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 2008-2009 Caruso Awards: The Best New Characters Of The Year
A quick explanation of what’s going on here. This is, as the title says, a list of what I feel are the best new characters introduced in the same time period as the first two lists, though I suspect number 9 is ineligible due to Leverage starting just outside the capture period. Well, tough, because I’ve written all that and I’m not changing it now. These are the characters that have entertained me the most, have served their show best, and have been created and manifested with the most care. The number one slot will come as no surprise to regular readers, and I must say I’m pleased to be publishing this post just a few hours before his triumphant (I hope) return to our TVs.
10. Nina – Reaper
It’s tempting to think of Reaper‘s resident hott demon as little more than a riff on Buffy‘s Anya, being a love interest who just happens to be a servant of a dark force, but while Anya was given a rich inner life — not to mention a tragic end: never forget! — Nina is perfectly designed to fit into the jollier — and simpler — milieu offered by CW’s comedy. For a show that has been so bad at creating compelling female characters (remember Josie?), it was especially pleasing to see Nina fit in so well, but then the second season was much looser than the first, allowing for much broader comic characters and sillier plots. Sadly for the fans, the show’s annoying cancellation by the misguided CW means we’ll never get to see how Nina’s relationship with Ben plays out. We’ll also miss out on Jenny Wade’s crackerjack comic timing. Someone snap her up, quick. The Dollhouse team could surely put her to some good use, especially with its new links to Reaper.
Best Moment: Spending an entire episode flirting with Sam’s douchey half-brother Morgan, just to lure him into a trap set by the Path of Steve. Then she eviscerates him. She’s, like, the perfect woman or something.
9. Eliot Spencer – Leverage
Leverage expends a lot of energy mimicking the air of casual smartassery Soderbergh mastered with the Ocean’s Numeral films, and then splicing it with the snarkiness of vintage A-Team. It’s not a knock, as Leverage does it well enough on a low budget, and entertains much more than most higher-profile network shows. Nevertheless, both Soderbergh’s con-movies and The A-Team are not known for their multi-dimensional characters, and ciphers will not work in a long-running series anymore. Plus, as with the increasingly tiresome Ocean’s films, without a heart at the center of it Leverage would pall quickly. Thankfully, the team’s bruiser — a long-haired, white B.A. Baracus played with dopey charm by Angel‘s Christian Kane — works as the show’s conscience as well as the guy who hits people in the head. Just as with the show’s hybrid nature, it’s a winning combination.
Best Moment: In the pilot, Spencer — who has, to this point, been portrayed as little more than a cool-as-a-cucumber hardass — begins to enquire into Nathan Ford’s past, and his obvious depression. His interest, and vow to look after his new boss, was the unexpected emotional hook that kept me watching.
8. Veronica Palmer – Better Off Ted
Better Off Ted pulls off a tonal miracle by lampooning sickening corporate thoughtlessness while still being a goofy, benign sitcom about office politics. Hiding its thorns under lovely petals of silliness (metaphoraclypse – sorry), the show gets away with some edgy material by playing up the wacky musical stings, and relying a lot on the charm of its lead, Jay Harrington. Nevertheless, the show wouldn’t work without its MVP, Portia de Rossi, who comes closer than the rest of the cast to playing a caricature. The hard-nosed, humourless, no-nonsense female boss is an overused archetype, but de Rossi plays Veronica Palmer to perfection, lacing her almost robotic personality with shades of doubt. Often as confused by the goings-on at the sinister/lovable corporate monolith Veridian Dynamics as everyone else, she maintains enough of an edge to keep her minions in check. What could have been a one-note cliche character is, in de Rossi capable hands, the number one reason for watching the show.
Best Moment: Nonchalantly squirting water into Phil’s mouth to stop him screaming following a cryogenic experiment gone wrong.
7. Patrick Jane – The Mentalist
Shows featuring anti-social know-it-alls flourished this year, taking their cue from the continued success of House, but the trick is hard to pull off a second time. Lie To Me‘s Dr. Cal Lightman, played by a hyper-aggressive Tim Roth, almost made it onto this list for his late run of excellent moments in the final few episodes of the season, but that character needed to be tinkered with as the show progressed. Patrick Jane, however, arrived fully formed. Surrounded by affable dopes who seem to dislike him half the time and then secretly delight in his antics when he’s not looking, Jane — as played by the extremely charming and dapper Simon Baker — is the mirror image of Lightman. While Roth’s character is a seething mass of hostility with a soft centre, Jane is a showman and charmer who hides a dark core, tortured by the murder of his family and desperate to catch their killer, Red John. The rest of the show is formulaic, but Baker’s brilliant work as a man trying to distract himself from misery with mischief and silliness is enough to keep us watching.
Best Moment: The season finale sees Jane closer to catching his nemesis than ever before, and his genial mask slips throughout. Brazenly promising to kill Red John as soon as he catches him, his colleagues are forced to question the wisdom of keeping a vengeful maverick on their team.
6. Dr. Claire Saunders – Dollhouse
It’s difficult to talk about Dr. Claire Saunders being a great character, as she is fictional even within the context of the fictional world she lives in. Formerly an Active, Whiskey is maimed by the insane SuperActive Alpha, rendering her useless as a puppet, and then made to take on the personality of a composite character, trapped within the building by fear, and judging the actions of her colleagues without realising she is one of their puppets too. The beautifully timed late season reveal of her origin made her even more tragic than she already was, and her final appearance in Epitaph One, haunting the Dollhouse like the ghost of someone who never existed, was heartbreaking. For those of us who have been adamant that Amy Acker is an immensely underrated actress, this first season was a powerful and undeniable vindication of our beliefs. Let’s hope Whedon finds a way to bring her back for the second season.
Best Moment: Every time she silently reacts to some amoral inanity from the loathsome Topher Frink with withering disdain, an angel gets its wings. (Edit: As pointed out in comments, it’s actually Topher Brink, not Frink. I guess my brain is slowly trying to erase itself so I never have to think about his annoying ass ever again.)
5. Constance Carmell – Party Down
Jane Lynch is like Tina Fey, Lily Tomlin, Goldie Hawn, and Joyce Grenfell rolled into one unstoppable comic behemoth-lady. Everything is better with her in it, and Party Down was lucky enough to have her for eight episodes before she disappeared to make Glee. Sad for the fans of the brilliant adult sitcom, but she left us with many joyous memories. Constance is a washed-up actress who doesn’t even realise she is washed up, hanging onto past glories and oblivious to the fact that these fleeting brushes with fame are the highlights of her career (such as playing a hooker in Baretta). While the show leads — Ken Marino, Adam Scott, and Lizzy Caplan — get the big emotional beats, Lynch takes Constance’s sad circumstance and explores all comedic and tragic aspects of it, sometimes all at the same time, without needing big plot developments to showcase her complexity. With just the slightest of plot-threads at her disposal, she makes Constance breathe, all while blowing every other performer on the show away. Considering the incredible cast (both regular and guest), that’s some achievement. I’m sure Glee is very good, but for taking Lynch away from Party Down, I shall hate it forever.
Best Moment: Almost too many to count, but the clueless liberal outrage that erupts while catering the California College Conservatives Union Caucus is priceless. Teaming her up with Ryan Hansen is a masterstroke.
4. King Silas Benjamin – Kings
To be perfectly honest, there are only two words needed to describe why King Silas Benjamin makes it into the top five of this list: Ian Mc-Fucking-Shane. His presence is enough to make Kings essential viewing for all fans of Deadwood who mourn the loss of Al Swearengen. He could have been playing a postal worker, with each episode showing him completing his route, and it would have been appointment television, but instead we’re lucky enough to see him as the monarch of the fictional country of Gilboa, a man tortured by the deals he has made to get where he is, and scared of the consequences of his actions. As his brother-in-law, Crossgen CEO William Cross, conspires against him and the attention of the nation turns to his potential successor, his faith in God and his love for his family are torn apart and rebuilt time and again. Watching Benjamin do terrible things to maintain his hold on power while being assailed by his enemies was one of the purest joys of the year. Sadly, that’s all she wrote. Yet another stupid decision from NBC.
Best Moment: During a power-cut orchestrated in a fit of spite by Cross, Benjamin is haunted by the Sabbath Queen, a manifestation of what seems to be the Devil, come to collect on a deal he made to keep his daughter alive many years before. The king’s sanity is tested to breaking point by the visions, and the intensity of the show jumped up about fifteen notches.
3. Mia – In Treatment
When compiling these lists — both this one and the subsequent Gupta list, it’s tempting to praise the nice characters and diss the out-and-out assholes. Nevertheless, the screenwriters of In Treatment managed to write a particularly frustrating character who does nothing but complain and belittle those who help her, lying to her loved ones and pushing them away, all the while oblivious to the negative consequences of her actions, and still manage to make her compelling, sympathetic and strangely lovable. At least, they did a lot of the work, but it’s Hope Davis’ masterful performance that really brings this contrary and annoying woman to life, making you care deeply for her even when she is doing and saying the most exasperating and needlessly confrontational things. Desperately unhappy with the way her life has turned out and eager to blame everyone for it except for the one person responsible for shaping her personality, Mia rails against therapist Paul for seven weeks, before finally reaching a point where she looks at herself from outside long enough to see that she can change, given time. There is no award prestigious enough for Davis. Her work as this character is utterly exemplary.
Best Moment: Her final epiphany during her final session is a breathtaking moment of catharsis and revelation, perfectly performed and deeply moving.
2. Dr. Raymond Langston – CSI: Crime Scene Investigation
As with Ian Mc-Fucking-Shane, bringing Laurence Fishburne into your show is guaranteed to make me watch it. When it’s a show I already love, I’m even happier. When the man I reflexively refer to as Morpheus is given a role as entertaining, as well-developed, and as rich with potential as Dr. Raymond Langston, I’m beside myself. Early reports about Gil Grissom’s replacement hinted he would be half scientist, half serial killer, and the suspicion that the long-serving CSIs such as Catherine Willows would not be promoted due to the introduction of someone new gave cause for concern, but Langston never turned into Mr. Hyde, and Catherine became head CSI, proving that the showrunners really give a damn about the internal logic of their show. Such thoughtful fan service is rare these days, and much appreciated. This meant Langston starts at the bottom and works his way up: an odd state of affairs when that character is played by someone of Fishburne’s fame and talent. Thankfully, this move paid off beautifully. Langston’s enthusiasm, naiveté, and kindheatedness are a breath of fresh air after the turmoil of the last few seasons, though the final episode, with Langston forced to kill a man in self-defence, shows he’s not out of the woods yet.
Best Moment: Langston’s first day on the job goes horribly wrong (botched fingerprint dusting, getting muck all over his suit, etc.), but eventually equilibrium is reached. He even wins over audience-surrogate Hodges. Sadly, the shrunken ratings for the best procedural in town did not reflect this meta plot point.
1. Dr. Walter Bishop – Fringe
There was no competition. Even with the character of Dr. Raymond Langston showing so much care and attention from the writers’ room, nothing could compare to the joy I feel whenever John Noble ambles onto screen, chattering excitedly about some food stuff or other. I’ve already waxed rhapsodic about Dr. Walter Bishop, and I don’t want to go over the same ground again, other than to stress how important John Noble’s (and Kurtzman and Orci’s, and Abrams’) work has been to me. Fringe is a bit of fluff that could well go far. The best episodes of the first season were genuinely exciting and well-constructed hours of TV that easily ranked among the best of the year. The potential is there for some really thrilling developments and some bold storytelling. It was also, on occasion, horribly boring and stupid, poorly written, formulaic, and crazy, though sadly not the right kind of crazy. At times I half watched it while doing other things, which is something I would never think to do with Lost. However, even in the show’s darkest moments, I never, even for a second, considered not watching any further. From the moment in the pilot episode when Walter pointed out he had pissed himself (“Just a squirt.”), I was hooked for good.
I can’t think of any other character on TV, past or present, who manages to be pathetic, inspiring, commanding, comedic, tragic and lovable all at the same time. He’s a narrative miracle, able to alter the mood of every scene he is in without ever betraying what the character is at his core because he encompasses every possibility. Part of that is strong writing (even the worst writer must relish putting words into Walter’s mouth, giving them a chance to shine), but most of it is the inspired casting of Noble, which opens up innumerable opportunities for pathos, drama or humour. The only other character on TV that makes me this happy is Ben Linus, who was also a happy accident of casting that gave writers so much to play with. Emerson and Noble are proof that casting interesting and daring actors is more than half of the job of making dramatic gold. Let us hope they inspire other showrunners to take a chance on the weird.
Best Moment: Oh God, where to begin? “I just got an erection. Oh, fear not, it’s nothing to do with your state of undress. I think I simply need to urinate.” “Unless you have an IQ higher than mine, I am not interested in what you think.” “To understand what happened at the diner, we use Mr. Papaya. This is upsetting because he is the friendliest of fruits.” “The only thing better than a cow is a human! Unless you need milk. Then you really need a cow.” Then there’s the random moments, such as shuffling around a room long enough to generate a static shock to his son’s head, or his various explosions of temper at the generally useless Olivia or Peter. Basically, pick even a weak episode, and wait for Walter to show up. Invariably, something fun will happen. When he’s not having some awful and distressing breakdown.
Next up, worst new characters of the year, and then miscellaneous stuff about best pilots and worst direction and all that jazz.
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.
End Of Season Review: Reaper
Best US Alternative Rock Album Produced Between 1990 And 1994. Prettiest Cast Member In Friday Night Lights. Most Powdery Wig In Britain 1752. These are hotly contested titles. Unlike the title of Best New US Show Of The Season 2007-8, which was more like the contest to win England Footballer Of The Year 2007 – all the potential contenders seemed to underperform deliberately, giving the impression it was an accolade no-one wanted to win.
Reaper takes it, although the victory owes more to what the show wasn’t than to what it was. It wasn’t high-gloss, soapy schlock about a bunch of hateful bastards; it wasn’t a rehash of tired sci-fi tropes aimed lazily at a supposedly easily-pleased audience; and it didn’t coast on a thin premise while besotted with its own insufferable quirkiness. It may not have been perfect, but Reaper remained reliably entertaining throughout its run, while demonstrating the importance of a solid concept and a strong cast.
One of the reasons I watched Reaper in the first place was its superficial similarity to one of the greatest TV shows of my lifetime, in which a seemingly ordinary young person reluctantly assumes responsibility for combating the threat of supernatural nasties. But Reaper is certainly not Buffy, and signalled this by having Kevin Smith direct its pilot. It’s as much about a bunch of guys hanging out talking shit as it is about evil hellspawn. Almost every episode sees Sam, Sock and Ben drinking pints at the bar, suggesting that for them beer is nearly as important as serving the Devil by trapping escaped souls and returning them to the underworld. And that is my kinda show.
This attitude underpins Reaper’s whole ethos. Sam may struggle with the burdens of his obligations to the Devil, but he still finds time to goof around at the Work Bench. Ben is thrust into life-endangering situations weekly, but he still loves to daydream about his perfect woman (who of course is independently wealthy, enjoys mixed martial arts and reads Sue Grafton novels). And Sock refuses to take anything seriously – work, the Devil, Sam’s romantic problems – unless it involves his mother. The show’s ambling, amiable spirit feeds into what Admiral Neck diagnosed back in November as Futurama Syndrome – the odd pacing that sees the main plot often wrapped up with ten or more minutes of episode still to unfold. While this was intially weird and unsettling, before long it came to feel familiar and natural, with the realisation that Sam’s adventures in recapturing souls aren’t what Reaper is about. Rather, it’s about Sam’s troubles in balancing his obligations, his responsibilities to friends, family, Andi and work – the problems we all go through when making the transition to adulthood. Their occasionally unearthly nature notwithstanding, Sam’s problems are instantly recognisable for all of us, as is the half-arsed way he goes about trying to solve them. Well, it’s about that and a bunch of guys hanging out talking shit.
Reaper’s main drawback was that for a long time it didn’t appear to be going anywhere: the guys just bumbled from week to week, being equally inept at bounty hunting, retail and affairs of the heart. This was an unusually long establishing period, and only when Sam stumbled (a) into another relationship that ignited Andi’s feelings for him and (b) on a demonkind plot against the Devil was any significant progress made. An ongoing problem – a surprising one, seeing as Reaper is one of the few shows on US TV created by women – is the female characters: Andi is little more than a vessel for Sam’s hopes and desires, only developing a personality in the final third of the season (and even then it’s mainly a ‘one of the guys’ personality); as for Josie, both her femaleness and her blackness feel tokenistic given that she appears only when soul-trapping brushes up against the law or when a Sock-related C-plot is needed; and when Ben finally gets to have a relationship it’s with the shrewish Sara, who manipulates him, steals all his money and leaves him in jail pining for the Grafton-reading fantasy girl Cassidy.
The way Sara was written wasn’t her only problem. I did a little cheer when I saw Lucy Davis’s name in the credits but sadly she was dreadful in the role, all eye-rolling and silly tics and incomprehensible muttering. For someone whose major career role has been on the radio, it’s astonishing how poor her diction is (see also Shaun Of The Dead, if for some reason you haven’t). Fortunately this was just about the only casting misstep Reaper made. The guest spots were a delight, from Melinda Clarke as the lonely mistress of the Devil to Jeff Kober as a hardworking neighbourhood demon, but the best was Ken Marino, essaying his usual easy charm as practical, sweet-natured ex-angel Tony.
But the near-perfect guest casting was no surprise considering the success of Reaper’s main cast. Rick Gonzalez might not be the finest actor on TV but his artless, affable presence is perfect for the sweet-natured Ben. Bret Harrison stands out from any number of blandly handsome puppyish actors not only for his physical comedy skillz – he can take a pummelling like a champ – but also for his hapless ability to inspire sympathy. But these two might have floundered without Tyler Labine, whose energy and gung-ho commitment give Reaper an anarchic edge. Despite his innate – and often hilarious – selfishness, it is Sock who usually provokes the team into action (Sam and Ben would surely remain hopelessly static without him), and Labine has the manic charisma to make this believable.
Labine may prove to be the breakout star of the show, but its ace in the hole is without question Ray Wise. My co-bloggers have already eulogised about his magnificent grin, but the key to the role is Wise’s astonishing ability to switch between avuncular and sinister in a microsecond. He also brings a subtle poignancy at times, inviting you to feel sympathy for the Devil’s inability to enjoy food or his isolation, before doing something gleefully horrible to remind you – hey! He’s the frickin’ Devil! Evidently Anthony Head auditioned for the part, but although he has a certain roguishness, I doubt even Giles could have managed Wise’s devastating combination of authority, playfulness and outright malice. Ah, fuck it – let’s face it, Head couldn’t have emulated this.
Like Friday Night Lights, Reaper has benefited from the lack of new dramas in season 2008-9 and been recommissioned (for 13 episodes at least), despite its mediocre ratings. Although it’s been enjoyable until now, it’ll be fascinating to see where it goes from here. Because while it’s a good show, I’m not convinced it can ever be great. Whether deliberately or not, it has virtually no emotional impact, and no evident ambition to make any; even the apparent death of Sam’s dad in the season finale didn’t quite disrupt the good-humoured atmosphere. I’m sure it can go on being an engaging, lovable show with charm to spare, which is far more than many manage. But if that’s the limit of its aspirations, that’s a shame – and it may not be enough to keep Reaper alive.
End Of Season Review – Ugly Betty
Ironically, Ugly Betty, a show about fashion, appears to have been deemed by the hipster douchebag massive to be utterly unfashionable. No longer attracting the torrent of column inches it once did, nor as many articles about how groundbreaking it is to have a major primetime network show have a Hispanic female lead, the show has had to contend with that most galling of fates for a show that was once the hottest thing around; being taken for granted. In the UK, it’s gotten so bad that C4 have delayed its return just so it can show hour after hour of horrible, tacky, stupid displays of unappealing bad behaviour, featuring a cast of blithering fuckwits, hopping from bed to bed, making fools of themselves and only getting a tarnished reputation into the bargain (I know, I said I wouldn’t go on about Dirty Sexy Money again, but I’m seriously pissed about Betty‘s shunning).
After being accepted by the mainstream in its first season, winning awards and magazine covers and the love of even the most fashion-averse person in the world (i.e., me), the second season had the same air of early tiredness that The O.C. had after it made waves with its freshman year, though that might be a consequence of becoming part of the cultural landscape with such speed and success. Just to clarify, I don’t mean that to be the insult that many others seem to. While some cultural commentators have written The O.C. off after its first season finale, we loved almost all of the second season and pretty much all of the fourth season, which was wonderfully unhinged. So Ugly Betty, after its excellent first season, had a sporadically highly entertaining second, with the odd mini-run of mediocrity, and a couple of patches of outright horror. Despite that, it was good enough to keep our interest, but we pray it doesn’t have a third season to match The O.C.
Of all the shows that returned after the strike hiatus, this was the one that seemed most damaged. While pre-strike Betty had been mostly a lot of fun, when it came back it didn’t seem to remember what had made the show fun in the first place. For a show that often feels like a half-spoof/half-homage to both the telenovela format it was adapted from and the endless churning plotlines of US daytime soaps, the second half of the season was disappointingly humdrum. The death of Bradford Meade (yet another onscreen heart attack for Alan Dale, matching the ones he had in The O.C. and Neighbours) triggered one last bonkers plot development, as Wilhelmina (the always excellent Vanessa Williams) extracted his sperm post-mortem, and convinced Christina to carry her and Bradford’s child.
While this was pleasingly melodramatic, it regrettably gave the dreary mugging of Ashley Jensen more screentime, something that had been missing in the first half of the season. Seriously, what with her in this and Lucy Davis stinking up Reaper with her expanding bag of tics and incomprehensible line readings, there seems to be a war between the Gervais graduates to become Most Annoying UK Woman On US TV. Ladies, please call it a draw and come home. There are characters in The Bill going uncast right as we speak.
Other than that, only the relationship between Daniel and Wilhelmina’s bipolar sister, Renee (played with sadly wasted gusto by Gabrielle Union), came close to generating that crazy frisson the show once had, but even that fell flat. It was transparently a contrived way to keep Wilhelmina in the same plot orbit as Daniel and the rest of the Mode staff after Bradford’s widow and children finally found a reason to remove her from the magazine. This was all necessary; once Bradford had died, and Wilhelmina’s duplicity had been revealed, there was no way to realistically keep her on staff before the announcement of her imminent child/heir to the Meade fortune, so she had to be removed.
It was understandable plot mechanics, but it was little fun to watch, mostly because it committed the cardinal sin of separating Marc and Amanda, whose friendship and bitchiness are our favourite thing about the show. There was a stretch of episodes where they didn’t interact at all, with Marc nothing more than Wilhelmina’s foil (also fun, but not in the same league as his screentime with Amanda), and Amanda chasing her real father, who for a time seemed to be Gene Simmons.
That was another problem with the latter half of the season. Although I don’t have anything against stunt casting, and think it’s often brilliant when done well (e.g., James Carville on 30 Rock and Carl Weathers on Arrested Development), it can also go very wrong or be totally pointless. While Simmons and Betty White worked out quite well, I’m still having nightmares about Eliza Dushku’s abominable “comedic” performance, and appearances by Posh Spice (gak!), Larry King, Lindsay Lohan, and Naomi Campbell were wasted (though it was a pleasant surprise to see her appear, the jokes about Campbell’s violent streak were disappointingly predictable). I guess that’s the price you pay once a show you like becomes popular. All the “cool kids” want to hang out with it.
With the garish soap theatrics kept to a minimum, the show relied on the relationship dramas to keep it afloat. We’d grown to like the characters, so it seemed like a good idea, but, sadly, it was often a mistake. Hilda’s flirting with Justin’s high school gym teacher was meet-bland, Daniel’s fling with Wilhelmina’s sister served only to keep the plate containing his irresponsible libido spinning, and Marc’s boyfriend Cliff mysteriously disappeared from sight as soon as they were seen trying to hire pr0n together. Come back, Cliff! Your relationship with Marc was the only one we ended up caring about!
Of course, the main relationship drama was provided by the Betty-Henry-Gio-Charlie square, a plot I had enjoyed at the start of the season. However, by the time the season finale rolled around, I was utterly bored with it. In the first season we had dreaded the onscreen arrival of Betty’s first boyfriend Walter in every episode (for all time he will be known as the Ugly Betty Gupta), while at the same time hoping Henry would return to make nerdy love eyes at Betty.
This season, every appearance of Henry served to piss us off, as we saw that he was actually not good enough for Betty either. As she grows as a person, and moves towards becoming a good writer (though probably never a great one; a lovely and realistic touch in a show that often skirts the edges of absurdity), it’s obvious she’s holding herself back to embark on a doomed love affair with someone whose chivalrous need to do the right thing by his new child will always get in the way of their love, if it even is love by that point. We grew ever more frustrated to see Henry’s vacillation and crossed priorities get in the way of Betty’s happiness, at first because we felt bad for her, and eventually because we felt bad for ourselves, as the same plot returned over and over.
That said, even if we found the arc dull, we thought it featured some of the cleverest writing, directing, and acting of the whole season. At first steadfastly Team Henry, I reacted strongly and negatively to the introduction of Gio, played by Freddy Rodriguez, this time sans rubber arm. Having loved Six Feet Under, we are steadfast fans of Rodriguez, but Gio royally pissed me off with his cockiness and bravado (Canyon was more forgiving). However, with Henry’s need to do the right thing often being indistinguishable from lack of backbone, by the end of the season we had washed our hands of him, thrown out our Team Henry badges, and put on Team Gio t-shirts. When, in the penultimate episode, he says to Betty, “I don’t wanna be the rebound guy. I wanna be the guy,” I went nuts. OMG Betty you have to marry Gio immediately!
Of course, the problem with the rise of Gio is that the battle between him and Henry was only even for about an episode, as Gio’s rise mirrored Henry’s fall. By the time Henry turned up at Betty’s doorstep to ask him to move to Tucson, we just got mad. Gio won! Get over it! (Though it does appear prescient now.) With Charlie (Jayma Mays) turned into a hissable cartoon villain (another misstep for the show; her character worked much better when she was even vaguely sympathetic, making Henry’s need for Betty even more uncomfortable and dramatic), there was no way his plan could work — not to mention that it would wreck the show. The final shot hinted that Betty got on a plane, but to travel to Tucson with Henry, or on holiday to Rome with Gio? Or to New York, where the show will be filmed next season thanks to Arnold Schwarzenegger and tax incentives.
If you’ve made it this far, you’ll note that I have little good to say about the show. Some of the characters became neutered (Judith Light’s awesome Claire Meade went from semi-unhinged bitch to kindly fairy godmother) or too unpleasant (Alexis became a humourless bully). Some plotlines disappeared entirely (Marc and Cliff’s relationship, Ignatio’s past crimes), or started off well and dribbled to an inconclusive stop (Justin’s grief over his father’s death, which had been one of the more compelling arcs of the season). As before, a lot of this could be attributed to the effects of the strike, but whereas the first season had a shockingly high quality level, some of the episodes from the second season are the worst ever. Some weeks I even wondered why I bothered watching it.
If this were any other show that means I would stop, but Ugly Betty still has flashes of brilliance, and remains one of the most consistently well directed shows on TV. Though the clunky episodes were as empty and uninspiring as the most tired examples of the genre it mocks, and even though there were some appalling promotional gaffes here and there (the blatant shout-outs to Wicked and 27 Dresses were just awful), it still held our attention to the end, and still managed to surprise and delight us often enough to make us forgive it its shortcomings. In part that’s down to the great cast, with America Ferrera, Vanessa Williams, comedy genius Becki Newton and her equally brilliant BFF Michael Urie, Mark Indelicato, and (when he has something to do) Tony Plana taking most of the honours. I’d watch the show just to see them all at work, no matter how crappy things get.
Plus, even at its worst it kept its good-hearted tone, which counts in its favour. Though many of the characters are snide, the show itself totally sincere in its klaxon-loud appeals to good nature and honesty, a trait I find myself continually happified by, even though I’m the archetypal grouch. A disappointment, then, but by no means a failure. I do hope next season heralds a real return to form, though that shooting relocation does make one wonder whether the tone of the show will change. One thing is for certain. Unless it suddenly became implausibly awesome as soon as I stopped watching it, Dirty Sexy Money will always be in its shadow, a poor imitation of glossy, soapy entertainment, empty and lunk-headed and mechanical. It’s not fit to lick Betty’s unattractive shoes.
End Of Season Review – House M.D.
While compiling our weekly views of how the previous seven days of TV had affected us, we noticed that the first half of House‘s fourth season had often been the highlight. Coming off an appalling third season, with its format badly in need of an overhaul, season four began with an almost clean slate. His usual acolytes scattered to the four winds, House was coerced into finding three new minions, which he did by way of a selection process that took up the first half of the season. It was pure genius, allowing the show to keep its dramatic side confined to disposable subplots (diseases of the week), while allowing the comedic half to flourish with withering putdowns, mischievous gameplaying, and petty squabbling. I think I said at the time that the show had been waiting to find its voice, and finally it had. Forget about the dreary seriousness of season three, with its silly bad cop subplots, and forget the formulaic nature of the show. It had finally found a way to rise above those limitations.
Much criticism is made of the rigid format and how the show cannot escape it, but it can wiggle around within it, which tends to take the attention off House and his machinations. Season four changed a lot, including pushing the medical drama just ever so slightly out of the spotlight, and concentrating more on House and his gameplaying. Plus, he wasn’t in danger of being “cured” by his colleagues, and no one had yet another freakout about his drugtaking. It allowed Hugh Laurie to do what he does best; supersnarky misanthropy tempered with flashes of intense humanity. Agonising over how to cure House (which can often waste several episodes of a season) was almost entirely removed, except in an episode in the second half of the season, No More Mr. Nice Guy, in which Kutner suspects House is suffering from neuro-syphilis which could be responsible for his terrible personality. Of course, this is a joke played by House, but much of the episode featured House’s colleagues worrying that they would ruin him as a doctor by curing him of his misanthropy, much as the show would be ruined by such a plot development. It was a nice way of acknowledging that they’re not going to be messing with House for a while.
At least, they’re not going to waste time with the staff of Princeton-Plainsboro trying to figure him out. Instead, in a nice twist, House himself might want to trigger a change in himself, with the two-part finale throwing him into a situation where one of the few things he cares about, Wilson’s friendship, is in jeopardy. Due to his irresponsibility, House and Wilson’s girlfriend Amber get into a bus crash just after she takes flu pills. With her kidneys damaged in the crash, she cannot process the amantadine in the pills. At the end of the final episode, Amber dies in Wilson’s arms after he shuts off her life support, and we sobbed. Seriously. Like, for a long time after the episode ended. Stupid TV show.
Perhaps next season this new antagonism will provide much of the drama, as House tries to win back the friendship of his only friend, perhaps by becoming a better person. The prospect of such an arc is potentially interesting, as change has to come from within, and I’d much rather watch Hugh Laurie battle with his demons instead of putting up with conversations between his colleagues about what to do with him, conversations that are rarely done well and can drastically shift the balance of the show from humour into boring hand-wringing and frustrating contrivance. However, it will almost certainly feature the removal of one of the most appealing features of the show; House and Wilson’s mostly good-natured game-playing. As I’ve said before, their interaction is one of the most entertaining things on TV, and losing that would suck. That change in tone at the start of season four might be temporary, but if Wilson’s reaction to the sight of House recovering from the coma he entered while trying to diagnose Amber is anything to go by, we’re in for a rough patch. Ingrate!
As I say, the first half of the season was especially good, with House bouncing off a large roomful of well-sketched characters, with his other colleagues stripped of their angst over his personality and becoming entertaining foils for him. They even fixed Foreman, who had previously just been a sulky minion and ended up becoming almost an equal to House. His arc was especially well thought out and depicted, with Omar Epps at first disgusted with himself for becoming the thing he most hated (i.e. an approximation of House), and then becoming reconciled with it.
That the second half of the season, after House had chosen his new team, was not up to the first nine episodes was not that great a surprise, especially with the disease of the week drama becoming more prominent, but there were consolations. Frozen, featuring House diagnosing an snow-bound Mira Sorvino via webcam was particularly entertaining, and Living The Dream, with House kidnapping the star of his favourite daytime soap was funny too. All the while, the tone of the show remained lighter than it has been, and even though the formula of the show reasserted itself in later episodes, I still felt that my support for the show even through its most tedious interludes had more than paid off. As Canyon said prior to watching the finale, even if the show can often feel like it is doing the same thing over and over again, there are very few, if any, shows on TV right now that do this kind of thing so well. The dialogue is better than pretty much anything else on TV. It’s funny, it’s smart, it’s philosophical. If it veers into sentimentality every now and again, that’s the price we pay for the rest of the intelligent writing showcased almost every week. The show doesn’t get enough credit for that.
Sadly, with the strike shutting the show down for a while, once more we had an arc damaged by not getting enough screentime, as with CSI’s Warrick arc. Amber quickly switched from Cutthroat Bitch to Best Girlfriend Ever, and if you had an inkling about what was lying in wait for her in the finale, you would possibly have found the whole thing contrived. Luckily we had no idea what was going to happen, but still, it could have done with more room to breathe. That’s not a proper criticism of the show, though, and Canyon’s praise still stands. The showrunners did the best they could with little time to properly set up that two-parter.
And boy, did it work out well. Writers Peter Blake, David Foster, Russel Friend, and Garrett Lerner (working from a story by Doris Egan) went all out over the two episodes (called House’s Head and Wilson’s Heart), treating the viewer to interactive hallucinations, spectacular set-pieces, arc resolutions (poor Thirteen finding out she was positive for Huntington’s while we were already upset about Amber was simultaneously cruel and brilliant), and heart-rending goodbyes. It was devastating and amazing and brutal and a million other things. It was easily the best of all the season finales we’ve seen so far, with Reaper, Ugly Betty, and Lost yet to come (not to mention Battlestar Galactica‘s mini-season finale and the last episode of Doctor Who).
That said, while I liked the whole finale overall, the first part was, sadly, overdirected to the point of obnoxiousness by Greg Yaitanes (who I have railed against before). If ever there was a TV director who is determined to get noticed enough to win a film career, it’s him, filling the episode with annoying Sonnenfeld-esque close-ups, flashy lighting, and Cuddy stripping. Here is a picture of her post-strip. I’m not going to contribute to the uncomfortable memory of poor Lisa Edelstein having to dress like a schoolgirl and rub her butt on a pole.
In contrast, Katie Jacobs, helmer of the second half of the finale, was relatively restrained, which was just what the more emotional episode needed. With more subdued editing and framing, we were treated to an emotional rollercoaster, perfectly judged and beautifully performed (there’s a good chance Laurie’s usual award nominations will be joined by some for Robert Sean Leonard and Anne Dudek). Okay, I will admit that there was one good sequence by Yaitanes in the first part, namely the dazzling bus crash flashback in the final scene. It’s big, scary, and superbly shot, and made me regret grumbling about the rest of the episode. That is, until I realised that the whole sequence was very reminiscent of the plane crash flashback at the end of Peter Weir’s underrated drama Fearless, even down to the shots of hands reaching towards each other, a tunnel of light, spinning and debris and carnage, etc. I don’t blame Yaitanes from borrowing from that sequence, as it’s great. If he didn’t borrow, then the guy knows how to create good scenes that just happen to really resemble scenes from a well-known movie. I guess that’s a skill too.
Other than the possibility of an organic transition from misanthropic House to a more caring, sharing House (who would still hopefully be enough of a jerk to be entertaining; turning him into Santa would be absurd), I have no idea what to expect of the new season. Will the new team leave? Thirteen now knows her days are short, so there’s a possibility she won’t be around for long. Will that mean a return for Cameron? That would mean more screentime for Jennifer Morrison, whose only purpose this season seemed to be making sure she stands as far away from ex-fiancee Jesse Spencer as possible while still remaining on the same show (it was as if they were playing hide and seek on set, which was both funny and sad at the same time). All I want to know is, will the show stay funny? Or will this be Tritter-Redux, with House and Wilson at each other’s throats? After the awesomeness of season four, that’s the last thing we need.
These Weeks in TV: Week 9-10
Least Subtle Reference to the War on Terror of the Week(s):
Love 30 Rock though we do (so much so we both watched our favourite episode Fireworks on the plane to and from the US even though we’ve both seen it a dozen times), warning bells flashed during the most recent episode’s sub-plot about Jack and Kenneth getting involved with Tracy’s community service. Tracy is doing a serviceable job of teaching underprivileged kids living in a hellish neighborhood to play baseball, though his goals are not very ambitious (he just wants to get them outside for a change, as they’ve never even seen the sun). Jack thinks they can go further, and with military precision he hijacks the project, getting them to bring down a statue, Saddam-style, and teaching them about Churchill. It also featured this on-the-nose image.
Funny enough, but it’s not the most topical joke. And why is Jack wearing those clothes? They’re there for one shot, gone the next. Yes I want 30 Rock to be fearless with their commitment to comedy and satire, but the illogicality of this moment rang false, and for the first time ever I thought the show writers had made a horrible miscalculation.
Thankfully, the conceit plays out as you would expect, and then goes further, with jokes about surges and changes of administration, bringing the joke right up to date. The wealth of detail and jokes in the scenario saves it, and by the end I was mostly satisfied no sharks had been jumped. Jack’s get-up still bugs, though. Oh 30 Rock, you beautiful creature, you have to be better than that! You’re not Family Guy, okay? Run free with your imagination, but know your limits! There’s a good boy.
Musical Moment of the Week(s):
The first episode of the Pushing Daisies twosome we watched recently ended with a song; not a first for the show, and a harbinger of what’s to come with the mooted musical episode in the pipeline. Swoozie Kurtz (as the dour Aunt Lily) finally caved in to her emotions under an onslaught of uppers dripped into her pies by her niece Chuck, and began to “cry” with the help of a downpour outside.
At this point Aunt Vivian, played by croak-voiced chanteuse Ellen Greene, bursts into an emotional rendition of Morning Has Broken, prior to them both returning to the water to swim, synchronisingly, at which point the screen becomes a gorgeous and abstract wash of colour and movement.
It’s rare that a visual effect or graphic touch on TV looks like nothing that has been attempted before, with the hectic production schedule meaning innovation takes a back seat to getting the show finished on time, but some remarkable thinker on staff came up with a series of images that I’ve never seen attempted before. Matching up perfectly with the song, it was a powerful moment. Getting past the early Sonnenfeld episodes, this show goes from strength to strength, so much so that I don’t want to mention its ever-present flaws (the good parts of the show easily make up for them now).
Most Frustratingly Overdirected Episode of the Week(s):
The first of two Heroes provided the best hour of the season so far, with no dwelling on the less interesting characters (Peter, Niki, Sylar and the Goopy Twosome), a major twist in Matt’s plot (looks like the evil Matt of the future might be inevitable), and even a little action. Not to mention lots of hott hostage bondage action.
In structure it borrowed from last season’s superb Company Man, focusing almost exclusively on one now condensed plot, which allowed for what felt like more forward momentum than the rest of the season put together. So why am I bitching about it?
The episode was directed by TV director Greg Yaitanes, who has worked on many of our favourite shows (House, Lost) and some of our least favourites (Prison Break, Drive).
As is often the case, his style is often dictated by the visual template of the show, not to mention the budget, though I do remember Drive having some flashy moments, undermined by the shoddy writing, casting, and again, budget.
That’s all par for the course, but sadly for the viewer, this week Yaitanes and Kring went crazy with the duality theme, and therefore the screen became filled with mirror images and clumsy compositions expressing the similarities and differences between Noah and Bob aka Evil Ned Ryerson, and Noah and the increasingly hapless Mohinder, though kudos for accidentally casting two actors (Jack Coleman and Sendhil Ramamurthy) who would not look amiss in a Jack Kirby comic.
It became more like a horribly misjudged running joke than a dramatic or artistic choice, not helped by the godawful melodramatic Act!Ing! filling the screen. There were so many “Noooooooo!” moments in it that I lost track of who was grieving for who.
Any emotional power the episode might have had was buried under waves of over-direction and incompetently handled performances, and as such represented a turning point in my attitude towards it, as exemplified by the smirk I wore throughout the next less flashy but equally silly episode.
Whereas before I might have forgiven the odd lapse of quality in the show, until it gets its supergroove back I will be forced to treat it with mockery and disdain. Pretty easy to laugh at it when the show features such badly written and delivered lines as “Lock him up. And throw away the key!” and “You’ve gone native!!!” (a line reading from Jack Coleman that is too entertaining to really hate on). I mean, who “dies” in slow motion like this anymore? And why the orange palette? Is it in danger of becoming ::choke:: CSI:Miami with superpowers?
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Most Beautifully Directed Episode of the Week(s):
In contrast, the first of the two CSIs was gorgeous, haunting, subdued and perfectly judged. As revealed way early by the network, Sara Sidle finally took her leave of CSI: Vegas after slowly coming to the realisation that she could no longer cope with the misery and horror she witnesses every day (a nice touch, as not only has Sara been affected like this before, but Jorja Fox has said one of her main reasons for leaving the show is her growing dislike of the ghoulish nature of police procedurals). We first see her surrounded by darkness, headphones stuck in her ears, oblivious to everything around her.
Slowly the lights come up around her, revealing her to be at work, and for the rest of the episode she is either coldly indifferent to everything around her, or furiously involved, a state catalysed by the return of Marlon West, the “one that got away” as Gil puts it. Played by Big Love‘s Douglas Smith, he first turned up in the excellent episode The Unusual Suspect, where his crime was covered up by his hyper-intelligent and deluded younger sister Hannah, played with chilling brilliance by the amazing Juliette Goglia. This time Hannah taunts Sara enough to drive her to distraction trying to prove her guilt.
The episode ends with a mirror of an early scene of Brass resolving to tell the parents of the murder victim of her death. This time Sara goes to Hannah to tell her her brother has killed himself, and though the evil brat is responsible for the episode opening murder, Sara finds no satisfaction in telling her about the suicide, as the cocky young girl breaks down in front of her. In an amazing episode, this was possibly the most unnerving and superbly acted scene.
Although she had probably already made the choice to leave before this, it certainly seems to set her choice in motion, and the final scenes show her removing her name from her jacket and leaving it for new CSI Ronnie Lake, and then leaving the building. Gil finds a note from her, and as he reads it we see Sara leaving the city in a cab, her face drawn, as the colours of the strip wash over the window, obscuring her. Only at the end do we see her properly, and her sadness is heartbreaking. Meanwhile, Gil remains at the lab, reading Sara’s unsentimental but emotional goodbye, and the lights around him dim, leaving him in darkness.
The whole episode was directed with a sure and stylish hand by Homicide veteran Kenneth Fink, but the final scene was what did me in. As I sobbed bitter tears over her departure, I crossed my fingers that Fink gets a movie career even better than that of Gregory “NYPD Blue, Fallen” Hoblit. It was a season highlight, my favourite hour of TV this week(s), and a prime example of the possibilities of TV. Kudos also the the stellar writing team of Sarah Goldfinger, Allen MacDonald, and Naren Shankar.
Canyon’s Highlight(s) of the Week(s):
With the axe hanging over our new favourite show Journeyman, the last two weeks saw our hero Dan Vassar travelling through time to save only one victim of a serial killer, Aeden Bennett, played with really really oily menace by Raphael Sbarge, who was memorably sleazy in one of our favourite CSI:Miami episodes, Backstabbers. So oily and sleazy! Once more, the limits of his mission frustrate him, and he shoots off to do his own thing and bring the killer to justice, despite the protestations of Livia, once more played with mysterious charm by Moon Bloodgood.
Dan prevails, and by the end of the first episode he gets the guy arrested and saves another victim. Hooray, right? Livia is not so sure, and warns him of a forthcoming test, which turns out to be the present-day release of Bennett, and his appearance on Dan’s doorstep. The second episode begins with Dan getting shot by Bennett, prior to travelling back to Bennett’s childhood, leaving the killer behind in the present, bemused but dedicated to making our hero suffer for putting him in jail by terrorising his wife, Katie.
Despite suffering from terrible blood loss and infection, Dan tries to complete his mission (helping young Bennett) before realising who he is. When he does find out, it seems like the show is going to explore the classic thought-experiment: if you went back in time and met young Hitler, would you kill him? As Dan is a good guy, it seemed obvious he wouldn’t, choosing instead to save the boy or educate him somehow, but instead he doesn’t just consider killing the boy, he seems about to go through for the longest time. Delirious and desperate to get back to the present he may be, but in the end his decency barely wins out (and in fact he might only prevail due to imminent unconsciousness). Kevin McKidd brilliantly communicated his frustration and anger, as always. Apologies for the crappy screencap here; that’s a knife and not a really long booger coming out of Dan’s face.
When this show started I thought it would be all about maintaining the episodic show template, with Dan hiding his power from everyone and getting into tedious and stereotypical scrapes instead of just coming clean. Perhaps this is one of the reasons many people avoided it, and if it had turned out to be that kind of show, it’s understandable. Happily, it’s much smarter than that. Dan doesn’t fix the kid, and doesn’t kill him either. It’s not a show about retconning plot difficulties; it’s a show about facing your troubles head on. Dan leaves the past alongside Livia (played by the moody Moon Bloodgood, in case you’d forgotten), and while he is getting treatment for his wound in a modern hospital, she finds his brother Jack, played by Reed Diamond, who has spent the past few weeks furiously accusing Dan of returning to his gambling ways, unable to accept the outlandish time-travelling excuse. Upon facing the supposedly dead Livia, he finally caves in and accepts what is happening, before resolving to help his brother save Katie (who, don’t forget, was once Jack’s lover).
Now the show is about all four members of the romantic quadrangle aware of the timeshifting situation, and I’m confident, after weeks of having my preconceptions shattered, that this amazing, unfairly neglected show will spend time exploring this new state of affairs in the same adult manner it has dealt with everything else. Knowing that the show is in serious danger of cancellation, I’m absolutely gutted. NBC have given full-season orders to both Life and Chuck. I’ve not seen the former, even though I like Damian Lewis (especially when he’s possessed by upper-class British alien spores in the memorable Dreamcatcher), but commissioning more episodes of the pitiful Chuck instead of giving this exemplary show a chance makes me want to join some futile campaign and send food to heartless executives. ::sulks::
Best Character Development Moment of the Week(s):
Friday Night Lights‘ resident screw-up Tim Riggins has been spiralling downwards for weeks now. Following his noble effort decision to save his friend Street from getting pumped full of shark stem cells (his plan? Spend all of Street’s stem cell money on booze), he has been kicked off the team, voluntarily exiled from his house after his brother hooks up with his overage paramour from last season, and forced to live with a redneck slob whose meth-lab is conspicuously hidden in a suspicious looking trailer in the back yard.
During this time he’s used his normal empty smarm and little-bad-boy-lost charm to try to improve his lot, but no one buys it. Finally, this week the full horror of his fate (slobbery, meth labs and all) came home to him, and in desperation he throws himself at the mercy of Coach Taylor, who wants nothing to do with him. At his wit’s end, Tim finally drops the obnoxious pride that has held him back since the beginning of the show, and apologises to the entire team for letting them down. Even better, what could have been a cloying moment is played for laughs, walking a fine line between being moving and being silly.
Such care not to unbalance the show is nothing new. One of the best things about FNL is the effort it makes to keep the previously established tone at a constant level, which is something that Heroes would do well to consider. Okay, that show has always had to be more fantastical than the gritty FNL; that’s a given. However, when Heroes started it had more in common with Unbreakable than Batman and Robin, but slowly the performances have become broader, the dialogue more corny (seriously, “You’ve gone native!!!”? Who says that?), the plotting more needlessly over-complicated and nutsoid. On the other hand, FNL has often introduced plots that teeter on the edge of absurdity, but the actors, writers and directors (not to mention the photographers) have ensured the material is handled in as realistic and unmelodramatic a manner as possible. It’s not worked all the time, but the success rate is still significant. The character arc of Riggins has been one of the best examples of that, and this moment was one of the highlights of the show. Even better was Coach’s reaction; grudging acceptance and pissiness. Of all the shows we watch, this is the one that feels like it lives and breathes even when we’re not watching.
Oddest Character Trait Reveal of the Week(s):
Before Journeyman Dan Vassar met 1940s time-traveller Livia, it seems she partied hard in the 90s. OMG she’s gone native!!!
Ain’t no party like a five-decades-in-the-future party, it seems. The moment is discombobulating. Why is Livia being such an oblivious idiot? Why is she not helping Dan? Of course, this Livia (played by Maxim favourite Moon Bloodgood) doesn’t know him yet, which bent our heads around. The Livia we’ve been introduced to is super-serious, so knowing she was once happy-go-lucky and able to enjoy her time-travelling is a lovely touch, deepened by her realisation in the next episode that her main time-travelling mission might not have been to save miscellaneous lives, but might have been to meet Dan, fall in love with him, and then break his heart by “dying”, which ensures he gets together with his current wife Katie and leads to the birth of Zack. Yet another awesome character moment in the most underrated show on TV that isn’t CSI.
Shocked Expression of the Week(s):
Pushing Daisies‘ death-defying hero Ned finds out he’s about to die at the hands of a nefarious olfactory murderer, and this is the reaction.
Shocked Reaction of the Week(s):
Prior to finding out he’s about to die at the hands of a nefarious olfactory murderer, Ned is shocked by the springing of the trap, and wheels around in confusion and does this bizarre move, all flailing hands and legs.
For weeks now Ned has been endearingly reserved, shy because he is scared of getting too close to anyone, and tensely holding back his arms so that he doesn’t accidentally brush Chuck and kill her. He’s already a gangly presence, but his ramrod stance and clenched body language has made him seem like a stick onscreen. This is not a criticism. It’s in keeping with his character, and his calm has made up for a lot of the craziness going on elsewhere in the frame. However, this burst of physicality made us laugh so much that we now want to see more of this. I’m seriously beginning to think Lee Pace is a big damn deal, and even if I wasn’t already falling hard for Pushing Daisies, I’d make an appointment for it just to see his performance (and Chi McBride’s, as he has been never less than amazing all season).
Chase Scene of the Week(s):
I’ve been waiting for FNL‘s Smash Williams to have a more prominent role, and while the current plot (which university is he going to attend so that he can get sexxed up and neglect his education) is pretty much the same as his main plot last year, at least this week he got to sleep with very much the wrong girl, which leads to him being chased off campus by her enormous and genuinely terrifying boyfriend.
I’m sure there are other things that can be done with the character, but it made me laugh anyway. Again, the show manages to make something stupid work brilliantly, especially when he is rescued by the ever-more cocky Matt Saracen, taking a break from ineptly stalking his magical Latina maid, who doesn’t miss the opportunity to bust Smash’s chops about his escapade.
Grin of the Week(s):
For the first time this season, the flashes of menace exhibited by Reaper antagonist Ray Wise every so often expanded and deepened, with the Devil threatening Sam and toying with his earthly girlfriend Mimi, played by Melinda Clarke (sadly not reaching her potential, though that’s going to be hard to do after playing a character as richly entertaining as Julie Cooper on The O.C.). As a result, it looked like this would be the first week where Ray Wise didn’t win Grin of the Week, but then, right at the end…
…Booyah! How do you like them tempting apples from the Tree of Knowledge? Bear in mind this is his reaction after telling Sam he had killed Mimi just to prove a point, which turned out to have just been a sick joke. That kidder! The episode wasn’t as funny as previous weeks, but the new, pissy Devil upped the stakes enough that it became one of the season highlights just by showing that there was some toughness in reserve for later episodes. Reaper wears its darkened colours very well.
Best Hitchcock Reference of the Week(s):
Except for when she kiiiiicks, and stretches, and kicks, I’ve not been a fan of Molly Shannon in the past, but her appearance in Pushing Daisies gave us some memorably bitchy asides, and a lovely pastiche of The Birds.
Of course, now I’ll never be able to watch Tippi Hedren’s performance again without thinking of Shannon’s horrified vogueing, but hey, I’ve seen the damn film about twenty times. It’s not like I’m going to go back to it that often. Yeah Hitchcock, what have you done for me lately? Huh?
Regrettably Spoiled Resolution of the Week(s):
After weeks of show-transforming shenanigans, House finally got off the pot and selected his final three students / colleagues / victims, removing Amber the Cutthroat Bitch from contention. Sadly, a spoiler on Michael Ausiello’s TV Guide blog alerted us to the final Cottages 2.0 line-up weeks ago, so we’ve just been waiting it out. Even knowing it would come down to snidely Taub, pointless Kutner and the ever-intriguing 13 (Olivia Wilde, proving to be a much more interesting actress now she’s not asked to play a Marissa-kissing ratings-baiting lesbian as in The O.C.), there was no point to having Amber on the team.
Her bitchery only existed because of her desperate need to win, and if she had, her defining characteristic becomes at best useless and at worst a liability. The winning trio might be more bland than her, but that never seemed to stop Cameron and Chase, now relegated to cameo status. Right now the only hope for those characters is to fill the gap left by the loss of House’s game, otherwise they should just get quietly dropped. Though sad to see the end of this glorious golden period, I’m eager to see how it all shakes out next year, especially if they stick to the humorous format they have now.
Note that I couldn’t be bothered to find a picture with all of the group. Kal Penn is being almost as underused as he was in Superman Returns, where he seemed to have been hired merely to balance out some of Bryan Singer’s careful compositions. Time for him to shape up, now he’s going to be getting more screentime.
Most Justified Hissyfit of the Week(s):
Considering the amount of time I go on about her, it should be obvious by now that FNL‘s Tami Taylor is one of my favourite TV characters ever, though in the past she’s been awfully perfect while hubbie Eric bumbles around and makes various social faux pas that only she can resolve. This week, she got to screw up, big time, and end up in everyone’s bad books. Getting Eric jealous by hanging around with another man, upsetting her sister by treating her as inferior due to her childlessness, and best of all, humiliating stroppy teen daughter Julie by accusing her favourite teacher (played by Surfing Jesus) of trying to groom her, while several students stand around in shock and then spread rumours about them around the school. Julie of course hears about this, and descends upon her mother like a swarm of flesh-eating flying piranhas like in that James Cameron film that one time.
The fury that pours off Julie is memorable, and for once, pretty justified. Though I love Tami (and the ever-awesome award-worthy Connie Britton), it was thrilling to see the showrunners put her in a position where her moral superiority is shot to pieces by a bratty teenager. Will Tami’s tirade against Surfing Jesus land her in hot water with the principal? Will Julie forgive her if SJ turns out to be a pervert? Will either of them GO NATIVE!??!?!!?!? I can barely wait to find out.
This Week in TV (Week 8)
Let’s do this quick style!
Highlight of the Week:
30 Rock again conquered all with satire of the war on terror that was actually funny and integrated into the plot without being heavy-handed even for a second. It also had a hilarious guest appearance by Edie Falco as CC, a Democrat love interest for Jack, which led to much soul-searching for both of them, and a magnificent scene in which Tracy feeds Jack exclamations of love a la Cyrano De Bergerac.
Which leads me to…
Lines of the Week:
“Tell her your privates wanna give her privates a high-five!”
“Tell her her butt look like an apple and you wanna take a bite!”
“Tell her she’s got tig ol’ bitties like the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders!”
“Tell her you want her to donate her body to science and you science! Tell her, Jack!”
Scene of the Week:
As wonderful as that scene was, I might have laughed more at the Lifetime movie based on Falco’s life, called A Dog Took My Face And Gave Me A Better Face To Change The World: The Celeste Cunningham Story, starring Kristen Wiig as CC.
It was pretty accurate, but the thing that sold it was Jack’s reaction as he watches it, exhorting everyone on screen to get the gun away from the dog and getting more and more exasperated as the tragic accident occurs. The capper is Wiig sliding out of shot and saying, “I’m going to get into politics!” I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again; I could not love this show more. That’s before I realised that CC is going to be a semi-recurring character from now on, which would be brilliant news if it wasn’t for that darned strike.
Stupidest Scene of the Week:
I’ve expressed my extreme displeasure with Chuck in the past, but I have to say, last week’s episode was the strongest yet, and featured guest appearances by actors I have been very fond of in the past; Rachel Bilson, who was The O.C.‘s Summer Roberts (and has still not conquered her enunciation problems), and Kevin Weisman who played lovable technological wizard Marshall in Alias. So I like Chuck now, right?
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! Even at the height of its powers, I had a miserable time watching it. Truth serums and poison and antidotes? Really? This is the best on offer? I noticed that the episode was written by show producer Anne Cofell Saunders, who has spent years on 24. Now, that show, at its worst, features some hilariously convoluted and bad plotting, and strained dialogue devoid of jokes. At its best, it has riveting and exciting plots featuring excellent timing and suspense, and strained dialogue devoid of jokes. That dialogue never improves. As a result, this episode of Chuck featured much stronger plotting than usual, with something finally being done about Chuck and Sarah’s absurd romance, but lumbered on with zero wit and horribly contrived comic sequences featuring the criminally unfunny Buy More staff. When I say criminally, I’m not exaggerating. They should all be hogtied or keelhauled or something. Isn’t there a punishment where people are sewn into sleeping bags full of vipers? Can we do that one, please? Especially in the case of Joshua Gomez as multiverse-Gupta Morgan? I nominate him as worst character on TV. Oh God, he makes my teeth ache! Oh God! Oh God!!! ::has nervous breakdown::
::recovers from nervous breakdown:: Still, the stupidest moment of the week came when Weisman’s evil baddie character poisons Chuck’s sister, Ellie, with a deadly enhanced truth serum, which starts making her tell the truth lots and lots, but only a few hours after her exposure. As a bargaining chip, he offers an antidote to Chuck and co. in exchange for a MacGuffin of some sort. He holds up the antidote to prove it exists, and everyone sees it.
Through various hilarious shenanigans, Chuck saves Ellie but gets him and Sarah and Casey poisoned. Through the magic of contrivance, the truthiness kicks in almost instantly, leading to even more hilarious shenanigans! But they will die soon, which just ruins the humour entirely. You’re bumming me out, Cofell Saunders. Chuck is smart enough to figure out where Weisman is hiding, and our heroic avengers rush to his hideout. When there, he offers them the antidote, and they take it. Here is a screencap of this moment.
Now, unless you’re colour-blind, you might be able to spot a slight discrepancy. Here’s a hint; check out the colour of the vials. Our heroes are about to drink the liquid, but thank God! Chuck realises the vials contain something other than the antidote, and throws it away! How did he figure this out? Because the previous vial that he not only held in his hand but administered to his dying sister was green and this one os piss-yellow? No! Because villains like to offer heroes bottles of poison instead of antidotes in, and I quote, “comic books”. Okay, sorry about this, but it’s pet peeve time. In the pilot, Chuck asks Morgan if he wants to play “video games”. I don’t know any gamer who refers to them as anything other than games, just as I don’t know any comic fans who refer to them as “comic books”. Graphic novels, yes, occasionally, but never “comic books”. Yet more proof that this show is targeted at geeks and nerds but written by people who have no concept of nerd culture. Painful stuff. Oh, and they cast the immensely likeable Weisman as a nasty bad guy, thus wasting his talents.
I really have no idea why I’m still watching this.
ETA: Canyon, who was kind enough to get these Chuck screencaps for me, pointed out that Weisman’s forehead appears to have become larger, not unlike some kind of large-craniumed psychic villain out of a comic “book”. [It's not just larger; it has Frankenstein stitches down the center and bulges out at either side. Something in there is growing, and I'm worried it's not his brain. -- Canyon]
Edit again, many many months later: Upon rewatching this episode for our Caruso Awards of 2007-2008, I found out that it wasn’t actually written by Anne Cofell Saunders, but by Allison Adler. Many apologies to everyone involved for the error. What did Adler previously work on? Family Guy and Commander In Chief. Perfect pedigree for Chuck, then.
Most Inventive Plot of the Week:
Pushing Daisies returned with another strong episode, though for most of it I remained hung up on the tweeness, and the over-direction (not Sonnenfeld-bad, but annoying nonetheless), and the peculiar cleavage overload, and my anxiousness whenever Chuck gets near Ned. At the end, however, I realised how much I’d enjoyed the plot, which revolved around a polygamist dog trainer, his four wives, their perfect dog, and an evil breeder with a get-rich-quick cloning scheme.
It was so off the wall but so creative and coherent that I couldn’t help but love it. The fact that the perfect dog is a cross between four breeds, and the dog trainer had four wives, lent a pleasant symmetry to the episode. The first murder plot (featuring a dandelion powered car) was perhaps too quirky, and I was concerned that there would be similar annoying details cluttering straightforward plots in the future episodes, but this was inventive and silly and yet never implausible, in that yes, cloning dogs and killing people with poisoned coffee is outlandish but nothing was as gratuitous as a car powered by dandelions, which was too too precious. It was a joy to watch, and yet again made me kick myself for doubting the show. Even though the flaws remain, it would be a grave mistake to diss some of the cleverest writing on TV.
Most Pissed-Off Reaction of the Week:
An overworked Tami Taylor asks Tyra and Lila (whose names will confuse me until the end of time) to help organise Pantherama, the annual rally for the Dillon Pathers, and with notable imagination, they get the team to strip off in front of the whole town. This is how she and her husband react.
For some reason Lila thinks it hilarious, though we thought she’d have to rush out and do some hardcore praying. Still funny, though.
Runner-Up Most Pissed-Off Reaction of the Week:
The documentary crew following House around the hospital edit together his misanthropic quips and turn him into a lovable hero that makes Doug Ross look like Peter Benton. (Sorry, I once loved E.R. Is that a crime?)
Having his carefully constructed nastiness ruined by a bunch of filmmakers really pisses on his chips. Oh, and remember I said Michael Michele was brought in as a snarky love interest? Turns out I was wrong again. This happens a lot. Get used to it!
Question of the Week:
Which was the best love scene? Pushing Daisies‘ Ned and Chuck?
FNL‘s Matt Saracen and Magical Latina Maid Carlotta?
Ugly Betty‘s Henry and L’Amanda?
Or Reaper‘s Sock and Gladys?
Clumsiest and Most Delayed Exposition of the Week:
From the thrilling opening of the latest Heroes:
Peter Petrelli: You gotta let me go, Nathan.
Nathan Petrelli: You go, I go!
Peter: No, I’ll be okay. You can fly, I can’t.
Nathan: Whaddaya mean?
Peter: It’s taking everything within me, all my power not to explode! Let me go!
Nathan: Peter!
Peter: Raaaaaaargh! ::big ‘splodey::
Yes, it was great that the writers acknowledged the gaping plot hole in the season one finale, albeit it with the subtlety of Niki’s fist to the groin, but it would have worked better several months ago. We’ll take a couple of lines of exposition at the right moment over “emotional truth” based on contrivance and ignorance of the laws of your own universe, thank you Mr. Kring. Mind you…
Most Exciting FX Sequence of the Week / Season So Far:
…Nathan saving Peter, getting burnt to a crisp, and then saved by Peter made me want to do a circuit of the living room in its honour.
That’s the Heroes I love! Which makes it all the more painful that…
Worst, Stupidest, Most Contrived and Insulting Death of the Week:
…making sure DL doesn’t die as a result of Linderman’s bullets, but lives on, becoming an actual, honest-to-God inspirational hero, and then dying off camera to a punk with a gun just so that Niki can come to her senses and seek help is just absolute bullshit. Even Ali Larter seems to be pissed about it.
DL was one of my favourite characters, and having him die in the finale would have been bad enough, but let’s be honest here. The writers had four months of backstory to explain, and they didn’t have enough for Niki to do, so they brought back DL from the dead just so she had someone to interact with during this episode. How else were they gonna fill the 45 minutes up? Sylar was out of commission, Nathan was in a coma, Peter was in a Company cell hanging out with “Adam Monroe”, and Hiro was in Feudal Japan. Problem is, DL was supposed to be dead, so he just gets hurriedly pushed out of the story in the lamest of ways. Imagine if Daredevil was run over by a car driven by Stilt-Man’s cousin, or if Animal Man slipped in the shower. This is how stupid DL’s death is. I know it’s just a show, and I am usually able to not get too worked up about these things, but that was appallingly bad writing and a disservice to the fans. Heroes gives with one hand, and it takes away with the other. I’m not a happy bunny!
Most Intriguing Character of the Week:
Yes, we now luff Journeyman. Other than being a little humourless, we love everything about it, and this week featured a superb plot twist, where we find out that Dan Vassar’s time-travelling companion Livia is leaping forward from 1948 instead of back from 2007! Turns out their love affair was conducted during a particularly lengthy leap on her part, which begs the question, how much of their moments together were actually spent during her leaps, with her popping out of the present when his back was turned? And if Dan is leaping because of an experiment in the present, how does that affect her 59 years ago? I love that the show is full of little questions and mysteries. It’s making the loss of Lost almost bearable. Oh, did I mention that Livia is played by internet favourite Moon Bloodgood? No? Whoops!
Moon Bloodgood, ladies and gentlemen.
Most Underwritten Character of the Week:
Rather than continue with the griping about Andi and her pointlessness, it’s perhaps time to start worrying about the other main female character, Josie, played by Valarie Rae Miller. For weeks now she’s been not much more than a walking plot device, an ex-girlfriend who just happens to work in the DA’s office, allowing the Soulbusters to find out information about the criminal pasts of their foes. Until now, the most interesting thing about her is that I was sure she looked familiar, and I thought I’d gone mad and started thinking she was the black Eve Myles.
Turns out she she was in Dark Angel, as the token black lesbian (James Cameron’s randomly activating liberalism at work, I’ll wager), where she just talked about her relationships and gave off waves of dismissive “attitude”. Despite her non-lesbianness in Reaper, she’s pretty much the same woman. Prior to this week all she has done is spar with Sock, but even then her perpetually annoyed responses fare not too well in the face of Tyler Labine’s off-kilter line readings and method quirkiness. Sock desperately needed a comic foil who was more than a match for him, and if it was meant to be her, it wasn’t established strongly enough and Miller was left with little to work with. Instead, Gladys the DMV demon has become the unlikely foil, much to our delight.
That leaves the problem of what to do with Miller. This week she actually got to interact with Missy Peregrym instead of get hassled by Labine, but to my disappointment, in contravention of Bechdel’s Law,all they could do was talk about boys. With the growing viewer frustration over the lack of variety or season arcs, the showrunners would do well to spend some time fleshing out these characters (especially Josie), perhaps give them an adventure of their own, one that doesn’t involve them talking non-stop about boys.
It could be the thing that vaults the always entertaining but unadventurous show up to the next level. Oh, and I know I said I wasn’t going to go on about Andi, but right now the show is wasting Missy Peregrym even more than Miller. I’ve got Stick It on right now, and while it’s painful to see Jeff Bridges playing a tough gymnastics instructor instead of winning the Oscars he should be getting on a regular basis, it’s amazing to see how lively Peregrym is. She’s not the best actress, but she’s funny and engaging and is willing to take a beating for the film. A montage of her hitting the ground over and over again was painful to see. Why is she not being used to greater effect? Damnit, my love of Reaper is getting sorely tested over its lack of commitment to giving the female characters something interesting to do. Consider this a black mark against the show that must be addressed (I’m sure the showrunners will hop to it right now).
The “What The Hell Is He Doing On This Show” Moment of the Week:
Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water, FNL introduced a new character, played by Surfing Jesus!
I honestly thought that John From Cincinnati‘s Austin Nichols was a surfer who got given an acting gig because showrunners David Milch and Kem Nunn thought it would be easier to train surfers to act than to do it the other way around, but it seems he’s actually an actor first and a water-skiier second. The watersports world’s loss is our loss too. Actually, that’s unfair. His performance as John was infinitely better than Rebecca DeMornay’s and she’s meant to be good at that shit. He was fine in FNL with what must have been a frustrating role to play (Julie’s new crush), and at least now he doesn’t have to keep saying “I don’t know Butchie instead” fifteen times an episode. (Seems he’s actually from Austin, which explains why he’s in FNL, though not why his parents felt it necessary to name him after the town he was raised in. Did they move there because of his name? Or name him that because they wanted to live there? Actually, I don’t care really. I’m just killing time.)
Pratfall of the Week:
Betty gets haunted by her kindhearted former self this week, and is reminded of the toll her job has taken on her, a cloying plot device wonderfully usurped first by having Dream Betty walk into a door, followed by Real Betty sitting on the wrong part of a chair.
As usual, the sentimentality of the show is undercut, allowing the subsequent genuinely shocking death of Bradford to hit hard without being dulled by contrived emotion earlier. Bravo showrunners, once more!
Grin of the Week:
Not just Ray Wise, but Ray Wise while getting repeatedly smacked in the head with a baseball bat!
Runner-Up Grin of the Week:
Buddy Garity trying to charm Tami Taylor with yet another of his harebrained schemes.
Brad Leland is the king of oily charm and thwarted optimism, and is always a joy to watch, but Buddy’s decision to look after the homeless Santiago meant we could see him question his own wisdom and face up to potentially troublesome responsibility. He was even more awesome than usual, but as I’ve said before, this is the best acted drama on TV, and it’s something we take for granted by now.
This Week In TV: Week 7
My first attempt at writing this post (on my brand new and gorgeous Tytn II, and no I won’t stop going on about it) went massively awry, spinning off into a sustained rant against a couple of new shows, and so I’ll save that for another time. Let’s keep this short and sweet. It was a good week, with a couple of shows missing and only a couple of real low points (ahem Bionical Woman ahem), so instead of spending hours writing a long post about every episode, let’s do this easy digest style, bitches! (Apologies for errors, coding screw-ups and spelling mistakes; I’m in a hurry here.)
Show of the Week:
House, continuing this most amazing of seasons with style. Our anti-hero is pressganged into saving a CIA agent suffering from what looks like a case of Topical Radiation Poisoning (topical in that it’s ripped from the headlines), Foreman outsmarts all of the new Cottages, Brennan gets kicked out of the team for poisoning this week’s other patient with thallium, and a new and sassy love interest is introduced; Dr. Terzi, played by Michael Michele, who had to contend with the grumpy Dr. Benton in E.R., so this should be easy.
It featured more cutting dialogue, bitchery, and belly laughs than anything else this week except for 30 Rock, which comes a very close second in the Show of the Week stakes. How long can House maintain this run of brilliance?
Best Line of the Week:
House (to Dr. Terzi): You know, I happen to have a position available on my penis. Wait a second, I just screwed up that joke.
Second Best Line of the Week:
House (to Wilson, who is amazed that House really is at CIA HQ in Langley): You’ve gotta get down here. They’ve got a satellite aimed directly into Cuddy’s vagina. I told them the chances of invasion are slim to none, but…
Actually, that whole scene was utter genius. It generated more hearty laughs than the entire season of Chuck to date, times 5.
Nightmarish Image of the Week:
Liz Lemon vomiting on a demon and then tucking into a cup cake.
It’s haunted me all week, though it’s worse with the wet, squidgy sound effect of the barf. Oh Liz Lemon, you made me feel so very ill.
Weapon of the Week:
In an otherwise lacklustre episode of The Office, I was happy to see an Oriental sword getting a bit of screentime in the horrid sweaty hands of Dwight. Let’s hope he gets a chance to brandish it sometime soon, hopefully in order to get rid of the ever-and-always vile Ryan.
Question of the Week:
Who has the widest shoulders? Michelle Ryan from Bionical Woman?
Or Reaper‘s Missy Peregrym?
Brave and the Bold-esque Team Up of the Week:
In a frustrating (for us) piece of cross-franchise promotion, Bruckheimer Industries chose to give Without A Trace a ratings bump by having series protagonist Jack Malone show up in Vegas investigating a missing child. Great for fans of both shows, a bit distancing for those of us yet to succumb to the charms of Anthony LaPaglia and his sticky-out top lip.
Actually, that’s just mean. I have nothing against LaPaglia, who was fantastic in Ray Laurence’s superb Lantana as Leon Zat (and was the best thing about Murder One‘s second season). We just felt a bit left out as lines directed at his character were obviously loaded with significance that we could not understand. At one point Doc Robbins asks him if he has kids, and his depressed face hinted at some great sadness we were not in a position to appreciate, though Wikipedia did get us up to speed later. That said, it was still a very strong episode, with Malone being a colossal dick, fronting on Hodges and bitching about Gil’s office. However, we’re going to have to watch the next episode of Without A Trace, because this was a two-parter, and evil murdering rapist scumbag John “Sol Star from Deadwood” Hawkes is still on the loose. What I’ve seen of Without A Trace didn’t impress me much, but as it has a fan base as rabid and as ignored and maligned as the CSI fanbase, I should give it another chance.
Guest Star of the Week:
Canyon and I are among that small subsection of humanity that doesn’t hate David Schwimmer. In fact, by the end of Friends, he was the only actor who still made us laugh on a regular basis. His appearance on 30 Rock as Greenzo, the demented manifestation of rabid ecological awareness, was inspired.
“Good job. Leave all the lights on for the invisible people.” He’s everything I would become if I didn’t try so hard to keep my eco-fear under control.
Musical Moment of the Week:
Amanda SummersDaughterofFeySummers, nee Tanen, distracting a grumpy wedding crowd with an impromptu version of Milkshake, complete with pipe organ backing and random choral embellishment, in the latest twist-packed installment of Ugly Betty (with only one reference to Wicked this week!).
Is Becki Newton the best comedic actress on TV? It’s a toss up between her and Tina Fey right now.
Saddest Scene of the Week:
Friday Night Lights‘ Jason Street (Scott Porter) is one of the best-written characters on TV, but has been in a rut for several weeks now, with a catastrophic trip to Mexico behind him, and much angst over his future. For a teenager with no movement below his chest, he’s doing well, with the love of his entire town, a job coaching, and a loving family, but still he’s searching for something. Tough news for Coach, who has to grudgingly accept his resignation, but good news for us, as we get to see more of his journey, and yet more of the best writing and acting on TV right now.
I’m not ashamed to say that this scene left me with a moon-sized lump in my throat, with both Coach and Street expressing their respect for each other, and fear that they have let each other down. I have yet to get tired of saying how incredible this show is. Apologies if you, the reader, have become tired instead.
Stunt of the Week:
Bionical Woman returned to conquer TV with its flat dialogue and unimaginative plotting, but did happily feature a great moment with Jamie grabbing some French terrorist by the ankle, swinging him over her head, and slamming him down on to a table.
The fact that she only has one bionical arm and no bionical spine and thus would have been snapped in two by such a maneuver can be ignored, as can the fact that her Xander-lookalike partner doesn’t think it odd that his supposedly 100% organic love interest just hurled a guy through a 180 degree arc without breaking a sweat. It was a great physical stunt performed with style and shot prettily. Thumbs up for that, showrunners! And thumbs down for everything else.
Most Wasted Former Mutant Enemy Actor of the Week:
For once, it wasn’t Adam Baldwin in Chuck. Reaper had a small role for Mercedes McNab this week, playing an immortal bad girl.
She was great, but didn’t get much screen time or many funny lines. Anyone who’s seen her in Buffy and Angel knows how hilarious she can be, so this was immensely frustrating.
Stupidest Moment of the Week:
In this week’s Bionical Woman our wide-shouldered heroine was on the trail of an ill-defined terrorist in possession of a list of some nebulous import. As this terrorist was played by Cylon scumbag Callum Keith Rennie we hoped for some improvement over the usual shittiness, but instead we got this horribly set up scenario involving plastic surgery. The first time we properly see him is a photo of him with the most outrageous aviator mustache in history. Good disguise, CKR!
It’s still recognisably him, though, which makes later scenes utterly ridiculous. Jamie and her wide shoulders go to a ball in Paris to intercept him, though she doesn’t wear an old man mask or spray infrared spray on the back of anyone’s head as in Mission: Impossible. The gimmick here is that CKR now looks so different from his Biggles photo due to extensive plastic surgery that only a Jamie-Eye-Cam picture of his iris is good enough to identify him, so she goes around the room scanning all of the guest’s eyes, until she comes across CKR, sans mustache. Even though he looks almost exactly the same, the only thing that makes her suspect he is the terrorist is that he won’t meet her gaze.
Firstly, why? He doesn’t know she’s Bionical, so why is he looking away? Secondly, HE LOOKS LIKE THE PHOTO!!! Those screen caps are not out of context; that’s exactly how the big cosmetic change was shown on screen. Just arrest him, dammit! But no, instead Jamie and the Xander clone follow him and allow him to lock them in a closet. Semi-Xander is so pissed he doesn’t notice Jamie has super-strength, either when she breaks down a metal door or when she flips a guy up in the air, over her head, and then back down again. If all of these covert operatives are this unobservant, no wonder terrorists can avoid capture with nothing more than alterations to their face fuzz.
The “You’ve Arrived, Sir!” Acting Triumph of the Week:
Glenn Morshower has been stoic and noble and great in several series of 24, mostly just acting as an audience surrogate in the presence of the super-heroic David Palmer. In Friday Night Lights, he broke hearts left, right and centre this week, compromising himself by burning evidence in an effort to keep his son, Landry, out of jail for murder.
It was all the worse for being such a doomed effort, and while we’ve been fretting over the future of our beloved Landry for weeks now, it seems we’re going to have to add his dad to our list of things to be concerned over. Still, now we’ve seen what Morshower can do. Let’s hope he gets cast in juicier roles than Secret Service Agent #5 in various dull action shows (not counting 24, obviously).
Grin of the Week:
Ray Wise!
Of course Ray Wise. What the hell did you think I was going to say?
-
Who We Are
admiralneck
daisyhellcakes
masticateur
Shades of Caruso Mini-Blog- Listmania ’11! The Best Movies Of The Year December 31, 2011
