New Shows, 4: Accidentally on Purpose, The Good Wife, NCIS: LA
Three degrees of meh. Reviews after the fold …
Accidentally on Purpose
The show, about a woman in her late thirties who has a fling with a much younger guy that leads to her getting pregnant, has lackluster reviews elsewhere. The Onion made its own feelings about Jenna Elfman known when a while back they posted a piece about a herd of buffalo being startled into group suicide by word of her new sitcom. Alan Sepinwall of the New Jersey Star Ledger (and hero to Chuck fans everywhere), writes that “she’s trying way too hard to sell the jokes here – possibly because she knows no one’s going to buy them without a whole lot of help.” Even the New York Post’s review by Linda Stasi (the highest rated review of the show on Metacritic), offers mixed enthusiasm in telling readers to “Suspend all disbelief, pretend the really, really offensive laugh track doesn’t exist, disregard the giant slabs of ham offered up by Jensen and Parham, and enjoy the chemistry between Elfman and Foster.”
My own response? Meh. It’s not bad. But it’s really not all that interesting or good. I liked Elfman on Dharma and Greg, and found her erratic energy to drive that show in interesting ways. I’m also a huge fan of Ashley Jensen in Extras, as I think she regularly owns the scenes, wonderfully likeable and gifted with brilliant timing and delivery. Here, though, Elfman’s energy is often grounded by an entirely ho-hum script, while Jensen is wasted in the role as perpetually sassy/lippy best friend, and each comedienne is doing her own thing, leaving little room for chemistry. The lead guy’s ho-hum too. And so nothing really jumps off the screen. I laughed a few times, but didn’t care about the characters, didn’t really care for the story, and would feel no urge or interest to watch it again. Don’t get me wrong – it’s fair enough as background, vanilla television, and it’s okay. But, well, meh.
The Good Wife
Imagine, if you will, a world in which there are very few Law and Order style procedurals. In that world, I’d be really excited by The Good Wife. It’s pretty decent as far as legal shows go, Julianna Margulies does an excellent job, and it made me care about the characters. The central premise, of a politician’s wife who returns to work as a lawyer in her forties after her husband is thrown in jail following a sex scandal, has an interesting hook for those who might’ve wondered about poor Elizabeth Edwards, Silda Spitzer, Hillary Clinton, Jenny Sanford, et al. While I can’t see the show getting too much mileage out of that premise, since it’ll wear off, it’s a smart gimmick to get non-viewers interested, and it evokes considerable empathy.
Certainly, characterization here is quite strong. Margulies really throws herself into the character in interesting ways. She effectively manages to look shattered and resilient in variable amounts. Equally impressive is Josh Charles as Will, who plays a lone friend who is neither pitying her nor blaming her. If the show creates sexual tension between them, I’ll be very disappointed, since at the moment, it stands to be a rare instance of a caring male-female close friendship on television. Christine Baranski is a kind of fun character actress. And Archie Panjabi is good, as is her chemistry with Margulies.
But we’re not in a world devoid of procedurals. We’re in one full of them. Everywhere. Granted, a bunch of them are pitched at guys, whereas this is immediately more female friendly. But SVU, Medium, and Saving Grace, amongst others, have their feet on base for that demo and for the Emmy nominations for Best Actress. So I worry about its chances in such a law-and-order saturated environment. I think it’s worth it, and hope it lives, and I’ll be watching it, if not religiously, and perhaps only for a while. But it hasn’t done quite enough to distinguish itself and to step well above the competition. Maybe that’s the magic of legal procedurals – that they only need to be okay to survive. So maybe it’s already free and clear. However, I feel that it needs to do a bit more to move out of meh and into excellence to be definitively safe.
NCIS: LA
At first, I found it hard to get over one salient fact while watching this: Chris O’Donnell is not cool, even though he really thinks he is. He’s got the squint, the slight hunching of the shoulders, the swagger, and he’s rasping his voice a bit at times. He’s even got the name: “G,” they call him. But he’s one of the most vanilla actors around.
But the more I watched, the more I realized that this is CSI: Miami, and thus he’s David Caruso. Like CSI: Miami, this is the second in the series, and it’s trying to distinguish itself by being a little sexier, high-concept, filmed with starker colors, and more glossy. The bad guy lives in a spectacular home with a great view, the central set of the NCIS base is lush and pretty, and it clearly wants to have a little more edge (and a more hip and racially inclusive cast) than the first in the series. And O’Donnell is Caruso – not a good actor, but someone who takes himself so seriously that you’ll either yield as a viewer and do likewise for the sake of the story, or you could enjoy the camp element (this is Robin from Batman and Robin, after all). Get him some sunglasses and some supposedly threatening cheesy lines, underscore those lines with a musical flourish before each ad break, and the show’s path to CSI: Miami will be complete.
And as with CSI: Miami, it’s okay viewing. It will never win acting awards, writing awards, and few will argue that it was overlooked. But it can be fun and engaging, and I’d imagine it will do very well. Indeed, so far, of all the shows I’ve seen, if I had to bet on one succeeding, it’d be this. Just as CSI: Miami has absolutely cleaned up in international viewing, this one could sail along merrily thanks to its gloss and its pacing (it has a pseudo-videogame beat in the background that carries the action along). I can’t really recommend it, just as I couldn’t recommend CSI: Miami per se, but both are passable television that will entertain reliably enough.
One thing NCIS has going for it, along with Bones (and The Mentalist), is humour. Indeed, when these programs air episodes devoid of humour they are rather poor. I approach all three as comedies, and in this regard they work rather well.