I-See-Dead-People (And They Make Me a Better Person!) Melodrama, CBS, Friday Nights
What’s it About? Full disclosure. This was my favorite pilot. By a long shot. Thematically rich, subtly acted (especially by a Patrick Wilson coming apart ever-so slightly at the seams), gorgeously shot, sumptuously paced, there was pretty much nothing I didn’t like about this pilot. One little subplot with a tennis superstar pushing her career over her health irked me a bit, but it was so small compared to this notion of reintroducing a long-lost spouse (who is also recently deceased!) and finding a missing piece of yourself that dominates this pilot. When judging the pilot as a whole, I so easily forgave it.
So why is “A Gifted Man” halfway down my list? Last post, I drew a line in the sand, saying “Up All Night” would be the last truly good show that we saw in the first week of premieres. And my favorite pilot is on the wrong side of that line?!? What kind of Scrooge am I? Someone needs to be visited by a kindly ghost and set straight, I tell you!
My problem is this: this show is going to be a procedural. Not all procedurals are uniformly bad, some are very good, but the promise shown in this pilot does not seem to match up with case-of-the-week shennanigans. “A Gifted Man” shouldn’t be a procedural, but, since this is CBS, it inevitably will be. It should be a linear story with some wild turns and an eventual final redemption, you know, kind of like A Christmas Carol — which this show basically is if you replace money lending with brain surgery and carolling street urching with underpriveledged Latino children — but, unless I’m
sorely mistaken, it won’t be. (This show would make a great British drama with
a short seven episode run, by the way. The wife is our erstwhile Scrooge’s Jacob Marley, setting him on the path to redemption, and then he’s visited by some other ghosts, and in a few short weeks we have our resolution and the doctor saves that one really important patient-in-need who we met in the first episode and who’s been deteriorating over the past six episodes but has become more and more sympathetic with each passing week. That’d be good. Yeah…) Unless CBS recaptures the narrative magic of “The Good Wife” and loosens it’s tie a little, this show will be a case-of-the-week ordeal about two doctors saving the patient-of-the-week I don’t care about, except one of those doctors is dead, and the other is a jerk… which is an interesting premise, I suppose, but not exactly what I want to invest in.
All that stuff about love and ghosts and shaman – that’ll still be in the background, sure. But I’m going to see a whole lot more of poorly fleshed out patients with neuroses and issues that will be resolved by the end of that week’s episode. I didn’t like the tennis-playing girl, and I’m about to get a whole giant dose of tennis-playing girl in the form of an endless carousel of meaningless patients-of-the-week that will show our Scrroge the error of his selfish, rich people ways. And that is not what I want right now.
(Note to CBS: I will be so happy if you prove me wrong, and the tennis playing girl comes back next episode and learns her lesson in a more stretched out continuity and the show takes off on some wild serialized adventure that makes me reevaluate the value of life and reaffirms my faith in humanity. So, um, keep that in mind CBS.)
On the Holiday Special Scale: 5 out of 10. I don’t see much potential for a classic holiday episode. I think a holiday episode from “A Gifted Man” will just fade into the background, just another heart-warming “Look what patient I saved on Christmas” thing. It’ll be too earnest. Once again, I’d love to be proven wrong, but, this show is basically A Christmas Carol, except the redemption’s already started and
it’s only September. The best part of A Christmas Carol is seeing how bad Scrooge can be, and on this show, Scrooge is already cuddly after the first chapter! God knows where we’ll be on the redemption scale by the time we get to Christmas… so… treacle alert! Be warned… and god bless us everyone!
On the Stupid Advertisement Scale: 10 out of 10. See above. This pilot had me captivated. I wonder where that captive state will lead me now. I’m a sucker for emotion, but I don’t want to be manipulated into the same story week after week. I want a coherent linear story, and I don’t feel like I’m going to get it – and I don’t feel like another doctor procedural is what our television culture needs right now.
However… None of this takes away from the pilot itself. Not one iota. I repeat: it is a great piece of television and I encourage you to watch it even if you don’t plan to stick with the series. (I’m almost inclined to encourage you to watch only if you don’t plan on watching the rest of the series.) Director Jonathan Demme gets a standing ovation for his work here. And a Perfect 10! Now, I don’t believe the series that this pilot has spawned will live up to the regal honor of this perfect 10 (you know every network is hoping to high heaven I’ll give them my Perfect 10 on the patented Stupid Advertisement From Hell Scale… right?) but a man can hope for a miracle, can’t he? That’s what this show’s about after all.
What’s it about? This is the pretty much the last of the pilot’s that have premiered so far that you can call unequivically good or especially promising for the future of television culture. Pretty much anything beyond this point is not going to make, probably shouldn’t make it, or is on CBS and will have millions of forty-year-olds watching it so it doesn’t matter what you think, youngin’!
In this show Will Arnett and Christina Applegate play brand new parents. That’s about all there is to that. Also in this show Applegate plays a producer on a kooky Oprah-parody show called “Ava,” which stars Maya Rudolph, who is pretty much a comedic genius about 90 percent of the time somehting comes out of her mouth. So which part of this show do think is the funny part?
Oh I’m sorry, you would be incorrect! It is not the easy-target parody featuring the comedy genius, but here’s a consolation prize… Literally, there is a consolation prize with this show: the Ava stuff (which also features Nick Cannon [yes, that Nick Cannon, from Nickelodeon]) seems completely out of place and Rudolph is playing her least funny archetype – the love-me-or-else diva – but this show is brilliant and subtle in spite of that, pretty much solely through the relatively quiet work of Applegate and Arnett as frustrated by loving new parents. This show is cute and unassuming and it shows that any overdone and familiar trope can be new again if the people putting it together make it work.
Maya Rudolph hamming it up as Ava. In double...
On the Holiday Special Scale: 6 out of 10. Why this low, relatively speaking? Because if the show sticks with what it’s good at, then we get another “Baby’s First Holiday” special, which will feel new but probably stands little chance of breaking out and becoming a holiday classic, unless the baby like dies mid-episode or something. (And I know I’m contradiciting everything I said above, but there’s only so much you can do with babies and holidays, right? Maybe I’m wrong.) And the the show pushes what it really wants to be good at, which is the Ava material, and does some sort of meta holiday special within a holiday special on the Ava show, there is only a ten percent chance I will not want to throw my remote at the television.
On the Stupid Advertisement Scale: 10 out of 10. So I’m not sure how much of a future this show has. What works will get old fast. Look how quickly “Raising Hope” had to refocus itself on stuff other the trials of being a new parent. What doesn’t work already doesn’t work and the show seems to think this is what I want to see judging by how much they’re giving Rudolph to do. None of that takes away from the pilot, which is sweet and funny and almost perfect in it’s own kind of unassuming way. Wtach that as a short film, your good. We’ll have to see whether future episodes can live up to it.
The Sing-Off episode 2 brings us the other eight groups. Are the producers saving the best for last, or are they hiding the weaker performers behind the good-enough-for-the-premiere groups?
Part 1
A really rough opening performance on My Chemical Romance’s “Sing” has me a little nervous for tonight. This was just not a good a cappella song. I mean thematically it fits but… While the chorus is… nice, the verses do not do a great job of showing off this style of singing, and that last chorus where everyone jumped in was pretty brutal – there wasn’t enough top on it, and it sounded like too many people singing not enough melody. Hopefully things pick up from here.
First up we have the Dartmouth Aires. Can they avoid the pretentiousness exit the Yale Whiffenpoofs suffered last year. We know they have talent, but can America get behind them? Their video sure makes them seem like normal guys. Unfortunately it makes them seem like normal guys with not very good voices. What I got from the performance of Stevie Wonder’s fantastic “Higher Ground” was a different story altogether. These guys have great voices and their performance was flawless… and I didn’t like it at all. This is a big personal taste thing on my part. The guy at the front was growling pretty persuasively, but it throws me when, behind him, I see some kooky looking kid in fluorescent green socks and a ten foot wide grin doing a parkour routine. This is a song with emotional highs and lows – I know I heard some mention of death in there – but this was just a constant assault of smiles and jumping. Is it better when the Dartmouth Aires do it because their cool college kids and The Cat’s Pajamas were lounge singers? I didn’t feel much of a difference between those performances, even though Higher Ground and Some Kind of Wonderful are very different song. So where was my emotional connection? The judges didn’t seem to mind that it vanished into thin Aires (I’m trying my hand at bad puns like Nick… Yeah, I’ll leave them to him from now on…).
Next up, we have the Pentatonix. They have the beat boxing cellist from Youtube! That’s so cool. Their claim to a unique sound is a tie to the club and dance scene. To be honest, they are… totally right! They sound completely unique. Their sound is so completely tight. The soft middle section of Katy Perry’s E.T. was actually intensely creepy, and the bass and drum effects were transcendent. They have everything that Urban Method claims makes them unique as a “rap” group. The Pentatonix sound like a track, but a way cooler track then anything that could come out of a sound panel, because there are humans emoting and working together behind it. Whereas Urban Method sounded like a pale imitation of studio effects, Pentatonix sounded like aliens hearing the studio effects we earthlings have and spitting them back for us as they’ve interpreted them. What’s the moral of the story here? If you see a beat boxing cellist on Youtube, ask him to join your acapella group!
Third in the lineup, we have the group from Liberia, Messiah’s Men, which is pretty darn cool. They’re a religious group. Will they go for a pop song? It worked well for Committed. Unfortunately, the song they sang seemed to mean a lot them, but isn’t connecting at all off the stage. It is slow, there is too much unison, it sounds empty in spite of this being a rather large group, and the drumming just sounds silly, like they threw it in at the last minute. There are no “moments” and too many singers seem to be reaching at random for pitches. Ben Folds is pretty much on the money in that this performance was moving but it lacked a key center. I think another problem was that, aside from hastily added in drums, this is not an acapella group. This is a choir, and that’s not what this show is for. When the song broke into a more African feeling, the song took off, and it sounded like something this show would be flaunting. I’m in an African Choir on campus and it’s just about my favorite thing in the world. Those harmonies really speak to me, but it took them too long to reach that destination, and, unless the next group is truly very bad, the Messiah’s Men don’t stand a snowballs chance in the Sahara of making it to the next round.
And since the next group is Sonos, who are pretty much the consummate professionals in this field, that’s not going to happen. I expect, as I sit here waiting for Sonos to step on the stage, to be blown away. But I am not. Their cover of “Wicked Game” was a bit to ruminative for me. I felt like I was watching an art piece I will never quite get. It was a cool cover, but not riveting television. What I thought: this is wonderfully sparse, the beat boxing is incredible, but I’m missing something. Ben is probably right that I’m missing a baritone voice, and Shawn is also probably right that I’m missing something more “familiar.” I don’t want Sonos to compromise their vision, but they’ll need to put something on the stage that audiences can relate to. This isn’t just me and my headphones. They need to work with the crowd, and “Wicked Game” was to personal and wierd and thought-provoking. Really, they have the opposite problem from the now-departed Cat’s Pajamas. Both groups are veteran enterprise’s but while the Pajamas’ experience came off as “sparkle,” Sonos’s comes off as “art,” and while I didn’t “get” this performance, I’ll take the art any day. They should absolutely stick around. There is no way that Messiah’s Men have more potential then the mighty Sonos.
And as it turns out, the judges agree with me. Sonos’ sexy sound sticks around another week. I am intrigued to see whether Sonos can turn it around and become the favorites in this competition I expect them to be.
The Deltones
Part 2
Committed came back to show us what they’ve been doing since they won, and I liked it. I always felt a little disappointed that Committed won in spite of never reaching the bar they set for themselves in the first two weeks of the competition. But what little I heard of Stevie Wonder’s “As” here sounded as ambitious, awesome and “butter” (Shawn’s phrase, not mine) as the Committed I liked best – the Committed that blew me away with their innovative arrangements of “This Love” and “Apologize.”
Kicking off the back half is The Collective. This was a group put together by last year’s breakout star Jeremy Lister, but oddly enough he’s not in the grouo, which breaks my heart a little. There were parts of their performance of Rolling in the Deep that I loved (the beginning) and there were parts that really turned me off (the chorus, which as Ben pointed out, really destroyed it for me). This arrangement felt too “Season 1” for me. I want to hear more of the innovation that made the opening bars awesome, and less of the innovation that turned the second verse into a totally different song.
I’m nervous about act number six, Soul’d Out. This is the sacrificial lamb slot, and while the Fannins already filled that role last week, the phrase “high school group” already has me prepared to be sympathetic but disappointed – it’s a reflex. They always bring a glee club, you know like the one on that TV show you may have heard of, but it doesn’t ever end well for the glee kids on this show, which actually seems about in line with that TV show you may have heard of. “We are basically a real life version of Glee,” one of the girls says, and I cringe. Yet Soul’d Out just may have bought themselves another week. For once, the problem was in the beat boxing, which meant the singing was pretty strong, especially on Age of Aquarius. There wasn’t enough countermelody and there was way too much repetition of the phrase “Arius” over and over again, but it was never once a mess. Let the Sunshine in was a bit of a mess, but, unlike younger groups in the past, they kept it together, and I’d say they’re about even with The Collective, which is a big feat for a group that, as Ben pointed out, probably doesn’t have a parent among them that was alive when “Hair” premiered on Broadway. (Which, thankfully, the kids didn’t stick too closely to. No naked hippies on this stage! They’re just kids, people!)
Third in the order, we have this season’s iteration of barbershop quartet Maxx Factor and legendary acapella singer Jerry Lawson. These groups reliably make it to the middle of the pack but never really threaten the front runners. Their job is to be adorable and provide historical context. This time around, it’s an old-school doo-wop group from Boston called North Shore. They are, as one would expect after so many years in the biz, perfect at what they do, and what they do will keep them around until it’s time for someone to actually get a recording contract and make money. Then they will be a memory again, unfortunately.
Tonights last group hails from Delaware. The Deltones are your normal, average college acapella group. Friends first, music second. Rejected from the other acapella groups on campus. Co-Ed. Music as a bonding experience. I’m pulling for them because… I get them. I think I have an attachment to them, even though I, of course, don’t personally know them. For some reason, I feel like I do. I’ll leave it at that. On top of that, they sang one of my favorite songs of all time, Randy Newman’s “Feels Like Home.” Contented sigh. The beginning was rough for me. I’m not sure whether I agree with Ben or Sara. Was it intentional vulnerability or nerves? I think they’re both right. I thnk that what was supposed to be “vulnerable” was made shakier by nerves, and so, for a long time, I could not find the tempo, and it did not seem like an artistic decision that the beat was no where to be found. But the Deltones pulled it together and turned in a deeply moving and polished performance. It doesn’t put them at the top, but it will get them through this fairly disappointing night.
I know I said I thought the glee club kids might make it through, but if I know these judges I suspect they will have mercy on the club and send them back to high school, where I’m sure they’ll comfort each other and avoid the mean cheerleading coach in the track suit. The kids did go home, but in what I think is the big story, The Collective finished ahead of The Deltones, which utterly surprises me. I can’t say I agree with that placement from the judges, but hey, they’re the professionals.
In the end, this second night of competition was a let-down. Only one group put up an unequivocally great performance. The rest were merely average. The cynic in me tells me that maybe this season is watered down, talent-wise, but the optimist says “Hey, any of these groups can turn in a classic performance next time they hit the stage. Trust in the process.” Only time will tell.
My final rankings for this week’s remaining groups:
1) Pentatonix – This season’s best performance so far. I love being blown away by this show, and The Pentatonix gave me something I have literally never heard before. They are in the driver’s seat now.
2) The Deltones – Raw and emotional. Underdogs. Relatively experienced. They have what it takes to make it work as this season’s Backbeats, but can they make it so a college group finally takes it all? I don’t think so.
3) Sonos – They’re better then what they gave this week. They’re going to challenge you no matter what, but I want them to at least give one genre-defining performance before they leave, if they don’t in fact catch on to how this competition works and take it all.
4) The Dartmouth Aires – Just because these guys dress in crazy colors and not coattails doesn’t make them any different from the Whiffenpoofs, and they seem as unattuned to the emotion of the music as that other Ivy League group. I shouldn’t be ranking these guys this low, but I just don’t like them. Sorry.
5) North Shore – They’re great. They’ll never win this competition, but it’s nice to have them on the television screen sharing their love for doo-wop.
6) The Collective – These singers have great potential. But they’re not a group yet. And they don’t have a lead like Jeremy Lister. It’s not enough that he’s just their musical Godfather. They have a week to figure it out.
What’s it about? Witches! The next generation of witches in a small Northwestern town discover that they have magical powers and try to work together to form the secret circle – which will bind them and keep them in check and protected – while, unbeknownst to them, their parents go around making mischief and killing people and mucking up the good name of upstanding witches everywhere.
On the Holiday Special Scale: 8 out of 10. Like Buffy, this show has immense holidays and monsters as metaphors potential. I mean, every week is like a Disney Channel Halloween movie, but I think that the quality stays up on this show and it continues to find ways to up the awesome quotient and keep viewers on their toes. This show is from the creator of The Vampire Diaries, and that show has had no trouble finding a fawning fan-base that will shout until their faces or blue that the show they love is way better then Twilight and all comparisons should stop. I believe them, and I think that this show will add another feather to The CW’s cap when it comes to talked-about supernatural drama done right.
On the Stupid Adveritsement Scale: 8 out of 10. The acting in the pilot is a bit wooden. Typically for The CW, what you see first is how pretty everyone is, and only a while later do you see if there is any substance behind the pretty faces. You always have to wait a bit to judge a CW show is what I’m saying. They front-load on the star-making, and then a few weeks in you either realize you have something that is light as air and insubstantial, or you have a really entertaining water-cooler beheamoth. This one feels like the latter, but it’s too early to tell, and the pilot mostly got me through on its looks and the machinations of its older cast members – the evil parents who are behind everything and pull some pretty cool magic.
What’s it about? I could describe the “plot” of this show – an unlucky-in-love girl moves in with three guys who need a fourth roommate – but that wouldn’t be telling you what this show is about. This show is all about making you go “DAWWWWWW!”
If you think Zooey Deschanel is as adorable and funny as a wide-eyed hamster a with pink bow on it’s head, you will love this show. If you think Zooey Deschanel is as annoying and shallow as a wide-eyed hamster with a pink bow on its head, you will not love this show. So it really all rests on how entertaining you find adorable things to be.
On the Holiday Special Scale: 8 out of 10. We already know that Zooey Deschanel can warble a mean “Baby It’s Cold Outside,” but I’m more interested to see how her character Jess approaches Halloween. We already saw that Jess had a bit of a strange childhood (my favorite flashback in the episode was to a young Jess playing “One of Us” by Joan Osbourne on the guitar while her relatives cringed), and I’d love to see that idea carried further. Jess loves Lord of the Rings references. I’d love to see her take Halloween a little too far and have her new roommates try to reel her in, only to realize that Jess’s enthusiasm is really what Halloween is all about. Then again that’s
probably what every episode will be like. But Zooey Deschanel will be in an adorable Halloween costume. So there’s that.
On the Stupid Advertisement Scale: 8 out of 10. This is the only pilot I saw with a large group of people, and they ate it up. The pilot is by no means perfect, but like Raising Hope and Glee (or on another network, How I Met Your Mother), it’s a perfect crowd show. It’s not too cerebral, like Community or 30 Rock, but it’s also not dumb like Two and a Half Men. It plays perfectly to a room full of laughter, and it balances out Deschanel’s awkward girl cuteness with some jerkiness on the guys’ part. It’s heart-warming but a little bawdy. It does rely too heavily on Deschanel acting like she’s not astoundingly beautiful, graceful and charming, which means she has to play insecure and naïve, which can only last so long. In short, it’s utterly watchable, but it begs for a bit more from the supporting cast to keep the kookiness in check and create a full library of scenarios and characters to play off of like we have in the How I Met Your Mother and Raising Hope universes.
What’s it about? I started out with fourteen shows, but last night I added a fifteenth – this fun, retro cocktail about the flight crew of Pan Am’s newest clipper jet adventuring through clear skies in 1963 – and I wanted to be sure to put it where it deserves to go, which is right in this slot after Revenge. I will say it was nice to see a show with a plane that didn’t deem it necessary to have devastating crash. All the drama came from within our erstwhile flight crew. There’s spy intrigue, a missing girlfriend, a steamy affair gone bad, and a lost and lonely young stewardess, and, with all that, we pretty much never leave the confines of that pressurized cabin. And it’s such a pretty cabin. So much space!
On the Holiday Special Scale: 9 out of 10. The wonderful thing about this show is that, any given week, it can be set anywhere in the world at a time that was extraordinarily intriguing. This show is getting a lot of comparisons to Mad Man, which, of course, it looks like, but you have to keep in mind that, while the offices of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce are gorgeous, they’re not going anywhere. The characters on Pan-Am have a gorgeous office, but when they open the door and walk outside, they open the door to another world. This show has already shown us a willingness to globe-trot. It’s shown us Cuba, New York, Rome and London, and all of those looked pretty convincing. The last show to be this temporally adventurous was Lost, and goodness I love making that comparison.
That being so, who knows where this show’s holidays will be set? I know when they will be set, and I find that fascinating in its own right. But that means I definitely want to see this show’s take on Thanksgiving in 1963. How will the flight crew celebrate Thanksgiving in Cairo? Or Rio? How about Christmas making an emergency run to a still-in-its-infancy Vietnam War for Christmas? This is how shows draw you in and keep you around. Pan Am will be a big hit riding on this promise alone. If it squanders that and sticks to closely to headquarters, expect people to get restless and catch another
flight.
On the Stupid Advertisement Scale: 7 out of 10. This pilot was exceptional – adventurous, sparkly, engrossing, even intriguing. Even the score, full of blasting horns is noteworthy for it’s quality. It completely took me by surprise. I thought I’d liked The Playboy Club pilot well enough, but this pilot showed me how much more potential there was that NBC had already squandered. That being said, there were times during this pilot where I was confused. There were some less than interesting transitions here, and I had trouble keeping my interest up between breaks. But this show really came together in its last ten minutes, and I think it only builds on the promise from here. That kind of promise keeps me coming back after ad breaks. It makes me think that I’ve found that “it” I described in my first post! Fingers crossed.
Count of Monte Cristo inspired sudser, ABC, Wednesday Nights
What’s it about? Well I’ll let protagonist and REVEEEEENGE seeker Emily Thorne (the jilted victim formerly known as Amanda Clarke) explain it to you:
“When I was a little girl, my understanding of revenge was as simple as the Sunday school proverbs it hid behind. Neat little morality slogans like “Do unto others” and “Two wrongs don’t make a right.” But two wrongs can never make a right if two wrongs can never equal each other. For the truly wronged, real satisfaction can only be found in one of two places: absolute forgiveness or mortal vindication. This is not a story about forgiveness.”
Oh, snap. And this is the truest statement you will hear in any pilot this fall. No mercy here. This show opens with the clarion call of gunshots and the death of a major character-to-be, leaving you asking the entire pilot, “Wait, so how do we get from Point A to Point B?!?”
Here’s three things we know about our major repertory players so far:.
Emily: Her real name is Amanda; her father was screwed over by his corporate partners for some unknown reason and died a lonely death in prison; and she will avenge her father’s unfair death by coldly dispatching those responsible by smoldering at the camera and sounding really intense in voiceovers. Will she forget the somewhat noble reason she came and get so lost in revenge that she ultimately becomes the villain?
It appears that she manages to corrupt straight arrow Jack Porter, which is kind of villainy. We know that he will probably be the one who pulls the trigger come Labor Day weekend; that he will do anything to keep his father’s business open; and that he has loved Amanda/Emily since they were kids… you know before the whole conspiracy went down.
Daniel Grayson is Jack’s opposite: he is rich and immoral and appears to be a major target of Emily’s. We know that: he claims to be trying to get his life back in order; that he looks and acts as much like one can look and act like Darren Criss without actually being Darren Criss; and he will, in a few months, be very dead.
And then there is Victoria Grayson, the big bad: She was once in love with Emily’s screwed over father, she was the mastermind behind the conspiracy to have him put away, and she is so not going to like it when she finds out that Emily is that man’s vengeance-seeking little brat.
In this episode, Emily begins to mess with Victoria by exposing the affair that her husband is having with her best friend. To do this Emily puts a mild poison in the man’s soup, sending him to the hospital in the hotel bathrobe. Nice move. Or as she puts it, “They say vengeance is a dish best served cold, but sometimes it’s as warm as a bowl of soup.” Zing!
On the Holiday Special Scale: 8 out of 10. If you can believe it, the pilot already is a holiday special. Actually it manages to squeeze in two holidays: Memorial Day and, in a peek into the future, Labor Day. Yeah, they’re bargain bin holidays, but this show is set in the only place on Earth where those holidays trump Christmas: the Hamptons!
Here the holiday’s serve as mere backdrops, but man do I want to see this show’s Christmas episode. It’ll probably never happen, because who stays in the Hamptons for Christmas? But goodness it would be fun. Everyone would try to tell Emily that Christmas is about forgiveness, and then she’d spike their eggnog and yell “REVEEENGE!”
What does this tell me about this show? Well, it’s going to hit one note over and over again, but if it hits it well, why complain? It’s why people still read the Count of Monte Cristo to this day. You’re like, “Alright dude, enough already,” but really you want to see it all tie together for him (and how crazy he can be about all of it – I like that Emily doesn’t really appear to be all there… mentally… it’s a promising sign for what’s to come). What have made Dumas’ classic better? Emily Van de Camp doing the revenge-seeking! This show will probably be the most succesful out of the gate, no problem drawing in viewers or getting people to talk about it, so at least we have until the mystery of Daniel’s murder is solved to relish all its dark, soapy glory. And I love that.
On the Stupid Advertisement Scale: 9 out of 10. One of our highest scorers here. This is don’t change the channel television. There was so much opportunity for horrible exposition here. I hear horrible exposition, especially on a soap like this, and I’m gone. This show handled its complicated ackstory beautifully, showing and pretty much never telling. Even when there was some telling, it toyed with your expectations, because the new girl in town asking all the questions already knows. She’s just being coy with her fake doltishness and naiveté. So even the exposition is spiced up with nuance.
This is basically the best CW series the CW has ever done – except it’s on ABC. It’s young, sexy, campy, water-cooler friendly and just soooo juicy. And it’s good. There was no way I was missing the next soapy twist on this show.
Will I be tuning in next week: You heard me. No way I’m missing a twist. I know Emily will get her revenge, but I want to know the toll it takes on her and the delightfully evil Victoria. I want to see this pretty town burn under the mighty wrath of the cute blond girl with the perfect fake smile. I could pick up Count again, but why do that when this show is Count with girls and bad puns? Score!
What’s it about? Well you see, there are these two girls… and they’re broke…
In all seriousness, this title is very clearly trying to jump on the bad economy bandwagon, and while the character’s go a lot deeper then you’d expect them to, even in the pilot, the conceit itself doesn’t go much deeper than that. Max (Kat Dennings) is a misanthropic Brooklynite who works multiple jobs to make ends meet. Caroline (new face Beth Behrs) is a bubbly heiress and business school graduate who lost everything when her father was arrested for a Ponzi scheme (sound familiar?) and all her assets were frozen. They meet. Their differences keep them apart. Their similarities being them together. All is well in Brooklyn. Except for… umm, poverty… and Brooklyn.
On the Holiday Special Scale: 10 out of 10. This show has pretty much split critics down the middle. Some think it’s the next Laverne & Shirley. Some think it’s another Two and a Half Men, but with girl jokes. Count me among those who see immense potential for this show, which rides, laugh track and all, solely on the backs of its leads, who are really great in this pilot. This is the show I actaully invented the Holiday Special Scale for. Watching the show, I started imagining crazy situations I could see these two ladies getting themselves into while trying to reach their goal of having their own cupcake shop, and Christmas just popped into my head. I imagined the diner decorated badly in holiday cheer; some Christmas themed leering from Oleg, the vaguely Eastern European sleezball cook; Max taking on some loony holiday season job like Salvation Army Santa at the urging of optimistic Caroline and hating it profoundly; and Caroline begging Max to try and recreate some over-the-top holiday tradition that Caroline did with her family back when they were rich. And I laughed at these scenarios and wondered how each character would deal with them, which is strange because I barely know these characters. For all I know, any holiday episode this show does will suck. But I don’t think that will happen. No, I think this show has the right idea, and as long as it goes where I think it’s going (Caroline and Max use the diner as home base but also try and secure employment by various other means, switching up the formula constantly) then I see a bright future for 2 Broke Girls, one where the two leads use their chemistry to build a Lucy and Ethel like chemistry and take the comedy world by storm, bringing laughter holiday special after holiday special. (Note that if the producers don’t use this chemistry and creativity, then I will totally despise this show.)
The Stupid Advertisement Scale: 7 out of 10. Rocky going at first. Based on it’s punchlines alone, your not going to keep watching this show. They’re clever, but they’re not going to get you past the dreaded ad break. But then, fifteen minutes in, something magical happened. The characters took control, relegating the jokes to second fiddle, and a female friendship that actually made wonderful sense began to form between two girls who would have appeared to have nothing in common. What changed? This show basically won my goodwill when, halfway trough the episode, we found out that, while she may be vain, naive, pretty and blonde, Caroline is also extraordinarily caring, sensible, intuitive and is way smarter then anyone else around her – including Max. What a surprise that was. Beth Behrs sells it completely, and while she’s selling her punchlines and phyical gags to the rafters, the little character things are delivered subtley and quietly. You are won over by them as the viewer as slowly as Max is won over by them, but by episode’s end, this show has done something extraordinary. It has made it’s two female leads equals – both in each others eyes and in the eys of the viewer – while giving them each distintive personalities and flaws that can be built on later. The minute I saw this, I was fighting like crazy through those ad breaks. Not only would I have reloaded in a heartbeat to see the neat sleight of hand they pulled with the character of Caroline – I was giddy when the break was over.
Watching Again Next Week: Yes, I will be, and I’ll know fairly quickly whether this show goes where I hope its going or whether it will in fact squander all the promise I perhaps misguidedly see in it and go the more 2 and a Half Men route. (Please god, no. Side note, the Advertisement scale was created while watching Two and a Half Men. I tried to watch the season premiere because I was curious about both how they dealt with Sheen’s departure and how they dealt with Ashton Kutchewr’s arrival. During the second commercial break, CBS.com locked me out and I had to reload the page and sit through two ad breaks before I could get back to watching the show. So little had I been enjoying myself that, in the middle of the third commercial I just said screw it and turned off the computer. And the Stupid Advertisement from Hell Scale was born. Two and a Half Men gets a zero. Yeah it’ll draw you in onn the hype, but it sure as heck won’t keep you their on quality and potential.
I have watched every network television pilot that has aired so far. When I told this to a friend last night, during the Gators trouncing of the Kentucky Wildcats, she looked at me like I was crazy. I very well might be. The common stance is that, if you are not being paid to do it, watching every television pilot is akin to tortue. Even if you are being paid, it’s just torture with a stipend.
Well, I’m here to report that it’s not as bad as all that. As a group, the 14 episodes I watched (I left out H8R and The X-Factor, keeping it only to scripted shows and sparing some of my sanity) are not crimes against humanity. (With one notable exception, and I will spare you the suspense, because it doesn’t deserve it. It’s Charile’s Angels…. Just bad…) I enjoyed a good number of them. But I don’t think I found what I was looking for.
What was I looking for? Well I think I thought I was looking for something else to write about. The heroic stance. I was doing it to inform you, my readers. But that’s a lie. I don’t even know you, and I’m not altogether sure you exist.
So I did it for me then, didn’t I? Must have. And I realize now that I was looking for another show for me. There has been a huge hole in my pop culture heart since Lost left me and Heroes went as stale and moldy as old bread, forcing me to break up with it. When I was a kid, I used to become obsessed with shows pretty much at whim. Law and Order had a phase. So did the West Wing. Lost is the first show I found on my own and stuck with until the end, and I figured that a beautiful new relationship with television had started. But since I broke up with Heroes, television hasn’t provided me the goods. Or I haven’t been looking in the right places. Good old-fashioned, healthy obsession has been hard to come by. And I’m sad, to be perfectly honest.
I only truly watch (by watch I mean turn on the television when it comes on every week and pay attention) three shows now: Glee, Mad Men and Community. Watching Glee today feels like having an old friend twist the knife in your back while singing a cheerful tune. It’s reminding me a lot of my painful break-up with Heroes. Mad Men is on a long hiatus. And Community is so funny but so short. I’m missing something big here. That attachment to show that is currently in the act of altering our culture as we speak. A show I can latch onto from the beggining and write effervescently about on a weekly basis while praying it doesn’t get cancelled. A show that is mine… and everyone’s. That’s what a pop culture nerd like me feeds off of. And without it, I feel kind of empty.
So I will say ahead of time that I went in there searching for something to fill that gap, and while I saw some great starts, I didn’t find what I was looking for. At least not yet. None of these shows have… it. “It” is the difference between the Harry Potter book you can’t put down, and that other book that you should probably keep reading because that’s what people do. “It” is special. And while these shows may have registered as special to someone else, to me they were just a homework of sorts: self-assigned, somewhat enlightening, but restraininginly by-the-book.
Know now, before I get into particulars, that I will say some good things about some very good pilots I saw, but I didn’t find my Lost. I didn’t find… it. I won’t grade these pilots on that scale, because that’s unfair, but know that the person doing the grading is looking for something more, and you’ll know when he finds it. (Fingers crossed for Terra Nova this week, eh?)
So I want to take a look at this year’s new shows, but, if you’d grant me a little leeway, I want to do it in a slightly different way. Pilots can be a lot of fun, (or they can cause physical pain, it’s kind of a toss-up) but grading them and then letting those grades influence the rest of the show’s history is a bit like assigning a final grade to an author’s second draft of their novel’s first paragraph. You rarely see someone go back in and grade the whole run of a show after it’s done, and so, sometimes, in the most perverse way possible, what sticks with that show, for richer or poorer, is the grade given to its pilot. Yuck. To get a better feel for these episodes then “good” or “bad,” I’m going to create two hypotheticals, my own special metrics, and use those situations to hash out my perspective on what’s new on the Fall TV slate. The two hypotheticals:
“It’s season two of [Insert Show Here]. It’s November Sweeps, when show’s load up on hyped up holiday specials. Are you about to see a stone-cold classic holiday episode? Or another dud?”
“You are half-way through the pilot of [Insert Show Here] on hulu.com or cbs.com or wherever you’re watching the pilot online. Right after 50 seconds of irritating, life-sucking ads, your internet gives. Do you go through the effort of reloading the episode and sitting through the same advertising break again? Or are you done?”
The first hypothetical asks for potential. The second asks for an in-the-moment reading of your enthusiasm for the pilot and your attachment to its ideas, potential be damned. Potential being great and all, except if I’m not enjoying what I’m seeing, I’m not coming back. A bit more detail on each scale:
The Holiday Episode Scale – I’m instituting this scale for grading a show’s potential, which so often gets left out in simple A-F grades. The scale basically asks this: Based on the pilot you just saw, what will that Christmas episode be like? What will the Halloween episode be like? Will it be good? Great? Most importantly, will you still be watching by then and will it keep you watching?
When you think about it, this idea factors in a bunch of intangibles – characters, writing, setting, plot – and asks you to evaluate whether you really see yourself commiting to this show’s universe down the road a bit. For instance, do you care enough about these characters after what inklings you’ve gotten from the pilot to see how their relationships change on any given holiday? If your instincts tell you yes, they probably are on to seomthing. How about the setting? Can you see the main set covered in a delightful holiday veneer or providing a new holiday setting you haven’t seen before? Do you trust the writers enough to believe they won’t just give you a canned retelling of those same old holiday tropes? Do you trust the show’s conceit enough to believe that it could really dole out a fresh message when you throw Halloween or Valentine’s Day in the mix?
In essence, can you see this show making a classic holiday (any holiday, some shows are better suited to some than others) episode? Can you see this show even making a holiday episode that you won’t hate or that won’t be the same old story you see every year? To be frank, can you even see this show making it to the holiday season? If all of the answers to these questions are no… you’re probably right… and you’re watching a show that’s not going to make it. Or that’s going to make it but will only be a waste of your time.
Really it’s a big gut call, but one with enough variables removed to make it a kind of fun experiment. Oftentimes, whether you’re dealing with a classic family comedy, an animated raunch-fest, a good-ol’ cop procedural, or a concept heavy sci-fi show, you can tell after one episode whether the series will be able to deliver the goods come November. Maybe not the first time out, true. Maybe two or three years down the line. But the potential to deliver a stone-cold classic is there. Or it’s clearly not. All it takes is to get a glimpse and recognize the potential.
The Stupid Interactive Advertisement from Hell Scale: I’m going to tell you something scary. Online advertisements are evolving… fast. They’re like bacteria that get used to your antibiotics and mutate into nastier little buggers with immunities and a vengeance. Lemme ask you, do you switch to another window when ads are playing? Well they know now, and when you come back after the sound has stopped, you’ll see the timer still has thirty seconds on it and you have to watch the whole thing without the sound. Dammit! Want to minimize your screen so you can at least look at something else? Sorry, that option is taken away the second the ad starts. You are that advertisement’s hostage! It owns you now. These ads are angry parasites.
And I know, it’s just thirty seconds… And it’s all so totally worth being able to watch television online for free! But, when it comes down to it… I’m a bad person, okay! An impatient person. And if, ten minutes in, I have to re-up the web-site and sit through one more ad break than I have to… well, I had better be damn sure what’s on the other side is going to be worth a few more of my brain cells dying a painful, movie-trailer infested death. (Why do advertisers think it’s cool to play the same two ads over and over again? It’s not. There’s a reason television doesn’t work like that. I do not want to buy the product more the third time I see the commercial in thirteen minutes.)
So this one’s pretty self-explanatory. When a gun is put to your head (okay, more like a slingshot, but you get the point), will you stick with the show, or will you just let it go? If it’s any good, you’ll make the small sacrifice and get back in there. If it’s not… well, there’s a lot of other things out there on the Internet that don’t take you hostage and eat away at your soul. Like Facebook! (Oh, wait…)
My next post will be about the show which came in highest in my silly rankings according to my metrics, which I think pretty accurately reflect how these shows are doing and will do, and I’ll work my way down from there.
In honor of this week’s episode of The Sing-Off, here are my top twenty performances from the first two seasons. The major take-away here: Season 2 blew Season 1 out of the water, which is good news for Season 3 if that trend continues. I provided videos for your listening and watching pleasure.
20) I’m Yours – Nota (Season 1)
This performance, one of the first viewers ever saw, starts out rough, but the minute the guys in Nota kicked in that Latin flair, the magic of The Sing-Off became apperent. With talent and imagination, these singers could do anything to these songs, and no one added in their own flair quite like Nota.
19) Sweet Caroline – Beelzebubs (Season 1)
This is not remembered as one of the Beelzebubs better performances, but give credit where credit is due. The guys had livelier tracks, sure, but they were never this pitch perfect or goffily sincere. A flawless performance of a silly song.
18) Live Your Life – On the Rocks (Season 2)
No one ever had as much fun on the stage as these guys, and that’s saying something considering this stage has seen the likes of legendary goofballs like the ‘Bubs. On the Rocks was consistent but never had a “steal the spotlight” moment. However, I would be remiss if I did not include their most light-hearted, rockingest performance.
17) Down on the Corner – Street Corner Symphony (Season 2)
Street Corner Symphony was well-established as a front-runner by this point, but unlike Commited, they didn’t rest on their laurels. Note their signature here: they insert their name into the lyrics.
16) Come Sail Away – Beelzebubs (Season 1)
Not the ‘Bubs greatest performance, but it was their most ambitious. You try cutting Come Sail Away down to a minute and a half!
15) Grace Kelly – The Yale Whiffenpoofs (Season 2)
These guys did not live up to their pedigree, but it was fun while it lasted. Off-stage they seemed cocky and off-putting, stiff, but during this cover, they were legit as can be.
14) Hey Soul Sister – Street Corner Symphony (Season 2)
This cover announced Street Corner Symphony’s arrival and told Committed that they would not simply be walking away with the title. A nice groove, a killer breakdown, a fresh take on an overplayed song.
13) Journey Medley – The SoCals (Season 1)
They were so theatrical, so cheesy, so Glee… and I kind of like them. This was their best performance.
12) Love Shack – The Backbeats (Season 2)
The judges worried the ballad lovers in The Backbeats would never be able to loosen up and have some fun on stage. Proved them wrong, didn’t they?
11) Down – Nota (Season 1)
This performance is considered Nota’s signature moment. I like it less then others, but you have to give in when that dance-break gives in.
10) The House of the Rising Sun – Jerry Lawson & Talk of the Town (Season 2)
Jerry Lawson was pretty much just resting on his legacy until this performance basically exploded my brain. These were some classy dudes, and it translated into one truly memorable moment for them.
9) Creep – Street Corner Symphony (Season 2)
I just love this song. If they sang it in tune, it would have ranked this high. They did so much more than merely sing it in tune.
8) Magical Mystery Tour – Beelzebubs (Season 1)
This is the song which introduced us to The Sing-Off. A giant bus on stage. The guys acting out an acid trip. Random flailing and funny-faces. And Sing-Off fans said, “Yep, I’m in.”
7) Jackson 5 Medley – Nota (Season 1)
This was Nota’s best performance. Eeverything I didn’t like about them worked here. Their take on “I’ll Be There” is beautiful.
6) Cooler Than Me – Groove for Thought (Season 2)
For one shining moment, Groove for Thought was the coolest thing to ever sashay across the Sing-Off stage. They pretty much disintegrated the following week, but I have to give credit where credit is due: this cover was the bomb.
5) The Who Medley – Beelzebubs (Season 1)
The best performance from Season 1, riding the back of a really emotional “Behind Blue Eyes.” And the ‘Bubs showed they could really rock out.
4) Apologize – Committed (Season 2)
This performance had Shawn throwing his arms up in the air. Nothing to comment on. It’s true. This take on OneRepublic won them the competition in Week 2. They never had to put on a performance this great again – and unfortunately they didn’t.
3) Fix You – Street Corner Symphony (Season 2)
My favorite Sing-Off moment. The other contestants coming out was a surpise. A surprisingly moving surprise. I know I had a little dust in my eye during this performance.
2) This Love – Committed (Season 2)
The best arrangement on this show, ever. Period. (The performance starts at 1:40)
1) Landslide – The Backbeats (Season 2)
And yet… I had to give the edge to the Backbeats for “Landslide.” The Backbeats were late bloomers, but they hit a grand slam when it came time to vote for the winner. They got my vote on this performance alone. It is the most starkly beautiful thing I have heard come from an a capella group. not just on this show. Ever. It’s that cello, man. That is some good cello.