It's finally --
finally! time to talk about the Fall TV Season. With all the
moving mishegas and being separated from the
Explorer 8000 Home Entertainment Server right as the season started up, I got a little behind on my TV. I set up the DVR to happily record in solitude at the new apartment, but it was there alone for about two weeks and it built up quite a backlog. I even took some shows off
my list to make sure I didn't run out of room. I'm finally more or less caught up, so here, in the order in which the premiered, are my reviews so far.
I got sucked in to
Everwood late last season for (of course) the tawdriest of reasons -- the Ephram-losing-his-virginity plot, and I got hooked and stuck around. I used to think Gregory Smith was cute in a jailbait/euro-porn kind of way, but now watching him makes me twitch a little bit. It's not the actor's fault, I'm just tired of all the whining on this show. I guess they're going for a somewhat realistic portrayal of the small town high school experience, but y'know what? Unless you're living through it,
that's boring. Even the more out-there, soapy plots are irking me. Dr. Brown is a world-renowned brain surgeon, so one would think he'd be smart enough to know that if you've paid off your son's ex-girlfriend to move away and keep her pregnancy a secret, perhaps the one person you really shouldn't tell is your son's current girlfriend's
father. Scott Wolf is amusing and adorable as ever, but if his hyperactive shtick doesn't go somewhere soon it's going to be as grating on the audience as it is on the other characters. We're slipping into latter day
Dawson's territory, where it's just hard to care much about any of these self-obsessed nimrods anymore.
Speaking of not caring much, I gave up on
LAX after four or five episodes. (I will say that part of my low tolerance for some of these shows, including
LAX,
Everwood and
Jack and Bobby (coming up) may be because they were backlogged on the DVR and I watched many episodes in a row, without the usual week to breathe. Of course, if a show's really good, that shouldn't matter.) I wanted to like
LAX, but in the end the theme song is the best thing about it. Heather Locklear is a close second, but as nice a compliment as "She's the only actor in the world who could make lines like that work" is, it doesn't change the fact that someone is making her say lines like that. At first it was exciting -- I don't think we've ever had a workplace drama set in an airport before -- but ultimately the setting hurts them. It's both too sprawling and too boring. The day to day stuff is mundane, and getting the audience to care about the plight of passengers just passing through is hard. It's like
The Love Boat without celebrities. Or love.
Mostly, I think the show suffers from poor structure. Each week they seem to set up these big character things and plot points that should carry through the series or the season, but then they don't seem to matter the following week. And for all that, I don't know who these people are. Why do we care about a cop hitting bottom if we've never seen him anywhere
but the bottom? Are the clowny security guards and baggage handlers supposed to make us feel safe? Unsafe? Racist? It's just not clear to me what they're trying to do. I wish they'd take more opportunities, as they've done a couple of times (one week's C plot about the birds springs to mind), to enlighten the audience about the inner workings of an airport, the way
ER once did for medicine and
CSI does for forensics. There's
got to be cooler shit out there than Blair Underwood. This one's off my DVR list, but I'll probably catch it again from time to time.
I don't have much to say about
Survivor, except that I don't know how people have followed it consistently from the beginning without shooting themselves. I've watched a total of two seasons (the first, and the pirate-themed one), and I'm already bored with the producers' sad attempts to make these challenges seem different. But mostly I'm stunned by how incredibly stupid some of the contestants are. I suppose they were cast because stupid can make for some good TV, but the liability insurance must be staggering. Want some unsolicited advice?
Don't go on Survivor
if you can't swim!!! How "Bubba" has not been voted off yet simply for being incredibly annoying is beyond me. I can't understand half of what he says. And what's with that t-shirt? I imagine the meeting where the powers that be decided to merge the tribes went something like this: "Quick! We need a merge before they vote off all the cute guys!" That was a truly terrifying strategy. It terrified me anyway. Oh well. I'm hooked now, so I'll keep watching.
After two episodes I really liked
Jack and Bobby. After five, I'm lukewarm, but still curious enough to stay tuned (unlike
some people). Christine Lahti and John Slatterty are two of my favorite actors, and Greg Berlanti is one of my favorite writers (perhaps his focus on this new show is behind
Everwood's descent into annoyingness -- the same thing happened when he left the
Creek), and the two boys are completely charming, but the premise doesn't really excite me, and I still think it's the show's weakest point. For anyone who doesn't know, we're watching teen brothers Jack and Bobby in the present, along with clips of some sort of talking head documentary from 2040-something in which Bobby is (or has been) President of the United States. The flash-forwards are actually my favorite thing about the show -- they're an endless parade of Hey It's That Guy actors, playing both people we know as teens and other members of the McAllister administration and his political rivals. They do get a little gimmicky (there's an AIDS vaccine! the VP is a woman! the "media secretary" presides over a webcast!) but given the current political climate a little bit of mucking about with future hopes is to be expected. But take those away and you've pretty much got
Felicity's Creek, 90210. With Berlanti and Thomas Schlamme both involved, the show is literally
Dawson's Creek meets
The West Wing, but it often feels like Berlanti did his present-day section and Schlamme did his documentary section and the two men never actually met. The (often heavy-handed) lessons Bobby is learning in high school are supposed to somehow affect the President he becomes, but it's not like we're talking about Superman here, and if
Smallville is as dull as it is, what made them think this wouldn't be?
There's a potential there (like in Bobby?) that I like, mostly in the snappy dialogue and direction (typical of Berlanti and Schlamme), and, like I said, in the talented actors. The best thing about the pilot was that we didn't know until the end which brother would become president, and the episode was constructed very cleverly to keep us guessing. It was fun. They couldn't have kept that gimmick up for long, but its spirit was helpful. In recent weeks they've dropped a couple of big plot teasers in the documentary sections, and I'd like to see those get resolved before the show's inevitable cancellation. But on the other hand, who cares? So the media secretary suspected that the President had an affair with the Vice President. So what? We only know the VP as a talking head, and we only know the President as a 12-year-old boy. Yet this little tidbit is somehow more compelling to me than any of the high school plots. It really is a strange little show. Some rescheduling and DVR weirdness took it off my list for this week, but I'm sure I'll check in on it from time to time in the weeks to come.
One of the things I enjoy about
CSI: Miami (the member of the CSI family I've watched the most) is the way they use the peculiarities of the locale to craft their stories. I say this having never been to Miami, and knowing that most of the show is shot in and around Los Angeles, so I suppose it would be more accurate to say that they do a great job of
appearing to use the peculiarities of the locale. But on a very basic level, you have one sister series set in the desert, and one set on a swampy peninsula, and you have two shows that, while similar in structure and formula, each has its own distinctive character. So of course I was excited by the prospect of
CSI: NY, despite the fact that it too is shot almost entirely in LA. With good writing and location scouting, that shouldn't matter, and the City seems like a natural, unique locale for the franchise. So why is the show so boring? More importantly (to a New Yorker anyway), why does it feel like it could be taking place absolutely anywhere?
To be fair, I only watched the pilot, but one scene pissed me off so much that I was done wasting DVR space on it afterwards. Gary Sinise and Melina Kanakaredes have a photo of a murder victim and they're trying to figure out where she is. In the background of the picture on camera-left of the girl is the Chrysler Building, and on camera-right is the Citicorp Tower. Since they know the heights of the two buildings and their distance from each other, and the height of the dead girl, they use this fancy computer program to take that data and the measurements from the photo and figure out the girl's distance from the buildings. Then the computer makes a triangle on a map and shows Sinise and Kankankaredes where the photo was taken. Cool, right?
With excitement, Kankarededededededes says, "Queens!"
Then, smugly, proudly, Sinise says, "Long Island City."
And I screamed at the TV, "DUH!!!" They needed a fancy computer for
that!?? The only place you'd see that particular view of Manhattan that close-up is in eastern Queens, just across the river and pretty much between those two landmark buildings. Now, I know this, and I just live here. I don't get paid to know the city like the back of my hand or, y'know, have a degree in forensic science.
It's entirely possible that the other two
CSIs are just as annoying to people who live in their cities, but they certainly seem less generic to me.
:NY just seems to me like it could be taking place anywhere. Which might be okay if the cast or the cases (okay, the single case that I saw, two if you count the
:Miami crossover from last season) were even remotely interesting. But they're not. I'll probably check it out again, but in the interest of saving space, I took it off the DVR list.
Ah, finally something not just good but freakin' great.
Lost is by far my favorite thing this season. I tried not to get my hopes up too much, just based on the pedigree of the show's creator (anyone remember
Harsh Realm?), but JJ Abrams has scored again. I don't want to say too much about this one in case anyone out there is planning to watch it and is at all behind, but this show is
good. What's maybe most impressive about Abrams is how different each of his shows has been.
Lost has more in common with
Alias than
Felicity, of course, but aside from a bit of mystery and the sense that everything must mean
something, it's a whole different genre. I can't think of another TV impresario (Sorkin, Carter, Spelling, Berlanti...) who can do that so well. I think the premise would be brilliant even without the mysterious supernatural element, though it can be a real challenge, since they can never add new characters to the mix (though there are all those extras milling about who haven't spoken yet), so they have to really make sure everything works. So far it does. The actors are terrific (and by the end of
Party of Job, I never thought I'd enjoy Matthew Fox), the writing is sharp and believable, and hey, it's the second gayest Hobbit! The show is shot beautifully, with a gorgeous-yet-creepy location, and those intensely disturbing flashbacks to the plane crash.
A lot of viewers seem to be overthinking the show. I guess three seasons of
Alias have taught us to be on high alert for clues to the larger mystery. You know what? I don't care. Abrams is a brilliant storyteller and I trust that he knows what he's doing. I'd much rather enjoy the show than second-guess every throw-away line or background prop. Part of the fun of the first season of
Alias was the way the story unfolded before we knew how intricate it would become. As it got more complicated, it got more exciting. I don't want to put too many expectations on the show, just enjoy it as it happens. So I'm staying off the message boards, and not replaying anything...too much.
I'm also really enjoying
Desperate Housewives, though it's a little hard to figure out. The tone is inconsistent, alternating between camp sitcom and high drama. But it's interesting, and certainly compelling. I've always been a fan of Marcia Cross, Felicity Huffman, and Brenda Strong, and they're all doing good work here. I'd like to see Huffman used a little better. Her character perplexes me; I refuse to believe that a woman with her background and her resources, with children as purely evil, wouldn't have brought boarding school into the picture by now. But no one plays strong-yet-easily-flustered quite so well. Teri Hatcher is completely charming (I never watched
Lois and Clark, so this is a discovery for me), and her Gilmore-esque daughter is funny and cute. Cross proves her versatility here; true, she's playing crazy again, but this is a very different kind of crazy from her
Melrose days. And then there's that hot gardener! So the cast is happy-making. The writing is clever, but the what-did-Mary Alice-do plot seems to me like an afterthought. I'd like it to either become a more major plotline or go away, since it seems disingenuous now.
The most recent season premiere, last week's
West Wing (see, I'm not
that far behind) picked up where last season left off. Which isn't necessarily a good thing. But I like where things are going. There are some interesting actors joining the cast this season, and I like where the plot seems to be headed. I still miss the Sorkin touch, and I wish it hadn't taken them a whole year to find their footing again, but I still appreciate it as one of the smartest shows on television, especially in the midst of the election. It's nice that someone (besides Jon Stewart) is willing and able to make politics entertaining.
I watched about ten minutes of the first
Real World episode and it kind of made my head hurt, so I took it off the DVR list. Of course, it's on constantly, so I've managed to stay pretty up-to-date against my better judgment. In fact, I'm watching it now. In
his book, Chuck Klosterman notes that long-time
Real World watchers like to bemoan that the participants have gotten younger and stupider, when in fact we've actually gotten older and smarter. I haven't watched an old enough season recently to test this theory, but I think it's probably true. And as each "cast" gets more aware of the power of TV, their inevitable bizarre celebrity, and (this is also Klosterman's) the tried-and-true RW characters they were hired to play, the show becomes less and less "real."
I tuned in to Philadelphia mostly because they broke with tradition and cast two gay guys this season. How egalitarian! Now they have the same opportunity to hook up in-house as everyone else! Not that it matters though, because one of them has already run into and gotten back together with an old boyfriend who he "just happened" to run into. And I "just happened" to catch the episode last week where they made some MTV porn in the shower. Boy (also "just happening" by) pointed out that even in this day and agey, there was an awful lot of man-on-man action for basic cable. Sure, the absence of boobs lets them shoot more and blur less, but they also gave it more time and more taste than they often give the straight couplings. Of course, I was distracted thinking about how there were at least two other people in the room (camera and sound), and wondering how anyone could be that un-self-conscious and not be thinking about weather their dicks would end up on the internet. I laughed out loud at the next scene though, in which the two "straight" boys "couldn't help" peeking at the homos going at it, making us wonder if they had cast four gay guys after all.
The other homo has the added pressure of being RW's obligatory "angry black man." But he also -- in what may be the smartest move in RW history -- has decided not to hook up on camera, since his family still has issues with his sexuality and may not want to see it on national TV. If only the dozens of cast members who've cheated on their significant others as if it wouldn't wind up on DVD were so sensitive. This bunch actually seems to be smarter than the last few casts, but at least there's the girl who said "I don't like a lot of attention" after going down on a banana in a bar contest --
on The Real World!!
See, and this is me
not watching RW! With the move I actually took some things off the DVR list before they even started. So I still haven't seen the new casts of either of the old
CSIs or
Law and Order, and I have yet to watch even a little bit of
America's Next Top Model. But who needs Tyra Banks when there's
Manhunt: The Search For America's Most Gorgeous Male Model? Just go to the website, it speaks for itself. It's the guiltiest guilty pleasure yet, and I downloaded the screen saver.
