TeeVee

Hemlock Grove: Mildly Toxic

associatevidiot — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 09:46:00 -0400

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.

McGreevy’s novel, on which the series is based, abounds with juicy concepts. A barely-surviving Pennsylvania steeltown, turned into a high-tech biotech hub by a far-sighted businessman. The creepy, vampiric wife who drove that wealthy heir to suicide. Her almost-as-creepy son, who has strange hypnotic abilities and a fascination with blood. His hulking, deformed sister. Their new friend, a Gypsy kid from a trailer by the river, who’s rumored to be a werewolf. Dark deeds. Twisted science. Murder.

Alas, Hemlock Grove squanders nearly every bit of that.

I’ve seen bad TV shows before, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen one this technically inept. The scripts don’t feel like stories so much as strings of random events, haphazardly slapped together in the edit bay. They don’t follow any sort of dramatic arc. Characters are randomly introduced without any establishment or context. Aside from the occasional brief flash of real emotion, the characters interact in ways that just don’t make any sense. Half the time, even the dialogue made absolutely no sense to me. It’s like the series was made by people who’d never seen a TV show before. Or a TV, for that matter.

When wealthy Roman (a weirdly flat Bill Skarsgard) and scruffy Peter (Landon Liboiron, who at least is kinda charming) have scenes together where they’re supposed to be becoming friends, it’s like the show just holds up a card that says THEY ARE BECOMING FRIENDS NOW SEE. The two have no chemistry together, and the bizarre, non sequitur dialogue they’re forced to spout doesn’t help.

How does Roman learn that Peter is, in fact, a werewolf? He passes him a note in class, with absolutely no pretext or prior discussion or anything, that says, “CAN I WATCH?” No, seriously. And Peter apparently says yes. And has Roman over to the trailer to meet his mom, drink some milk, and watch Peter gruesomely shed his skin, eyeballs, and teeth, and then devour the gory remains.

(The wolf-out is conceptually awesome, novel, and well-executed. But in the context of the so-called “story,” it gets laughable. And Peter’s lupine form is perhaps unfortunately adorable. “It’s a puppy!” I cooed, secure in my own masculinity.)

Also, if you would like to see the usually excellent Famke Janssen deliver the most bizarrely awful performance of her career as the devilish Olivia, Roman’s creepy mom, good news! Though she’s perfect casting on paper, I’m not sure she has any idea what she’s doing in this series, with her vaguely European accent and her constant smoking and random sex-having. That makes two of us.

Lili Taylor, as Peter’s mom who is apparently not also a werewolf for whatever reason, is great, even when she’s saying things that make absolutely no sense. Lili Taylor is great in even the worst of filmed entertainments. I think that’s her superpower. (See: The Haunting. Actually, don’t. A fireplace eats Owen Wilson.)

There are only three things that might keep me watching this show. One is Aaron Douglas, the beloved Chief Tyrol from Battlestar Galactica, doing his damnedest as the genial local sheriff. Another is the show’s abundance of very, very pretty actresses. And the third is Nicole Boivin as Shelley, the one character the show doesn’t seem to have fumbled yet.

The series’ take on the Frankenstein monster (get it? Shelley?), Roman’s little sister is a wheezy behemoth who slumps through life, hiding her misshapen face behind a wig. Her skin glows strange colors, and electrical devices act peculiar in her vicinity. But underneath, she’s brilliant, Jane-Austen-heroine witty, and heart-meltingly sweet, which Boivin manages to convey with only the occasional voiceover and a few fleetingly glimpsed facial expressions. From her spooky and well-handled appearance to her winning personality, I like Shelley. I’m rooting for her. Which is more than I can say for anyone else in this mess.

If Hemlock Grove were just ineptly made on nearly every level, that’d be bad enough. But … Eli Roth. Oh, Eli Roth. You really do not like ladies and their lady-parts very much, do you?

Oh, sure, you like to see them naked. I can sympathize with this, to some degree. But I probably should have pegged your type the moment I saw that fake trailer you made for Grindhouse, in which a topless cheerleader jumping on a trampoline gets a psycho killer’s knife shoved into … well, pretty much the worst, most cringe-inducing place one can imagine. And it’s played for laughs.

Hemlock Grove continues this delightful injury motif right from its opening moments. After we watch Roman have random sex with a conveniently topless hooker for pretty much no reason, we get to watch a screaming girl get devoured by some mysterious beast. Well, partly devoured. Guess which part?

If you’re saying “Ewwww” right now, and have completely lost your appetite, you’ve guessed it.

Eli. Dude. Sit down and talk with someone about this. (Not Quentin Tarantino. I don’t know how much help he’d be.) This is not a healthy attitude to have towards women.

I will probably watch at least a little bit more of Hemlock Grove. Partly for the pretty ladies, I’ll confess (though emphatically not for the violence perpetrated upon them). Partly for Shelley. But mostly because one rarely has a chance to marvel at any big-budget, prestige production made with this level of absolutely baffling incompetence.

Now, if only Netflix came with an MST3K mode. I would love to hear what Joel and/or Mike and the bots could do with material like this.

"Hannibal" Conquers Crime-Show Conventions

associatevidiot — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 13:49:00 -0400

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.

Showrunner Bryan Fuller, working off the famous novels by Thomas Harris, is no stranger to death (Dead Like Me, Pushing Daisies) and madness (Wonderfalls, whose surly slacker antiheroine got thankfully altruistic messages from little toy animals and other tchotchkes).

We’ve seen flashes of Fuller’s darker side in a few of the better episodes of Heroes he penned. And while it was basically Pushing Daisies With Monsters — a premise I would have watched the hell out of, dammit — Mockingbird Lane, his recent reboot of The Munsters, also had vampiric Grandpa showing no reservations about eating the neighbors, and dropped grimly hilarious hints that pretty blonde Marilyn viewed life from a near-sociopathic remove.

But Fuller’s never explored his pet obsessions so forthrightly, and frighteningly, as he does here. With the superb collaboration of pilot director David Slade, Fuller creates a gorgeously crafted world of murky lighting, surreal nightmare visions, and sinister symmetrical compositions that lovingly homage Kubrick, all set to a menacing, skin-crawling droning on the soundtrack.

At least in its first hour, Hannibal shows no interest in actually solving mysteries. We don’t learn who killed the woman whose horrifying, pity-inducing death we watch FBI profiler Will Graham piece together in the episode’s excellent opening scene. When the episode’s killer du jour, abundantly perforated with Graham’s bullets, sighs “See? See?” with his dying breaths, we don’t. A solution would provide some kind of comforting catharsis — and Hannibal wants you rattled, on edge, horrified and fascinated and slightly grieving.

Will Graham exists in that exact frame of mind. Marooned somewhere on the “frigid tundra” end of the autism spectrum, he’s too good for his own good at getting into the minds of killers. His own horror at how well he can imagine evil has him rocketing at bullet-train speeds toward a nervous breakdown.

Hugh Dancy plays Graham superbly, as a sort of Bruce Banner who lacks the escape valve of Hulking out. At one point, he even growls, “You wouldn’t like me when I’m psychoanalyzed” — one of the ways Fuller twists his previous shows’ love of wordplay into something barbed and queasily funny here.

Graham’s so twitchy, trembling with fear and anxiety, that at times it seems like Slade’s shooting him at a different frame rate as the other actors. Only in the company of his houseful of lovable dogs do we see him relax and uncoil, surrounded by creatures whose behavior he understands, and who will not hurt him. (Oh, God. Something horrible is going to happen to those dogs, isn’t it?)

Plenty of series might show you a troubled protagonist waking from a nightmare. Hannibal shows you Graham stripping off his clammy shirt, laying down a towel on the bed where his sweat has soaked through the sheets, and wrapping himself in another towel, shivering, to try to return to sleep.

The show wants to drag you viscerally into Graham’s shoes, and it succeeds magnificently. When he feels for a victim, you do, too — and that scarlet vein of compassion and sorrow gives the show a pulse so many other procedurals lack.

And what of the title character, Hannibal Lecter, the suave psychologist with the grisly diet? Anthony Hopkins played him as a leering, lip-smacking boogeyman, but I like Mads Mikkelsen’s serene, debonair take much better.

If Will Graham is constant, nervy motion, Mikkelsen’s Lecter is utter stillness. This is an apex predator, bemused by the little meals scurrying all about him, constantly keeping a mental scorecard to decide who’s next on the menu. His face betrays no emotion save mild interest, and his darkly witty dialogue is one long series of double entendres. (“She followed her heart to London,” he says, explaining the absence of his secretary, and we hope he’s speaking figuratively.)

There’s a famous shot in Rosemary’s Baby that’s partially obscured by a doorjamb, which legendarily prompted some audiences to crane their necks, trying to see around it. That’s Lecter’s whole character, and Mikkelsen’s whole performance, here. He’s a puzzle for us to solve, fascinating and repellent, and the absence of clues he offers us only makes us want to look closer.

Does he try to kindle a friendship with Graham because he wants to be caught? Wants to be at last understood by someone he respects as an equal? Does he want to help Graham? (The clandestine way he does so in the pilot will convince you that you do not, ever, want Hannibal Lecter to try to help you. Or, for that matter, to bring you breakfast.) Is he trying to drive Graham mad? Or does Lecter just want to play a fun little game to pass the time?

Why does he call the killer Graham’s hunting — is it professional courtesy, as he drolly implies? — to tip him off, an act that provokes a torrent of horror? And if he’s such a monster, why do we see him at the episode’s end, fast asleep in a chair beside a hospital bed, holding the hand of an innocent girl who nearly died because he made that phone call? Is he capable of compassion? Is there some little glimmer of goodness within him? Or does the dish of pan-seared human lung we just saw him chop, cook, and savor leave him no room for that? Hannibal doesn’t tell you — at least, not yet.

Lest I heap too much praise on Dancy and Mikkelsen, the rest of the cast packs a near-ridiculous amount of talent. Laurence Fishburne brings unexpected warmth and surprising spikiness to FBI chief Jack Crawford. The pilot’s funniest line is a startling outburst of alpha-male rage from him, which gives you an idea of where Hannibal’s sense of humor lies. Caroline Dhavernas, reunited with Fuller from Wonderfalls, is every bit as canny and compelling here as fellow profiler Alana Bloom. (My Y chromosome compels me to inform you that she also remains smoking hot.)

Even The Kids in the Hall’s Scott Thompson does solid work here, playing completely against his usual fey cheerfulness as a dour, flinty coroner. And the consistently excellent Gillian Anderson will turn up later in the season as Lecter’s own shrink, which promises to be as close to fun as this series will ever allow itself to get.

If CBS had any shame — and, well, Two and a Half Men, so no — it’d be earnestly taking notes here, to apply to its own Elementary. That series mires the fine character work of its leads in weightless, cardboard cases full of cookie-cutter victims. Watching Hannibal, I thought: This! This is how you craft a crime series with a tic-heavy, quasi-autistic genius protagonist!

By focusing less on the rote mechanics of crime, and more on the shivery psychology behind it and the emotional trauma it inflicts, Hannibal breathes ghastly new life into a near-dead genre. Its pilot seemed to fly by, and though I felt profoundly unsettled from its opening minutes onward, its final, meaning-packed image still left me ravenous for more.

NBC will re-air Hannibal’s pilot Wednesday at 10 p.m. ET. The series airs at 10 p.m. on Thursdays, right after The Office, which makes one wonder just how Dr. Lecter might conduct Dunder-Mifflin HR performance reviews.

Mission to Mars

associatevidiot — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 13:46:00 -0400

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.

Revisionist History 401

associatevidiot — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 13:25:06 -0500

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.

Getting Smashed

djloehr — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 19:41:00 -0500

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.

An actor with an odd, intense face.

djloehr — Tue, 25 Dec 2012 03:40:36 -0500

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.

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

associatevidiot — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 09:47:18 -0500

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

associatevidiot:

Shame has kept me silent until now, but I just gotta say it: MTV’s Teen Wolf is a pretty great show.

I know, I know. It’s a needless reboot of an ever-more-irrelevant bit of ’80s pop culture flotsam, given a heavy gloss of Twilight for the basest of cash-in purposes, airing on a network that has basically become a 24-hour advertisement for skin care products, poor life choices, and venereal disease. And yet.

Beware the Doppeldeaner

associatevidiot — Sun, 20 May 2012 13:13:00 -0400

Beware the Doppeldeaner:

associatevidiot:

Few great TV shows can continue to thrive without their original showrunners. The seasons of Joss Whedon’s Buffy and Angel that he entrusted to Marti Noxon and Jeffrey Bell are universally considered both series’ weakest. …

Intro to Television Adaptation

djloehr — Sat, 19 May 2012 14:01:33 -0400

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

A reprogrammed, debugged TRON.

associatevidiot — Sun, 13 May 2012 19:21:27 -0400

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.

Hoosier Daddy

djloehr — Fri, 11 May 2012 00:32:59 -0400

It’s Thursday night. The 10 year old wants to stay up to see the season finale of one of his favorite shows. He sings along with the theme. ”Jabba the Hutt, Jabba the Hutt, Jabba the Hutt, Jabba the Hutt…” The 7 year old dances along.

Yes, yes, it’s a school night. But the 10 year old is a fan of “Parks and Recreation.” I can’t help that NBC put it on at 9:30 pm. When I suggested watching over the weekend online, he said, “Dad, spoilers.” So we watch it live. He makes up the sleep elsewhere in the week, probably in math class. (As long as his grades stay up, he can sleep at school all he wants.) As for 7, he doesn’t really sleep, so he’s fine.

Tonight was a little bittersweet, not just because it was the season finale but because news of renewals and cancellations has been trickling out all afternoon. No word about “Parks” as of yet.

It might seem odd to think that kids would enjoy “Parks.” I grew up on “The Bob Newhart Show” & “Barney Miller,” so it’s probably both nature and nurture around here. But it’s not even the comedy—a lot of it flies right over their heads. (They get Ron Swanson, for the most part.) It’s that it’s a show that hits us where we live. Southern Indiana.

Our town is a bit smaller than Pawnee, but it’s pretty damn close. And while we don’t have murals like the ones in their city hall, I know a summerstock theatre not too far from here with the real thing. (I wouldn’t be surprised if someone on the staff had toiled there for a summer or two.) Aside from that…

Sure, we watch “The Middle,” but the setting is almost incidental there. After watching pretty regularly, 10 year only just realized it was also set in Indiana. But the sense of place is a glorious thing on “Parks.” And goodness knows, they nail it. The boys recognize Pawnee.

I bring all this up tonight because I want the show to continue. Not only because it’s funny, even though it is. Not because it’s as inspiring as “The West Wing” at its best, even though it is. Not because I like it, even though I very much do.

I want it to continue because my boys get to see something approximating their town on a broadcast network. That’s a rare thing nowadays.

The Name's Afoot

djloehr — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 19:29:00 -0500

Having failed to come to an agreement to do a straight-up American version of the BBC’s Sherlock, CBS has gone in a completely different direction. They’ve greenlit ElemeNtarY, a pilot which updates Sherlock Holmes to the present day, but sets it in NY. (You see what they did there, yes?) They’ve cast Jonny Lee Miller, who just did a tremendous run on stage in Frankenstein, alternating as the monster and his maker with co-star Benedict Cumberbatch. (Hm. Name sounds familiar.)

And now, they’ve announced their Watson. Lucy Liu.

In honor of this innovative, game-changing paradigm shift, I’ve come up with several alternate titles in case focus groups are confused by the capital E along with the NY. (“Why isn’t it set in Elmyra?”)

How I Met Your Watson

The Good Watson

Two and a Half Watsons

A Gifted Watson

Murder, She Watson

Watson Jones (a Quinn Martin production)

The Watson Whisperer

Watson Five-O

Watson of Interest

Sherlock and Key (apologies to Joe Hill)

NCIS: Los Watson

You’re welcome, CBS. You know where to send the check.

Learn from my mistakes: Why abusive TV relationships suck

manyhats — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 00:34:00 -0500

Sometimes I wish I could forget that this pilot was kind of great.

My name is Serenity, and I have a problem.

I’m shackled to shows past their expiration date, even though I know they’ve gone sour and everything in my brain is screaming to stop the madness. Heck, even when I spend most of that 42 minutes of air time fiddling with my iOS device, playing Tetris or some other bit of mind-numbing visual entertainment, anything to keep myself from actually staring at that thing up on the screen.

Today, after work, I spent nearly an hour attempting to make an episode of Glee stream properly on my computer. My internet wasn’t cooperating, as it often doesn’t when I attempt to watch Flash-based media, and it was doing that early 2007 “stream three seconds, stall, stream three more seconds, stall” bit everyone hates but for some awful reason puts up with.

And after forty-five minutes of doing this, I sat back and wondered: Why am I trying so hard? I haven’t been interested in this show for at least a year. The songs have devolved from interesting musical adaptations to whatever happens to be popular at the time. And it frequently makes me want to set things on fire. But I kept on bashing my head against the desk trying to watch this stalled stream.

Part of it’s completionism. Because if I stop watching now, and the show gets cancelled this year, I’m not going to go back and watch those eight episodes I missed.

But what if there’s brilliance hiding in there somewhere? What if the show pulls out a beautiful moment you would have otherwise ignored, because you threw it all away? What if it makes a huge turn-around?

I had this problem with Grey’s Anatomy: It was a guilty pleasure show at the start, it hit a slump, I stopped watching for a few seasons, and then everyone started talking about how the sixth season was incredible—a return to form.

I had left—I had managed to make it out alive!—and then stupid Grey’s had to go and yank me back in for what admittedly ended up being one of my favorite season finales of any television show in years.

But to get to that damn payoff, I made myself go back and watch a season and a half of terrible television. Is a spectacular finale really worth that much brain-draining nonsense? Let me know if you figure that one out, because I still can’t decide.

Anyway. It’s these what-ifs that plague me and keep Glee in my queue (and make me secretly wish that the show gets cancelled so I don’t have to continually torture myself).

Abusive television relationships, guys! They’re evil. And I’ll bet everyone has at least one. Yes, even you. (One word: Heroes.)

Maybe this is the week I ditch Glee from my queue. I still haven’t finished my first watch-through of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, for pete’s sake. I have so many better things I could be enjoying. I still haven’t seen this week’s Parks and Rec!

And yet…

Marketable Princesses, Assemble!

associatevidiot — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 23:25:28 -0500

associatevidiot:

Last fall, ABC debuted Once Upon a Time, its umpteenth attempt to duplicate the success of Lost — this time, with fairy tales. Fans of Bill Willingham’s long-running comic book Fables quickly began grousing that the show was a cheap ripoff of a proposed, but scuttled, TV version of the comic. Willingham has since graciously doused those rumors, but I think his fans were half right.

Once actually is heavily inspired by a comic book — but not the one most people seem to think. And even more improbably, it may actually have a shot at being a structurally stronger show than Lost ever was.

Read More

The Objects of Lady Edith Crawley's Affection

associatevidiot — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 18:39:00 -0500

(A Comprehensive List)

Patrick Crawley, her first cousin, fated to wed her sister Mary. Drowned on the Titanic. (Or did he?)
Matthew Crawley, her third cousin, utterly unmoved by the erotic power of local church architecture.
Sir Anthony Strallan, kindly fiftysomething refugee from a Monty Python sketch about absent-minded vicars.
That one farmer guy who was OK with her wearing pants and eating sandwiches with her hands, and who taught her to drive a tractor just like the little people do.
P. Gordon, hideously disfigured burn victim prone to violent mood swings, and also potential lying con artist. Also, Canadian.
The conductor of the Rippon-to-Swindings omnibus, whom Edith thought was smiling at her one time, but who was in fact gazing past her to admire a particularly lovely cloud.
Prime Minister David Lloyd George, who declined to respond to any of a string of increasingly ardent and perfume-scented letters.
An engraving of John Phillip Sousa reproduced in the newspaper, torn out and creased to unrecognizability by long nights beneath Edith’s pillow.
The dog, dressed in a dinner jacket and taught to sit at a miniature table and listen to Edith talk about her day in exchange for bits of chicken.
A particularly handsome elm on the grounds of Downton Abbey.
An effigy made of sticks and straw, attired in a disused footman’s livery, and kept locked in an abandoned attic storage room for midnight sessions of practice kissing. Referred to privately, with dreamy reverence, as “Lord Edward Widdershins.” The wedding is scheduled for June, but will be called off when the dog, in a fit of jealous rage, makes off with Lord Edward’s left leg.

I’m amused by all the stories that borrow from the press release about Matthew Perry joining...

djloehr — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 18:09:32 -0500

I’m amused by all the stories that borrow from the press release about Matthew Perry joining The Good Wife as “an attorney from Chicago,” as opposed to all the other characters in this show about…attorneys…in Chicago…

"Television is a medium because it is neither rare nor well done."

jsnell — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 18:08:17 -0500

“Television is a medium because it is neither rare nor well done.”

- Ernie Kovacs