New Shows, 5: Mercy, Eastwick, The Forgotten
More reviews after the fold, with comments on gender in Mercy and Eastwick. I’m running out of ways to say things are mediocre to piddling, though …
Mercy
I’ve heard this panned by some critics, and my viewing of the Upfront clips suggested it would be horrific. I suspected that the urge to play with the title of the show in my review would be too large. But it turned out to be passable, if nothing more.
It’s set in an odd gendered space that bugged me somewhat. The women are in charge and clearly we’re meant to be impressed by all this female power, yet ultimately what the women are in charge of are your traditional coded-female issues – clear communication, taking care of other’s feelings, and easing family and work tensions. While on one hand, I’m not blind to the degree to which these responsibilities are thrown onto real life women, and thus while on that hand, the show at least asks viewers to value such roles, on the other hand, it does a pretty lousy job of trying to challenge those binaries.
I do like, though, how the show’s set in a rather messy world, where not everything is cut and dry. I like how it gives Guillermo Diaz from Weeds a chance to be something other than a stereotype. Lead Taylor Schilling does an okay job, and is much more interesting (written, and acted) as the center of a medical drama than is the soggy piece of cardboard that is Meredith Grey in Grey’s Anatomy. And there were some well done moments. So it’s alright, and those slamming it are being unfair. But it has its problems, Michelle Trachtenburg being a big one – her character is impossibly wet behind the ears, and more appropriate for Doogie Howser, MD than for this show. I also worry that in its attempt to be gritty (which at times succeeds), it threw too much at the wall in the pilot, and would’ve been better advised to pick its spots and be patient.
I don’t know if I’ll bother with another episode. It’s not DVR-able, as far as I’m concerned, but if I was channel surfing, I might watch it.
Eastwick
Lipstick Jungle and Cashmere Mafia both failed, suggesting that the Sex and the City clone idea was a failure. So instead the producers here decided to:
(a) move the scene to Stars Hollow (it’s filmed on the Gilmore Girls set);
(b) give them powers, thereby making it a grown-up Charmed; and
(c) put them in a harem
The first move’s an interesting one. For all that SatC was touted as a hip urban show, I always wondered how much popularity it gained from women definitively not in an urban environment wanting a taste of that life. Granted, to move the action to a small town necessitates somewhat less rampant consumerism … though only somewhat less, as the fetishism of Egyptian cotton sheets is hard to miss in the pilot. But the style is similar, based around girlfriends talking about “boobs” (their word), vibrators, and penises more than I’d have thought your average 14 year old boy was able to. Except now it might seem all the more identifiable to many viewers, set in a small town?
The second move is handled sloppily. In my TV Comedy class, I’ve been showing clips of older sitcoms, and I think of how poorly magic was handled in The Munsters or I Dream of Jeannie – you see it coming a mile away, it’s given too much screen time as the producers are ever so proud of themselves, and thus it interrupts pacing, and I can always think of better ways to use the powers than do the lame practitioners on screen. The episode I showed my class of Jeannie is “The Americanization of Jeannie,” one in which Jeannie reads an article on the “emancipation of the modern woman,” which turns out just to be about how to get nicer clothes and make your man treat you to dinner at fancy restaurants more often. Jeannie can do anything, yet all she wants is a nice dinner and the undying attention of her “master.” I fear that Eastwick could only be headed in that direction – like Jeannie, these women are set to inherit awesome powers, and instead of doing anything all that impressive with them, it seems as though they’ll use them to make sure the guys who were mean to them pay the price and the next guys are nicer. Pretty empty and vapid, eh?
And that “eh?” segues me to the leader of the harem, Due South’s Paul Gross. Gross is having a lot of fun in the Jack Nicholson role, and was one of the highlights of the show. Except for the fact that it’s depressing to see the women start to become his yo-yo’s on a string. Even when Rebecca Romijn’s character has a vision of her daughter being raped by a young man, when she races to the rescue, it’s Gross who has to step in and punch the little turd, when it would’ve been nice to see her ring his bell herself. Yeah, yeah, it’s a remake, but why not reenvision the harem leader in a less harem leader manner?
Thus if Mercy’s gender politics seemed a little off, Eastwick’s seem really retrograde, and highly problematic. I vote no.
The Forgotten
This show posits a quasi-underground network of people who step in to identify a dead John or Jane Doe after the police have given up, and who clearly hope to solve their murder. Right off the bat, though, the show’s way too self-serious about the network, to the point of significant comedy. For instance, there’s an exchange near the end when someone asks Christian Slater where the people who found Jane Doe are, and he says “we’re everywhere,” thereby sounding one part Verizon ad, one part Crossing Over with John Edward.
Slater takes himself too seriously too. Or maybe he’s just trying to inject some intensity into a show that is painfully lacking. Watching this was a chore, since it’s just so very boring. If the often well-written, habitually well-acted Without a Trace couldn’t survive on network TV, I can’t see how this snoozer will go far. I’m even bored writing about it, so let’s end things here.
Recent Comments