Hemlock Grove: Mildly Toxic

I’ve been enjoying House of Cards, Netflix’s most recent big foray into original drama. And my fondness for teen werewolf drama is regrettably well-documented. So Hemlock Grove, its new series from novelist Brian McGreevy, Lee Shipman, and tiresome goremeister Eli Roth, should be right up my alley. I’ve been looking forward to it for months, in fact.

Unfortunately, Hemlock Grove’s first two hours are, um, not great. Really not great. The series has terrific, imaginative ideas, but seems to have no clue what to do with them.

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by associatevidiot

“Hannibal” Conquers Crime-Show Conventions

Network TV is thickly carpeted with corpses.

No. 1 network CBS has built the foundation of its ratings success on more than a decade’s worth of bodies, piling up by the week in its various procedurals; often female, often unclothed, killed in ways both improbable and somehow depressingly mundane. But along the way, network crime shows — and many of their cable counterparts — have lost the sense of horror that ought to accompany death. They’ve forgotten to make it frightening, to make us feel for the victims, to make our guts twist with sorrow for the awfulness of it all.

NBC’s Hannibal brings all those primal emotions screaming back to prominence, and hooray for that.

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by associatevidiot

Mission to Mars

UPDATE: Well, that was fast. 

Back in the day, I cultivated a regrettably well-earned reputation as TeeVee’s resident Veronica Mars superfan. And while time, Dax Shepherd, and sloth-induced hysterical crying jags have diminished my fanboy ardor somewhat, the show still easily ranks in my personal all-time TV top 10.

So I’m more than a little psyched to see that Mars creator Rob Thomas and star Kristen Bell have teamed up, with Warner Bros.’s blessing, to launch a Kickstarter drive for a big-screen sequel to the show. 

However adversely tree-dwelling mammals may affect her central nervous system, Bell remains one heck of an actress, and she’s long been hurting for roles equal to her talent. Plus, Thomas’s idea for the film’s plot, which promises to pick up the various threads left dangling by the show’s suitably grim final episode, sounds nifty and intriguing.

I’ve already chipped in ten bucks — sorry, Rob, but even I would feel a bit embarrassed to own or wear a “Veronica Mars: The Movie” commemorative T-shirt — and I really hope this project surpasses its $2 million goal by April 12. I would have killed for something like this back when the show was initially cancelled, and I’m thrilled to see creators finding new ways to let fans directly fund the things they enjoy.

by associatevidiot

Revisionist History 401

David Guarascio and Moses Port seem like really, sincerely nice guys. Which, upon reflection, may be the problem.

See, they’ve taken over the reins of NBC’s brilliant Community — with apparently genuine reluctance, as befits their nice-guy status — from its stupidly ousted creator, Dan Harmon. And while Harmon is certainly capable of kindness, the persona he chooses to share with the public is anything but a nice guy.

In his blog posts, Tweets, and admirably frank interviews, Harmon comes across as kind of a mess: Insecure, combative, self-loathing, borderline alcoholic, and obsessed with making things his own way. But you can make the case that this heart of darkness fueled Community’s greatness.

You don’t suddenly yank your sitcom into a completely different genre — epic fantasy, action movie, heist caper, understated drama — unless you’re the kind of person with the guts to regularly say “f*** off” to the incredibly powerful suits paying your salary. The show’s first three seasons are one long, intermittent upraised middle finger to the conventions of sitcom TV, often against the express demands of a network and production company actively interested in the safest return on their investment.

And Community’s characters had all come from, and occasionally revisited, places far grimmer than your basic sitcom joke delivery vehicles. They were narcissistic liars from broken homes, chronic screwups, pathetic aging horndogs, overgrown children avidly fleeing responsibility, OCD perfectionists, powderkegs of simmering rage, and occasionally honestly, unsettlingly insane. They weren’t fawning wish-fulfillments of people we viewers would like to be; the members of the Greendale study group came from a much more real, and more damaged place. Yet they were still funny and likeable, not in spite of these qualities, but because of them. Because we got to empathize with Jeff, Britta, Pierce, Abed, Shirley, Annie, and Troy at their worst, we cheered even harder when they lived up to their best.

That courage and humanism seem to have left with Harmon. The series’ fourth-season premiere, though scripted by series veteran Andy Bobrow, feels like Community Lite - the pieces are all there, but the soul is gone.

Don’t get me wrong. Community’s cast remains a murderer’s row of comic talent, especially the unstoppable humor engine that is Donald Glover. The premiere had more than a few good jokes, and a terrifically funny tango scene that went to the kind of weird, uncomfortable places in which the series specialized. Guarascio and Port seem to honestly love what Harmon did with the show, and fear the potential that it’ll slide into something lesser under their watch.

I really hope that doesn’t prove true, but based on the season premiere? Sorry, guys. You should have feared harder.

The characters all seem to have lost a dimension. They act in the same ways they acted before, but more because the plot demands it than because it fits what their character would want. They seem to have lost that crucial inner life that made them so intriguing before.

The show tosses in goofball references, but doesn’t commit to them. They’re not tied into the themes of the story, and they don’t come with the bold changes in tone and visual style that marked Harmon’s homages. Greendale’s eternally unsettling Dean Pelton throwing his own personal Hunger Games for admission to the coveted History of Ice Cream class? That could make a great episode all on its own, but here it’s just one paper-thin storyline among many — a vehicle to drive the plot, rather than an opportunity to explore something deeper.

If anything, in trying to satirize what the show might become, Port and Guarascio have actually made it happen. The premiere included a fairly excruciating animated “Greendale Babies” segment that didn’t seem to realize it was actually as awful as it was pretending to be. (Well, aside from one halfway decent Pierce joke.)

The new Community isn’t awful. Even at half strength, the top-notch cast makes it funnier than most sitcoms. I’ll keep watching in hopes that it picks up steam and regains its heart as the season goes on. The new producers and the writing team all appear to care a lot about the show, and to want to make the best version of it they can.

But without Dan Harmon and his weird, messed-up vortex of personal pain, I don’t know whether that best version will be as good as it once was.

by associatevidiot

Getting Smashed

As a playwright and theatre producer type, I watched all of the first season of SMASH with amusement.  It wasn’t “hate-watching,” it was “disappointment television.”  The show survived, thanks to NBC’s ratings woes, but there was a regime change in the interim.  They recognized that much of the show wasn’t working, and they moved to address that.

Details leaked out here and there.  Main character’s husband and son?  Gone.  Scheming assistant type?  Gone.  Debra Messing’s scarves?  Gone.  All well and good, but were they going to address any of the actual problems with the show?

Not really.

Reading this TV Guide interview with the new executive producer, formerly of Gossip Girl, I realized that season one might not have been so bad.  Why?

“…music to the ears — literally — of Smash’s younger viewers, who will not only get to hear Hit List’s rock-infused, Rent-like songbook, but also covers of more current bands like Death Cab for Cutie. ‘These are the types of songs that these characters would think about or dream about or know,’ he says. ‘I was very conscious to pull from a wider range of musical styles that fit the characters maybe a little bit more clearly than last year.’”

No, those are the types of songs Gossip Girl viewers would think about, dream about or know.  If your characters are musical theatre professionals—never mind on Broadway—then they’re thinking Jason Robert Brown, David Yazbek, Michael John LaChiusa, Jonathan Larson, Marc Shaiman & Scott Wittman.  They’re thinking Sondheim, Porter, Gershwin, Rodgers.  They’re thinking Schwartz, Webber, Menken.  They’re looking for the next wave of new composers, they’re spending time at Joe’s Pub and elsewhere, they’re singing good songs from shows that closed too soon.

They’re not fantasizing about Death Cab for Cutie songs.

“Screw Loose,” sung by Alli Mauzey, words by David Javerbaum, music by Adam Schlesinger, from the musical “Cry-Baby.”  Performed at Joe’s Pub at the Public Theatre, NYC, as part of IF IT ONLY EVEN RUNS A MINUTE 8, an ongoing series that pays tribute to underappreciated musicals.

And a psuedo-Rent musical is so 1998.  (See Slings and Arrows.  Seriously.  If you haven’t, go see it.  That nails the world of theatre beautifully, complete with its own fake Rent.)

“There’s almost not much of a difference between a pop song in a show like Grey’s Anatomy or Gossip Girl that is telling you the emotion of the moment and a cover on Smash that’s also speaking to the inner emotion of the character and the scene.”

If that’s really the case, more’s the pity.  Shouldn’t a show built around producing big, new, Broadway musicals seem at least a little different from a hospital drama or a teen soap?

“It was important to me to set up for the audience that covers will take place in the characters’ minds only. Unlike last year, where people sang in Times Square, in bars and in bowling alleys — none of that happens this year. All of the covers are a peek inside the inner emotions of the person that’s singing them.”

Theatre folk are liable to burst into song at the drop of a hat.  (I’m exhibit A.)  The thought that they’d suddenly start singing in a bowling alley or in the middle of Times Square was one of the most realistic character moments in all of season one.  Doing away with those kind of moments shows how much—or how little—the new staff understands about the people who make theatre.

At least they got rid of those damned scarves.  God.

by djloehr

An actor with an odd, intense face.

Sometimes, I picture him at a pool table, gone to his eternal reward until someone wants to play the best.  No.  He’s a side man, blowing his horn, hoping against hope that something will click, something will change.  But it doesn’t.  So he steps in front of a truck.  No.  He’s a low-level mob guy, he’s gotten a phone call, his son is dying in a war halfway around the world where there isn’t even supposed to be a war.  And this time around, this man with the odd, intense face who keeps wandering in and out of these twilight zones, this time he dies so his son might live.

Whenever I catch Jack Klugman in a Twilight Zone, he rips my heart out every damned time.  His anger and desperation in “A Game of Pool,” his depression and redemption in “A Passage for Trumpet,” his desolation and sacrifice in “In Praise of Pip,” his sorrow and sudden joy in each one, these are what I think of when I think about Jack.  But it’s that last one that hits the hardest.

Here he is, a bookie roughing up a welcher, a matter of so-called life and death even, and in the midst of this, he takes a phone call.  His eyes, his face, his manner shifts.  Everything stops, and he tells the room that Pip, his boy Pip, is dying.  The surprise in his voice is just devastating.

You can have your Quincy and your Oscar Madison.  I’m going to remember bookie Max Phillips, pool player Jesse Cardiff, and Joey Crown, musician with an odd, intense face, all of whom left the earth today.

by djloehr

Late to the Party: God Help Me, But MTV's "Teen Wolf" Is Actually Pretty Good

by associatevidiot

Beware the Doppeldeaner

by associatevidiot

Intro to Television Adaptation

Sony expelled Dan Harmon.

Less than twenty-four hours in and there are already plenty of posts about it, not least of which is Harmon’s own account.  All of them note that the new showrunners, Moses Port & David Guarascio, were more recently consulting producers on “Happy Endings.”  Some wonder about how the tone of the show might change without Harmon at the wheel.  Others wonder how well the new producers can—or will—adapt to the show.  The general consensus is that “Community” won’t be the same without him.

I don’t know how that will go, but I do remember that Port & Guarascio were behind the proposed adaptation of “The IT Crowd” for NBC.

(No, you’re not imagining things, that is Joel McHale.  Yes, he’s badly miscast.)

Class dismissed.

#threeseasonsandamovie

by djloehr

A reprogrammed, debugged TRON.

Either Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz learned to write better at some point between their screenplay for TRON: LEGACY and now — an uncertain notion, given their cutesy-wutesy dwarves-hatching-from-eggs episode of Once Upon a Time — or it’s a lot easier to craft an entertaining story without studio executives breathing down your neck. Whatever the case, their pilot episode for Disney’s new animated spinoff, TRON: UPRISING, manages to pack a good 80% of the movie’s visual style, easily half again as much genuine excitement, and a far more intriguing and engaging cast of characters, into just over a half an hour. 

With an impressive cast including Elijah Wood, Emmanuelle Chiquri, dependable gravel-throated menace Lance Henriksen, and the original film’s Bruce Boxleitner, and an entertaining premise that sneaks superhero tropes into the movie’s digital world, UPRISING marks the first time I’ve been unreservedly entertained by anything TRON-related. Check out the nifty first episode yourself, free and legit on YouTube, and be prepared to go, “Oh, COOL!” a lot more than you ever did in the theater.

by associatevidiot