The Extratextuals

I’ve been a bit busy, so my final pilot reviews have dragged their heels, but here we go (reminder that three are to be found at Antenna):

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Outsourced

I expected to hate this. The clips looked awful, and the concept sounded like yet another opportunity to make fun of Indians. And yet after watching the first two episodes, I’m somewhat intrigued.

Yes, there are definitely some nasty stereotypes. Witness, for instance, how quickly both the Indian and Aussie women fall for Ben Rappaport’s Todd Dempsey, ‘cause we all know how much the rest of the world’s women are just aching for an American man, right? And Manmeet’s (insert shudder at the cheap joke in his name here) reverence for all things American further ups the national chauvinist ante. The dark, brooding, silent Sikh is hardly likely to win the writers an “excellence in diverse and enlightening depictions award” any day soon. And much more.

But there’s also quite a lot of humor that’s directed at America and American culture, represented most clearly in the show by a slew of pointless, gaudy, kitsch novelty items for sale by the team. Dempsey, moreover, is an interesting mix of cultural presumptions and earnest interest in negotiating difference, while Diedrich Bader’s Charlie Davies serves as comic fodder for being less willing to budge culturally, his resulting isolation rendered in the clearest of high-school terms by occupying his own table in the cafeteria.

The show could still be a lot better, but it’s already much better than I expected. It stumbles over itself at times, but at least it’s trying. For a business that makes so much money from the rest of the world, American television has often been so painfully unconcerned with anyone who isn’t American, and so happy to ignore the rest of the world. Outsourced is by no means a stunning postcolonial, politically savvy text, but it’s doing a lot more than do most shows. And it’s actually quite funny, if you can put up with the awkward moments when its chauvinism crashes back on itself. I’ll continue to watch, if only because of its potential, and because I don’t think it’s yet suggested that said potential is dead.

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Blue Bloods

Whose dumb idea was it to cast Donnie Wahlberg in this show? Tom Selleck’s a charismatic guy, Bridget Moynihan is no Connie Britton but she can hold her own, and Will Estes seems likable enough. Then there’s Wahlberg, as drab a detective as one can imagine, boring even when torturing a suspect, and expressing anger with one eyebrow, happiness with the other. But for him, the cast has quite a lot going for it, and then in he comes and the scene flattens.

More broadly, I found the show passable, but little more. The idea to mix family drama and procedural is handled awkwardly at times, but at other times distinguishes the show from the other 156 procedurals on primetime network television in a healthy, even occasionally interesting way. Yet – and it’s a big yet – the whacky introduction of the “Blue Templar,” a secret society operating within the police, and the suggestion that their activities will loom large for the show, did reek somewhat of a shark being placed under the water-ski ramp in the pilot.

I’m not much of a procedural fan anyways, so I set the bar much higher for what will bring me back, and while I could see the show being decent enough for those who like the genre, I won’t be returning.

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Shit My Dad Says

Okay, I must admit that the title of this show alone bugs me. It highlights how remarkably juvenile and immature American censorship can be. The fact that CBS would commission a show called SHIT My Dad Says, and then refuse to use that title itself, insisting instead on calling it Bleep My Dad Says, makes me laugh and cry at the same time. The other pilots have showed a child being abducted, a woman brutally beaten by a burglar, and have found endless humor in joking about sex … yet we can’t say the word “Shit”?!! Clay Davis, where are you when we need you, my friend?

Moving beyond the title, though, this is not a good sitcom. The production of jokes and one-liners is telegraphed well in advance, to the point that they might as well add a countdown in the top left corner of the screen. Overall, it’s hard to imagine that anyone in the writing team really wanted to be on this team, other than because they needed a job – there’s no great vision, nothing that’s all that exciting, and little to keep either their own or the audience’s attention.

Except for Shatner. I feel sorry seeing him stranded in this mess, but credit where credit is due, he largely makes the thing watchable all by himself. Shatner is a wonderfully talented comic actor, and even when fighting a rather mediocre script and co-stars, he often made me laugh and occasionally made it work. This and this alone could well keep the show alive, long past its time. With apologies to the Shat, though, I’ll be elsewhere.

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No Ordinary Family

I need a few more episodes to judge this show better, especially since the pilot is so densely laden with set-up. Besides, as endless superhero movies have proven, scenes in which superheroes realize they have powers are the easy ones to write, whereas the real test of a writer’s abilities come after the realization, when we see what the heroes do with those powers, and how the metaphor of having powers (since it’s always a metaphor for something) maintains itself.

But I’m interested enough to invest in seeing several episodes. Michael Chiklis delivered a good performance, Julie Benz has never been my cup of tea but she always manages to do an okay job in otherwise excellent shows, and I have a real weak spot for Romany Malko, who made both Weeds and Forty Year-Old Virgin so much better with his comic presence, and who once again makes his scenes fun and funny here. The daughter is shrill and very annoying at present, but that could hopefully resolve itself once she finds reason to do something other than talk down to everyone else on screen.

The show struggles a bit at making the family drama fit into the superhero show, and its continued success or eventual failure will likely rely heavily on how well it manages to balance these elements in the future. For now, it’s fun, and it’s especially refreshing to see a superhero show that doesn’t take itself so darn seriously.

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Law and Order: Los Angeles

I foresee problems for the latest in this franchise, and I blame the casting. It’s simply too back-end heavy. Alfred Molina is a good actor, and though Terence Howard doesn’t appear in the pilot, the idea of the two of them swapping out the DA role in the show is tantalizing, as both men really know how to command a camera’s and audience’s attention and interest. But the detectives are boring, and thus I can’t see myself being willing to sit through half an hour of hum drum, poorly paced, monotonous delivery until we get to the good part. This seems a violation of the franchise recipe, too: consider SVU, in which Christopher Meloni, Emmy winner Mariska Hargitay, Ice T, and Richard Belzer provide a wonderfully quirky and interesting detective team. Or think of many of the other strong character actors like Jerry Orbach who have anchored the first half-hour of others in the franchise. And then we get Skeet Ulrich, fresh from the Keanu Reeves Don’t Move Your Face School of Acting, and Corey Stoll, who might be okay, but has nothing much to work with.

Moving the franchise to LA was no doubt meant to make it sexy. At least, the pilot wants to promise as much, with LA night clubs, reality television stars, young starlets, multi-million dollar houses perched on the hills overlooking the city, and so forth. And yet despite all that, it began as remarkably boring, with the pacing all wrong. Dialogue seemed to sit in the air, scenes dragged on, and even the night club scene seemed fuelled more by downers than uppers. Oddly, too, as though composing a four hour-long French film, the director often paused on wistful looks into the distance for no particular reason. Molina rescued the affair, sped it up, added acting heft, and got the story back on track. Once in the courts, no less, the plot settled into a more familiar Law and Order style, complete with twists, rebuttals, and tension. But when I’m already not enough of a fan of the franchise to watch its other incarnations, I can’t see why I’d want to watch this one, unless it’s the second half, once Ulrich is out and Molina or Howard is in.

new shows, reviews ABC, Blue Bloods, CBS, Law and Order: Los Angeles, NBC, No Ordinary Family, Outsourced, pilots, Shit My Dad Says

What new shows lie ahead? Last week’s Upfronts gave us the answer. The allure of so many new shows is impossible for me to resist, and thus this is the first in a four part series discussing the new network shows for Fall. I’m not discussing summer additions, since most of those have already offered previews and various trailers or other promotional materials, so they’re more established, and since I have to cut it off somewhere. I’m also not discussing new cable shows, despite the cable channels being part of the Upfronts this year (as Amanda Lotz describes here), since there are so many channels that it becomes impossible to know when to stop.

Those warnings, offered, let’s begin.

And I start with the large crop of new comedies, 13 between the Big Four to be exact (The CW doesn’t believe in [intentional] comedy anymore, so it seems). This is a huge freshman class, and it suggests the degree to which all that crap about sitcoms being dead was so very wrong. Indeed, and as the third installment in this series suggests too, 2010-2011 promises to be just as full of procedurals and comedies as any point in television history.

The problem with evaluating new sitcoms is that the trailers must establish the sit(uation) in the sitcom, and to do so they nearly always create little more than archetypes and stereotypes. The challenge for any comedy is to live and breathe beyond those types, to play with and around them, and to be original in doing so, and sometimes none of that happens until the pilot is done and dusted. So I’m hesitant to crown any of these excellent at this point. But I’m more than happy to crown some of them as horrific.

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Let’s start with NBC (see their trailers here), who as Derek Kompare notes here in his post on the network’s attempts to change its brand identity as Erstwhile Loser at these Upfronts, has a lot to prove and a lot to play for.

• Friends with Benefits looks painfully bad, and if nothing is scheduled against it that you like, please take up a hobby because it could hurt you. Luckily, its title is bad enough to warn you away, I hope. It reeks of the network trying to announce that it’s cool and hip, but that hip is the broken hip on the cool cadaver of comedy. I don’t really get who they’re pitching this at: in an age of CW and Internet porn, surely anyone who wants titillation can find it elsewhere, so what’s left in this tepid looking show but a badly-executed would-be romcom? I don’t plan on finding out. Though I will give points for the Yo-Yo Ma gag.
• The Paul Reiser Show doesn’t look as puke-drenched, but it is a bit sad to see Reiser once more riding the Seinfeld coattails (Mad About You being the original Kenny Bania), this time trying to do something Curb Your Enthusiasm-like. It’s meta and it’s singlecam, and but he’s Paul Reiser, not Larry David (and as Seinfeld told us, listening to Bania is like being beaten with a bag of oranges). This is the kind of format that cable will always do way better, which makes me wonder if someone in the NBC-Universal cable division was filling in for an NBC exec the day this one got greenlit. Oh, I’m sure it’ll be fine unobjectionable, blah comedy, but I’d like something more.
• Perfect Couples, which focuses on three different young couples, is only meh for me – not bad, not good. Best case scenario: it learns from How I Met Your Mother how to do funny couples humor and delivers to the same audience. Worst case scenario: it looks like a really bad hybrid of HIMYM and Friends that burns out after the he says/she says humor runs dry. The tester: if they make jokes about men and women’s different reactions to the prospect of going shopping in the first three episodes, it’s gonna be bad (‘cause they already did the “she takes all the space in the bed” joke in the trailer, so thin ice has been courted already).
• Outsourced is a clear example of what I mention above, regarding pilots and types. Set in a call center in India, this show’s potential to peddle endless Indian stereotypes uncritically and moronically is vast. But it’s also a very rare beast in being an American show (a sitcom, no less!) set outside America with predominantly non-American characters, so the upside is worth tuning in for. I’m not getting my hopes up, but it would be nice if it works.

Overall, then, I just don’t see NBC returning to greatness with these comedies, though with The Office, Parks and Rec, 30 Rock, and Community, that’s not their problem, so tune in later for discussion of their dramas.

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ABC has three new comedies of its own (see all their trailers here), stoked on by the success of Modern Family and Cougar Town (and the impressiveness of The Middle, albeit to middling ratings):

• Mr. Sunshine, starring Matthew Perry as the manager of a sports arena, has me very excited. Why? Allison Janney. I looooove Allison Janney. CJ Cregg was one of the very best characters on television, and Janney is brilliant in all things. She also has history opposite Perry. This looks like it could be a smart comedy, and it’s certainly something different (a manager of a sports arena? Pa Brady never did that!), which may doom it on network TV, and maybe I’m letting my love of Janney carry this too far, but a person has to believe in something, and I believe in Allison Janney. The trailer looks like Sports Night meets The Larry Sanders Show.
• Happy Endings, however, looks to be in competition with Friends with Benefits for lamest new comedy. Elisha Cuthbert stars as … oh, I don’t care, and neither should you. She is close to a polar opposite to Janney in terms of acting skills. Trailers for comedies risk taking the only funny bits in the show, but here there are none, a sadly telling indicator of the horror that lies ahead. Don’t get me wrong – romcoms can be good, but this isn’t.
• Better Together strikes me as a very conventional sitcom. Kind of like Perfect Couples, it offers three couples, here a sister and her recent fiancé, a longtime unmarried couple, and their parents. With a fairly decent cast of sitcom-ready actors, it looks competent, if unspectacular, the kind of show I might find amusing yet not feel I need to follow. Dharma and Greg for the 2010s.

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In terms of branding, I give the gold star to FOX (see all their clips here), who are launching four new comedies, three of which are exactly the kind of comedies you’d expect from the network.

• When people said that My Name is Earl should’ve gone to FOX, where it would’ve been a better tonal fit, clearly Greg Garcia listened and took Raising Hope there. Once more offering a seriously messed up hero and supporting characters, the show follows the arrival of a new baby in the lead’s life. Suitably irreverent, edgy, and very funny, this show looks quite good, I must admit, and it will nicely fit the Earl-sized hole in my viewing schedule. Any show with a flashback scene of a baby riding down a street with his head sticking out the bottom of a car must be good, right?
• Running Wilde also brings back a great talent to the small box, in the form of Arrested Development creator Mitch Hurwitz, with Will Arnett starring no less. Arnett is so fun to watch on screen, and the plot seems suitably ludicrous that I will definitely be watching when it starts. Offbeat, strange, and overdone in fun ways, it could be very good.
• Mixed Signals is another Friends/HIMYM-type show in a year with many of them. It seems fairly adept, perhaps the best of the bunch, yet I’m not sure the market analysis that’s told all these execs that people really, really want more of these types of shows is right, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see most fall my the wayside. Perhaps the studios are simply moving romcoms to TV and away from film since they don’t think they’ll succeed in 3D.
• Bob’s Burgers is another animated sitcom, but miraculously NOT from Seth McFarlane. The bits I saw seemed resolutely Adult Swim-y in their bit-ishness and low grade visual style. I’m guessing this is too cheap looking for network TV, and I give it a short life, especially if it’s as ho-hum as the clips suggest.

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CBS only has two new comedies (see them here):

• Shit My Dad Says promised to be amusing if only to hear how people read the title on network TV. And it stars William Shatner as an irascible, opinionated old guy. So I expected a lot more, but the trailer is resolutely unfunny. Wow, who would’ve thought that a Twitter feed wasn’t enough to build a show off? At this point, studios should be more respectful of The Shat – don’t let this be his last role, CBS!
• Mike and Molly bothers me, since it seems entirely premised on the fact that its stars are heavy (even the title graphics, at present, are of a scale). Fat jokes are fine for five minute segments in a stand-up routine (or for Twitter feeds?), but as the basis of a show, the format seems too doomed to the bi-polar swing between self-loathing and inspirational “we’re all beautiful” platitudes. I’d rather a show like Roseanne where the stars are heavy but just get on with being funny about a variety of topics. I’d hold out more hope that they move away from that premise in due time, but it’s from Chuck Lorre, so comic genius and sophistication don’t seem to be in the cards.

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And those are the comedies. Next up: reality television.

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