun is involved. Instead we get little windows into their lives, like the endearing revelation that Greg is writing a book on Las Vegas history. In CSI: Miami, if a character has a life outside their work, it usually involves sex or relationships. In the original and best, it involves little character details like that. Man, this show really does feature some of my favourite character writing.

The Gil-Sara romance is a case-in-point. They’ve been dating for ages, and now they’re getting married. While other shows would make a big deal about it, here it happened in the middle of the episode without any warning or fanfare. It made it all the more touching, and cheered us both up considerably, after the misery of the other shows. Shame she’s only in the show for a little while longer. It does not bode well for their future.

Beyond the sadness and the arc establishment, this week also saw Dirty Sexy Money finally not totally suck. It was by no means a triumph (God no), and Canyon couldn’t even brave it (I think she was wise to; I’m only sticking with it out of stubbornness), but while the plots are unoriginal (school bullying, marital strife, affairs, jealousy), at least the dialogue had improved massively since last week. I know I’m being partisan and forgiving because of the connection to an old favourite, especially as the episode had two writers credited and not just one, but when Veronica Mars ace Diane Ruggiero’s name appeared in the credits, hope sprang up. I was rewarded with two good scenes. The main one had Donald Sutherland acting the paint off the walls as he confronts the duplicitous Jill Clayburgh. Finally some life! Shame that the increase in emotional truth came at the expense of revelation. Instead of Clayburgh revealing which of the Darling children was fathered by Peter Krause’s dad, we got an exchange that went something like:

Sutherland: Will you tell me?
Clayburgh: I will tell you!
Sutherland: Will you?
Clayburgh: Yes, I will!
Sutherland: Really? Because I really want to know!
Clayburgh: Yes!
[Cut to commercial]

I get that not immediately revealing who is lacking Donald Sutherland’s DNA is a way of creating tension in the family, and leaves the room open for a big revelation later in the series, but it just sounded laboured and mechanical. Also good was Zoe McClellan (whose boobs made a startling return in several scenes) confronting Natalie Zea over her previous relationship with Krause.


As far as I’m concerned, the only interesting plot is between Nick and his wife, and the threat of his work and past coming between them. Again, it’s nothing new, but the Darlings are odious enough to give the marriage plot some heft. It would be horrible for their relationship to be broken up by such a bunch of poorly written, illogical caricatures. Plus, it’s much more intriguing than the endless and record-breakingly tedious rivalry between Samaire Armstrong and Seth Gabel’s girlfriend. I’m so uninterested I can’t be bothered to Google the name of the actress. Sorry, miscellaneous actress. I’m sure you’re a lovely person but life is short. Blame the show writers and your life-sappingly dull character, okay?


Seriously, this shit has been going on for three episodes and each week it feels like ten minutes of footage has been accidentally edited in from another show. This show is run by Craig Wright? Who worked on Lost and Six Feet Under? How is this kind of glaring mistake possible? Showrunners! It’s killing the show! Drop it now! You just got a week reprieve by adding a shout-out to Explosions in the Sky and hiring Erick Avari (this week playing an Italian. Or a British spy. I wasn’t paying much attention). Don’t blow this tiny bit of goodwill now.

Also very much improved was Pushing Daisies, which was not just tolerable (see above), but actively entertaining. A lot of the flaws are still there and are obviously never going to go away, and dear God, someone tell the showrunners that they don’t have to end their episodes with scenes as showy and silly as that ineptly staged sword fight, but my own personal bugbear (that damnable Sonnenfeld) was absent for much of the episode. While there was still the relentless dollying and repetitive compositions, a lot of the show was simply shot and worked very well. Amazing how distracting it is when a director is shouting, “This is one of my signature shots, bitches! I won’t stop until Sonnenfeldian is in the dictionary!!!”


Everything that has almost been working (notably the tone and a lot of the humour) finally came off once the distracting frippery went down a notch, and as a result I could relax and enjoy (Canyon is yet to be convinced, I think). Also great was the resolution of some plots much earlier than expected. Chuck knows about the deadly ramifications of her resurrection, and Olive and her Cleavage of Mass Distraction (seriously, the camera won’t stop staring) suspects something is up with Chuck’s appearance at the Pie-Hole. I thought that stuff would come up later, once more one-off mysteries were solved, but we’re rattling through plot options at a faster pace that expected. This either means there is more to the central premise and Ned’s powers than expected, or they’re going to have O.C. Syndrome, with all of their good ideas burnt out after one season. Fingers crossed it’s the former.

I’m afraid to say that while pretty much every show we watched this week shook up their game after a start-of-season warm-up, Bionical Woman remains the low point of the TV week. There are new writers coming in, and NBC are obviously committed to the show, but will they bother to make it good and popular instead of lazy and popular-enough-to-get-by? I’ll stick with it in case it does suddenly improve in quality, like, a thousand-fold, but until then we’re forced to put up with writing, acting and directing that would have shamed the silly 70s original. Though at least this version did feature Jaime kicking the homophobe across the room a couple of times.


That was kinda fun. Apologies for linking to the AV Club again, but Sean O’Neal skewers everything that is wrong with the show much more succinctly than I can. The only interesting thing brought up by this episode was the curious moment where the brat sister sleeps through a car alarm outside. The pilot originally featured Mae “AnnHog from Arrested Development” Whitman as Jaime’s deaf sister, but it was changed after testing badly (dammit!). Does this scene hint that her sister is going deaf? It would make sense after the comments about the possibility of congenital disease in the Summers family tree last week. Perhaps the showrunners had an arc about deafness and bionical implants in mind. That would be interesting. Other than that, only counting Katee Sackhoff’s use of the following expression is keeping us diverted during the show.


As for the other shows this week, Friday Night Lights is still the highlight, even with the horrid muder plotline, but that has been subsumed, at least for now. 30 Rock was not as good as last week, but that is no criticism, considering how good that episode was. The funniest moment of the week came during The Peter Serafinowicz Show, but I’ll leave that for Canyon to talk about. Also on BBC was the new series of Heston Blumenthal: In Search of Perfection, featuring everyone’s favourite baby-faced cooking savant, which I had been looking forward to. Just to be really annoying, our Sky+ box decided to delete it after it had recorded. If anyone reading this has a Sky+ box, I strongly suggest you renew the warranty after a year. These damnable things fall apart quickly.

Angered by this, we decided to give the BBC’s much vaunted iPlayer a try, seeing as how it allows you to watch certain shows up to a week after they have aired. It’s supposed to be easy to use, but it took forever to install the player (for a long time we couldn’t as there were “technical difficulties” on their end), and when we finally had, and had downloaded the episode (which took ages), it played for about 4 minutes and then offered up a series of randomly selected freeze-frames with a voice over. Okay, we have a crappy laptop that sometimes freezes up when we’re using Winamp, but yesterday it was working fine. Only iPlayer malfunctioned. So I don’t get to see the damn show. If the BBC is going to have to show more repeats now, can it hurry up? I’m sick of missing stuff.

Other shows we didn’t watch but will eventually; Dexter, Journeyman (apparently saved from cancellation for a little while), Viva Laughlin (the worst show ever made, from what I’ve heard. Can’t wait!), and Mad Men. We’re very behind on that, and will get around to catching up, especially as the season finale appears to have blown everyone’s mind. It didn’t appeal to us much early on (we get that things were different back then, so please stop showing lots and lots and lots of smoking), but we’re willing to give it another try. It may have improved. Tell Me You Have Suddenly Started To Love Me is a case in point. The show format did not appeal to us at all, but slowly we’ve come to look forward to it every week. Not much has changed, but with enough care and attention to character growth and gentle, Lost-paced revelation, it has snagged us. That’s not to say it’s amazing, but we’ve still turned a corner on it, and if anyone asks for a recommendation we will give it (though stressing how long it takes to grab the imagination). That said, what did they do to Ronny Cox?


My heart sank a little when I saw him. He looks like a 900-year old hobo! Let’s hope it’s his character and not something more serious. Here is where I would put a sad-faced emoticon, if I were so inclined.

This Week in TV: Week 3

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Writing enormous TV posts like this make me feel like Tolstoy, if Tolstoy was obsessed with blogging about how crap Bionic Woman is? Playing Guitar Hero II has taken over our lives to such an extent that we’re only now finishing up last week’s TV, but still I soldier on. I’d drop some of these shows in order to have some room to do other things, but if the rumours about poor old Journeyman are true, our viewing list might already be about to shrink anyway.

Perhaps I should start with the good news; 30 Rock‘s very funny pilot was eclipsed by the magnificent second episode, a half hour so packed with jokes that it left us happily confused and breathless after just a few minutes. Tracy, Liz and Jack were all back to their best after an uncertain start, and Kenneth the Page was on fire, especially trying to seduce Tracy’s wife. Best of all was the return of Will Arnett, now in the closet thanks to his involvement with the Church of Practicology, the religion invented by Stan Lee. Sorry, the alien king living inside Stan Lee. If Arnett was a recurring character, and NBC could stop trying to hawk t-shirts featuring jokes that haven’t been featured on the show by the time the ad appears at the bottom of the screen, this would be the best show ever made. As it is, even taking that into account, it was the highlight of the week by a mile.


That’s not to say there wasn’t other good stuff out there. CSI, House, Ugly Betty, and Friday Night Lights were all at their best, or close to it. Sadly, many of the new shows are going horribly wrong, to the extent that we’re beginning to think we were sold some horrible lemons. Whereas my doubts about the last couple of new seasons have quickly been allayed by the range of new shows, my hopes for this season have been dashed horribly. Of course, I’m aware that it’s early days for everything, and there is always room for improvement.


For example, Chuck was certainly better than it has been (and Reaper was less so, making me wonder if there is some kind of seesaw of quality thing going on, in which case please stop it, shows), but Dirty Sexy Money and Bionical Woman were stultifying. The former is off Canyon’s watch list, and the latter is almost off mine. They soiled almost everything else we watched just by being watched on the same machine.

Dirty Sexy Money, in particular, is just horrible. No longer shall I call it Dirty Stupid Monkey, as it doesn’t deserve an affectionate nickname. So many things were wrong with the latest episode that I don’t even know where to begin. The stupid bouncy-bouncy music that keeps popping up throughout, skewing the tone towards comic even when Peter Krause and Donald Sutherland (the only good thing about it) are discussing murder and betrayal; the stupid promotional considerations (I get that Bulgari sponsored this week’s show, but forcing the mention into the show by having Billy Baldwin’s big speech be conducted in a Bulgari shop was just stupid); Krause’s bemused reactions to all of the “wacky” “shenanigans” of this “off-the-wall family”. Canyon pointed out that she’s so glad to see a happy Krause after being miserable, tortured Nate Fisher for five seasons of Six Feet Under, and she has a very good point, but this relentless chirpiness has begun to grate faster than John Krasinski’s smirks at the camera in The Office. Actually, four seasons in and that still doesn’t annoy me.


Krause’s “OMG you sure are a freak” eye-rolling would be justified if anything in the show was actually outrageous, but for a show about a larger-than-life influential family dominating New York and being obsessively watched by the media, they’re all pretty dull people, and their arcs so far are narcoleptic (Jeremy is in a relationship with someone his sister doesn’t like! That’s the definition of dramatic magic). Only Billy Baldwin’s love affair with a transexual works, and that’s because it’s actually very sweet and not played for forced laughs, even though he himself is. Actually, everyone is, except for Peter Krause, Zoe McClellan, Donald Sutherland and Jill Clayburgh, who are so far removed from the monotonous and unamusing silliness polluting the rest of the show that they might as well be in a different programme.

Even worse than some of the casting (Natalie Zea, Seth Gabel, and Samaire Armstrong are all dreadful and annoying), is the lack of imagination on every level. The AV Club are blogging relentlessly about the new season, and whether story-of-the-week storytelling (Reaper, Chuck) has any place on TV now that we’ve been blessed with a newfound confidence in the commercial viability of long-form storytelling (Lost, The Wire). Dirty Sexy Money seems to be getting a break from them simply because it is built to work well as long-form, with multiple story possibilities thrown up by the large and controversial Darling dynasty, their internal and external rivalries, and the murder of Krause’s father. And Samaire Armstrong’s piss-poor approximation of the Paris Hilton it’s okay to love. If you find selfish vacuity amusing or endearing, that is.


That’s all well and good, but if the storytelling is bad, who cares how many story possibilities there are. The direction is flat and unoriginal; a scene early on in the third episode where Krause interrogates the younger Darlings about a sex tape and we see a montage of them appearing in front of him with “wacky” responses was embarrassing, tired, and poorly choreographed. The dialogue is even worse. When it’s not doling out pointless exposition (the first scene repeating everything that was in the Previously On just three seconds earlier was the worst), it deals almost exclusively in cliches. Here are some choice examples:

Patrick: What part of “no” do you not understand?

Nick: We just assumed.
Patrick: Well, there it is, Nick. You assume, you make an ass out of you and me.

Juliet: (to Jeremy, on the phone) I’ve left, like, three messages!
Jeremy: (tied to a bed) Sorry, I’ve been kinda tied up.

Patrick: How many people get life right?
Nick: I don’t know. But I do know, tomorrow’s another day, another opportunity, another chance.
Patrick: I like that! (adds empty cliches to speech)

These are the jokes (and the morals), folks. How can empty, first-draft dreck like that get on air any more? We’ve been spoiled by The Sopranos and The Wire and Deadwood, and now expect the same care and detail in all dialogue on TV. Okay, those are HBO shows, and this is network, but if Lost and Veronica Mars and Friday Night Lights and Ugly Betty (at its best) and especially House can pull off dialogue of such a high-calibre, then so can DSM. It certainly needs it, because it has nothing else to offer. Nothing. It is truly dire. I even started wishing for John From StinkyNasty to come back, simply because even at its worst it could still sound so great and different (Ed O’Neill’s scenes in particular could be lots of fun). DSM represents a retrograde step for The New TV, and must be stopped. Or improved drastically. Getting rid of the “Rebecca Colfax, Darling family publicist” running joke would be a good start. 30 Rock did it properly with Emily Mortimer’s “I’m Phoebe, you might not remember me, we met in the gallery, I’m engaged to Jack, I have avian bone syndrome” joke.


I’m torn as to whether it was worse than Bionical Woman, which plumbed new depths this week. Worst moments included the girly dance bonding scene between Jaime and her brat sister (shown above, ringed by Sarah Corvus’ evil optical interface), Miguel Ferrer trying to hide behind his desk so everyone forgets he’s in the show, hacking internal circuitry by thinking hard, plot illogicalities like Sarah teaching Jaime how to do said hacking after they’ve been tracked several times instead of before, risible sub-plots about babysitting designed to give Jaime someone to fight in the “Insert fight scene here” slot towards the end of the show, and many many many many many more moments. And oh, God, if you thought the dialogue above was bad, check these pearls out:

Ruth: (to Jonas after he fools a lie detector) We’ve gotta find a way to teach this. How do you do it, anyway?
Jonas: I’ve been married. [Zing!]

Sarah: (appearing in a dream sequence for some reason) We’re the only two people with sub-retinal charged coupling devices implanted in our optic nerves, but our human brain still filters out things it doesn’t want to see. Don’t let it. See everything. (cue mini-montage of Jaime looking around)

Jonas: I want her under lockdown now. I want this entire organisation on full alert. I want Corvus found and brought in, dead if necessary.
Nameless goon: (fondles gun suggestively) Roger that.
Jonas: I want her streaming optical interface tracked permanently, I don’t wanna make a move unless we know when, where and why.

Jonas: (to Jamie) If Sarah Corvus wants something, she’ll pretty much tear through a wall to get it. Just make sure that wall isn’t you. (Cut to montage of Sarah working out by punching a wall to pieces with her bionical fists)

Jaime: (during another training montage) I guess I’m not used to thinking of myself as artificially intelligent.
Jae: That’s not what I said. I said part of your programming includes artificial intelligence. The ability to learn. And more important, to unlearn. (Hey Ponytail Variant Yoda, guess what; people do that without chips in their brain! You’ve been in your underground bunker for too long, dude.)

Mysterious Homophobe from Grey’s Anatomy: (during yet another goddamn training montage) You think Sarah Corvus is gonna bring gloves to a fight. No, something tells me she’s gonna leave her little pads at home. What we need to find out is the animal. Now we all know that if your training is worth a damn, by now I should be able to take this crowbar and be able to swing it as hard and fast as humanly possible and not get within an inch of you. That’s right, boys and girls. I’m about to get analogue on your ass. So whaddaya say, Summers. You ready to find the animal?
Jaime: Bring it on, bitch.
::Mysterious Homophobe swings crowbar exactly as hard as he promised to not ten seconds ago, just missing Jaime as she dodges::
Jaime: Are you insane?!??!?!?!

It’s not just the appalling dialogue. The best thing I can say about Michelle Ryan is that her accent is absolutely flawless. I’ve completely forgotten she’s English, and she seems to have forgotten her time here too. Wasn’t she supposed to be really good in EastEnders? I remember her being not that brilliant in Jekyll, but then she was often onscreen with The Nesbitt in full ham-chewing mode and most actors would disappear into the wallpaper around that display. As for Katee Sackhoff’s totally abstract performance as an evil (or is she??!?!) bionical woman, she’s entertaining, but for all the wrong reasons. When the best thing about your show is the worst thing about another show (I’m no fan of Starbuck), you’re in trouble. Her eye-rolling, quietLOUDquiet linereadings, and gurning have been fun, though.


As I said earlier, new shows have a choice to make; “worthy” long-form, “unworthy” plot-of-the-week, or a mixture of the two. Bionical Woman is ineptly trying the latter. There are subplots about her health and genetic make-up (there was talk of her grandmother having something wrong with her), and Mark Sheppard as a bad guy (Thomas Kretschmann was in the pilot, but he’s vanished now). While that burbles on uninterestingly in the background, we have Jaime punching various un-named men for MacGuffin reasons, and it’s not very diverting. Quite the opposite, in fact. It’s not quite Torchwood-bad yet, but it’s flirting with those depths.

The other two new nerd shows, Chuck and Reaper, are taking the plot-of-the-week template even further. The latter only hints at bigger arcs, such as the death of Andi’s father. That might not even be an arc. So far the show seems happy to stay in a formula for the time being, and while it would be nice if the show had greater ambitions than just filling an hour every week, at least it does it with style and humour. Plus, the cast gelled in the pilot, and are getting better every week. Everyone gets the material, from the cast to the producers to the directors and writers. It may not be Buffy-quality, and I strongly doubt it ever will be, but it did something the first season of Buffy did that ensured it had a future beyond plot-of-the-week episodes; it set a tone, and it followed it through. Having a template that you can work from immediately is half the battle, so I’m still hopeful, even though this week was less fun than previous weeks. Anyway, it still has this smile, so it gets a pass.


Other shows introduced this season have been slower to establish a tone and a template, and if Bionical Woman is the worst offender, Chuck is also guilty. It’s had a rough ride so far, but this week’s episode was the best yet (and just in the nick of time, at least as far as we’re concerned). The cast are starting to work out, and the writers are figuring out how to write specifically for them. It even has a little title sequence now, which is nice. Adam Baldwin still shines out, but Zachary Levy is becoming more likeable week by week. I think I even laughed once. Possibly at a bad guy getting hit in the face with a microwave oven. Because my Inner Child is large and in charge.

However, it still bugged me. Again the show put all of the pieces in place for laughs and thrills, but still kept missing the sweet spot over and over again. There was the odd moment where it worked like a charm instead of just hinting that it might work like a charm somewhere down the line, but it tickled at my annoyance synapses anyway. Only later did I realise what it was; it made me miss Alias. If you’re going to have a new spy show on TV, you have to be better than the first two seasons of Alias. Chuck is not that good. I mentioned this to Canyon and she pointed out that Chuck is lighter in tone than Alias, and she’s right, I’m being a bit unfair. So perhaps I shouldn’t compare it to that. I’ll compare it to a lighter spy show; Chuck has to be better than the hilarious and supercool first season of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. And again it fails the test. If it becomes its own thing, it could work out really well, but having two spy factions at war with each other, and an ostensibly foxy lady in a short skirt kicking people repeatedly, you’re inviting comparisons to a recently screened and superior show that you just can’t live up to. Sorry, Chuck.


More long-form drama happened in Heroes, which is playing the long game to such an extent that it feels like nothing will ever be resolved. This is the criticism that is levelled at Lost all the time, but Lost is about the anticipation and the wait and the slow reveal, so complaining about that is like complaining that chocolate tastes too chocolatey. Heroes, on the other hand, is revealing even less, and at a slower pace, and to make things worse, in the place of revelation is a series of ridiculous plot mechanics that, so far, are not at all interesting. The third episode was the best so far this season, but that’s not saying much. The Hoirish plot is still risible, but at least Peter got to telekinetically move a truck around. That was fun. As was Claire’s Richard-Donner-Supermanesque flight with the obviously superevil flying student guy.


Plus, it’s always good to see Zachary Quinto, even without powers, and the nerd in me delighted in the miniature appearance by Nichelle Nichols (who, in my mind’s eye, will forever be dancing half-naked in the moonlight, thanks to Star Trek V. Thanks for that, Shatner!). The cliffhanger with the Eighth Painting was great too, but as Canyon said, if they kill off Noah, that’s game over for good. The show needs him badly.

Everything else did its thing, and did it well. The Office was mostly hilarious, though still too long and still flirting with over-the-top plots. Michael kidnapping a pizza delivery boy was perhaps a bit too far, but as he was just acting out his anger at that snotty little asshole Ryan, it made some sense. CSI continues to dazzle, this week featuring a guest-starring role for Harold Perrineau, which made me even more eager to see him return to Lost in February. Speaking of Lost, Tell Me You Masturbate Behind Locked Doors During Our Special Half Hour features not just Sonya “Penny Widmore” Walger, but also the newly enskeeved Ian Somerhalder, who does not look good as a hipster douche. Please, someone shave him/ban him from acting.


Now all we need is for Maggie Grace to show up as a love interest and this show jumps 15 levels of awesomeness (to level -18 on the Awesome Scale). Not because I like her, or liked Boone and Shannon. Just, you know, I miss Lost. ::cries::

Actually, we’re beginning to enjoy Tell Me The Title Of The Show Again a bit more. It’s not that it has changed at all. It’s still the same ponderous, self-important, humourless show it started out as, and character development is measured in millimetres-per-episode, but the mood and pace has started to win us over. Yes, it commits all the worst crimes of bad independent cinema, and thinks that the route to dramatic relevance is nothing more than discussing “real” relationship issues in a “real” way, with “real” body parts on display (not counting the plastic dick employed in the first episode), but we’re very very very slowly coming to derive some pleasure from it that doesn’t involve making fun of it. Some of the bolder choices (the long scenes in the therapy room) are great, and making almost all of the characters unsympathetic is working out much better than expected. Best of all, Carolyn has finally given up on getting pregnant, therefore cutting down on her addiction to peeing on pregnancy tests and having unwatchable flameouts, which means Widmore Laboratories stock is gonna plummet. [/obscure Lost joke]


Another non-network show, Dexter, had its best episode last week, but it doesn’t matter much. We’re watching just out of obligation now, and if it wasn’t for Michael C. Hall and the odd good scene with Julie Benz (now suddenly sticking up for the memory of her evil ex-husband, improbably enough), we’d have dumped it long ago. I’ll get into it in more detail some other time, but the main reason we hate it is the ever-present narration, which is either face-slappingly obvious, cliche-ridden, or just badly written. We get that we need to see into the thoughts of Dexter, a character whose onscreen persona is a lie, but the narration often fails so badly that unintentional hilarity is the outcome instead of the blackly comic and piercing look into the heart of darkness that the show strives for. We stuck with it for a while, but one week he said:


Dexter Morgan: I’m not the monster he wants me to be. So I’m neither man nor beast. I’m something new entirely. With my own set of rules. I’m Dexter.

Show instantly broken. The anvilliciousness of it all kills any mood or suspense. It happens at least once a week, and provides a guilty pleasure for us:


Dexter Morgan: My sister doesn’t understand me. It’s easy for her to laugh and joke with her partners, easy for her to grin from one side of her mouth while eating various types of burrito. I can mimic the laughter, but the thing inside me that makes me laugh is broken. There’s no doctor that can fix my laughing chip. It stays that way. I don’t laugh. I just watch. I’m Dexter.


Dexter Morgan: Again I get stiffed by the guy who fixed my car. $400 for an oil change? It’s criminal. So criminal, perhaps I could feed my hunger by visiting some justice on him. But no. Harry’s code prevents me. That’s not the way he taught me. I have to leave this guy alone, hope that some other serial killer comes along and chops him up real good and… Oh. Where was I? Getting confused here. Oh, now I remember. I’m Dexter.


Dexter Morgan: I see people go about their days, eating food. I can’t eat food the way they do. I’m empty inside. No stomach. So I can’t eat. I mean… Hold on. Sorry. No stomach? I’m talking metaphorically here. Of course I can eat food. I’m Dexter.

Thankfully, this week saw the possibility of a workaround; Dexter communing with his dead nemesis, Rudy the Ice-Truck Killer.


Even though Christian Camargo creeped us out, it was good to see him possibly returning in a dream capacity to reduce the reliance on the voiceovers. It’s also nice to revisit Six Feet Under‘s trick of talking to the dead as a way to dramatise a character’s inner life. Sadly, in the final scenes, Dexter lays his past to rest, and so next week I assume we’re back to square one. Shame. At least Dexter is now in some peril, with his stash of body parts discovered and the loathsome Doakes on his trail, so perhaps the show will become a little more driven, but the supporting cast continue to let the team down. We’re nowhere near giving up on it (especially now Keith Carradine is around as a profiler making life tough for Dexter), but it would be nice if it learned from its mistakes a little faster.


We’re hoping House is also learning from its mistakes (such as leering at Cuddy, which is what House and Wilson are doing above, the perverts). The first three episodes of season four have been superb, with our anti-hero bouncing off his new retinue to hilarious effect. Of course, with each episode he whittles the size of his team down, so soon we’re going to be left with (best case scenario) three new Cottages, or (worst case scenario) the old Cottages, back from exile and newly snotty. In a perfect world we’d keep the large staff. House’s major flaw is the immovable and repetitive format, with most of the better episodes playing with that formula as much as the showrunners can. They’ve written themselves into a metaphorical corner, and the only thing keeping the show from falling into unwatchable irrelevance is this struggle to keep inventing subtle ways to fool the viewer that things are changing. Come on! [/Gob Bluth] Instead of doing that, just go all out. Keep the big staff for a bit longer, and when that starts to pall, change it again. We’ve still got the procedural investigative work, but with more room for humour. That’s when the show works best. Having this new team around has been a real treat, but waiting for the inevitable retcon is frustrating. Damn, loving House is as annoying as it must be to love House himself.

I nearly forgot; Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe was mostly superserious but essential viewing, partly because his excoriating perspective on the news coverage of Madeleine McCann’s disappearance was magnificent and rightly furious, but also because it featured a short film by Adam Curtis. His stock tricks were there: superb montage editing; excellent soundtrack choices (tracks from The Fog and Fight Club), sly humour. Sadly, the worst criticism of him is that he simplifies complex issues too much, and five minutes explaining why TV journalism has gone wrong over the past 30 years was just not enough. Still, a little Adam Curtis is better than no Adam Curtis at all, so it was brilliant anyway. If you’ve not seen his work before, go to these sites to see Century of the Self, and The Power of Nightmares. His other masterwork, The Trap, is available if you dig deep enough. They’re the three most important documentaries you’ll ever see.

Friday Night Lights has rebounded from the first episode’s terrible plot mistake with some style, though to be honest the best thing I can say about it is that the showrunners are doing the best they can with a large hole in the hull of their ship. It still remains a marvel, though, with the best acting on TV right now. Jesse Plemons and Adrianne Palicki are performing miracles with their silly plot; the final scene horrified and thrilled us in equal measure. Kyle Chandler is the Archduke of Deadpan, and should never be out of work ever again, if there’s any justice, and Brad Leland got big laughs, drunkenly making a fool of himself in front of the whole town. Best of all, Connie Britton’s Tami is suffering from post-natal depression, and spends the whole episode on the verge of a nervous breakdown. She is utterly convincing, but it’s painful to see. Where is her Emmy? Where? Someone give her an Emmy! Or Golden Globe! Do I have to actually construct a Caruso Award and send it to her agent? I’ll do it! I’ve got some glue, and this house is filled with stuff I can mount on a piece of wood. My Wonder Girl action figure? Would that do?


I can’t end this post with such a sad image. Ugly Betty is juggling its own formula, cleverly introducing another love interest for Betty before her old love interest leaves the scene. While cutesy Christopher Gorham waits on the sidelines, polar-opposite Freddy Rodriguez is wooing her by, well, being generally obnoxious and rude. He’d piss us off, but we’re fans of his work on (this again?) Six Feet Under, so he gets a break for now, but they might be better off dialling down the nastiness just a little. No matter. Even if that goes wrong, we’ll still have Michael Urie and Becki Newton as Marc and Amanda. I luffs them almost as much as they luff themselves.


Don’t ever change, you vainglorious bitches.

This Week in TV: Week 2

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Due to foreseen circumstances (i.e. birthday celebrations) we didn’t get to watch much of this weeks TV until Saturday night, since when we have plowed through every show of the week. I tell you, watching that much TV in such a short space of time is a really bad idea, and we ended up suffering from opinion overload. What’s worse, that block of TV featured the season premieres of the second seasons of our two favourite new shows of the previous year, namely Friday Night Lights and 30 Rock. Would they continue their winning streak, or would they fall apart horribly, perhaps with some really ill-advised murder plotline? As well as those worry-fests, there was lots of second episodes, some good, some bad, some just disappointing.

I’ll get the quick stuff out of the way before going into enormous detail about why I didn’t think Pushing Daisies had anywhere near as good a pilot as Reaper, which may take a while, and will contain the phrase, “Ban Sonnenfeld!” The pilot of Dirty Stupid Monkey was promising enough , but episode two was a hellish 45 minutes of non-jokes telegraphed by wacky and intrusive musical stings, obnoxious characters, and pointless over-editing. If we had a sin-bin for shows that are on their last legs, this would be in it, even though it’s early days and we really do like to be as fair as we can. It was significantly less interesting than the pilot, and the only point we could make about it by the end was that Zoe McClellan, who plays Krause’s wife Lisa George, has the most photographed boobs of the week, and that includes Sonya “Pregnant me up!” Walger’s prominent and mostly-naked embonpoint in Tell Me You Something Something. We counted about a dozen close-ups of McClellan’s chestonics, none of which served any purpose. Much like the show itself. Improve, stupid show! And soon!

Also, minus points to Chuck. Apologies to the Chuck fan that frequents this blog (you know who you are, dude), but this show is on notice too. For God’s sake, it has Adam Baldwin and a severely under-used Tony Todd! It should kick at least a little ass, but it has no recognisable point. The jokes are almost there, but the action is sorely lacking. The final five minutes were especially bad, with a poorly shot and ineptly looped helicopter landing scene that reminded me of the camcorder spoof scene in the first episode of The Day Today.

I gather the third episode sets the format in stone, and perhaps that will be enough to give it a reprieve, but it needs to conjure up some really memorable moments (so far the only thing that has stood out for me is the free-running stuff, but that goes without saying), as well as generate some chemistry between any of the actors. Everyone is helped by Baldwin’s presence, because he’s a class act, but otherwise no one seems capable of breathing life into the project. Contrast that with Reaper, coming off the second excellent episode. The cast works so well together (and with such witty material) I can only imagine the Chuck staff are eating their livers in frustration. Let’s hope they can save it. Perhaps they should cast Ray Wise. I could stand to see two shows a week with this grin all over it.


Again, everything in Reaper was great, and I see Kevin Smith is still present; he’s listed as consultant. A lot of people are saying they were a little disappointed with the second episode, but I thought it almost as strong as the pilot. I guess it helps that I find Tyler Labine hilarious.

Another show suffering from terrible doldrums is Heroes, with another weak episode full of bland exposition, illogicality, and general inept silliness. I’m sure billions of word-bullets have been fired at the internet about Hiro’s boring Japanese adventures, and the Hoirish Ghangsterrrs (a subplot so moronic I think I’m dreaming whenever it comes on), and Noah working in retail (with Chuck and Reaper already covering this territory, I can’t help but feel that some executives think dramatising the service economy is what the people have been crying out for. Hey, executives? No no no no no!). I’ll just say this, and then move on; showrunners, for a long time there we thought you had an awesome concrete storytelling plan, but the finale ruined that. Our trust in you has been badly damaged, and this season needs to make up ground, and quickly. By this we don’t mean turning Maya and Thingy into the plague threat of the season. 24 has already cycled through nuclear and plague threats. Do something new. Please start surprising us again, or you go on notice too. Oh, and stop making Peter do this face.


I had hoped we’d seen the last of his weird Duh face. It’s not a good look for him, and you can’t write that out like you did those horrendous bangs. Also wrongheaded was Bionical Woman, which is setting a format in stone early (too early; it’s been awfully rushed so far), by having Jaime join up with Miguel Ferrer’s shady organisation. This week featured the TV week’s worst line, as Ferrer blackmails Jaime into joining up by saying, “Those legs, that arm, that ear and that eye all belong to me and they cost $50m dollars.” Whoever wrote that gets a cookie.

The horror has been well documented here, but there was also an egregious mistake I can’t believe they let go, and by that I don’t mean hiring the homophobe from Grey’s Anatomy. The plot centres around a nerve gas attack on a town called Paradise (hence the episode title; Paradise Lost. Because Jaime’s easy life has been lost, you see? LOST!). Jaime joins up with SORBMF (Shady Organisation Run By Miguel Ferrer), and undergoes three days of hardcore montage training, before overhearing that Paradise has been attacked. She volunteers, she goes there with Grumpy SORBMF Operative #2, and they find a girl who had been in a basement overnight and thus, improbably, survived the gas. So, the attack happened the day before. So why is it that at the start of the show, before Jaime is drafted into SORBMF, she is in a bar with a TV saying that Paradise has been quarantined? That happens three or four days before she gets there. Either I’m missing something there, or that is a shocking continuity error. Okay, plus points to the show for hiring Friday Night Lights‘ Kevin “Herc” Rankin as a tech nerd, but otherwise, BIG FAT BLEH!

Two shows surprised me this week. The latest installment of Tell Me You Love Me Even Though I Won’t Have Sex/Babies/Relationships With You was just as humourless and earnest and one-note as the rest of the season, but at last we get to see the some of the characters reveal their inner thoughts in some detail, instead of just making gestures. For weeks now David has been refusing to have sex with his wife Katie, as well as being bitchy about her attending therapy, all the while gurning his way into Guptahood. This week he redeemed himself in a long therapy scene where he and Katie threw little bombs of discontent at each other. It was a strong scene, certainly the most interesting thing that’s happened so far, and well acted by Ally Walker and Tim DeKay. We also found out that Palek the Vulcan Inseminatron has been having second, third, fourth, and fifth thoughts about impregnating his wife Carolyn, whose desperate need for a baby went beyond mere mom pangs and into psychotic screechy territory, ripping towel dispensers off walls and haranguing Palek at work. The DavidGupta is dead. Long live the CarolynGupta. My God, woman, if you want a baby so badly, there’s someone we know who might be able to help you out.

Also surprisingly okay was Journeyman. It’s nothing groundbreaking, but Canyon and I had fun trying to figure out the ramifications of his powers. Having his wife start to believe him was a great touch, and if they could start to introducing the other characters into his circle of trust, there could be some interesting stories to tell. It helps that Kevin McKidd plays our hero, Dan Vassar. As Canyon said over the weekend, Dan is a very sensitive character, obviously empathic and eager to help his retro charges, and yet McKidd was cast, with his cauliflower face and heavy build. The disconnect between his look and his character is very appealing. It’s not the best show around at the moment, but it’s the show I enjoyed most from NBC’s Monday Night Nerdery line-up, and I would like to see it survive the chop, though I doubt that will happen.

We also enjoyed the second episode of House, with our anti-hero testing out several new Cottage candidates, including Kal Penn, Olivia Wilde, Anne Dudek, and best of all, Carmen Argenziano as a fake doctor who impresses House enough to get hired as an assistant. The Office was good too, though please let the hour-longs end soon. The pilot was mostly superb, but the second episode really overstayed its welcome. Creed was perfect, as always, but Michael got a little wearing by the end. Consider this a tiny criticism; the show was still vastly entertaining.

Funniest moment of the week (for me at least) was Peter Serafinowicz as robotic daytime chatshow host Michael-6 from his new sketch show. It has been established that we are big fans of the man behind That Voice, and were looking forward to his first shot at the spotlight. Mostly it was great, with only a couple of sketches falling short (Clone House! We get it! Please stop now!), but my god, Michael-6 rendered me useless, wheezing and coughing, totally dumbstruck by the brilliance of it. The moment he went on a rampage, throttling audience members and spitting milk like Ian Holm in Alien, was one of the highlights of the week. More please.


Also great was CSI, even though it signalled the beginning of the end of Jorja Fox’s run on the show. Turns out the contract wrangles that almost got her and George Eads thrown off the show years ago finally bit her in the ass, though she doesn’t sound too upset about it. It’s a shame, as we’ve liked Sara (we like everyone on the show, and were delighted to see Wallace “Hodges” Langham finally included in this week’s credits), even though her arms are unusually long.


The rest of the episode was fun enough, with the only other big surprise being Warwick’s divorce (signposted with traditional CSI: Classic economy with nothing more than a line about divorce being a bitch). Best of all, it ends with a wonderful scene showing the assembled cast members racing around on a go-kart track with Sara watching from the sidelines. Touching and funny, and all done with elegance and liveliness (as a bonus, Nick calls Gil “Ricky Bobby”. YES!). The quality of this show is outstanding, and no one notices because it’s a popular procedural and therefore cannot be considered good TV. Screw that. It’s great, and it features awesome hats. Eat that, snobbish critics.


30 Rock returned, and as The AV Club pointed out, it was slightly off, but nonetheless featured some big laughs and some obnoxious Bee Movie plugs (hopefully the movie will be good enough to retroactively forgive it for making 30 Rock seem like an advert). Odd that the show went for the fat suit gag, just like Ugly Betty the previous week; hopefully that gets dropped soon, because it just isn’t that funny. No matter. Everything else was great, especially the countries that only rich people know about, Jack’s agonised reaction to the mention of Lost being on another network, and his summer schedule of terrible reality shows, including MILF Island.

Friday Night Lights also returned with a second season at once desperately needed (more TV of this outrageous quality is always welcome) and totally superfluous (the first season was a perfect gem that didn’t really need any expansion). I will quickly touch on the deeply troubling Tyra/Landry plot (I’ll try not to spoil all you lucky folk who have yet to see the show), because really, this has got to get a LOT better before it totally ruins everything.


FNL fans everywhere are freaking out about this plot, which worked well as a one off thing in the first season (I gushed about it here), but now threatens to destroy one of the show’s best characters (Canyon is working on a Standing in the Shadows for Landry that hopefully won’t be rendered defunct by this horrible twist). Alan Sepinwall, in his excellent blog What Alan’s Watching, says that things do not get better, and interviews Jason Katims, whose responses to the criticism are kind of obnoxious, but there is one good thing that can come out of it. If the absolutely awesome Jesse Plemons gets a career-making showreel out of this plot development, at least we’ll have that. His performance (and that of Adrianne Palicki as Tyra) was excellent. As was everything else in the first episode. And hey, Chris Mulkey is the new Panthers coach. What with Ray Wise on Reaper and Miguel Ferrer in The Woman Who Is Bionical, this season is like a big shiny present to all of us Twin Peaks fans.

Of course, the big premiere of the week was Pushing Daisies, by Wonderfalls/Dead Like Me creator (and Heroes staffer) Bryan Fuller, and the weight of the world was on its shoulders. Lauded by critics since its appearance at ShoWest, it has been praised as the sole repository of originality in an otherwise dull new season, and the next big thing (if the audience can swallow it). Being cynical, I was wary, but the pilot did make me laugh quite a bit, and the cast were very likeable, especially Chi McBride as Emerson Cod (and hey, a small role for Repo Man actor Sy Richardson!).

However, I’ve got big problems with it. Firstly, original? Torchwood featured a Resurrection Glove that brought corpses back to life for 30 seconds (or a minute; I was staving off overwhelming ennui every time I watched the show, so I could be wrong).


In that, it was also used to find out who killed the person being resurrected. I can imagine that’s the logical way to go once you come up with the concept of a Resurrection Glove/Pie-Maker, but still, it’s a bit too close for comfort. Canyon pointed out that Torchwood creator Russell T. Davies did rip off Philip Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass almost completely during the Doctor Who season two finale, so he can’t really complain about plagiarism. Tru Calling creator Jon Harmon Feldman could, though.

Secondly, Barry Sonnenfeld was once a magnificent Director of Photography. His work on the Coen’s early movies blew me away when I was younger, and he did strong work with Rob Reiner on When Harry Met Sally and Misery. Then he became a director with an extremely limited bag of tricks ripped off from his time on Raising Arizona, mostly involving dollying into something to express emphasis, fish-eye lenses, lots of attention-seeking POV, and pointless overhead shots. I greatly enjoyed Men in Black (mostly due to Ed Solomon’s co-scripting and the excellent chemistry between the leads) and Get Shorty (where Sonnenfeld reined in some of the excess, though sadly not all), but everything else he has done is average-to-horrible. His TV adaptation of Ben Edlund’s awesome The Tick was rendered almost unwatchable with his heightened reality shtick, and sadly he’s brought even more of that to the table with Pushing Daisies.


In a 42 minute long show, he had at least 34 emphasis dollies, 11 overhead shots, and POV every five minutes (yes, I actually counted). It blighted the show to such an extent that I even forgot to be annoyed by the cloying narration. I may have enjoyed some of Tim Burton’s early work, and I might have even liked Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, both of which were stylistically very similar to Pushing Daisies, but that knowing fairy-tale style gets old real quick, and the show was utterly hamstrung by it.

By comparison, the over-directing in Ugly Betty annoys me not a jot. In fact, I think it’s one of the best directed shows on TV, even though it too is garish and overdone and often very silly. Perhaps it works because the tricks are used with a lot more restraint, occasionally settling down to just let the scene breathe for a few minutes. Plus, the show might not be the acme of bitchery that it thinks it is, but some of the saltiness of the show does keep the sugariness at bay. Each week there is a battle between the two tones, and it almost always maintains a happy equilibrium. (This week was excellent too, with Vanessa Williams rocking the house down. She wuz robbed at the Emmys!)


I will admit, the love story between Chuck and Ned charmed me, and the final scene with them holding their own hands whilst looking at each other made me cry a little, but only when Sonnenfeld hands over the megaphone (reportedly midway through the third episode) will I relax and assess the show without a red mist of rage descending every time the camera whooshes towards someone wearing an expression of surprise.

Oh, and third strike against the show; if Ned’s touch can kill Chuck, can the directors please ensure they keep the two of them as far apart as possible? Whenever they’re onscreen together I’m stupidly terrified Ned will trip over something and accidentally kill her. The scene where they smashed the monkey sculptures together almost gave me a heart attack. This might prove to be the one thing that ruins the show for me altogether; the fear that a mistake will kill her. I know it won’t (the show wouldn’t survive it, after all), but I was agitated for a long section of the first episode. Reaper‘s pilot was a much more relaxing and enjoyable first hour, and Kevin Smith, Michele Fazekas and Tara Butters are to be commended. They win a Caruso award for Best New Show! It means nothing, but they’ve won it! Yay showrunners! Keep it up!

This Week in TV: Week 1

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Here in the UK, not much is going on in tv — except for the debut of The Peter Serafinowicz Show later this week, of course. You’re welcome, by the way, Serafinowicz. You better do your Terry Wogan impression in return. But in the US, this week marked the beginning of the new tv season — and with it, the end of our free time, as we are going to be watching something like 20 shows this year. Thank god for you, bittorrent — you help us feel as lazy and slackjawed as we would if we lived in America.

First up should’ve been K-Ville and America’s Next Top Model (if we are not deep, at least we are eclectic), but we never bothered to download K-Ville after middling reviews, and Living tv just started showing ANTM’s eighth “cycle” (did you really need to further emphasize that the show is full of bitchy women, Tyra?), which we haven’t seen yet. The one showing in the States now is the ninth, so I expect that we’ll be plowing through that after the current Living cycle is done. I’m proud to say that I got AdmiralNeck hooked on this show, first as it subliminally crept up on his subconscious as I watched it while he was doing other stuff, next as he’d occasionally look up and say, “Why is that unattractive woman dressed as an exotic bird being forced to climb 50 flights of stairs and then have a photo shoot while barfing and pronouncing medical jargon?”, and finally as the show wrapped its glittery, bitchy tentacles around his brain and he grew to love it in all its camp ridiculousness as much as I did. Somewhere Tyra Banks is cackling as she guzzles from a vat of barbecue sauce.

Next up was CSI: Miami, another show that’s airing a season behind on UK tv. Notice a trend here? We’ll also be waiting till the “current” season finishes on Five and then will do our best to catch up with the actual current season so that we can experience H and Co.’s ridiculousness in real time. The first show we actually watched was Chuck, the new Josh Schwartz series that doesn’t have a voiceover by Kristen Bell (though it could probably do with one). It was slickly directed (by McG) and professionally made, featured a fairly charming nerd and his wacky best friend (both of whom work at meaningless service jobs in a large retail outlet), introduced an interesting comic premise and a love interest to boot…and yet there was something a bit off about it. The dialogue had the appearance of being funny without actually eliciting any laughs. Each line that was meant to be a joke had the right tone and delivery, and yet they all seemed like placeholders for writers who had meant to go back and put funnier lines in but never got the chance to.

[In this picture, Chuck, played by Some Guy, is joined by Adam Baldwin, modelling Patrick McGoohan's hair from The Prisoner. Chuck is saving the day here, defusing a bomb using DOS. How this is possible is not explained. - AdmiralNeck] It’s a likable enough show, and I’m certainly willing to stick with it — especially as The O.C. was so often hilarious (with the exception of the execrable third season), and there are erstwhile Veronica Mars writers on staff. Plus, pilots are never the best episodes; even great shows usually need some time to find their footing.

However…we watched Reaper a few days later, and everything that Chuck did wrong, Reaper did right. Like Chuck, it’s about a fairly charming nerd and his wacky best friend, both of whom work at meaningless service jobs in a large retail outlet, but while Chuck accidentally learns government secrets, Reaper’s main character, Sam, learns that his parents sold his soul to the devil. And gay dudes still can’t adopt? They don’t even sell it for anything cool, like a giant chicken that lays sacks of money, or a flying donkey, or the ability to multiply themselves. No, instead they use it to save Sam’s dad from a terminal illness. BORING. Plus, hello, Ghost Rider? Total rip-off. Nevertheless, the writers explain that as well as they can, plus it turns out that the devil is Ray Wise, which is absolutely perfect casting.

He’s exactly the right combination of charming, confident, witty, and lovable (just check out his line reading on, “I’m the devil!”), as well as terrifying when he needs to be. I only found out who Ray Wise was a few months ago when I watched Twin Peaks for the first time, but I thought he was fantastic in that, and also as a reporter in Good Night, and Good Luck; it’s criminal that he’s not more famous. I want to hug whoever cast him in this, because it’s brilliant. But though he’s easily the best thing about the show, the pilot had a lot of promise — it’s got a great light comic tone, the jokes are quite funny, the actors seem capable, and the premise allows for both interesting monsters of the week and the darker undertone of Sam’s parents’ misery at having not gotten a talking monkey out of the deal. While Chuck faltered in tone and didn’t immediately have any really likable characters or real wit, Reaper got everything right. I’m looking forward to seeing how it plays out. [The pilot was directed by Kevin "Silent Bob" Smith, doing a much better job than McG on Chuck. A commenter on the AV Club pointed out that this was probably the best-looking project of Smith's career, and he/she has a point. I loved everything about it, pretty much - AdmiralNeck]

Also on Monday we got the return of Heroes — a lackluster season opener after an even more disappointing finale. The problem with Heroes seems to be that there are a lot of placeholder episodes where not much happens, and then certain standout episodes that completely justify all the rest of the mediocre stuff. The plotting has been fairly good up till now — except, of course, for the ridiculous cop-outs of the finale — but the dialogue is still largely flat and I still find myself struggling to care about some of the characters (one of those characters’ names rhymes with Glurmesh, and another rhymes with Bricky and Shmeshica). The opener gave us an idea of what’s happened to (almost) everyone after the events of the finale, but it didn’t do much to advance the plot or further our emotional investment with anyone. Sometimes Tim Kring’s Crossing Jordan-heavy resume really shows, and I feel bad for fanboys who have certain expectations about superhero stories but are instead treated to schmaltz about brotherly love above any worries about plausibility or things that make sense. Oh wait, I feel bad for me too.

On Tuesday we got House back, and I can’t believe how much I love this show without the Cottages. Funny janitor! (Dr. Buffer!) More Cuddy! Funny, non-suicidal, non-miserably-addicted House! No whining Cameron! No giant-prick Chase! And best of all: more Wilson! Why can’t Wilson have this big a role in every episode, I ask you, and also, why can’t he move in with House again so they can play more funny homoerotic pranks on each other?

At any rate, it was great to see the show back in its usual form — when they make House too dark a character, the show loses its charm and becomes a miserable repetitive procedural. It’s a repetitive procedural no matter what, but at least when House is cracking racist jokes and Wilson is stealing his cane, we get a lot of entertainment. When House is slipping deeper into the miserable throes of an addiction that we know he’s never going to cure, or being relentlessly pursued by a cop with gay panic (he really, really doesn’t like having thermometers in his ass, something I think Arthur Conan Doyle never mentioned in the books), the show is too dark to be fun and too shallow to properly explore those issues with any real seriousness. As far as I’m concerned, leave the Cottages out of it and bring on the new interns. (As an aside, I’ve read several articles now about how miserable Hugh Laurie is living in America without his wife and children, and now I actually kind of have a hard time watching the show knowing that it’s making him so unhappy. Move your family to the States, you stupid man! It’s not like the show’s getting cancelled anytime soon.)

CSI: Original Flava came back on Thursday, and what a relief it was to return to its quiet thoughtfulness after the disgusting bombast of CSI: Miami (not that I don’t love the disgusting bombast, of course). CSI is consistently one of the best, and one of the most underrated, shows on tv. I’m not quite sure why it’s so ignored critically — maybe because it’s so popular, and critics assume that anything popular (especially anything popular produced by Jerry Bruckheimer) must be shit, or because it gets lumped in with all the other police procedurals on tv (I often see this happen, and know that they couldn’t possibly be watching the show to make such a comment). It’s always been an intelligent, riveting show, filled with great characters (I don’t think there’s one character on the show that either of us dislike, which I don’t think I can say of any other show on tv) and twisty cases that often manage to keep you guessing until the end. In the past two seasons CSI has upped the game even more and begun playing with the procedural form, experimenting with telling its stories in unusual ways and creating arcs that have reverberations for both the characters and for later storylines.

William Petersen’s Gil Grissom is one of the most unusual leading characters on tv — he is odd and obsessive, a scientist and a man who studies entomology as a hobby, often preferring the company of insects to the company of humans. He is also the best boss ever, fair and kind to a fault, as well as unfailingly thoughtful, about both the people around him and the cases he takes on. He lets the science lead his investigations, never making assumptions — something the CSI: Miami judgement-bots should take a course in. And he is entirely accepting of oddness in others — I have never seen him judge even the strangest perps who come through the door. This is perhaps his most unique, and lovable, characteristic — he even had a charming and utterly believable, though ultimately heartbreaking, romance with a professional madam/dominatrix.

Anyway, CSI returned from a cliffhanger involving one of our beloved CSIs — Sara, who Grissom is having a relationship with. Last season’s Miniature Killer captured her in the finale, and this season’s opener concentrates on the team’s efforts to find her before she dies out in the desert. For all the drama, it’s a profoundly quiet episode, completely different in tone from Quentin Tarantino’s fantastic two-parter in which Nick was in peril, but managing to echo some of those episodes’ themes. Grisson’s profound distress is poignantly shown but never belabored, and Sara’s struggle to keep her wits about her (she manages to do several very clever things even while she’s hugely disoriented by sunstroke and dehydration) keeps her fate in doubt until the very end. It was a marvelous episode in a show that just keeps getting better and better.

This week we also caught up with HBO’s new relationship drama, Tell Me You Love Me (or, as it should be renamed, Tell Me At Length How Much You Resent Me, Then Have Graphic Prosthetic-Based Sex With Me). This show seems to be garnering a generally favorable critical response, and it’s tough to see why — because it’s on HBO? Because it’s serious and therefore worthy? Because it explores “real” issues that “real” people face? It seems now to merely be a collection of the worst kind of indie movie cliches. There’s virtually no music (that’s real!), the couples in the show are miserable (also so real!) and only seem to stay together because there wouldn’t be a show otherwise, hardly anything ever happens to advance what plots there are (you can’t ask for realer than that! People’s lives are horrendously boring and miserable!), the characters are all in therapy (just like all white upper-middle-class couples!), and no one ever resolves an argument through communication when it could be dragged out indefinitely through misunderstandings (so real that soap operas abide by it!). Almost every single character in the show is a Gupta — the only ones who aren’t are not so much likable as not hatable enough to want to kill them. The plots revolve around the couples’ various problems with each other, and by the third episode in hardly anything has happened, and what has happened has happened badly. [Plus, all the characters spend their time either whining, moaning, or gurning. It's very unpleasant to watch. See below for proof. - AdmiralNeck]



I’m all for quiet movies and tv shows that focus on character rather than a fast-moving plot, but they have to know how to do it right, or the result ends up as bad as any crappy sitcom or Heroes-rehash on network tv. The show is not automatically better because it deals with “real” issues, and I hate that these kinds of shows are given more leeway because they’re “serious.” Just because you’re supposedly talking about issues that matter to most ordinary people, that doesn’t give you license to not care about good storytelling. You’d think there would be an extra emphasis on good dialogue and insightful characterization, but instead we get the young couple who have sex a lot and break up over worries about monogamy, the youngish couple who are baby-crazed and only have sex when they’re trying to conceive, and the middle-aged couple who have kids and haven’t had sex in a year. Seriously? This is the best they could come up with? There’s a difference between “classic” conflicts and stereotypical ones. And by the way, Cynthia Mort, real life is often quite funny. If people were really as miserable and humorless as they are on this show, we wouldn’t have such an overpopulation problem. And when couples are as miserable in real life as they are here, they usually go ahead and break up. I’m willing to give the show more of a chance — mostly because AdmiralNeck and I have fun mocking it — but it better shape up soon.

We also watched the pilots for Bionic Woman, Journeyman, and Dirty Sexy Money (known in our house as Dirty Stupid Monkey), as well as the season premieres of Ugly Betty and The Office, but I’m gonna let AdmiralNeck handle those, as I am reviewed out.