The Extratextuals

As explained in my previous post, last week I attended the Paley Center for Media’s Fall TV Previews screenings. First up was FOX, who showed the pilots for Nashville, K-Ville, Back to You, and Kitchen Nightmares. See my reviews below the fold, though you may want to take my reviews with a grain of salt, given the medium-out-of-context issues I discuss in the previous post.I’ll post ABC, NBC, CBS, and CW later (in that order)Nashville

How it was probably pitched: Laguna Beach meets American Idol in Nashville.

Oh my is this bad. At least Laguna Beach (from whence its creator came) was at times watchable for the odd meeting of reality and scripting. But here the acting and delivery are so wooden as to make the average Grade 3 school play seem Tony-worthy, so nothing seems real. Just listen to the voiceover: “She dreams of becoming a star, but is there room for one more star in the Nashville sky?” In such lines, and with considerable self-importance, the show asks us (again and again and again) to care about the dreams of some spoilt, plastic kids to make it big in Nashville, but since most of them are thoroughly unlikeable, this causes a problem. I don’t want them to make it big: I’m tired of them already. The script drips cheese all over the place, including such hunks of Havarti as, “Wow, she has beautiful eyes. I can’t wait to hear her sing.” If that line sounds like a non-sequitur, well that’s the show: concentrating on lots of things that are irrelevant. So, while the producers probably don’t care about whether I want to watch it or not, I can’t see it winning over their target demo either, since it’s all over the place. Encouragingly, though, even FOX doesn’t seem to have much faith, since they’ve given it the 9.00 p.m slot on Friday nights, when all its cool young target demo are either out partying, or at home and resenting (as they should) the type of people who Nashville wants them to care about. Some shows like this can be camp, and certainly, most of us in the theater were laughing, but it was a derisive laugh. Ed Wood or Jerry Springer are endearingly bad; Nashville is just bad bad.

K-Ville

How it was probably pitched: NYPD Blue in New Orleans.

I usually don’t like Anthony Anderson, so I went into this expecting not to like it. Set in post-Katrina New Orleans, it’s a procedural, starring, as the FOX exec who introduced the shows offered, an “in your face” cop, and another who is “a guy looking for a new start, like the city itself.” Sounds cliché, right? And it begins that way, as my notes to myself include the words “preachy” and “patronizing.” But it softens up along the way. It also started to grab me a bit. This is a sad show at times; for instance, when Anderson’s wife explains that she moved to Houston for their daughter’s sake because the daughter still cries every time it rains, there’s a degree of poignancy and power to the line. I’m aware, though, that the fact that the pilot lacked peppy ads ruining the mood likely helped it achieve a gravity it may lack on broadcast television, as did its big screen presentation. At a macro level, the show has a lot that it wants to achieve, some of that important and valuable. How it balances this with the day-to-day procedural is where it will live or die; the pilot concentrated its energies on the macro, thereby letting the procedural fall by the wayside, but whether the show continues to botch its procedural element once it’s set the scene will be telling. I also wonder how its sad tone will fare on broadcast television, since few other broadcast shows go there, and since its timeslot means that it will be competing with Dancing with the Stars’ happy aura when it comes on at 9 p.m on Mondays. The Wire it is not, and at the moment a good procedural it is not, but it has some small potential.

Back to You

How it was probably pitched: Frasier meets Pittsburgh’s Murphy Brown.

I wasn’t expecting this show’s humor to be so bawdy. Something about the good girl image Patricia Heaton likes to self-righteously beat us over the head with lead me to expect something else. On one hand, that image therefore helps to make some of the jokes sound all the more edgy. And Kelsey Grammer’s an oddly likeable actor, someone I can’t completely warm to, yet who has significant comic skill. Moreover, Josh Gad, as the young newsroom director, seems okay, and I’m a real sucker for Fred Willard (who couldn’t be after Best in Show?). At the end of the day, though, it’s all quite silly, simple humor, the setting and set-up are wholly familiar (a news anchor is demoted back to his former digs at a local news outlet in Pittsburgh, much to the chagrin of his former co-anchor), and the characters are cardboard cut-outs. I want to say that sitcoms need to bring something new to the table these days, and that the age of doing what the last sitcom did is over; thus, I’ll be fascinated to see how this show fares, since I’m not convinced it does bring anything new. I could watch it if it was on, but wouldn’t seek it out. Oddly enough, too, looking at its stars, and at the schedule – it goes up against Kid Nation, Pushing Daisies, America’s Next Top Model, and Deal or No Deal, the first three of which are likely to pick off a significant youth audience – it seems to direct itself towards an older audience, an audience that I didn’t think FOX gave a damn about.

Kitchen Nightmares

How it was probably pitched: Extreme Makeover: Restaurant Edition, with angry Brit.

Review: Simple premise – take a restaurant that is failing, add Hell’s Kitchen’s cantankerous and potty-mouthed Chef Gordon Ramsay, and film. Lately, I’ve become addicted to the Food Network shows and to the cooking reality competition shows, so I was interested. The non-American in me too also appreciates seeing the Ramsays and Simon Cowells of the world talking a bit of sense to molly-coddled babies. I liked its general thrust, though it sorely needs commercial breaks, and probably another show to watch at the same time, since it ends up being just a little too much yelling and high drama for a full 45 mins. I’m also a bit skeptical about its prospects for variety in the long-term: restaurants can only have so many problems (right?), and the solutions are likely to always be the same – namely, let Ramsay yell at you, buy new equipment, add new dishes, and let’s have a group hug. Given that its competition in the schedule includes three other new shows (Private Practice, Bionic Woman, and Gossip Girl) and Criminal Minds, it’s hard to read its chances, but it seems a take-it-or-leave-it show, more of a show to be stripped on cable than a network highlight.

previews Back to You, fall previews, FOX, K-Ville, Kitchen Nightmares, Nashville, pilots