The 2008-2009 Caruso Awards: Miscellaneous Bits and Bobs
The new TV season is full swing, and yet here I am, still talking about last season. Of course, I’ve farted around for a couple of weeks doing very important things (not playing Halo 3: ODST, no matter what my endless tweets and Raptr updates will say), and am only now getting around to putting this up. Please forgive my tardiness.
Though I don’t want to say too much about the new season, which is just coming into shape, I will say that some shows (Fringe, House) have yet to get back to full strength, some (CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Dollhouse, Lie To Me) have come back with a confident bang, and some new shows (Community, Flashforward) have really piqued my interest. One new show (Modern Family) made me think I will never trust another critic ever again. Unless something really dreadful comes along, I think I have my Worst New Pilot of the 2009-2010 Season winner already sewn up.
Anyway, here are my final thoughts on the 2008i-2009 season. There were originally going to be more YouTube clips on here, but I’ve had a dispiriting day watching them get taken down. Fox and NBC, sorry for infringing on your copyright, but all you did was get rid of some free publicity, as I was going to tell the world how awesome your shows were. Except for that clip from Heroes. That was up because Angela Petrelli’s insanely histrionic reaction to her son’s death was the funniest thing of the year. So I can understand that one. And now, on with the hyperbole…
Best New Show: Sons of Anarchy
If one were to be unduly harsh, you could compare the first episode of Sons of Anarchy with the pilot of The Shield. Considering that is easily one of the most impressive and instantly captivating pilots ever made, there was little chance that showrunner Kurt Sutter could ever compete. That he made a pilot as good as the one that kickstarted his biker epic is a testament to his skill as a writer, and his decision to get Sopranos director/producer Allen Coulter in to co-direct it is exactly the kind of smart move that a good showrunner should make. The first few episodes were not perfect, but the building blocks were there.
What sets Sons of Anarchy apart from every other show debuting during the 2008-2009 period — even the eventually superb Dollhouse — is how quickly changes were made, and how confidently they were put in place. By the time season highlight The Pull came around, it was already shaping up to be essential TV, but that episode propelled it onto a completely different level of excellence. Ramping up the pace of the show and throwing one or two of the less interesting characters into terrible danger / potentially ruinous moral compromise, Sons of Anarchy hinted that it could become something that will rival the mighty Shield for complexity and dramatic power. It helps that it features one of the best ensembles on TV right now, filling out its main cast (which, let’s not forget, includes Ron Perlman, an impressive star-making turn from Charlie Hunnam, and relentless magnificence from Kim Coates) with guests spots for Mitch Pileggi, Drea DeMatteo, Jay Karnes, Dayton Callie, Maggie Siff, and the incredible Ally Walker, who blows everyone else away with her terrifying warrior mentality and fearless sexuality. And in season two, we get Adam Arkin and Henry Rollins. Seriously, what’s not to love? From all accounts, the second season is even more unhinged than the first, which is saying something considering the incredible brutality and amoral shenanigans from the first. I can’t wait to dive in.
Worst New Show: Parks and Recreation
Creators Greg Daniels and Michael Schur are not idiots, obviously, but this landed with a terrible splat and couldn’t convince me to hang around long enough to see if it would improve. Part of that was because I was mad at the dip in quality over at The Office. Was it fair to blame this show for that? Probably not. Parks and Recreation has been mooted for so long (remember when it was supposed to be a straight spin-off of The Office?) that their attention has probably been divided for a long time, and the fourth season of The Office was great. Nevertheless, the energy of one show definitely seemed to have been split between two, and the result was a listless hour of supposed comedy.
I have fought with myself over whether it would have been worth hanging around to see if it got better, but then I remember little things that irked like the way the showrunners differentiated the talking head interjections from those of The Office — using two cameras for the faux-interviews instead of one — which drove me into fits of absurd rage. The Office already has trouble keeping the faux-doc format going, and this conceit draws even more attention to the fakeness of it all. Perhaps I’m just burned out on this format. ABC’s new comedy Modern Family has been heralded as the next great sitcom after just two episodes, with across the board raves. We watched last week’s pilot in a state of shock. Flamboyant gay stereotypes? Clunking, obvious jokes about the generation gap? Appalling overacting from everyone (with Julie Bowen being the worst offender)? A character misinterpreting the accent of a Columbian woman? (I say Columbian because Sofia Vergara is from Columbia. She’s probably expected to play someone from a different country in this.) Modern Family is exactly the kind of retrograde laugh-track-enhanced sitcom that seems almost archaic now, but because it’s filmed in a single camera faux-doc style, it’s treated as a cutting-edge exploration of modern American mores. Bullshit. It’s Everybody Loves Raymond. Dressing a raccoon in baseball gear doesn’t make it a baseball player. It just makes it a raccoon covered in sport gear. (Note to self: use less raccoons in metaphors. It just complicates things.)
I also remember one potentially funny scene in Parks and Recreation — involving hapless and strangely unlovable Leslie trying to convince a bunch of ill-informed citizens that her plans are worthwhile — failing to take off, and I realise that after this summer of purposely ignorant right-wing hijacking of the health-care town hall debates, this kind of scene probably won’t ever be funny again. Democracy failing to work because of the Crazification Factor getting in the way of intelligent debate is something I just can’t laugh at right now. What makes this turn of events most sad is that the concept is so full of potential, and yet it didn’t even work before the protests. I can’t figure out how you could take an idea this promising and fail to make something that mixes madness and profundity in the same way as The Office. Compare that to Knight Rider. That was always going to be shit. This should have been a potent mix of satire and ridiculousness. That’s why I have to put it in this category. Apparently it has found its stride in the second season, from what I’ve heard on the Hinternet. Sadly, the people who are saying that also keep going on about how Modern Family is hilarious. So, you know…
Best Title Sequence of the Year: Hung
The choice of music (I’ll Be Your Man by The Black Keys), the phallic objects in the background, the pace of it…
…It’s a perfect title sequence.
Best Pilot: Kings
From what I can gather, there was very little publicity for Kings when it made its way onto the screen. Many have said this was the reason for its failure to find an audience, though to be honest a literate curio like this was unlikely to ever become a breakthrough hit. Alternate histories? Playing with Biblical stories? Unappealing main characters? It just seemed like a real long shot. It was impressive to see NBC gamble on making the show in the first place, but as with the equally intelligent Journeyman, making a show and trying to make the show available to a wide audience are two different things.
To be honest, with Journeyman the hurt is greater. That show was less ambitious, but as a result was more likely to find an audience if given a chance. It also improved as it went along. Kings started off incredibly strong and then stalled a little. That’s the problem when a show gets a pilot this impressive. Written by showrunner Michael Green and directed by the underrated Francis Lawrence, Goliath (the name of the pilot) was like no other pilot I’ve ever seen. Even though it was made on a shoestring, it looked incredible. Even more appealing, it had a weird edge of fantasy even beyond the alternate earth conceit, with God interacting with certain characters in a matter of fact way even though the show did not explicitly preach Christian values.
Perhaps this more than anything alienated audiences: atheists might rebel against a show that openly debates the wishes of God, and Christians might be irked by this God not being a recognisable version of their God. While I fall into the first category, I don’t mind God turning up in fiction as long as It’s not used as a deus ex machina or Unexplainable Puppeteer (hello Battlestar Galactica) or as an accurate version of “our” God (a sky bully who gets pissed off if we don’t play by Its crazy rules). The version of God in Kings was not a big deal, but Its mysterious behaviour, and effect on the behaviour of the main characters, was fascinating.
As was the superb character King Silas Benjamin (not to mention his allies and enemies), and the superb use of New York locations (standing in for the fictional city of Shiloh) to give a sense of epic scale to the show, and the incredible cast… As I say, the show was fascinating to watch right up until its unfortunate cancellation, but it never quite lived up to the promise of that amazing pilot, simply because the pilot made you think you were watching the most amazing show ever. We weren’t, but it was damn good nevertheless. Even the slightly disappointing finished product was better than almost everything else on TV. You could practically sense the cult following develop as you watched, not to mention hear the knives coming out for it as you realise how odd the project was. We’re lucky we saw any of it, to be honest.
Worst Pilot: The Unusuals
Seemingly rushed into production as a result of the writers’ strike, The Unusuals matched an underwhelming concept with a poorly defined set of uninteresting characters, failed to find a consistent tone, and handed off directing chores to the ever-feeble Stephen Hopkins, a man who has never made even one good film (I remember liking The Ghost and the Darkness when I first saw it, but I fear I’m being kind). There was no way I was going to enjoy this.
The main reason for my annoyance is that there were some good actors in there who just couldn’t rise above the material or the execution. Some of the most interesting actors — both promising and established — flounder within the show’s poorly thought-through format, with some characters played as broad as possible and others reining in the madness. Jeremy Renner in particular looks like he’s wandered in from another show. Harold Perrineau does okay with his skittish character, while Adam Goldberg sucks all of the energy out of his scenes with a sour and unappealing demeanour, not to mention a terrible mustache. The conceit that a hypochondriac with a fear of death is partnered with a man who wants to die and yet seems blessed is one of those ideas that sounds great on the page and fails on screen.
As for Amber Tamblyn, playing a high-society girl trying to make it as a cop in the cuh-rayzee precinct, it was a more entertaining concept when rich-boy Carter turned up in E.R. That was only one of the shows this seemed to emulate. M.A.S.H., NYPD Blue, Hill Street Blues, Hooperman (for crying out loud): it was an echo of greater shows, a throwback to 80s cop dramas when they started to become more confident and complex. Sad thing is, we don’t want babysteps any more. We’ve moved on. The low ratings and inevitable cancellation of this show proved that. Let’s hope those good actors turn up in better projects now.
Best Pilot of the Year Not Selected For Series: Virtuality
I won’t go into how much I hated the Battlestar Galactica finale again, as I’m beginning to come across as a total crazy person who is obsessed with going on about it, but it did make me reconsider trying out Caprica, the Stoltzified spin-off. Why should I keep watching shows set in this universe, made by this team, who had so disappointed me throughout the last few seasons? Yes, Jane Espenson would be there too, and I love her work, but still, I cannot imagine being invested in this story any more. There is a good chance I’ll relent, because good SF is hard to find on TV at the best of times. Nevertheless, my annoyance remains.
You can imagine how uninterested I was in another Ronald D. Moore / Michael Taylor show (I was never fond of his BSG episodes), especially one that seemed so prosaic. Moore has stated in the past that he was interested in making BSG because he felt the urge to rebel against Star Trek‘s chirpy universe and its reliance on holodeck technology to change up the show, which made Virtuality — a show about space travellers who use virtual reality technology to relax — a curious proposition. I resisted this too, and then relented after seeing the feeble Defying Gravity, which seemed to be drawn from the same template. Thinking Virtuality would be nothing more than a space soap along the same lines as the other network drama, I gave it a spin, expecting little.
I love it when I’m proved wrong like this. As much as Fox’s other new SF show – Dollhouse – Virtuality is a fascinating and challenging exploration of ideas, dramatically filmed and featuring an excellent cast. In fact, the cast is even stronger than that of Dollhouse, with excellent turns from Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Sienna Guillory, Richie Coster (who needs more work, stat), and the ever-dependable Clea DuVall. All the actors are on top form, but these four really stand out. As for the comparison with Defying Gravity, the only thing they have in common is being set in space. Virtuality is about so much more: our perception of reality and how it will inevitably be twisted by the lens we observe through, how technology can affect us emotionally, how we refuse to let it go even when it is obviously not doing us any good (an idea expressed far more clearly here than in Lee Adama’s ridiculous speech in the final BSG episode). While Defying Gravity really is a soap set in space (with one character seemingly completely defined by the pregnancy she once terminated, which is as regressive a character arc as is possible), Virtuality is about ideas. It’s proper SF.
At least, it was proper SF. Even though it was obviously incredibly ambitious and beautifully made (with top direction from Shades of Caruso favourite Peter Berg), and even though were was huge potential for relatively cheap but gripping drama, it was shelved. I’m utterly depressed by this turn of events. There was only one misstep in the whole pilot, with a nasty perception-rape sequence that made me uncomfortable. Reliance on rape plots always upsets me, but here even this most unpleasant of plot threads is used to further the show’s exploration of whether there is a gap between virtual and actual reality, and what happens to us when we lose track of the difference between the two. If the show was willing to treat something potentially exploitative as cleverly as this, we would almost certainly have seen a lot of very smart SF in the rest of the series. But no. While Whedon got lucky with Dollhouse, the Virtuality team saw their show taken away before they could go any further. The best thing I can say about it? It was better than most movies I’ve seen this year. It’s a crying shame there will be no more.
Most Unfairly Cancelled Show of the Year: Reaper
Patton Oswalt is a brilliantly funny and caustic man, but recently he broke my heart. In this interview, he explained how, while filming his turn on Reaper, he saw the crew and cast crushed by their parent network, The CW.
When I did Reaper, the episode I originally did was supposed to be the beginning of this introduction to this overall mythology, because they clearly were taking the Joss Whedon playbook: You have a monster of the week for a while, and then you start linking it all up, and you create this overarching kind of world and story. And in the middle of the week, the network just came down on them and said “No, go back to monster of the week.” And you could feel this deflation amongst the actors, because they really understood that they had to start putting mythology into things. The network was just like, “Nope!”
This is the network that, when it was The WB, cancelled Angel, so I already have a big problem with them. Now I have an even bigger one. It may have not become something more ambitious, but it was endlessly lovable, and became admirably silly in the second season. The first was funny, but at times the second season was funnier than many sitcoms. The monster-of-the-week format of the show, which had seemed so restrictive, sometimes ended up shoved into the cold open, with the rest of the episode dealing with silly relationship drama, Sock shenanigans, or sly mythology expanding business with recurring characters like Nina or Tony. This might not be as involving as Buffy, but it was never as blandly diverting as something like The Mentalist. It fell right in the middle, which is apparently deadly.
That greater focus on just being daft was working for us, but the lack of a coherent arc from week to week (other than Sam’s lacklustre efforts to get out of his contract, and the hints that he is a more important player in the battle between God and The Devil) seemed to doom it. More than any other show departing this year, this is the one we’ll miss. Goodbye to one of the most entertaining casts on TV, some of the most eccentric writing of the past few years, and most of all, goodbye to the best Devil in recent pop culture history. He may be showing up in Dollhouse, but will Ray Wise be this mischievous, charming, delightful? Ray Wise fans everywhere, please come together one last time to marvel at that beautiful, beautiful grin.
At least one of us is smiling, I guess. [Insert sad-face emoticon here]
Best New Double Act of the Year: Ray Drecker and Tanya Skagle - Hung
When compiling the list of best and worst characters, I had certain unspoken rules in place to stop myself from focusing exclusively on certain shows. Party Down‘s cast of beautifully observed characters could have dominated the first list, and Knight Rider could have dominated the second. My biggest quandary was caused by Hung, HBO’s lovable male-prostitution-and-economic-disaster comedy that has so entertained us recently. How do I get to honour two of the funniest characters of the year without breaking that rule? As ever, inventing a new category is the perfect answer. Hung is a show that has a few tonal errors (what was going on with the horribly misconceived Jessica, played with occasional delicacy by Anne Heche?) and a very loosely defined season arc (two pimps fighting over Ray and his magical dong), not to mention some wasted actors (why hire Gregg Henry and put him in about five scenes?). At times, it felt like we were watching half a show.
Nevertheless, it became appointment viewing just because of the wonderful work of Thomas Jane and Jane Adams. Their chemistry, and their relentless bickering and grudging friendship, was the thing that made Hung exceed its limitations. It also made Shades of Caruso reconsider the talents of both actors. Thomas Jane was given moments of pathos which he has never really had a chance to play before, and he excelled, especially in the season finale. Jane Adams has always played sad-sack losers, but this time she was given a chance to give Tanya some nobility even as her plans fell apart around her. Both actors also got to show off their physical comedy skills, with Adams especially amusing during her many impotent temper tantrums.
It was their interplay that really held the show together. Even as other plot threads and arcs seemed to falter or shoot off in predictable directions, watching these two actors play off each other was more than enough to save the show. It’s notable that episodes where Ray and Tanya aren’t onscreen together were the weakest of the season, whereas the ones which explored their dependent relationship and accidental exploration of each other’s personality were the most satisfying. Hopefully the show continues to throw these polar opposites together next year.
Best New Couple of the Year: Sawyer and Juliet – Lost
Ah yes, the love triangle/quadrangle. The constant refrain of Lost doubters (and some fans) is that the show is wasting its time whenever it focuses on the relationship drama of Jack, Sawyer, Kate, and Juliet. “We don’t care about that shit! Show more Faraday!” Yes yes, love drama tends to make me go to sleep as well. Many shows are hamstrung by tedious relationship dramas: House is at its dreariest when Thirteen and Foreman, or Cameron and Chase, go on and on about their coupledom; Kings ground to a halt every time David and Michelle made goo-goo eyes at each other. Hell, even the otherwise perfect Party Down was at its least interesting every time Henry and Casey got together. So there is precedent.
However, I love the relationship drama from Lost for two reasons. One: at the end of the season, we see how far Jack has fallen from grace. We thought he was the square-jawed all-American hero who would bring everyone out of the wilderness like a be-stubbled Moses, but over time we see he’s a deeply damaged, semi-psychotic loser who – as we find out in the final episode of season five – even lied about his character-defining anecdote from the very first episode. How much of a loser is he? After pushing away the woman he “loves” with his whiny attitude and various emotional breakdowns, and after years of trying to figure out what his purpose is now that his dad isn’t around to torture him, he has two choices to make a difference in his life: a) man up and seek help for his depression, all while giving up on the thought of making a go of things with Kate, or b) detonate a nuclear bomb, killing everyone on the island, in the hope that it will change history and allow Oceanic 815 to land safely in LAX so he doesn’t have to put up with the mess he made of his life. I’ve said before that one of the things I love about Lost is that it shows the psychology of its characters in minute detail, and this final touch – showing how far people will go to avoid making simple changes in their lives because of their fear of what will happen if it fails – is the perfect metaphor for how we hold onto our broken selves even when we know how to make things better.
Two: It also gave us the wonderful, tragic pairing of Sawyer and Juliet, which justifies all of the sturm and drang to get there. So far, all of the pairings that have been tried were wrong somehow. Jack and Kate didn’t work because Jack is insane. Kate and Sawyer didn’t work because Kate keeps messing with Sawyer’s head. Jack and Juliet didn’t work because Jack was not even slightly into Juliet and was just using her to get over Kate. However, as soon as the fourth season ended with a shirtless Sawyer walking out of the sea towards a drunken Juliet, I knew we would get to see something go right. And, for the most part, it did, even though it was not to be.
It’s not just that the combined hottness of Sawyer and Juliet is so great that it probably melted most of the TVs in the world. It’s also not just that selfish Kate and crazy Jack were finally out of the equation. It’s even not just because seeing Sawyer and Juliet flirting while shooting people was the most awesome thing ever. It’s that there was barely any controversy in the relationship, which probably would have even survived the forthcoming Purge, somehow. It’s only when Kate returns to the island and reignites Juliet’s psychological damage (previously caused by the break-up of her parents, the infidelity of her ex-husband, and the death of her lover Goodwin) that it all goes horribly wrong. Did Sawyer still hold a candle for Kate? Probably. Did he love Juliet? I reckon yes, and I believe he would have done anything for her if she had given him the chance. All of this made the quadrangle emotionally powerful, as we finally had something to hang on to. Would Sawyer and Juliet survive the machinations of the island/Esau and Jacob? More than any other relationship in TV history (except for Fred and Wesley in Angel), my nerves were set on fire by the possibility that those kids might not make it after all. Of course…
Most Upsetting, Most Harsh, and Most Unfair Scene of the Year: The Incident finally happens – Lost
…we all know how it turned out. Nothing else this year made me cry as much as this.
Damn you, stupid TV show! Damn you for being so fucking mean! And damn you Emmy voters for not giving nominations to Elizabeth Mitchell and Josh Holloway. They were amazing all season.
Worst New Couple of the Year: Luke and Bess - In Treatment
In Treatment‘s second season deviated dramatically from its source material — the Israeli drama Be’Tipul — when it moved main character Paul Weston from Maryland to Brooklyn, allowing the show to dramatise his dislocation from his family, as well as to provide a reason for why he suddenly has so many new patients. This meant that we lost the chance to see season one patients Amy and Jake return, this time as a divorced couple fighting over their son, leading to the creation of two new patients, Luke and Bess. With their marriage in tatters and resentment flying between them, their son Oliver suffers terribly, putting on weight and falling into depression as his parents either fight for custody of him or, amazingly, against custody.
None of the characters in this show are particularly nice to Paul, but the games Luke and Bess play with him, using his advice as justification for a serious of awful, selfish choices, were worse than the usual antagonism people show their therapist. Many times during the season I was horrified by their behaviour, and by the time the season finished they were openly talking about how their lives had been ruined by their marriage and how they wanted another chance at what they had with barely any regard for Oliver’s well-being. When Paul finally loses his temper with them in episode 28, it elicited a round of applause from us. Figuratively speaking. And to be honest, he should have been even angrier with them.
Of course, this being In Treatment, these two horribly selfish people are written so well that we can see their point of view — and their humanity — clearly enough that even at their worst we cannot completely write them off. Their eventual remorse is a relief, but it’s still not enough considering how completely both parents are oblivious to the young boy’s needs. Thankfully, Paul is there to prove to Oliver that he will still be there for him, in some respect. His final scene with Oliver, talking to him via “phone” in his office, started a deluge of tears from this admittedly weepy viewer. If Oliver escapes this miserable situation with his psyche intact, it will have nothing to do with his parents.
Most Underused Character of the Year: Boyd Langton - Dollhouse
Whedon has a talent for peppering his casts with older character actors playing the “parents” to the younger crew. With Buffy we had Giles, in Angel there was Wesley (though his efficacy is doubtful; he’s arguably more flawed than any of his compatriots), and Firefly had Shepherd Book. These stern characters with hearts of gold gave their respective shows some kind of grounding when things got wacky, though Whedon wasn’t averse to making them run through some ridiculous hoops (Book’s mad hair, Wesley’s various pratfalls, Giles’ guitar playing). Sadly, while Langton got a chance to be silly in the disappointing comedy episode Echoes, he rarely got a chance to do anything interesting either. Many characters got to have interesting arcs and secrets, but Langton seemed to be getting less and less screentime as the series wore on. Making him head of security broke the student-mentor relationship between him and Echo, but then this might be Whedon trying to throw his own archetypes out, confounding our expectations. That he would give handler-duties to someone who appears to have an unhealthy sexual attraction to Echo (I’m talking about the plasticine-man known as Ballard) shows there might be something to that.
Nevertheless, it is a shame to cast someone like Harry Lennix — who has intense onscreen presence and then some — and then not give him as much to do as possible. His new role means he will interact more with Olivia Williams, meaning the two best actors on the show get to bang heads together: joy! That promotion, along with his new connection to Whiskey/Dr. Saunders, suggests he will be given more to do in the second season, but nevertheless, his relative inaction in later episodes was one of the few things I didn’t like about the improved half of the first season.
Most Entertaining Villain of the Year: Gemma Teller Morrow – Sons of Anarchy
One of the great pleasures of Sons of Anarchy is how it mixes up its Shakespeare. The debt it owes to Hamlet has been acknowledged by creator Kurt Sutter, but less attention has been paid to his shameless steal from Macbeth. Gemma Teller Morrow — former wife of SAMCRO leader John Teller — at first seems like a strong biker chick, but by the end of the pilot episode has revealed herself to be a conniving, power-hungry Queen whose sense of morality has been twisted until she will do anything to protect her family and the direction of the gang, a fact proved by her attempt at driving Jax’s junkie wife Wendy to an overdose. Later in the season she apologises to Wendy for this act, but even then she’s only doing it because she’d rather her son stay with a recovering junkie than return to his longtime sweetheart Tara. Plus, she does seem to be implicated in John’s death, possibly committed by her current husband Clay Morrow, which appears to have been done to prevent a change of direction towards legitimacy for the biker gang.
The most miraculous thing about this character is that she has dispelled my previous reservations about the talents of Katey Sagal. I’ve complained about her terrible voicework on Futurama before, where she leaves no joke intact, but I had suspected her dramatic work was not as shaky. She was great as John Locke’s departed love Helen in Lost, for example. In Sons of Anarchy, she’s even better, outacting even Ron Perlman when she’s in full flow. This display of Macchiavellian sneakiness got even more entertaining as the season progressed. There was a certain amount of character modulation during the latter half of the season, with some of her excesses toned down, and the horribly stagy confrontations between her and Tara tweaked until they sounded like actual human conversations, but even so, her Lady-Macbeth-esque manipulations of all around her were a source of delight even when she misfired a little. Gemma, as Journey almost said once, don’t stop conniving.
Least Entertaining Villain of the Year: Miguel Prado - Dexter
Dexter sure does have some crappy nemeses. In the first season, he goes up against his own brother, played with ridiculous camp evilness by Christian Camargo. In the second season, he is forced to conquer his evil girlfriend, manifested by Jaime Murray with a bag of absurd tics even more annoying than those of Dexter’s sister Debs, who is played by the equally dreadful Jennifer Carpenter. In the fourth season we’re getting John Lithgow. My memories of his madness from De Palma’s Raising Cain do not bode well for any Over-Act-O-Meters used to track the progress of this show, though I reckon he will be infinitely more entertaining than Dexter’s other “villains”.
Last year we got to see Jimmy Smits contend with the usual quota of ineptitude, improbable motivation, and mustache-twirling obviousness that comprises the Dexter Big Bad, and he made a meal of it. Amping up his intensity to sky-high levels, Miguel Prado went from saint to madman in the blink of an eye, all pretense at showing him as a morally complex human thrown out of the window with a haste even this most feeble of shows has never exhibited before. His cluelessness meant his occasional victories against Dexter relied upon our “hero”‘s IQ dropping 100 points, which is a flaw that has run through the show from the beginning. Prado would then, naturally, make a bunch of mistakes, all the while chewing scenery like a murderous Donald Sinden. I say he was the least entertaining villain of the year because watching his character arc was deeply unsatisfying, with him changing his personality from moment to moment in order to move the plot, and not vice versa, but I did get a lot of pleasure from his reaction after he finally kills a bad guy.
Nastiest Villain of the Year: Nolan – Dollhouse
I can’t make any glib observations about this. Whedon is an avowed feminist, and this new show seemed to be a peculiar expression of that worldview, drawing both perplexed condemnation and optimistic readings. The fact that the show didn’t immediately say that the Dollhouse was a bad place threw a lot of viewers (including myself), but I’m sure a lot of Whedon’s fans (again, including myself) hoped that things would be clearer in the long run.
By the end of the season it was obvious that the Dollhouse tech was meant to be The Worst Thing That Has Happened To Humanity Ever, and not just because it brings about the end of the world (or at least, the end of Humanity). The most graphic and upsetting example of this comes in the excellent episode Needs, where the Actives come to and “escape” their prison (but only because they are allowed to). Drawn to the terrible things that have made them volunteer for Activeness, we see November visiting the grave of her child, and Echo deciding to stay behind to rescue her fellow Actives (surely this should worry the Dollhouse executives a bit more). Sierra, who I’d never found to be particularly compelling, goes to see the man who has paid the Dollhouse to make her an Active. Any doubt that the Dollhouse is a force for evil is removed once we find out that Nolan (played with oily menace by Vincent Ventresca) has paid the Dollhouse to turn her — a woman who once refused him — into an Active just so that he can violate a woman her whenever he feels like it. As Couch Baron says here, there truly are no words that can describe how awful this is. It was the most potent way to show how dreadful this technology is, and upset me deeply. The bad taste remained for the rest of the season. How rare for a network show to explore this kind of moral depravity without shying away from it.
Best Cast of the Year: Party Down
Just as with this year’s Best New Double Act category, I created this category last year to give shout-out to Reaper‘s wonderful cast, which featured a host of great actors, especially Ray Wise, Tyler Labine, and Ken Marino. This year, Party Down gets a nod for featuring so many great actors, including Ken Marino. If I’d been blogging when Veronica Mars started, I probably would have highlighted the terrific cast of that show too, which would have meant discussing Ken Marino’s turn as sleazy private investigator Vinnie Van Lowe. Basically, Ken Marino seems to be my weakness. If he’s around, I am helpless.
Which is not to say Party Down worked solely because of him. As I’ve mentioned at length in my Best New Characters award list, Jane Lynch is breathtakingly good as Constance Carmell, and her replacement (Jennifer Coolidge) was just as good. Of the core cast, I’d highlight Ryan Hansen too, playing the adorably clueless Kyle Bradway — basically Dick Casablancas with a heart of gold. His vapid interactions with Jane Lynch are the highlight of many episodes, and he even manages to make tolerable the time spent with Martin Starr, here doing worryingly convincing work as the deeply unpleasant Roman DeBeers. He’s probably the weak link in the cast, though I would also become annoyed by the endless hipsterish emotional evasions of Casey Klein, played by Lizzy Caplan. (Side note: I think it’s fair to say that, thanks to real-world annoyances too numerous to count, I automatically take against any character on TV who spends all of their time on the phone instead of doing their job, or while other people are trying to talk to them. Those caveats are meant to signify that Jack Bauer is not to be considered one of these people. When he’s on the phone, he’s actually saving the world).
At the heart of this amazing ensemble is Adam Scott, formerly playing Palek the Vulcan Inseminatron from Tell Me You Love Me, and now utterly rehabilitated from that indie-movie-aping earnestness after his incredibly bold turn in Step Brothers. Here he is required to be in enormous emotional pain for the majority of the time, and it’s a credit to him that playing a completely shut-down shell of a man doesn’t mean he isn’t funny. His ability to mix up this world-weariness and emotional vulnerability with deadpan wit is essential to the success of the show. He’s Tim-from-The-Office, but even more pathetic. You weep for him in every episode.
So, they’re a fantastic core group, but they’re not the only reason Party Down wins this award. Just as with 30 Rock and Arrested Development before them, this show manages to get some of the best character actors around to populate the secondary cast. In the first season we saw Ken Jeong, J.K. Simmons, Steven Weber, Marilu Henner, Joe Lo Truglio, Mather Zickel, Joey Lauren Adams, Molly Parker, Breckin Meyer, Rob Corddry, Rick Fox (as himself), George Takei (also as himself), not to mention — for the Veronica Mars fans out there — Kristin Bell, Enrico Colantoni, Daran “Cliff McCormack” Norris, Ed Begley Jr., Alona Tal and Jason Dohring. Matched up to the best sitcom scripts of the year, there was no way this show was going to fail. Even though I’m agnostic on the appeal of Megan Mullally (drafted in to replace Jane Lynch in season two), I have a strong feeling she will be magically transformed by this most glorious of shows.
Worst Cast of the Year: Parks and Recreation
I feel a little ill, because I’m about to criticise the casting of a show that has Amy Poehler in the lead role. Amy Poehler, who was the best thing about last year’s Baby Mama. Amy Poehler, who was one of the best things about SNL for the past few years. Amy Poehler, who was one of the three things in Southland Tales that was actually great and entertaining instead of desperately bad and misery-inducing (the other two things being The Rock and Wood Harris, with whom she shared her scenes). She makes me laugh pretty much every time I see her, but not here. In that case, I’m willing to assume she was just dealt a bad hand, and given a character who is unworkable. The only times Leslie Knope comes alive and becomes more than a badly formed lump of unrealistic character flaws is when she pines over Mark Brendanawicz, her selfish and unappealing colleague played by the talented Paul Schneider. Again, another talented actor playing an unlikeable and uninteresting character. Maybe I should rethink this category. Is it the cast, or the show, that I don’t like?
Well, Aziz Ansari is in it. I’ll admit, I have not seen much of his work. He was in Funny People for a couple of minutes, and the effect he had on me was akin to having my soul Maced. Perhaps I’m wrong. This show seems to be underwritten and poorly thought through, which could account for it, but his turn as Tom Haverford is almost unwatchable. I’d say that’s more than just a glitch in the writing. The same goes for Nick Offerman as the Dwight-Schrute-esque Ron Swanson, a character that screams desperation from the writers but is not at all helped by Offerman’s flat performance. Both Haverford and Swanson seem like the kernel of a joke expanded to character-size without much thought given to whether these characters will work. As it is, they’re just belligerent. The less said about Aubrey Plaza and her pointless teenage character April Ludgate, the better. (See above for comments about affectless, oblivious characters like Ludgate and Casey from Party Down.)
Perhaps the thing I resent most is putting someone as funny as Chris Pratt opposite a comedy void like Rashida Jones. She was charming enough in The Office but wasn’t expected to be particularly funny. Here she is either a dope being manipulated by Pratt’s Andy, or she berates him, making her seem churlish and him seem like a victim, which he isn’t. Crappy couples on TV are not often fun to watch (ask any Lost fan who despairs whenever Jack and Kate get together). I’m more than willing to accept that a lot of these actors are far better in other roles. Hell, I’ve seen them be better. Pratt was hilarious in The O.C. as Che, and Paul Schneider was riveting in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Perhaps I’m being way too harsh on these actors. Sadly, the bottom line is that, unlike The Office that came with only a couple of good characters, already based on archetypes from the UK series, and then built the supporting cast as they went along, Parks and Recreation started from scratch and got none of the characters right. Even a good cast would have trouble making this bunch of half-formed comedic scribbles come to life. In time, if it doesn’t get cancelled, perhaps this will change. Let me know when it does. Until then, I’ll stick with Community, Dan Harmon’s brilliant new sitcom, which recently started almost fully-formed and will hopefully keep getting better.
Best Guest Star of the Year: Jon Hamm - 30 Rock
For a little while, we were non-converts to the Cult of Hamm. He entertained us enough in Mad Men, but we had enough reservations about the first season that he didn’t really register in our consciousness, even after the Dick Whitman revelation gave Hamm the best acting opportunities. Perhaps we thought he was just a pretty face, and couldn’t imagine there was anything else in there. Canyon was also offended by his Brylcreemed hair. She deemed it unappealing. I wasn’t about to argue.
Then came the far superior second season, and sightings of his normal hair (adorably floppy), and then a turn on Saturday Night Live that was so confident and charming that I fully expect Hamm to eventually challenge the hosting records fought over by Christopher Walken, Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin. Dramatic excellence, perfect comic timing, a willingness to play off his image, and seriously, one of the handsomest faces on Earth; if he can sing and dance, he’s got it all. We are now members of the Cult. Wearing robes and everything. It’s proper infatuation.
His three episode run as Dr. Drew Baird on 30 Rock was joyous. It was so good that the plot of his final episode, with him coming to realise that having everyone fawn over him all the time is something that doesn’t happen to anyone else, was even alluded to in the third season of Mad Men (reacting with bemusement when Sal points out that he doesn’t get hit on by flight attendants on every flight he takes, unlike Don, who is obviously spoilt for choice). Once Mad Men is over, Hamm can pretty much pick a direction. Not many actors get to achieve stardom and show both comedic and dramatic chops. Maybe he’s more like Dr. Drew than he realises.
Most Resurrected Character of the Year: Captain Jack Harkness - Torchwood: Children of Earth
I thought I always wanted Captain Jack’s immortality to be used more, as it’s a nifty little gimmick. I don’t think that any more.
Most Surprising Directorial Work of the Year: Akiva Goldsman on Kings and Fringe
Akiva Goldsman has done some awful things. His script for Batman and Robin is rightly reviled. He’s great at simplifying complex narratives and turning them into multiplex fodder (A Beautiful Mind, I, Robot). He’s the go-to guy for big movies based on crappy thrillers by bad writers (he’s adapted John Grisham and Dan Brown). When nerds hear his name, they sob with misery. “Why is this man so beloved of Hollywood?”, they shout. “It must be proof of its awfulness, along with the career of Michael Bay!” Of course, my own feelings about Bay are not so straight-down-the-line, and now, Goldsman has begun to win me over.
All he had to do was build up his experience as a director by making two of the strongest hours of TV of the 2008-2009 season. His debut, on Kings‘ The Sabbath Queen, showed a talent for atmospherics and interesting visuals, pacing the episode beautifully and getting some good performances from even the weaker actors on the show. After that he wrote and directed Bad Dreams, one of the highlights of Fringe‘s first season. Again, the creepy atmosphere was beautifully judged, and the opening few minutes were hypnotically staged. Even better, the big finale was disturbing and tense, even as it played with some less than fresh ideas, and then we got a video clip of a young Olivia that wouldn’t have looked amiss in Hideo Nakata’s Ringu. If you’ll forgive me for cheating and ignoring my own rules, we’ve also seen his work on the first episode of the second season of Fringe, and again, it was very impressive. In time it’s obvious that he will be directing films too. I hope he finds some interesting material to work with, but even if not, I look forward to seeing what he will come up with.
Least Surprising Directorial Work of the Year: Greg Yaitanes on House and Lost
Shades of Caruso took against the TV (and occasional film) director Greg Yaitanes after some hilariously overwrought and showy work on shows such as Heroes and Drive, and we’ve yet to be convinced he deserves reappraisal. Last year he won an Emmy for his work on the first part of the House season finale, which would have been understandable when you take the logistics of the shoot into account, but is frustrating when Katie Jacobs’ work on the far more affecting final episode wasn’t even considered (and she’s listed as co-director of the Yaitanes episode too, but didn’t get a nomination). Since then, Yaitanes has been given a co-producer credit on House, and contributed numerous episodes to this season, including the shocking Simple Explanation, in which Kutner (Kal Penn) commits suicide offscreen.
I will say this: the scene where Foreman and Thirteen discover the body was brilliantly done. Unfortunately, Yaitanes had a vision for this episode and went ahead with it. Everyone at Princeton Plainsboro is obviously very depressed about Kutner’s death, so Yaitanes lights the entire episode as if all the colour has been drained from the hospital. It’s an entirely grey hour of TV, just in case you didn’t get it from the performances or dialogue or sad music all over the place. To be honest, the episode Joy, directed by an unexpectedly off-colour Deran Serafian, featured the worst direction of the season, but Yaitanes was consistently bad here, and worse elsewhere.
You see, he also managed to infect my beloved Lost with his ridiculous film-cooties. I could talk about the flashy work he did on Heroes, but to be honest he’s the least of that show’s problems, so I don’t really mind if he stays on it. Lost, however, is a totally different matter. He had worked on the show before, in the first season, and as we started rewatching the show recently, I noticed he was kinda bad then too. That was when the show was in its infancy, and was still trying to find its tone, so his attention-seeking excesses were less obvious. By now, we all know what works and what doesn’t work within the very specific Lost world, which made Yaitanes’ excesses even more noticeable than usual. We know that Ben is creepy and Sayid is scary and intimidating, which are characteristics stressed by their very specific line-readings. In He’s Our You, we see a flashback to a face-off between the two characters, and both Michael Emerson and Naveen Andrews draw out their sentences to absurd lengths, with poorly edited pauses between each shot emphasising that they are both very methodical people who hate each other.
Lost usually treats these big moments with a sense of grandeur that works well, considering the unapologetically grandiose nature of the narrative, but this scene stepped over the line between epic and ridiculous. It made my favourite show seem like a parody of itself. I don’t even want to get into the awful “interrogation” scene later (included above), which was poorly written but even more poorly directed. What was Andrews doing here? It’s all over the place. The final scene with Sayid shooting young Ben was brilliant, but it was the only bright spot in a very disappointing hour of Lost. When you compare this horrible misinterpretation of the tone of the show to the consistently impressive work of star directors Jack Bender and Stephen Williams, it just looks amateurish. I keep hoping he’ll settle down, but the latest episode of House was directed by him, and as it was about a games programmer, most shots seemed to feature arms coming out of the side of the frame towards the person being observed, just like an FPS, so it might be a while before he realises less is more.
Best Shout-Out of the Year: House
Stephen Colbert is a huge fan of House, and it seems the feeling is mutual. (It’s the photo above his shoulder, obviously.)
This is the only way Colbert is ever going to get on a Fox channel without being mischaracterised as a baby-eating Trotsky clone.
Intensity of the Year: Lance “Intensity” Reddick – Fringe
While Parks and Recreation fans, or Dexterites, or people with Unusual taste, might be mad at me for being a big meanie and saying such terrible things about their favourite shows, surely there can be no controversy here. No one else this year was so stern and scary and just fucking in charge.
I suspect Lance “Intensity” Reddick can atomise titanium just by looking at it. As with Harry Lennix on Dollhouse, Reddick is pretty under-used on Fringe. Most of the time he is onscreen he’s taking the Fringe team to various crime scenes, or giving Olivia either a bollocking or a pep talk. This is not a good use of this man’s talents. He also showed up in Lost, as the sinister Matthew Abaddon, where he stopped being sinister just before getting shot and killed. Which sucked. I hope season two of Fringe sees him doing more entertaining stuff. I’d like him to shoot one of their ridiculous monsters (a part squid, part mushroom teenager hiding under carpets, for instance), or have more screen time with Blair Brown and Her Metallic Arm. If the Fringe showrunners don’t hurry up, he could well get very bored very soon. In this AV Club interview, he says he wants to try his hand at comedy. (For the record, though he is seemingly never required to show it on TV, Mr. Reddick is fully capable of expressing amusement, and isn’t just a scarily intense man.)
If he left Fringe to do that, you know I’d be checking it out.
And that’s it for this year. In the next few weeks, some new polls or something. Maybe some chatter about the London Film Festival (I got really carried away buying tickets the other week). Stay tuned, new readers. As you can see, I may not post as often as I would like, but when I do, I tend to post big.
The Annual Culling Of The Shows
When I say culling, I’m not referring to us cutting back on shows. Don’t be ridiculous. We’re so far behind on most shows that we’re following that it is tempting, but it’s not going to happen any time soon, because I hate to give up on anything. Of course, I’m actually referring to that awful time of year when the networks pass judgement on the underperforming programmes on their rosters, slicing out much-loved cult faves and giving the kiss-of-life to some real oddities that no one is really passionate about. Hollywood Reporter has a report on the status of many shows here (this information is arranged in a more pleasing list format by Herc in this AICN Coaxial post), and it contains good and bad news, as ever.
Most upsetting is the unequivocal cancellation of Reaper, which has improved by leaps and bounds this year. Having shaken off first season nerves, the showrunners and performers have allowed more oddness and format-shaking looseness in, with some episodes doing away with the ponderous soul-hunting stuff in the cold open in order to follow the protagonists as they bumble along in their super-amiable way, and others just running with gags that would never have occurred last year. In a recent, very entertaining episode, more time was expended upon Sock (seeking chemical castration to prevent his lust for his step-sister) and Sam (dealing with his zombie dad’s attempts to bond with him) than was spent on what would once have been considered the A plot, which was just fine by us. Nevertheless, that burst of energy came too late to save it. Sam, Sock and Ben (and Ray Wise, of course) will be missed.
The woeful state of Jerry Bruckheimer’s roster of shows surprises me. While the CSI franchise is not going anywhere (especially now that the original series is on such consistently great form, courtesy of Morpheus), Without A Trace and Cold Case look like they’re in trouble, with one of them probably cancelled. I get that this is due to the financial pressures of running both shows, but they always seemed like they’d be around forever, like bigotry and flatulence. I say that despite the fact that I watch neither of them and have exactly zero interest in them.
I’m much less surprised that Eleventh Hour is facing doom. It’s only just started airing in the UK, on Living (which means watching it exposes me to endless adverts for Grey’s Anatomy; a seriously nauseating experience, especially with Kevin “Journeyman” McKidd popping up every couple of seconds to remind me of our favourite recently cancelled series). A less apt channel I cannot imagine, as Eleventh Hour has yet to display a pulse. Is this the most boring show on TV? Yes, despite the insistence of the ever-present Clicking Clock Of Teh Doom, it’s much less silly than Fringe, but it’s not like it gets the science right even in such unambitious circumstances, so it hasn’t even got that going for it.
At least Fringe, while being full of risible science, is not ashamed to forget about realism and just go all out, showing us people turning into rampaging porcupine monsters, or macrophages that burst out of your mouth and crush your windpipe on the way out, or teleportation devices that are just fucking wicked cool and if you don’t agree then I’ll never love you. Eleventh Hour, on the other hand, is sober but utterly joyless. It also features a lot of googly-oogly eyes, as Rufus Sewell and Marley Shelton have intense ocular orbs that scare the piss out of me. Not for much longer, though. Farewell, Dr. Hood and Thingy Gunbabe. I hardly knew you or cared.
Two other shows I don’t watch are Num3e7501019 or whatever the hell it’s “called”, and The Unit, pictured above (that’s First African American President David Palmer carrying what looks like a life doll for people with a fetish for deli-shop owners). While Numbronics has a few fun character actors on it, I cannot understand how a procedural about numbercrunching has managed to last for five seasons, and is likely to come back for another. I saw the first three episodes, and tuned out because I couldn’t see how the concept could sustain itself. And yet there it is, running even longer than the similarly restrictive Bones (though of course the charm of that show, apparently, is the chemistry between Boreanaz and Deschanel). What happened to the Numberation format to make it run this long? Was I wrong to drop it? (This is a rhetorical question; I’m not going back to it no matter what I hear.) Maybe a long-running character will turn out to be a serial killer, to the delight of its many fans. Or am I thinking of another show?
In contrast, the possible cancellation of The Unit saddens me despite my utter ignorance of it. Why? Because this year creator Shawn Ryan treated TV watchers to one of the classic seasons of one of the greatest shows ever created. The final season of The Shield was a nerve-destroying tour de force, and to think he’s lost one show (on a high) and then maybe lost the other one without fair warning makes me unhappy on his behalf. For providing us with such a thrilling conclusion to The Shield, he should win awards, not get thrown off TV with such disregard. Fingers crossed that, if worst comes to worst, he can come up with another show as great as The Vic Mackey Glower Hour (twice as thrilling as The Jack Bauer Power Hour, even on a good day, tension fans!).
After a whole season of speculation about being dropped by Fox, it looks like Terminator: The Needlessly Long Title Involving The Important-Sounding Word “Chronicles” is finally being cancelled. That, and Dollhouse, have suffered the fate of Friday Night Lights; running to overtake the expectation of imminent extinction. While FNL has, happily, been renewed for two more seasons, T:TSCC is not going to be so lucky. Perhaps Fox only really needed it to dilute the impact of the upcoming film in order to damage its box office chances, if their behaviour over Watchmen is anything to go by. Ironically, even though I was enthusiastic about T:TSCC when I saw the pilot, I only watched one more episode. Of course Torchwood, which I was comparing it to, got worse than even I could imagine, and yet I watched it all the way through to the hysterical end. What’s up with that?
Surprisingly, Dollhouse might make it to a second season, which would probably be surrounded with even more chatter about cancellation. The only thing people have linked to Dollhouse more than those early, awful episodes is the expectation that it will not last. While once that was irksome, it’s a testament to the quantum leap in quality from the sixth episode on that cancellation would now be a tragedy (in terms of TV show potential, not actual real tragedy). The last two weeks have provided more brain food than any other show on TV that isn’t set on a mysterious island. As long as Dollhouse 2.0 is allowed to continue to explore the distortion of the moral norm caused by Dollhouse tech and not just have the ever-unappealing Dushku wandering around in bondage gear prior to some poorly edited fighting, a second season would be welcomed with fireworks and Bacchanalian parties (and, sadly, a flurry of woeful fanfic). If the show is not going to play to its intellectual strengths (yeah, I said it), why bother giving it another chance?
As I said earlier, we’re inundated with shows, even more so now that In Treatment is back for two and a half hours a week, so maybe I should be glad Cupid is being axed. I never watched the original starring Jeremy “Mercury from The Metal Men” Piven, so I have very little awareness of what the show is like, but we’re talking about a remake of a failed show, replacing the undeniably watchable Piven and the equally appealing Paula Marshall with Bobby Cannavale and Sarah Paulsen. I’m having trouble mustering enthusiasm for this, and now that it’s been cancelled, that enthusiasm dims even more. If I do watch it, it’ll be out of loyalty to the man who brought us Veronica Mars (though that wasn’t enough to make me watch 90210).
Still, I can’t imagine that it could be worse than Castle or The Unusuals. Despite the charmkrieg that is Nathan Fillion selling almost every shitty joke and laboured flirt-op (and proving he is indeed better, better than Neil, at so many things it’s hard to conceal), everything else about it is to entertainment as formica is to wood. A lot of unimaginative shows feel like they are made by machines, but the machine that made this is constructed out of string and cardboard and powered by irradiated rats. Still, at least it’s not The Unusuals. ABC’s website made this sound like a drama featuring a bunch of unorthodox cops whose rarified skillsets allowed them to solve crimes no one else could. Canyon thought it was meant to be a straight-up comedy. That it satisfied neither of us is a sign something went haywire as soon as calloused fingers typed Fade In.
It’s telling that, in the pilot, you see a clip of Bruce Weitz on TV in some kind of sitcom, as the show also felt a lot like Hill Street Blues, but this time with a team comprising nothing but the weirdos like Renko, Belker, and Buntz, but lacking the stable characters like Furillo, Coffey and Esterhaus. The first hour, directed with typical ineptitude by Stephen “The Reaping” Hopkins, was interminable, cutesy, unimaginative, uninvolving, edited into incoherence, cloying, drab, desperately quirky, and, most annoyingly, filled with terrific, wasted actors, like Jeremy Renner, Harold Perrineau and Terry Kinney. Such talented guys. Oh, and Adam Goldberg is in it too. Erm… ::tumbleweeds blow by::
So, if we lose that, no biggie. Better Off Ted, however, is just about the most lovable show on TV that isn’t Reaper, and even if it’s not as funny as 30 Rock, or as clever as The Office, it’s still worth rooting for, especially as series creator Victor Fresco also gave us Andy Richter Controls The Universe, and I’d feel bad for the guy if he was responsible for two great sitcoms cut down in their prime. It has cemented our love of Portia DeRossi, who is just wonderful as the android-like Veronica Palmer, and has managed to satirise soulless corporate culture in such a non-abrasive manner that we almost love our monolithic overlords by the end of it. It’s mild stuff, but compared to the laugh-void that is Parks and Recreation, it’s Arrested Development meets Seinfeld. I’ve got my fingers crossed for it.
Sadly, I doubt anything can save my favourite new show, NBC’s bonkers soap opera/religious fable/alternate-reality-curio Kings, which would be unmissable even if it was just 45 minutes of Ian “Swearengen” McShane walking around his “palace” muttering to himself, but manages to excel by featuring Ian “Swearengen” McShane walking around the city of Shiloh, capital city of the Kingdom of Gilboa, scheming against his foes (including Brian Bloody Cox!), railing against a preacher (played by Eamonn Bloody Walker!), and trying to predict what God wants of him in order to protect his eroding power base even when that makes him act against the interest of others. As with Dollhouse, no one expects it to make it to a second season, which is heartbreaking. In a season as dreary as this one (where the only other new shows worth following are the frustratingly erratic Fringe and the fluffy Mentalist) it’s been a revelation. No matter how the other shows fare, knowing that the Sword of Nielsen Damocles hangs over such a promising head is enough to make me wonder why the hell I bother watching TV when ambition is so often rewarded with dismissal.
Self-indulgent whinge #268 over.
The 2007-2008 Caruso Awards (The Good)
Though it might seem perverse to be assessing the bests and worsts of a TV year when the new TV year is very much upon us (The Shield started last week, and Fox’s big new hope, Fringe, starts tomorrow), weirdly enough we’re actually doing this earlier than last year. It’s hard to know where to put the cut-off dates, but now seems the right time to get on with this. There are going to be some omissions, such as Mad Men (we didn’t think the first season had anything strong enough for inclusion, and the second season, though improved, is not yet over) and The Shield (we’re a couple of seasons behind, but catching up fast). Also missing are mentions of Terminator: The Sarah Conicles (© Masticator and Masticatrix) and The Middleman, two shows I think I will end up loving but have not seen enough of to be sure (and believe me, the first fifteen minutes of the third episode of Middleman was so funny it almost got into the list anyway). I will also include a couple of two-parters, because they were just too perfect to be separated, and will regrettably be going over a lot of stuff I’ve covered before, but what can I say? When I’m enthusiastic about something, I have no off-switch.
Best episodes of the season:
10. Pushing Daisies – Sniff It Good
For a few weeks there, I was in two minds about sticking with Pushing Daisies. Maybe I would have been more forgiving of it if it hadn’t been treated like God’s own TV show by most critics before it had even aired, a blanket pre-judgement that grated because no one seemed willing to admit that for everything that was right with the show, there was something very wrong. At least, that’s how it was at first. As the season progressed, it became clear that the critical consensus was swinging away from blanket praise to complaints that the tone was too sickly, and just to be contrary, we began to fall in love with it. As the show became more bittersweet (in counterpoint to the colours and romance) it blossomed, and this episode represented the high watermark. Not only did it introduce Paul Reuben’s olfactory expert, it ended on a heartstopping rendition of Morning Has Broken by Ellen Greene playing over a hallucinatory animation sequence that still makes me choke up whenever I think about it.
9. CSI: Crime Scene Investigation – Goodbye and Good Luck
Coming after the two best seasons of this long-running show, the eighth was a disappointment, though one littered with the odd classic moment. This episode, chronicling the final case of CSI Sara Sidle, was the season highlight by a long chalk. Directed by star helmer Kenneth Fink (also responsible for the excellent finale, which detailed the last moments of CSI Warrick Brown), it featured the return of Sara’s arch-enemy, the bad seed Hannah West, and brought their antagonism to a surprising and moving conclusion, just in time for Sara to leave the team in an attempt to save her damaged soul. Visually impressive (as I mentioned at the time), emotionally draining, and beautifully judged, it was the total opposite of the empty gore-fest that non-fans assume CSI to be. Even when not operating at maximum efficiency, surely this is one of the most underrated shows on TV right now.
8. Doctor Who – Forest of the Dead
The general consensus is that no matter how shaky Doctor Who can be, at least Steven Moffat will pop up at some point and save the day. So it was with the River Song two-parter, which was lauded pretty much before it aired. Another truism is that heightened anticipation will often lead to disappointment, and the first part, Silence in the Library, featured so many of the tricks Moffat had already used that this felt less than fresh, even with a spirited performance from Alex Kingston. Luckily for Nu-Whovians everywhere, the second part, Forest of the Dead, was a heartbreaking triumph. Though still reusing elements from previous Moffat scripts (especially The Doctor Dances), the emotional surge in the last five minutes dispelled any misgivings, mixing uplift and tragedy with enough enthusiasm that pointing out its flaws feels like mean-spirited carping.
7. Journeyman – Emily/Blowback
Journeyman was the little show that couldn’t, no matter how much we had hoped it would. Damned as nothing more than a Quantum Leap rip-off, it struggled to attract the Heroes audience at exactly the moment that the Heroes audience decided it didn’t want to watch an entire episode through, let alone hang around to see what was on afterwards, even if that meant missing out on something bold, complex, and thought-provoking. By this point in the show’s run we had realised something special was happening, and this two-parter, exploring the disastrous consequences of Dan Vassar’s actions, and the limitations of his power, was a perfect example of its uncompromising storytelling. With our temporally-challenged protagonist’s liberal good intentions responsible for attracting the attention of a serial killer (played with sleazy menace by Raphael Sbarge), he is forced to contemplate the unthinkable in order to save his family. Kevin McKidd acted the hell out of that moral quandary, Juan Carlos Coto and Kevin Falls wrote the shit out of it, and all across the internet, people finally woke up to the brilliance of this show. Sadly, it was too late to save it from cancellation.
6. Battlestar Galactica – The Hub
Bouncing back from a sorely disappointing third season, Battlestar Galactica picked up a bit but was still not firing on all cylinders. While the plot seemed to be moving pieces into place with some actual honest-to-God events, of all things, many episodes were still tainted by unconvincing histrionics, variable performances, dreary subplots, and clumsy narrative conceits. The Hub featured none of these. With super-total-ace writer Jane Espenson focusing on Laura Roslin (one of the show’s most compelling characters), all of the swish pyrotechnics and gung-ho action paled next to the season’s most dramatic moment; Baltar’s delirious confession of his role in the Caprican genocide, and Roslin’s almost homicidal response. That Mary McDonnell is not the recipient of every award going for her pitch-perfect reaction is a crying shame. And then, to top it off, she tells Bill Adama she loves him. This is the show I once loved. Where the hell has it been?
5. The Venture Brothers – Tears of a Sea Cow
After a long wait, The Venture Brothers returned with a greater emphasis on continuity and drama, to such an extent that my enormous anticipation soon withered into confusion and annoyance. While Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer were still providing the gags, something seemed amiss. By the time we reached Dr. Quymn: Medicine Woman, the repeated focus on a depressed Monarch, the creepy Sgt. Hatred, and Dr. Mrs. The Monarch’s efforts to cheer her husband up had robbed the show of so much of its energy that even that episode, which featured none of those characters, was still not hitting the bullseye. Luckily, Tears of a Sea Cow marked a huge return to form. With Dr. Venture and Brock Samson missing in action for the majority of the episode, the focus shifts to Hank, Dean, and Dermot on one side, and The Monarch’s defiance of the Guild of Calamitous Intent on the other, and as they all accidentally come into conflict of the most half-hearted kind, the show got its mojo back.
Nothing much happens for 22 minutes, but the details are perfect. 21′s immortality misunderstanding, H.E.L.Per’s incessant drumbeat (running joke of the year), The Monarch’s psychosexual obsession with Dr. Venture coming into full bloom; just those three moments would qualify it for the list, but the episode was filled to the brim with comedic gems. In the last few episodes of this reinvigorated season we were treated to the sight of Mark Twain and Oscar Wilde in a League of Extraordinary Gentlemen spoof, the return of Colonel Gentleman and his manboobs, the introduction of super-robot Ventronic, and a shocking two-part finale that featured death and retirement horror. Arguably, those moments were funnier or more dramatic, but Tears of a Sea Cow wins out for bringing the show back on track.
4. Friday Night Lights – Let’s Get It On
As with many of these mini-posts, I’ve already gone on about this exemplary episode at length, so forgive me for going over old ground, but though this season didn’t reach the heights of the first, it was by no means the disappointment that many felt it to be. The worrying plot threads were handled well, the stupid plot threads didn’t hang around long, and the performances were as classy as ever. Though the series had many high points, including Riggins’ speech to his former team-mates, Santiago’s first game, and Tami’s sister arriving to drive Coach insane, this episode featured the highest quota of genius moments, with special praise for Street’s plunge from a boat and subsequent “baptism”, and the sweet and funny Y Tu Mama Tambien scene at the end of the episode. No other show on TV treats adolescent confusion and pain with such seriousness of purpose, or respect for its characters and audience. Everyone who doesn’t watch it is missing out on an incredible experience. Seriously.
3. The Office – Dinner Party
The Deposition, the episode that preceded this one, was excruciating enough, showing the relationship between Michael and Jan to be riven with distrust, mutual loathing, and flashes of inappropriate aggression, yet held together by desperation and fear of loneliness. The Dinner Party, set almost entirely in Michael and Jan’s house, made The Deposition look like a traditional two-camera and laugh-track sitcom from the 70s. The vicious sniping between Michael and Jan was terrifying in its ruthlessness, made all the worse for happening in front of Jim, Pam, Andy and Angela (and, later, Dwight and his babysitter, played with deadpan skill by the wonderful Beth Grant). Director Paul Feig and writers Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky delivered a masterpiece of sphincter-tightening discomfort that not only showed up the original BBC series (which I would have thought was an impossibility), but also anything that fraud Mike Leigh has done. It was the kind of format-busting experiment that proves that, when given enough legroom by the suits at the network, mainstream TV can transcend expectations and deliver devastating and uncompromising storytelling. And yes, I’m aware I’m saying that about a comedy.
2. House M.D. – House’s Head / Wilson’s Heart
Again, I’ve hyper-praised these two episodes, but allow me to indulge myself once again. As with the Journeyman two-parter, it’s impossible to separate these two episodes, even though this time there is a distinct quality difference between the two. While the second half, with the team attempting to save the life of Amber the Cutthroat Bitch, was measured and quiet, the first part, with hallucinations and bus crashes, was big and flashy. It was a superb episode, but mostly despite the attention-seeking efforts of director Greg Yaitanes. That he has been nominated for an Emmy while Katie Jacobs, director of the second episode, was overlooked, is regrettable (on edit: turns out IMDb lists her as co-director on the first episode, but she gets no attention from the Emmy judges). Nevertheless, this season finale represented House at its best. Coming at the end of the most entertaining and thought-provoking season yet, it was the perfect capper, the best episode in the history of the show, and proved the doubters wrong; there is still life in that controversial static formula, especially when used by a showrunning team as bold as this one.
1. Lost – The Shape Of Things To Come
I have spent the months since the season four finale of my favourite show trying to decide which episode was the one I loved the most. Was it The Constant, which used the baffling premise of the show to create a love story that defied time and mortality? Or was it that amazing last episode, filled with more action and surprise than anything other show screened all year? Or was it the one that made me even more long-winded than usual? Just a week ago, I finally came to the conclusion that it had to be this episode, featuring time-travelling, cold-blooded murder, the triumphant return of Cerberus the Smoke Monster, and the best performance of the year. Screw it, the decade. Michael Emerson’s command of the screen is already frightening, and this most shocking of episodes featured his greatest moment yet, a near-wordless breakdown followed by terrifying revenge as our anti-hero chooses to unleash unworldy terror upon his nemesis, even at the cost of losing his hold on the thing he holds most dear. There were countless other superb moments in this episode, but that was the most impressive five minutes of the year. Forgive my hyperbolism, but no other work of art or popular culture has moved and amazed me more than that “simple” bit of acting. I am simply in awe of the man, and the entire Lost team for ignoring the critics and getting us to this point at the deliberate pace they have. If the rest of the payoffs are even a fraction as powerful as those featured in this episode, it will all have been worth it.
Coming up! The ten worst episodes of the year (hint: one of the shows included rhymes with Fuck. Another one rhymes with Norchwood). I might even get into some other stuff. Let’s see how this week goes.
Now That’s Some Good Drama
You should look pleased with yourself, Don Draper. Not only are you the archetypal Alpha Male, but the show you appear in just got good. Really really good.
Just as Six Feet Under and Big Love really hit their stride in their second seasons, Mad Men just kicked off the last scraps of its metamorphonic cocoon and properly fluttered its wings for the first time. I’ve had issues with it in the past, but most of them are resolved now. The season premiere disappointed me, losing some of the goodwill the end of the first season had generated, but the last two episodes have pushed us past “like” and into “love”.
Things that pleased me greatly include:
For the first time ever, despite Canyon’s continued aesthetic annoyance over Don’s flat butt, we’re looking forward to next week’s episode, which features Don and Betty taking the kids away for a weekend of awkward silences, chain-smoking, and maybe even some tears from Betty due to her Bottomless Nordic Sadness. Let’s hope this newfound enthusiasm of ours isn’t thwarted.
End Of Season Review – CSI
A while back we got into the habit of reviewing the shows of the previous week, at first in depth, and then, when it became apparent that it was cutting into my eating and sleeping time, with a bunch of quick comments. I was enjoying doing it, before the strike came and threw everything into total disarray, thus making such a project untenable. When shows slowly dribbled back onto the screen, we barely even noticed. Ugly Betty returned with such little fanfare (in the UK, that is) that we have only just caught up with it. Same with Reaper. Some shows didn’t bother coming back (Pushing Daisies, Heroes), the showrunners deciding to start afresh next year, and some will never come back at all (Bionical Woman, the unfairly cancelled Journeyman). Of those that came back, many of them had lost whatever momentum they had prior to the strike. A pity, but still, over the last couple of weeks, the season finales made up for some of those missteps. We intend to have a look at the state of these shows at the end of the season, but please bear in mind, the quality of the shows was damaged by the strike, and nothing managed to escape losing energy as a result (even my beloved Lost has struggled to cope with the disruption to its schedule). We accept that judging them too harshly would be unfair.
CSI returned with some not so great episodes, much to our disappointment. Though my love for the show remains, I think they’ve passed their high-water mark, which for me would be season six, which featured the aftermath of the amazing Tarantino-helmed season five finale, the introduction of the evil Hannah West, and the incredible two-parter A Bullet Runs Through It, which I maintain is better than almost all crime films I’ve seen in the past ten years. Season seven memorably featured the brilliant Miniature Killer arc (and my personal favourite CSI episode ever, Monster In The Box), and Greg’s ongoing woes after killing a mugger, which fitted in perfectly with his growth as a CSI; everyone else on the team acted like his difficulties were just part of the job, and no worse than anything they had gone through themselves. It also featured the intriguing mid-season Liev Shrieber arc, which was marred only by the actual presence of Shrieber himself. However, on a week-to-week basis, I thought season six was stronger. Perhaps if I rewatch I will disagree with myself, but for now I’ll rely on my memory of that slight deflation I felt as season seven progressed.
This season was weaker still, with some very strong episodes scattered throughout. The best was probably Sara’s departure, Goodbye and Good Luck, which featured the return of Hannah West at her creepiest. Brilliantly directed by Kenneth Fink, it was moving and gripping in perfect balance, and since then hardly anything on the show has matched up (again, bear in mind we’re aware the show was damaged by the strike, and are just glad it came back at all this year). Post-strike, we saw the return of Method Man as Drops, in his most entertaining episode yet, though that’s not saying much as his previous appearances were in the horrible Big Shots and Poppin’ Tags, memorable only because of the running joke with Brass ineptly talking like a rapper and not getting laughed off the screen by everyone around him. It’s kind of embarrassing, and while I’m all for more Method Man, I wish his episodes were stronger.
There was also the classy A Thousand Days On Earth, which saw the team investigate a child death, with some of the team jumping to conclusions and investigating someone on the child sex register, only to find that every one of their assumptions was incorrect. By the time they realise their mistakes, lives have been destroyed everywhere, and Catherine ends up with a new enemy. It was a brilliant examination of how disparate facts do not count as evidence of guilt, no matter how completely those facts apply to the crime in question, and how assumptions make an “ass” out of “u” and “mption”. (A non-Chim Chim Cookie to the firsts person who names the film I just quoted!)
Another highlight was the peculiar The Theory of Everything, with a teleplay from David Rambo and Buffy ace Douglas Petrie that felt like a semi-comedic X-Files episode. Only a tenuous grasp of physics let it down, trying to link the connectivity of a series of crimes with string theory, and including characters called Bohr and Planck. Other than that it was a well-paced head-scratcher, quirky but funny, and not “funny” as many comedy episodes end up being. Speaking of that, following on from the half-comedic/half-serious The Chick Chop Flick Shop, which I thought would be the low point of the season, CBS foolishly came up with a writers-swap plan, with Evan Dunsky, Sarah Goldfinger, Carol Mendelsohn, and Naren Shankar writing an episode of the nigh-unwatchable Two and a Half Men, and Chuck Lorre and Lee Aronsohn derailing a beautiful procedural just so they could settle some old scores with an underwritten parody poking fun at their time spent working on Roseanne, Grace Under Fire and Cybill.
Just to make things worse, they cast the awful Katey Sagal as the screeching, egotistical sitcom lead, and her yokel-voiced double, which was an early warning sign the episode was going to be full of silly trickery and ineptly handled nods at the more melodramatic end of the whodunnit spectrum. Sagal seems fine as a dramatic actress (though at the moment I think my only experience of her playing a role straight is in Lost, as Locke’s lost love Helen, where she was terrific), but as a comedic actress she is appalling. Her flat, joke-killing line-readings in Futurama destroyed the show almost every week, and to see her continually cast in comedies amazes me. Why do people think she can do funny? She has no idea of how to tell a joke, and what’s worse is that her crappy timing is matched with eye-rolling hammery that Zero Mostel would have envied. Dear God, I hated this episode so completely. When the Shades of Caruso End of Season Awards are handed out, this is gonna be high on the horror list.
Luckily, the season ended strongly with For Gedda, at the end of which we lost another CSI, as trouble-laden Warrick’s involvement with the evil Lou Gedda came to a bloody head (literally!). Framed for Gedda’s murder and suffering from amnesia (a device I could normally do without, and yet was used well in this finale and that of House), the CSI team work to clear their colleague, which happens with uncharacteristic ease (and with a little help from the usually officious Ecklie. Obviously getting killed on Lost made his mood-swings more manageable). Of course, this being a season finale, it wasn’t going to end without a big event, and knowing that we were expecting something extra to happen, Warrick is cleared with several minutes of show left to go, and the pace slows right down so that we, the viewer, are left to agonise over what is going to happen. There’s the moment he is cleared, and a discussion with Gil, and a bit of team bonding over dinner, and a farewell to Nick, and a walk to his car… By this point we were in pieces, knowing that he would be leaving the show in a much more dramatic fashion than we’d previously thought, our nerves stretched to breaking point. For Warrick, there was no decision to quit, no suspension over his recklessness. Instead he got a bullet in the neck from the under-sheriff, revealed to have been complicit in Gedda’s criminal activity all along. It was a truly bleak and upsetting end to the season.
We’ve said it many times before; CSI is a rare show where we like every character, and it’s always hard to see them go. Jorja Fox has her fans and detractors, but even if she was our least-favourite character, we liked her enough to be sad to see her go (and seeing her relationship with Gil suffer made us sad too). This was even worse, though Dustin Lee Abraham and Richard Catalani were smart to put Warrick’s woes into perspective by referencing his gambling addiction and culpability in the death of Holly Griggs, who was killed in the very first episode. He’s always been heading towards this final tragedy, which maybe is what made it so hard to watch. To be honest, the denouement of his arc needed a bit more time spent on it prior to the final episode, but as with many shows, having a truncated season meant some plots got given short-shrift (I gather that, in particular, the final episode of Bones has enraged people for rushing a big development with one of the cast). We can’t hate on the show because of that.
Though it wasn’t the best season finale ever, it did feature some of the best filmmaking. Director Kenneth Fink (having a good year) and director of photography Nelson Cragg pulled out all the stops. This episode some of the most luminous and beautiful visual work of the whole season, with some gorgeous backlighting and bounced light giving everything a soft edge when not filling the frame with stark colour contrasts. It was a joy to look at. Most movies don’t look this good. Kudos to the crew and production staff for making such a gorgeous show.
So what next? According to Michael Ausiello, Jorja Fox and the real-life-naughty-man Dourdan will both be in the next season opener, though I doubt they’ll be around for long after that. Though I’m sorry to see those characters go, this season hinted that the format has been going without changes for too long. Though the ambition of the show has increased, it has strayed too closely to gimmickry this year, what with the Two and a Half Men project, the Without A Trace crossover, Hodges and the murder game (an episode I liked, but still thought was a jokey episode too far), and the other shenanigans listed above. Next season will feature at least one new character, Bryce Adams, played by Lauren Lee Smith, an actress who is utterly alien to me. I’m still happy about it, as the first choice for that role was Katee Sackhoff, who is utterly alien to everyone on planet Earth. As a Starbuck hater who thought Sackhoff was beyond laughable on Bionical Woman, I’m thrilled she won’t be stinking up this show.
The only other question is, will Ronnie Lake return? She got some screentime earlier this year and has yet to come back. Another Louise Lombard moment for the show? A quick IMDb check shows she’s been jinxed by taking centre stage in The Chick Chop Flick Shop and is now appearing almost exclusively in slasher flicks. I guess we’ll just have to hope the shake-up to the series extends to something more than just a cast change, and we’ll see an intelligent continuation of this murder plot, now that we have a bona fide sneaky asshole villain on the show. As Jon Stewart would say, just as he reflexively does in almost every edition of The Daily Show, Damn you, Undersheriff McKeen! Damn you all to hell!!!!
TOUCHDOWN!
We have to shout from the rooftops; Friday Night Lights is coming back for a third season of 13 episodes, all of which are guaranteed. Just as with Veronica Mars I have been holding two thoughts in my head in a kind of DoubleThink mode, loving it and yet not wanting to commit to it too much because shows this wonderful rarely last long. Mars, Firefly, Journeyman, Deadwood, Dollhouse (we all know it, let’s not kid ourselves that Fox will suddenly surprise us); we’ve been burned before. But finally, some good news!
Yes, 13 episodes is not the amount I would like (can 365 installments a year be managed somehow?), but I’d rather have an HBO-size season than nothing at all. More Smash! More Riggins! More Landry! Best of all, more wonderful Coach and Mrs. Coach sparring! Where’s my booze and pompoms? It’s go time!
This Week in TV: Week 12
As the last few shows air their last written and filed episodes, each week gets emptier and emptier, leaving us free to do other things, such as watch movies (we’re going through a lot lately), go back and see the stuff we missed the first time (Gossip Girl, Dexter and Mad Men are on our list), or play more Guitar Hero (which accounts for my knackered wrist). Plus, these posts should get smaller. After all, only four shows that we regularly watch got aired last week; Journeyman, CSI, 30 Rock and Pushing Daisies. However, I just came off a crappy shift at work and some scumbag on my street is sabotaging my bins (it sounds so silly on paper, whereas in real life it unleashes the rage), so I’m as mad as hell, and I probably will take it anymore, though I will not be a happy chappy while I do take it. I’ll try to intersperse the rage with stuff I liked.
Most Annoying Cliffhanger of the Week:
If I was going to say, which was the most dramatic cliffhanger, it would be a toss-up between the revelation of Aunt Lily’s real relation to Chuck (hint: not aunt) and Warrick’s suspension from CSI, but the low-key shocker at the end of Journeyman was the one that caused me the most agita. At the start of the episode, Livia is in her own time in the 40s, and we see that she has a boyfriend. At the end of the episode, she has a fiancee.
Quite dramatic, but the thing that annoys me most is that, of course, NBC has canceled this excellent show just as it begins to attract the attention of the fanboybase and the blogosphere and Herc at AICN, and now we’re seeing things that obviously were going to play out over the season but now will be dropped with a thud. How would this have played out? Would she tell Dan? How would that affect him? Is he still in love with Livia? Is Livia’s fiancee (Henry) still alive in the present? If not, how would that affect her? Would she try to help him? Or does she already know his fate and is using that knowledge? Does she know her own fate? Is she still in love with Dan? Was she ever?
Bear with me, I’m not quite done yet. Did Livia just get that “instinct” thing that Journeypersons get that tell them what their task is, and it said she should seduce Dan and then disappear, leaving him grieving and ready to begin a relationship with Katie? Or does Livia love Dan? How is she coping with the fact that she probably spent only a few months between seeing Dan for the “last time” before dying and then seeing him on his first time-trip, in which time he had moved on, got married, and had a child? The show throws up millions of character-based questions on top of the overall time-travelling mystery, and how many of them can be answered in the next two episodes? I am so pissed at the cancellation of this show that I cannot express it without using words and sentences that will warp the internet like a mega-dense object warps space/time. Let’s just say that NBC are not on my Christmas card list, no matter how much I love 30 Rock and Friday Night Lights. Screw them and their much vaunted Clash of the Choirs. Thanks for ruining Christmas, jerk-asses. (ETA: Christmas isn’t actually ruined by this news, but those heartless NBC arse-nodules sure tried anyway!)
Still Funnier Than “Pimp My Trike” Visual Gag of the Week:
30 Rock‘s The Girlie Show is obviously meant to be pretty dreadful stuff, but seriously, is this worse than Studio 60‘s dire Crazy Christians sketch?
Everyone loves farting. It’s a scientifically proven fact.
Most Despicable Omission of the Week:
The Golden Globes nominations have been announced, and there’s a lot there to like (two nominations for Big Love!) and a lot to be pissed about (no nominations for Jeanne Tripplehorn, Chloe Sevigny or Ginnifer Goodwin??!?! WTF??!?!), but possibly the most egregious snub is for Pushing Daisies. It got three nominations (yay!), and two of them were for Lee Pace and Anna Friel. Excellent stuff. They started off well and have gotten better as they’ve grown into their characters. However, where in the name of unholy Cthulhu is Chi McBride’s fully deserved nomination for supporting actor?
I get that the Best Actor/Actress nominations are more spread out, with more categories and more possibility to shine, but even though McBride was eligible in the overstuffed category of Best Performance By An Actor In A Supporting Role In A Series, Mini-Series Or Motion Picture Made For Television, meaning he had more competition, it’s still out of line that he didn’t get a mention. Of course, Kristin Chenoweth got snubbed as well, and that makes me angry as well, but I’m taking up cudgels over McBride because as much as I love Chenoweth in Pushing Daisies, her break-up with Aaron Sorkin partially inspired the creation of Studio 60, so I’m still a little mad at her about that.
Leaving aside that bitterness, it baffles me as to how McBride could have been snubbed. Two nominations for Entourage? Jeremy Piven and Kevin Dillon might be great on that show, but by now Piven’s only getting nominations because of his past wins. He’s not suddenly turned all crap, so they can’t not nominate him, but they feel they should nominate Kevin Dillon as well, so the supporting actors (Pfft. Like anyone considers Thingy Grenier the lead) gets two nominations right off the bat. Any other time I wouldn’t care, but it means nothing for Chi, and that shit ain’t right. Here’s Emerson and Ned to facially describe my mood.
i.e. Not pretty.
Most Entertainingly Exasperated Person of the Week:
Last year, Sir Gerry Robinson tried to fix a poorly running hospital in the quizzically titled Can Gerry Robinson Fix The NHS? (Answer: apparently not, though not through lack of trying.) We managed to get through it despite the knee surgeries (they involved hammers) and eye surgeries (I won’t describe those, because I might hwoark), mostly because Sir Ger was a hugely entertaining host. Usually TV presenters are required to be dispassionate (unless they’re appearing on Who Do You Think You Are, You Son-Of-A-Bitch, in which case they must cry), which is why he was so mesmerising. With every obfuscation and vacillation, he got more and more frustrated, rubbing his hands over his reddening face, gasping in amazement like a dying fish, and talking directly to the camera with rising agony. His sentences were along the lines of, “I asked the manager if he was able to hire new nurses, and his response… his response was… well, it was… ::sigh:: it was just. Un. Believable!”
This week he went back to see what had happened one year later, and everything was going swimmingly, with metal knees banged into place and eyes fiddled with. ::retch:: At least, he had managed to inspire the staff of Rotherham Hospital to change their working habits and strive for efficiency, which was great. However, to Sir G’s immense face-rubbing horror, the government’s “See, we do care about the NHS by spending wads of cash on it” initiatives were making a mockery of their progress, accidentally punishing them by creating a new walk-in centre nearby that would leach off money and easy-to-treat patients. On paper more private trusts sounded great (which is all that matters to a short-sighted politician), but it served no purpose other than to doom the established and improving hospital.
Sir Gezza got to talk to some oily suit-wearing Mr. Smith style creep whose explanations of why the drop-in centre would work out were cyclical, incoherent, and unconvincing. This triggered yet more face-rubbing and sighing from Sir Gerry, but this time we were following his example. Please BBC, send a copy of this to Michael Moore. As much as Moore was right to go after privatised medicine, he needs to see this too. Centralised control isn’t working either, much as I hate to say it. The show was a real eye-opener (much as the first was) and, thanks to the unusual and likeable onscreen presence of Serge Erry, accidentally entertaining too. If unutterably depressing and frustrating.
Bittersweet Show of the Week:
Much has been made of the cutesy tone of Pushing Daisies, with its Jim Dale voiceover, overdesigned sets, and twee murder plots (dandelion-powered cars, taffy drownings, mortal beatings with a baseball bat that has the word “kindness” etched into it, etc.), and there is something to that. However, while the production design is filled with details that will either annoy you or make you smile (such as Olive’s pajamas and quilt covers matching her bedroom wallpaper), the showrunners have stealthily removed the most cloying detail, namely the sickmaking lovey-dovey relationship between Chuck and Ned, as well as making Chuck subtly smell of death. No one notices it except for olfactory genius Oscar Vibenius, played by Paul Reubens, but still, it’s a peculiar and morbid touch.
Ned and Chuck are still together, of course, but over the past couple of episodes the miserable reality of their situation has stripped them of their giddy joy. Not only are they unable to touch each other but Ned’s power killed Chuck’s father and has forced Chuck into hiding from her family. Horrible for them, great for the show. Any worry that their chirpy romance would make the show hard to stomach has been allayed. Instead there’s the bittersweet sense that the romance might actually be doomed despite the starcrossed nature of their love. The scene with Ned finding a heartbroken Chuck was unexpected and affecting, unlike any scene between them to this point.
Add to that Emerson’s relentless pissiness, the increasingly dark humour (they really make the resurrection scenes as dark as possible) and the easily forgotten fact that the show is a weekly murder mystery (often with an alarmingly high body count), and it’s hard to keep levelling the cutesiness criticism at it. This week saw some frozen-corpse jokes involving dogs pissing on snowmen used to hide dead bodies, ice-picks chipping ice away to expose decaying flesh, and a head block stuck to the back of one guy’s head, in what was possibly my other favourite sight gag of the week.
This week was the Christmas episode, and only the ultra-cynical 30 Rock matched it for anti-Yuletide sentiment. How many Christmas specials can you remember that end with two lovers debating whether to temporarily resurrect a decaying loved one just so one of them can get one minute of hasty closure?
That’s some brass cohones they’ve got on that show.
Easter Egg of the Week:
Didn’t notice this when I first saw it, so thanks to those who alerted me to it. (Click on it to get the full detail)
Thanks also for spotting, “It’s not a Lemon party without Old Dick.”
Cheapest Shot of the Week:
I know Pushing Daisies is prohibitively expensive, and I get that they have to save money somehow, but come on guys, when looking for a snowy street to slot in as the view from a window, don’t just steal a shot from a movie everyone’s seen before.
A cookie for the first person to name the film it’s stolen from.
Performance of the Week:
Until this point, Katie, played by Gretchen Egolf, has been somewhat overshadowed by gruff Journeyman Kevin McKidd and internet sensation Moon Bloodgood, having been stuck with the role of frustrated wife/mother. It could have been worse. If the show hadn’t been so gratifyingly bold, she would have been kept in the dark about Dan’s time-travelling leading to multiple iterations of wifely paranoia and threats of divorce. Though frustrated wife is still not the best role, it’s been written well, and Egolf has done a great job with it.
This week, she got to push the envelope even further, as she deals with the shooting of Agent Richard Garrity in her kitchen (man, Mark “Ryan Chappelle from 24” Schultze, who played Garrity, really gets no luck), not to mention being terrorised by the loathsome Aeden Bennett. Instead of brushing the incident under the carpet, we see Katie organising a large Christmas event for the family, doing her best to keep herself busy. Just to make things awkward she becomes haunted by the apron she had been forced to wear by her tormenter.
Each time she comes across it her reaction is more extreme, leading to a mini-breakdown in front of her mother-in-law. Of course, in keeping with the tone of the show, her reactions are low-key and believable, as is her fractious relationship with Dan’s mother. It’s a terrific, subtle performance, and it made me sit up and take proper notice of her for the first time. I feel a bit bad for not giving her a chance earlier. According to her IMDb page she’s not done too much work, but I have seen (and adored) Anthony Minghella’s version of The Talented Mr. Ripley, though I don’t remember her in it. Interesting fact, if it is indeed a fact: according to IMDb (which is authoritative, n’est-ce pas?) The Talented Mr. Ripley had two working titles; The Mysterious Yearning Secretive Sad Lonely Troubled Confused Loving Musical Gifted Intelligent Beautiful Tender Sensitive Haunted Passionate Talented Mr. Ripley, and The Strange Mr. Ripley. I mean, come on. The Strange Mr. Ripley? That’s a really moronic title.
Back in the world of Journeyman, Dan’s mother helps Katie deal with Dan’s disappearances, having dealt with her own husband’s absences, by telling her she doesn’t need Dan, and can survive on her own. Oddly enough, that does the trick. Dang, at this rate, he’s gonna end up divorced. How will the show cope with that incredible possibility? Oh, that’s right. It won’t. Because NBC canceled it. The corporate scumwads.
Casting Choice I’m Never Going To Be Able To Get My Head Around of the Week:
Though I was amazed to have lived long enough to see the downright peculiar sight of Michelle Ryan onscreen with Miguel Ferrer, nothing beats the discombobulation I get when I see Anna Friel acting alongside Paul Reubens.
That’s daddy-murdering Beth Jordache talking to Pee-Wee Herman! Wow, the 21st century truly is an age of wonders.
Sneakiest Introduction of a Plot Thread of the Week:
While Journeyman has so far focussed on the romantic quadrangle of Dan, Livia, Katie and Jack, a fifth element was introduced a few weeks in; a love interest for Jack, Dr. Teresa Sanchez, played by Lisa Sheridan. Her introduction was kinda sketchy, with a meet-cute date getting disrupted by Dan, and it seemed like she was just there to give Jack someone to hang out with and make Katie jealous. As the weeks wore on, she continued to pop up, and we thought little of it. She didn’t seem to trust Dan, but that’s fair enough, neither did Jack. Then, as Jack comes into the time-travel fold, she is left out and her suspicions increase. Was she in league with poor dead Mark Schulze? Or Elliott Langley, the mysterious quantum physicist? Nope, she’s a doctor, and thinks like a doctor. Dan is acting like a bi-polar depressive, and she recognises the signs.
Jack catches her snooping around looking for anti-depressants and is furious that she would sniff around his brother like that (amusing considering that’s exactly what he had been doing just a little while ago), but Teresa drops a bombshell; depression is hereditary, and she’s worried her new child, fathered by Jack, will end up the same way. There had been no inkling that news of the pregnancy was coming, and instantly Teresa becomes important and part of the tangled web of relationships on the show. What will happen to her child? Will she get rid of it, as was hinted strongly? Even if she keeps it, will she stay together with Jack? Or will Katie leave Dan and unintentionally tempt Jack away from Teresa? Oh, that’s right. The show has been cancelled, so we’ll never know. I almost forgot about NBC’s cowardice and lack of foresight. Silly me. I should write it down on the back of my hand so I don’t forget!
Not Quite, But Almost, Grin of the Week:
As there was no new Reaper this week we should retire the Grin of the Week award, but it’s necessary to reward this near-miss from the recently un-nominated Chi McBride, who apparently recovers from carbon monoxide poisoning as if from a fruity dream.
Most Upsetting Show of the Week:
CSI is one of the grisliest shows ever made, not afraid to show autopsies and murders and crime scenes and all sorts of unpleasantness. This week, however, saw a different kind of nastiness; dogfighting. Tracy Jordan might have dabbled with the “sport” and wrung some laughs out of it earlier this year, but with our criminalist heroes stumbling across a dogfighting ring, the laughs dried up faster than a turkey slice in a pub Sunday roast. They even managed to show some of a fight, which made us both very unhappy.
It got worse than that screencap suggests. A couple of minutes later and a gunfight breaks out between the scummy dregs of humanity and the police, a rarity on the flagship CSI (but nothing special on the Miami variant). Some of the dogfighters get blasted to evil shreds, and I say HA! because yuk, youse guys is scum. Even worse than the NBC execs who cancelled Journeyman. Far far worse, in fact. That’s some serious evil.
Still, it gave us some quality Nick Stokes time, which is always a good thing. George Eads is a big dog-lover in real life (at least according to Canyon, who is similarly a fan, of both dogs and George Eads), and it’s the perfect episode. After Warrick’s raging bullshit from the previous episode, it’s good to see the opposite approach. Nick is obviously sickened by the dogfighting and eager to take down the bad guys, but he at least attempts to be dispassionate, opting instead for some quality gloating when he gets his man.
Classy guy.
Most Suspended Idiot of the Week:
Warrick, on the other hand, goes off at a suspect at the end of the episode and gets suspended by a horrified Gil. Way to go, douchenheimer. What did you think was going to happen?
This is the sort of thing that happens in CSI: Miami every couple of weeks. They’re always getting framed or involved in murders (or shot by nailguns or caught buying drugs for their terminally ill sister etc. etc. etc). Guess Gil’s more of a man than H, seeing as how he stands up to Warrick and gets him canned for a couple of weeks. H would swear to clear the presumed-guilty CSI with his most earnestest orange expression on his face. On a good week he’d get to shoot a perp and either kill or wound him badly, though leaving him conscious so he can threaten to kill him. I can’t see Gil ever doing that.
Best Guest Stars of the Week:
Nothing can top the mighty 30 Rock for quality guest stars, happily following in the footsteps of Arrested Development by hiring excellent actors and giving them juicy parts to play. This week featured the first appearance of the Lemon clan, played by Anita Gillette, Andy Richter, and veteran funnyman Buck Henry.
Even better, the return of scheming mother Elaine Stritch, making Jack’s life a living hell. Not only was she great, but she brought out the best in Alec Baldwin (yes, he managed to be even more incredible than usual). His hissing delivery of the line, “Really? Life is too short? Because your life seems endless,” just about finished me off.
It’s fair to say he’s got next year’s Emmy in the bag as well. Perhaps the Golden Globe as well! That’s if he got nominated, that is. For all I know the voters nominated Zach Braff over him this year, for his work in re-popularising the gurn as a valid comedic move.
That feels so much better. Next week, the final journey for the Journeyman, and pretty much nothing else. Unless I’m lazy and wait until after the Kylied-Up Doctor Who Christmas Special airs. Without Martha in it I might not be able to muster the energy, though. ::still bitter after all these years::
This Week in TV: Week 11 (Part 2)
It’s with a saddened heart I continue my piercing, pissy, puisant comments about That Week in TV, as it has turned out that NBC has decided against renewing the episode order for Journeyman, choosing instead to keep Chuck going even though it’s limping along, narratively, like a two legged woolly mammoth in the middle of a heatwave. As usual it’s a case of one show getting young viewers (and being aired at a reasonable hour), and another show appealing to adults who have less disposable income but being aired at 10pm. Idiotic. While at first the new season appeared to be weak, the improvements in Pushing Daisies, Reaper and Journeyman have been very welcome (and we’re hearing good things about Gossip Girl, which appears to be the good Josh Schwartz show of the season, and will be watched by us as soon as the strike begins to really bite). That still only means three (maybe four) shows were worth our continued attention, and none of them have done very well. Reaper has low ratings, but is on CW where that’s par for the course. Pushing Daisies has a bigger following than Journeyman, but it’s still not the breakout hit ABC were hoping for. And this is all before we get into the strike situation, and how that’s affecting things. Kevin Falls, Journeyman creator, has said that the strike could end up saving Journeyman, but he’s a classy guy and hopes that’s not the case.
Although NBC isn’t ordering a full-season of Journeyman, it hasn’t officially canceled the show either. In fact, there’s a remote chance it could get a second season pickup if the strike continues through the spring, when the town is usually developing pilots for the next TV season. “If there is scorched earth and there are no pilots, then that’s a whole different thing,” admits Falls. “There is probably a better than average chance that we would come back. But nobody wants that. I would throw my show on the sword if this strike would end beforehand. Too many people suffer from a long strike.”
No matter what happens, not getting to see the full season plan come to fruition (it’s in the article, but beware, it contains spoilers) is regrettable. NBC may run three of my favourite shows (Friday Night Lights, The Office, and 30 Rock), but right now we’re not on speaking terms. ::does obscene Italian hand gesture in general direction of NBC HQ::
Ah well, it was pretty obvious this would happen, so I shouldn’t act surprised. I shall continue, through the tears. ::sniff:: I wonder how internet and lad’s mag superstar Moon Bloodgood is taking it?
Oh, she’s got a husky to keep her company. That’s alright then.
Saddest Hair Loss of the Week:
The Pasdar, a hairstyle that could have swept the nation if it had more screentime over the past few weeks, TIM KRING!, was sadly laid to rest this week with the shocking (and downright show-crippling) shooting of Nathan Petrelli, former senator and flying ace, gunned down by a mysterious assassin just as he was about to finish the sentence, “I have the ability to fly” to a gathering of journalists. Nicely timed, mysterious assassin who has probably yet to be cast. Pasdar has been Heroes‘ MVP this season, bringing some snarky attitude to what has otherwise been ponderous and grumpy in place of the effortlessly low-key atmosphere of the first season. Rumour has it that of the two characters “killed” this week, only one is actually dead. While I may not have been the biggest hater of Niki (I was curious to see how her power was going to play out), I’d very much appreciate Kring’s sudden interest in the opinion of the fanbase play out with him listening to the cries of “Pasdar death but noooooo!” and let Ali Larter go. Look, even her superpowered family is upset about Pasdar’s death.
Seriously, they are not reacting to Niki’s flaming demise at all, even though it looks that way. If you saw the show and it looked like they were mourning Niki, you saw the work of an editing hacker. For serious. No comebacks!
Best Directed Scene of the Week:
Friday Night Lights is often a masterclass of directing, as well as writing, acting, lighting, catering, and many other things. It could cure the sick and change the rotation of any celestial body it felt like as well, I’m sure. That said, even with a quality level and artistic ambition far above pretty much everything else on TV right now (or ever), this week featured a breathtaking set piece, as Dillon Panthers newbie Santiago plays his first ever game. Even for a new character he has been pretty sidelined so far, interacting with most of the main characters for a couple of minutes each episode, being used as a device to show new aspects of their personalities (Tyra’s snobbery, Buddy’s generosity, Coach’s… well, his pissiness, which is not entirely new). This week he got a sequence to himself, first being driven to the game by Buddy and expressing his fear by having a big hissyfit, screaming insults at Buddy and disparaging the game (which was probably more hurtful to his benefactor than anything he could say about him personally). Somehow, Buddy’s response (threats and fury) inspired Santiago, who grumpily snarls, “I hate you!” but goes to the game anyway.
The game is a disaster, with the first half going conclusively to the opposing team. What was so superb about that is that Buddy must have realised at that point that Santiago was so scared he would probably choke on the field, but if he didn’t play he would never trust Buddy, and would begin to reoffend again. Buddy never does anything he thinks will harm Dillon’s game, but finally he sees he has no choice but to do what’s right for a single person, even if it screws up the Panthers defence. Gambling on the possibility that Santiago would surprise everyone, Buddy begs Coach to let him play, and in the third quarter, he relents. And it goes badly.
Bewildered, scared and frustrated, Santiago chokes horribly, and thanks to the visual template created by Peter Berg in the movie and the show pilot, the camera is right next to him as he tumbles and screws up. Coach reacts in his usual manner.
With everything looking bleak, and third down reached, Santiago scans the manic crowd, and the sound of their cheering drowns out everything, until we hear a low growl coming from him and his fellow Panthers. The look in his eyes at this point is, frankly, terrifying.
It might be a cliche that the scared character comes through in the end, but it’s used a lot because it’s effective and can be moving when done right. Knowing what the stakes are, thanks to weeks of slow character development, it doesn’t matter that you know he will be alright. The moment he sacks the quarterback and changes the momentum of the game still works because by now his success is important, not just for him but for Coach and Buddy and, by God, the whole damn town!!!
During this five minute sequence there is barely any dialogue, just sound collages and incoherent shouts, with the cameras placed as close to the action as possible. It’s the sort of scene you expect in a movie, but to see it on TV, where tight schedules make it hard to create effective visual set-pieces, shows that technology and skill and training and understanding of the medium has grown to such a point that this kind of superb, moving, nerve-wracking storytelling is possible on a regular basis, if extra effort is expended.
And yes, Buddy apologising for shouting and then telling Santiago he won the game with a single play made me cry. A lot. Stop judging me!
Most Welcome Guest Director of the Week:
Shades of Caruso loves William Friedkin. Loves! Do we love every movie he has made? Oh hell no. Jade? Love the Mighty Caruso though we do, that is a piece of shit movie, and Joe Eszterhas is a hack who has had a couple of lucky strikes to his name (three if you count the colossally entertaining Showgirls). That’s not his worst film. Rules of Engagement, with Sam Jackson and Tommy Lee Jones, is possibly the most despicable movie I own, ideologically repulsive and galactically overwrought. Peter Bradshaw sums it up way better than I could in his Guardian review. Speaking of which, Friedkin also directed The Guardian, in which a family is terrorised by an evil tree. 
Not a triffid, a tree. Turns out Friedkin took his name off the film, replacing it with Alan Von Smithee. That’s right. Allan Smithee was not a good enough pseudonym. It had to have a Von in there. You’d think he was being funny, but having seen him in interviews, he has no sense of humour about himself at all.
Other crimes include terrorising and injuring his cast members on The Exorcist, wearing cravats and high pants and aviator shades (see above and below for examples), and praising Joe Carnahan’s absurd Narc just because he thought it was a homage to his filmography. So why were we thrilled to hear he was directing an episode of our favourite crime procedural?
Because he is so very entertaining. And unable to see how ridiculous he often is (his commentary for the aforementioned Rules of Engagement is my favourite ever, so unguarded are his comments). And because he has made some of my favourite movies, obviously. The Exorcist and The French Connection, predictably, but I also remember loving Sorceror when I was younger (importantly, that was before I saw Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear, so who knows if I’ll still like it if I saw it now). Recently he did a great job directing Ron “Awesome” Shelton’s Blue Chips, starring Nick “Also Awesome” Nolte, as well as directing one of the best (and certainly most underrated) action movies of the last ten years, The Hunted.
In a way it was the proto-Bourne Ultimatum, stripped down to the essentials and almost entirely devoid of the absurdity that can often mar his films. Tommy Lee Jones has about 15 lines of dialogue, Benicio Del Toro is like a machine (or an animal, or a machinimal), and the final 40 minutes is a long chase scene. It’s all so spare, with barely any event getting in the way of telling the story of two stone killers trying to kill each other, sometimes with stones. It sounds boring, but it’s riveting, and brutal, and thrilling.
Of course, he also directed To Live and Die in L.A., featuring a young and never-sexier William Petersen, running around at the speed of light and getting his Little Billy out for the camera. It’s not that great a movie, and when we watched it recently we just laughed at it from the first frame to the last (sexxy John Pankow? Erm…) but it’s so…
…large, I guess is the right word, so unafraid to do whatever it takes to get a response from the audience, that I can’t help but love it a little, from the vibrant Robby Muller photography to the super-dated Wang Chung soundtrack to the relentlessly erotic mise en scene (apologies for putting a first year Film Studies phrase in there, but seriously, most of the film has a neon pallette, with strip clubs and their neon-ness playing a large part in the plot). Plus, of course, the awesome car chase, which has become a recurring Friedkin motif, whether he likes it or not.
So, it’s all very interesting to us as both Friedkin fans and CSI fans, and so cool to see Petersen reunited with the man who convinced him to shamelessly display his genitals. But CSI is not like the films mentioned above. There’s not much sex (and it’s rarely lascivious), no garishness (just well-balanced colours), no overt tackiness. It has a glossy sheen and treats the underbelly of Las Vegas with tact and a non-judgemental manner. Surely CSI: Miami, with its clumsy handling of moral issues, melodramatic plotlines, and sleazy sensationalism (which are factors in our affection for both show and director), would be a better fit. So how would Friedkin modify his directorial impulses to fit the CSI: Classic template?
By framing a drug-addled, hallucinating, shag-happy Warrick for the bloody murder of a stripper/hooker and setting almost the entire episode in a neon-soaked strip club, of course. It even opened with a car chase. So I guess the writers wrote the episode specifically for him? I guess? ::sigh::
That’s not to say it was bad. Warrick’s screw-ups are a standard plot device since season one, and this season has hinted that the break-up of his marriage has affected him far worse than it might have seemed when he makes offhand comments about it. Having his woes come centre-stage does another wonderful thing that CSI does on occasion; create episodes based on the troubles of the actors. Gary Dourdan has recently been in trouble for beating up a TMZ photographer, so that wild streak of his seems to have been parodied in this episode. It’s reminiscent of Marg Helgenberger’s episode about cosmetic surgery, which was cheekily filmed while her Botoxed forehead didn’t move an inch for an entire season. Not even a twitch. We couldn’t believe the brass balls of the producers for doing that. This episode was a bit like that, and the extra frisson worked well.
Also good was a wonderfully creepy scene where Warrick investigated a weird barbecue pit behind the strip club. Nothing much happened, but the atmosphere was deeply troubling. It was such a pleasure to watch, knowing the guy still had it. Of course, he still had to go and screw it up by going off the deep end, ending the episode with a lengthy hallucination/sex scene, which included topless Dourdan for the ladies…
…and a semi-naked imaginary-knife-wielding hottie who ends up dead a bit later, at which point Warrick unleashes a “Nooooooooo!” that would make Darth Vader’s Revenge of the Sith “Noooooooo!” cower in fear.
Overall, it was another triumph for our hero Friedkin, but as usual, a triumph tainted with the stench of failure. There may be directors I love because they never get it wrong (or at least, very rarely), and some directors I hate because they never get it right, but Friedkin belongs in that unique subset: a director I love and hate and love to hate, because he gets things wonderfully right and horribly wrong, sometimes in the same movie. Or scene, even. I really need to see Bug ASAP.
Goofiest Facial Expression of the Week:
Question: Why was Milo Ventimiglia cast as Sylvester Stallone’s son in Rocky V? Here’s a hint:
That’s some serious currybum face going on there. Perhaps he absorbed the powers of someone who could propel bowling balls through his ass. Useful if going up against the animated bowling-pin army of a particularly inventive mad scientist, but otherwise not good for much.
ETA: a concerned citizen has pointed out that Milo Ventimiglia was actually in Rocky Balboa: The Balboening, and not Rocky V: This Time It’s Personal And The Other Four Times Didn’t Quite Count. I apologise profusely, and will eat a bowling ball as punishment.
Bizarre and Miraculously Non-Gratuitous Nudity of the Week:
Friedkin’s CSI episode featured a lot of gyrating ladies in their shiny knickers, which Friedkin would probably have explained away as his attempt to show the dark heart of Vegas, and not lots of miscellaneous flesh. He can win as many awards as he likes, like this one presented to him by a couple of film professors and Mark Kermode in his best zoot suit, but at his heart, he’s a salacious son of a bitch, bless him.
However, Reaper managed to get hott lady skin on TV and make it a plot point. Sock and Ben realise that Cady, if the daughter of Ray Wise, will have 666 on her body somewhere. Contriving to erect a hot tub in his front yard, Sock and Ben get Cady alone and convince her to strip by saying it’s the only way they’ll ever trust her with their friend Sam. And she does.
Actually, that bit is a bit crazy, even though she convinces both Sock and Ben to strip too. Maybe Cady is a wild child and we don’t know it yet. Or maybe kids these days do that sort of thing all the time. Back in my day the sight of an ankle would turn men into sexual werewolves, but then our local vicars were prowling the streets with silver-bullet shooting crucifixes in order to stop the sexx. (These are all metaphors, by the way. I come from the West Midlands. No one in the West Midlands has ever come up with something as cool as a gun shaped like a crucifix, especially one built to kill lycanthropes.)
“What in the Wide Wide World of Sports is a-going on here?!?!” Sight of the Week:
Christopher Gorham is adorable as Henry in Ugly Betty. We’ve been rooting for him and Betty, and panicked during the gloomy Charlie-months, even though Charlie was played by the equally adorable Jayma Mays. Canyon has commented on his cuteness in the past, and I can see that. He’s a good looking guy. But OMG seriously, what. The hell? Is this?!??!!??!?!?
That’s not a trick of the eye. He works out. I get that. But is he having his intestines removed? Are they hidden in a tesseract located in his abdomen? And what’s going on with his upper body? It’s enormous! His arms are big too. Not Benjamin McKenzie girder-style guns, but still, plenty big for a guy who gets hired to play bookish nerds. I’m a bookish nerd, and I once worked out, but if I ever ended up looking like that I’d sprint to the nearest Wendy’s and gluttonise myself on their wonderful Jalapeno Double Melts (limited edition! Buy five today!), just to get that belly back.
For God’s sake, he looks like an man-sized ant in a wifebeater. The second episode of Ugly Betty was, as I said before, much better than the previous one, by an order of magnitude, but the sight of this torso, and him dancing badly, was deeply troubling.
Face/Off of the Week:
Hiro Nakamura vs. Adam Munroe? Useless Mohinder Suresh vs. Sylar? Niki Thingummybob vs. the elemental force known as fire? Nuh-uh. Julie Taylor vs. Tami Taylor!
It burnt up the screen. The tension building up between mother and daughter all season has boiled over once before, but just to make that metaphor redundant, it boiled over again this week, with an incoherent and frankly scary screaming match. It was, as is often the case with Friday Night Lights, utterly believable.
In the final touching scenes, it seemed that they had put their troubles to one side for baby Gracie’s baptism, but it didn’t feel like anything had really been resolved. With typically astute writing, Julie the brat was not so bratty as to misunderstand her responsibility on the important day, but not so mature that her frustration with her mother was resolved. Hopefully there will be many more rucks, as this was a great scene (and Canyon’s favourite moment of the episode).
Next week, no digressions about werewolves, no Grin of the Week (no Reaper!), and more Journeyman, prior to being shoved into a corner and forgotten by network execs with a lump of coal where their hearts should be, and probably not much else. My typing finger will be most grateful for the break.
This Week in TV: Week 11 (Part 1)
Considering there were less shows on TV this week, I actually have more to wonk on about than usual, what with the “volume” finale of Heroes, the reunion of To Live and Die in LA legends Billy Peterson and Billy Friedkin, and two episodes of Ugly Betty (not because two were aired, but because we missed one). So, I’m splitting this in two, so I can finish the rest of it tomorrow and get to bed (I have no choice; Man-Thing is on Sky Movies and I can’t find the remote). Anyway, let’s get this out of the way right now, because I bet the suspense is killing you.
Grin of the Week:
Ray Wise!
That’s never changing. Get used to it.
Canyon’s Highlight of the Week:
Reaper has gone from being our favourite new show of the season to a show we greatly enjoy but tend to forget about not long after, but this week saw all of the elements fit together pleasingly, with the non-female cast at their best, the female cast finally getting suspicious of Sam and his reaping buddies (though it took a ridiculously long time to happen, at least it finally is), Donavon “Ted the douche” Stinson getting a finger broken by an angry bookie (funnier than it sounds), and an interesting new plot element coming into play; Sam’s new girlfriend Cady, played by Jessica Stroup.
Is she the Devil’s daughter? As she seems to kill everything she touches, including the doomed goldfish shown above, it seems like that might be the case. It’s hard to say too much about the show most of the time, as what it does well is play off the chemistry of the leads, with a lot of the heavy lifting done by Tyler Labine. Sock is one of the most appealing characters of the new season, a cross between Shaggy and Jack Black, which is enough to make many people stay away. A shame, as his timing and delivery is pitch-perfect. As good as Bret Harrison and Rick Gonzalez are (and even though they’re improving every week), they are still straight men to Labine, who controls the screen every time he’s around.
Only Ray Wise is more lovable than him, but that goes without saying.
My Highlight of the Week:
Controversially, it was the “volume” finale of Heroes, which was packed with plotholes and tonal errors and silly dialogue and silly deaths and all sorts of nonsense, but was much more propulsive than the rest of the season put together, and managed to make the first season finale look even worse than it already did. Though the show is seemingly broken beyond repair (unless a new writing team is brought in, and sharpish), this did have its good points. Hiro’s revenge on “Adam Monroe” was excellent, Sylar’s Popeye moment was hilarious, and Elle’s realisation that she can be a good person if she tries hard enough was nicely handled. It’s the first time this entire season that I’ve been glad Kristen Bell has been around.
Partially, my heightened enjoyment was attributable to my new relaxed approach to watching it. Knowing it will probably suck has made it a more entertaining viewing experience, as I have now stopped trying to compare it to season one’s highpoints (which, as Canyon pointed out during this episode, were actually fewer than I remember). It’s a fun show, but it’s not ever going to compare with our real favourites. I remain fond of it, though. Canyon, on the other hand, seems to actively dread it now, and while my mocking is affectionate, hers has become ruthless. She even dissed Matt and Peter’s think-off, which I loved, silly expressions, fish-eye lenses and all.
Bzzzzzzt! I’m thinking the hurty words at you! With my face!
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzing! I’m thinking them right back, two times! To the bridge!
Lowlight of the Week:
Due to our trip to the US, we dropped the ball on what was screened each week, meaning we missed an episode of Ugly Betty (this strike isn’t helping matters. With The Office gone for a while and other shows reaching the end of their runs, we don’t know what’s going on). Upon realising this we were overjoyed. Ugly Betty! We love it! Silly transitional wipes and all! And then we watched the missed episode, and our hearts sank. Truly, this was a fresh hell. How bad? Trying to make Alan Dale the comic relief. He’s a fun serious actor, but even The O.C. knew not to do that.
Though it might sound like I’ve completely lost all perspective and entered the world of the Internet Crazies when I say this, it is scary when a beloved show misfires so completely that there are no saving graces left. Case in point: Alias was, for two seasons, one of the best shows on TV. It had some problems, but often they were fixed quickly, and each week offered something of quality. The first season was especially good, as good as any network show I’ve ever seen. Even the show reboot that happened midway through the second season worked well, and was kicked off by possibly the best Alias episode ever, Phase One. And then the third season started with a two-year leap forward that removed all dramatic tension from the show, added a multitude of dreary questions, and changed every character into a blander version of themselves. It was catastrophic, and even though I tried, I just couldn’t muster any further interest in the show. (I know, I was talking about Ugly Betty. This will all make sense soon, I promise.)
There were no warning signs that Alias was about to spin off the tracks, but suddenly it was a shadow of its former self. Did the show fall asleep next to a pod and wake up with no emotions? What’s scary is that this can obviously happen to any show we like, and this episode of Ugly Betty, filled with dead lines, shameless mugging, desperate plotting, obvious tricksiness, and Dirty-Sexy-Money-level writing, made us fear for the worst. I just checked the credits of the horrid episode again, after IMDb conflicted with my memory. The show credits say the writer is Charles Pratt Jr., a veteran soap writer who worked on General Hospital among others, but IMDb is telling me it was Bill Wrubel. Whoever it was, I can’t imagine them wanting to own up to having written this. Joke after joke fell flat, to the point that we could barely watch actors we enjoy trying to find the laugh. It even unfunnyised Amanda. Amanda for God’s sake!
It was so wrong and Bizarro-World inept that it made us think the show was broken. Stupid really, considering the writer’s strike has meant they’re dragging in producers to write episodes (the same thing happened with the dreadful Wicked advert they aired a few weeks ago), but for a moment, it was as if the show was never going to get back to its normal self. And it upset us. Yes, there are far worse things in the world than a show going bad, but one of the things I love about TV shows is realising the showrunners, the producers, the writing staff, and sometimes even the network execs, have reached a point where they know exactly what kind of show they’re making, what stories they can tell, what points they can make.
Suddenly a show that’s good reaches the next level, with jokes and plots written for the actors, arcs clicking into place, continuity increasing in complexity; it can be really satisfying. Classic example: the arrival of Spike and Angelus in Buffy turned it from a diversion to the best show on TV (EVER!!!). Journeyman started off okay, but when Dan’s stash of stolen money started to play a bigger part in the show, it leapt to that next level, and became our favourite new show of the season. Pushing Daisies has done the same recently, and is a huge joy.
Sadly, the opposite is also true. A good writer leaves, a new producer comes on, cast members fall out or get big heads, networks start to fiddle with the format. When Bryan Fuller left Heroes, it hobbled it. When Ron Moore began developing Caprica, his focus left Battlestar Galactica and the show began to fall apart. When Josh Schwartz began developing new shows for Fox (on their say-so, the big jerks) and took his best writers to help him out, The O.C.‘s third season became an endurance test, haemorrhaging viewers and good will. Goddamn, that show sucked for 25 whole weeks, improving only once Marissa died a horrible death, and that was in the very last scene of the whole season. Dammit Fox, just let your showrunners do one show at a time! Slavedrivers!!!
So, was this the beginning of the end for Ugly Betty? Can you bear the suspense? Of course not! The following week, written by reliable writers Jon Kinnally and Tracy Poust, was not the best episode ever, but it had some amazing moments, tons of laughs, and a paintball sequence that featured Rebecca Romijn-Stamos-O’Connell dressed like a cross between Barbarella and Tina Turner in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. It was top notch.
So I worried for nothing. And wrote about it at length. Please believe me, I do have some perspective on things. I’m not one of the Crazies. For instance, I do not wish death on Jennifer Garner. This exempts me. Because I say so.
Performance of the Week:
Not much to say, really, other than that Jesse Plemons is bringing it every week, and the murder storyline, created by the showrunners to showcase his talent, is justified for that reason alone. He has been staggeringly good.
And Glenn Morshower, as his father, has been every bit as good. That said, no one else on TV this week has done anything as heartrending as Plemons’ final scene, with Landry not charged for the murder of the evil rapist, but still haunted by his guilt. Impressive stuff.
Most Badass Moment of the Week:
Striding into Primatech Paper HQ, Pisspoor Peter Petrelli and Sark (sorry, David Anders is so linked to that role in Alias that I can’t separate him from it) chewed bubblegum and kicked ass, sans bubblegum. Peter fired lightning bolts and telekinetically hurled previously unseen Company henchmen around, and Sark tripped some guys up with Hiro’s sword. Even the potentially moment-ruining sight of a stuntman ineptly bracing himself for a telekinesis-caused somersault for a good few seconds before leaping into the air didn’t ruin things.
In the scheme of things it was not the most nerdcool moment ever, but it did what this show should always be doing; having the superpowered people do superpowered things. As a kid I would despair when Lou Ferrigno only got a couple of minutes screentime in The Incredible Hulk, or KITT didn’t even do a big jump in Knight Rider. Now that I’m older I understand about budget constraints and how cool moments mean nothing without good writing and well-developed characters, but my God, we’re talking about a show with about a dozen superpowered navel-gazers moping about. Surely one or two of them could do something fun or badass each week. I’m not even talking about my previous rant, where I called for more heroics (though that’s still a valid complaint). If you can’t have the characters saving others or helping them out, just have them doing wacky powery stuff. This action sequence was hardly the most complicated thing to shoot. Just throw a couple of people at a wall, blow up a couple of small objects, add a CG effect or two, and the viewers will be happy. Damn, if a little thing like that can make Milo Ventimiglia and David Anders look like the coolest motherfuckers on the planet, it’s worth the expenditure and effort.
Worst Guest Star of the Week:
Who was your favourite Slayer? Buffy? Hell no, go to the back of the class and suck an egg. Kendra? Nice try, but WRONG! The correct answer, of course, is Faith, the bad Slayer who tortured Wesley, killed a human, got stabbed by Buffy prior to throwing herself off a roof onto a barrel on the back of a moving truck, and begged Angel to kill during a fight in the rain in the finest moment of Angel season one. Eliza Dushku was so good in that role that it’s probable she’ll never get out from Faith’s shadow. Though Buffy and Angel were shows that handled both drama and comedy brilliantly, she was almost exclusively asked to do drama. During the series-worst episode of Ugly Betty we found out why.
She cannot do comedy. At least, she can’t do broad comedy. It was as if I’d finally achieved my dream of making my own film, and had kindly cast a good friend of mine for a lark, only to find that they thought the key to being funny is flapping their arms, rolling their eyes, and screaming their dialogue as if their vocal cords were on fire and only expelling a lot of air would put it out. I’ve slated Samaire Armstrong’s obnoxious comedic performance in Dirty Sexy Money before, but Dushku made her look like Groucho Marx. Hopefully Whedon will be able to fix this, play to her strengths, and harness some snarky humour talent out of her in his new show Dollhouse, coming to a TV screen near you in a million years when the strike is over (blame the producers, who are assholes just like Will Graham said).
Nearly The Worst, But Ultimately Very Funny Guest Star of the Week:
When James Carville turned up to give Alec Baldwin advice on how to stay together with Edi Falco on 30 Rock, it felt like obnoxious and unfunny stunt casting, especially with his laboured and overused catchphrase “Cajun style!” Canyon has recently expressed some frustration with the show, thinking it a bit laboured, and this appearance threatened to make me agree with her.
Cut to the next scene, with Toofer and Frank imitating each other in a war of identity, and I had forgotten it already. And then, to my immense displeasure, Carville and his cadaver face walked past, and that catchphrase came up again and again, going from mildly funny to unfunny to desperate and then (thank Neo!), back to funny, and with his final shot, hand deep inside a vending machine, all the way up to hilarious (at least in my humble opinion).
Canyon did like Pete’s special lunch treat to himself, though. Bento box, the lesbian scene from Mulholland Drive, and the office to himself. Until Kenneth invites his kids around.
Screen capture. Cajun style.
Best Guest Star of the Week:
As if to make up for making us temporarily hate Eliza Dushku (which, along with every other flaw in that terrible episode, ensured that episode of Ugly Betty gets onto the Worst of the Year Caruso Award shortlist), the next episode featured an inspired appearance by Betty White, playing off her positive public profile and gay fanbase by screwing over Wilhemina, bitching about Golden Girls lesbian fanfic, and fighting a rat for her severed finger (offscreen, sadly, but the imagination works wonders).
She was so natural and funny and charming it made Dushku’s appearance seem even more wrong. Damn, I really hated that episode.
Okay, tomorrow, the best directed scene of the week, the most over-directed scene by a notoriously arrogant director of the week, and a glimpse at a sight no human can ever forget. And I’m not talking about Viggo Mortenson’s balls (that’s old news. Keep up, granddad).
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Shades of Caruso Mini-Blog- Listmania ’11! The Best Movies Of The Year December 31, 2011
