Fall TV Review: Worst Week

Worst Week is an American adaption of a British series about a guy going to visit his girlfriend's family preparatory to asking for her hand in marriage. Along the way, there's a series of contrived mishaps that put him in increasingly embarrassing situations.

There's one episode of The Brady Bunch (Season 5, Episode 18, "Two Petes in a Pod") that I use as my farce benchmark. This is the episode where Peter meets an identical looking kid at school, then puts him to work when he accidentally has two dates on the same night. The doppelgänger later backs out, and Peter has to keep both dates on opposite sides of the house, while running back and forth keeping them entertained. One date expects to be going to a costume party, so Peter's dressed up like Dracula, with a cap, and fake hair and teeth. Everything starts to fall apart when Peter forgets to take off part of his costume when going to the other side of the house.

If I'm watching any sort of show where there's any case of mistaken identity, or someone has to keep someone else occupied while pretending to be something else, or there's some giant misunderstanding, I immediately think of Dracula and try to determine if what I'm watching is better or worse than "Two Petes in a Pod".

So, back to the review. In the opening credits, there was an "Adapted for American television" credit. Becki saw this, and said "It must have been French. Or worse, Belgian". I thought about this for a second, and actually, this show would have been way better if it had been French. I don't mean of French ancestry, but actually French, like with French actors, speaking French, with English subtitles. If I went to the movies and saw something this silly and contrived (example: guy pees in a pot containing a marinating goose, thinking he's in the bathroom), but in French, I'd probably be rolling in the aisles. I would expect that out of the French. Instead, I'm just groaning.

There are other things wrong with this show besides the fact that the premise of ridiculously forced predicaments can't possibly last more than a few episodes. Example: the male lead looks like a potato. There were a couple of good things about the pilot, though. Aziz Ansari was in it, which made it a little more bearable for the 30 seconds he was on screen. In a scene in a funeral home, Herb Alpert's "A Taste of Honey" was on in the background, which is funny because it's so out of place.

We recorded the second episode to see if we could figure out how they could possibly extend the premise past the pilot, and see if by chance it got any better or what. It didn't.

So, anyway, this is worse than the one where Peter left his Dracula cape on.

Fall TV Review: 90210

The local CW affiliate has their transmitter located south west of our house, and 'A' Mountain is directly between our house and the transmitter. So, I can't get an HD feed over the air from them. DirecTV doesn't include the CW in the HD locals they provide, so I can never see anything on the CW in anything better than blurry over-compressed satellite delivered standard definition. So, anything on the CW automatically has a strike against it.

Because of some screwup with the DVR where it was trying to get the over-the-air channel that it should have known it can't get, I lost the first 45 minutes of the 2 hour premiere. I'm not sure that having those 45 minutes back would have made this any better though.

The first scene I saw had what looked like a spoiled teen shrugging off someone's attempts to protect her and taking responsibility for her own actions. I thought I was watching some pilot from Bizarro world, but luckily it didn't last.

Shortly thereafter, some people went to some rich people's birthday party where Tilly and the Wall were playing. This part was awesome. The only bit of the original Beverly Hills, 90210 that I ever watched was one time when I recorded it because The Cardigans were on. It's fitting because Tilly is likely all I will remember about this version. I was only able to enjoy Tilly for a little bit, because it was at this time that the local affiliate declared a tribute to the silent movies of yesteryear and stopped broadcasting sound.

The sound was cutting in and out for about 15 minutes, and the picture was lost a few times as well. During this time I saw Lori Loughlin, who strangely doesn't look a second older than she did on Full House. I also saw Jessica Walters apparently reprising her role as Lucille Bluth. I also saw Shannen Doherty who looks about a ton uglier than she did before somehow.

By the time the sound came back for good, they were into some sort of plot that I couldn't keep straight because I honestly can't really tell all these young good-looking people apart. Like when one girl is introduced to a guy, but looks awkward, is it because this is the guy she was just on a date with, or this is the guy that she ditched to go on the date? I don't know. The kids these days all look the same to me. Especially when I'm yelling at them to get off my lawn.

So, I didn't really follow any of this well enough to determine if it was any good, but, come on. It wasn't likely that this one was getting added to my list anyway

Annual Fall TV Review 2008

It's that time again, time for my annual assessment of the new fall TV season, where I sift through the crap so you don't have to.

It's starting early this year, because the CW was hell-bent on getting 90210 to start on September 2nd, as in "9/02". Thanks a lot, CW. I just barely finished the Olympics, and I was counting on taking a few weeks to catch up on other stuff. But no, you needed the gimmick of the date (because every little bit is going to help this turd, right?). So, why couldn't you get the show to start at 10 PM?

Viva Laughlin

Viva Laughlin is an American version of a British show (Viva Blackpool) about the young upstart casino owner going up against the established casino mogul with a murder mystery thrown in. Being a British show gives it about 50/50 odds of success, since British imports have split evenly between being long running hits (The Office, Sanford & Son (née Steptoe & Son), American Idol (née Pop Idol)) and the really gigantic stinkers (Coupling, First Years (née This Life), Life is Wild).

It's got Hugh Jackman in it, which increases its odds, but it's also got Melanie Griffith, which decreases its odds by a slightly greater amount. So its odds are still about even until you learn it's a musical. To my knowledge, there has never been a successful TV musical, so you can just about count it out right there.

Don't get me wrong. I'm about the world's biggest proponent of the singing and the dancing and the musical theatre. But, I don't have a lot of hopes for someone to do a musical on the small screen successfully.

All of my worst fears were confirmed when I watched the pilot. It's not a musical like singing and dancing production numbers. It's only a musical in the sense that occasionally a song will play, and a character will sing along to it. Let me clarify. A song will play in its actual recorded version (Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil", for example), and a character will sing the same words along with the recorded track (so you hear both him and Mick). It's almost as if CBS bought a musical, but then was too embarassed to actually show a musical, so came up with ways to shield the American public from all that pesky singing.

If CBS took out all of the music, though, what's left would be still unwatchable. It's easily in contention for the worst new show for this fall season. About the only thing the show gets right is the feeling one gets from the actual city of Laughlin. Laughlin, Nevada is Las Vegas's ugly stepsister, where you get all of the desperation and seediness of Vegas without any of the fun or character. It's decidedly second-rate, and you always get the feeling, no matter what you're doing, that it would have been better in Vegas. This show recreates this feeling by being a decidedly second-rate show. The acting, the dialogue, the sets, the costumes and everything seem like low-budget rejects from other, better shows which provides a good parallel to the city of Laughlin. However, that's not a reason to watch this show. There is no reason to watch this show.

Samantha Who

Samantha Who (formerly known as Samantha Be Good, formerly known before that as Sam I Am) is the new comedy with Christina Applegate as someone who got bonked on the head, develops amnesia, and then slowly discovers that the person she used to be is not really the person she'd like to be.

I never really watched Married With Children, so I don't have any previous experience with Ms. Applegate, good or bad. I find her to be kind of the right balance between cute and annoying in this show, and the show itself is almost funny. I really like Jean Smart, also, no matter what she's in. I'm not sure how long they can drag out the amnesia thing though, because eventually she either recovers, learns everything about herself, or forges a new life and grows to accept it. There eventually has to be an end to the finding her in embarrassing comedic situations caused by her not remembering some crucial element from her past.

Also, I don't understand why developing amnesia after a bonk on the head is such a problem. I learned from Gilligan's Island that it's easily cured by applying another bonk to the head.

Women's Murder Club

I kept seeing this one come up on the To-Do List on the TiVo and thought, "Oh man, I gotta watch this?" But, rules are rules, so I dutifully recorded it just to see if it was any good.

It's not.

It seems like with a title like Women's Murder Club you'd have a club of women that commit murders. Or maybe a club that murders women. Either would be more exciting than what it actually is, which is a club of women who solve murders. The club is comprised of a medical examiner, a DA, a cop, and a reporter. They solve murders and talk about boys. A lot. It's apparently based on a book.

The pilot had one of the weirder cold opens of any pilot this season. The woman cop is checking her voice mail, trying to figure out where the reporter is that she was supposed to meet when the reporter falls from the sky and crushes the car next to her. That was pretty cool, actually.

The rest of the pilot was just unbearable, though, because the hens in the club really did spend more time talking about boys then they did actually solving murders. Also, the DA lady's short white boy hair was just really repulsive.

Life is Wild

Life is Wild is about a woman and her kids marrying a man and his kids and then the whole family moving to South Africa so the man can be a vet at a game preserve run by his dead previous wife's estranged father. It's the most common premise around.

The show felt more like an ABC Family type show than an actual network show. It had the same sort of wooden acting and stock footage.

One of my pet peeves is poorly written little kid dialogue. Anybody who's spent any time at all around kids could easily tell the difference between what a kid would actually say and what some writer who's never been around kids would think they would say. Oddly, it usually manifests itself as dumbing down of the kids. I very rarely see kid dialogue where I think "No way would a kid of that age string together that kind of complex sentence structure and raise that sort of insight into the issue at hand." However, I constantly see kids on TV or movies that make me think, "why is that kid retarded?"

Anyway, this show has that problem.

Pushing Daisies

For most people, it seems like it would be kind of hard to know what to make of Pushing Daisies. It's brightly colored (almost to the point of garish), there's some sort of supernatural or magical element, the sets are almost cartoony. I watched Bryan Fuller's other series Wonderfalls and Dead Like Me, so I don't think this is too much of a stretch although it certainly is farther out there than either one of these.

It's got a lot going for it. There's Jim Dale. Kristin Chenoweth is in it (although the crocheted dress she wore in the pilot is hideous). Ellen Greene is in it. There are supposed to be some semi-frequent musical numbers. And, the pie shop is named The Pie Hole. That's brilliant.

However, there's one big problem with this show that keeps me from watching it. Ned brings Chuck back to life, which means that the slightest touch from him kills her. Dead. Forever. But Chuck and Ned seem to spend way too much time in way too close of proximity, taking unnecessary risks. They'll sit next to each other, sit in a booth across from each other, work in the same kitchen together. It makes me physically uncomfortable to watch.

If I'm holding my phone in my hand and walk into a bathroom where the toilet lid is up, I start to freak out because I'm sure that the phone will somehow slip out of my hand and fly across the room straight into the toilet. I have to move my other hand over and hold my phone in both hands to start to feel secure again. This is the same feeling I get watching this show.

Carpoolers

I absolutely loved the short-lived Sons & Daughters, so I'm really glad to see Fred Goss working again in Carpoolers. He's playing pretty much the exact same character, so that helps me like the show as well.

Another plus is that the show's created by Bruce McCulloch, so other Kids in the Hall will be present hopefully. Also, I think Fred Goss lived in three different houses in the first three episodes, so that helps keep it fun.

All in all, this show is silly more than it is funny, so if it were solely up to me I might not commit to it. However, Becki really likes it, so we keep watching.

Cavemen

Much has been already been written about Cavemen, from better writers than me. In case you don't know, this is the show based on the successful series of GEICO ads with the cavemen living among our time. It seemed like such a no-brainer, given the success of Mr. Whipple's World in the 70s, and the more recent successes of Noid Patrol and Where's the Beef Now?.

This was a very early candidate for worst show of fall 2007, but I'm pleased to report that the powers that be have managed to make a show that's actually not the worst of the year. (Big Shots, I'm looking in your direction...). It's not good, but it's not nearly as bad as you might think. It pretty successfully sets a tone not at all unlike other comedies where a particular class of people, normally looked down upon, have to live among those who normally do the down-looking. Its closest analog is The Munsters, but I think it has just the slightest hint of Jeffersons.

It has a couple of things going for it. Nick Swardson was hilarious in the first episode, and the character of Nick is pretty funny. However, I don't understand why, with the bigger budgets that a series allows, the makeup's worse than the commercials.

Aliens in America

Aliens in America gets points from me for being a half hour sitcom, yet foregoing a laugh track. That's become more common recently, but is yet still too rare. It also has Amy Pietz, who I've liked in other things. But, the rest of the show just didn't click for me, so I'm not watching it.

Moonlight

Moonlight is about a vampire detective. Genius. Somebody somewhere realized people like detective shows, and they like vampire shows. It was an idea whose time had come.

Too bad it's not any good. I liked the reference to Hearst College, and I love it when a show uses really old stock footage, like the night shot of downtown Los Angeles showing the First Interstate Bank Building with its big sign on top (which hasn't been there since 1998).

The female lead is terrible. Just stunningly unwatchable. Even if the rest of this show was good, I would not watch it for that reason alone.

Big Shots

Big Shots has been often referred to as Sex in the City for men. Well, I didn't like that show, and thought there was probably a pretty good chance I wouldn't like this one either. Sure enough, less than two minutes in, I said out loud to everyone and no one in particular, "I hate this show."

I don't even want to write any more about it except to say that I loved Joshua Malina on Sports Night, but if this show stays on much longer he will be dead to me. Also, one of my pet peeves is people being pronounced dead too quickly on TV shows, without proper resuscitation efforts. This show had someone getting knocked over by a golf cart, someone else saying "Call 911!", and then another person just kind of leaning over the victim and saying, "You can forget 911". And that's it, the guy's dead. No CPR, paramedics, AED, nothing. Yes, I know it was important to move the story along quickly at that point, but come on, writers. What's wrong with knocking the guy over, then cutting to the country club the next day: "He died?" "Yes, can you believe it?" "Hit by a golf cart causing a sudden heart attack, wow!", etc. Doing it the way you did takes even slightly intelligent people out of the story.

Oh, and the one slightly redeeming thing about the pilot is the frequent use of the phrase "tranny hooker", which is always funny, even on a crap show like this.

Dirty Sexy Money

The premise of Dirty Sexy Money is not one that would normally interest me. Spoiled rich people doing spoiled rich things. But, as with Gossip Girl, there's something else to this show.

For starters, it's got Peter Krause and Donald Sutherland. I loved Sports Night and Six Feet Under, so I'll give Peter Krause a chance in anything. And Donald Sutherland's just one of my favorite actors ever, so I'll probably watch him no matter what. If there was a series in development for next fall called White Pages in which Donald Sutherland read from the phone directories of major metropolitan areas, I would watch that too.

The characters are not all that likable, which is to be expected since they're spoiled and rich. But they strike the right balance of being unlikable enough that it's fun to hate them without being so unlikeable as to be repulsive. There's a little bit of a mystery thrown in, and at this point it's not entirely clear if Donald Sutherland's a good or bad guy. I'm really rooting for him to be good, because at this point, he's definitely the most likable person in the whole family, and it would be a shame for the show to lose that.

The pilot suffered a little from making already over the top characters even more over the top so that the audience could pick up quickly on the tone of the show. I'm sure that will smooth out over time, though. One of the best parts of the pilot is that it includes my new favorite phrase of fall TV 2008, "tranny hooker".

Life

The premise of Life is that a cop gets framed for a murder he didn't commit and then spends 5 years in prison until new evidence exonerates him. Then, a large settlement with the city also gets him his job back, and he solves crimes with some sort of new compassion for the criminals and some intuition he picked up in the joint.

This show seems to be targeting House, in that they both feature a main character who's fairly unlikeable and says completely inappropriate things. The things House says are actually funny, though. This guy's just dull. I can't tell if it's the writing, or bad acting, but the lead didn't seem watchable at all. I think it's something about his fairly high pitched voice.

The pilot was really annoying because they wanted to beat you over the head with the idea that everything's changed so much since this dude went to prison. So, we were treated with bits of dialog like:

phone rings
"Aren't you going to get that"
"Oh, the phone in my pocket? It's so small I forget it's there"

or...
"He sent an IM to the kid saying..."
"What's an IM?"

or...
"Can I take your picture?"
"How? That's a phone."
"It's got a camera on it. Where've you been?"

or...
speakerphone rings in car; car picks up
"How am I talking to you?"

Alright, we understand. He went to prison; the world went on without him. At this point it's like Unfrozen Caveman Detective. "Your modern devices frighten and confuse me." Tune in next week when we see the main character work on his Rubik's Cube and get completely flummoxed by a Starbucks.

The one good thing about this show is it has Adam Arkin in it, so I'll probably watch it once more, but it's long term prospects don't look good for me.

Private Practice

I didn't watch Private Practice. It's a spinoff of Grey's Anatomy, which I'm already not watching since I previously determined that the only point of the show was to demonstrate how many of the characters could have sex with how many of the other characters and in which combinations. Since Private Practice spins off of Grey's, it carries Grey's taint with it, which means it's exempt from my "must watch every new show" rule.

Bionic Woman

When I'm recording these fall pilots, I've gotten in the habit of starting all the recordings one minute early and ending one minute late, just to accommodate any network scheduling shenanigans. When I went to watch Bionic Woman, though, I noticed my recording started right at the end of a really pivotal scene where Starbuck, the original Bionic Woman, is getting shot.

I checked online recaps later and determined that I had started probably about a minute into the show, which means that NBC had started it a full two minutes before the scheduled start time. I could write pages on how much this bothers me, but for the sake of brevity I will limit myself to the following:

Networks: I don't care what time you start your show. If you want to start it at 8:57, that's fine. If you want to start at 9:14, that's fine too. I don't care that you don't stick right to the hour or half hour in an attempt to jump on other networks' programming. I have enough TiVos that I can keep up and still catch everything. All I want is for you to tell me what time the show starts and then stick to it. I see all sorts of things in my guide like shows starting at 9:58 and 10:02, and that looks like you're doing the right thing. However, if my guide says 10:02 and you start the show at 10:00, I can't watch it. If the guide says 10:00 and you start the show at 9:57, I can't watch it. I refuse to watch only part of a creative work that's meant to be enjoyed as a whole, especially when there's no good reason why I shouldn't be able to watch the whole thing. Remember, you're the ones who want me to watch your shows. Don't make it harder for me.

So anyway, I was confused through the whole pilot, because I had missed crucial exposition. I'll probably watch the next episode, but if I feel even slightly confused by what I missed, I won't be able to really get into it, and will drop the whole series. So, it all comes down to that first minute.

As far as the review goes, Starbuck wasn't that good in the pilot, and the girl playing Jaime Sommers was pretty wooden. It had Miguel Ferrer in it, though, and he's cool.

Cane

Cane is an hour drama about Jimmy Smits and has family's sugarcane/rum business in Florida. Overall it was one of those things where it may be good, but it just isn't what I'm interested in. So, I dropped it. For future reference, here's the good and bad about Cane:

Good:

• It has Hector Elizondo in it.
• It has Nestor Carbonell (aka Batmanuel) in it.
  

Bad:

• Hector Elizondo's character's dying, so unless the sugarcane has magical healing properties, he's probably not long for the series.
• It has Nestor Carbonell in it, which means we'll have to make do with less of him on Lost.
• The daughter of the rival sugarcane family is played by an otherwise respectable British actress who puts on the worst Southern accent I've heard on TV all year.
  

Reaper

I didn't get to watch the pilot for Reaper. For whatever reason, my local affiliate started the show 15 minutes late. There was no sporting event that day or major news interruption. From what I can tell they just lost their watch or something. Starting 15 minutes late meant that the last 15 minutes wasn't on the TiVo when I went to watch it. If I can't watch the whole thing, there's no point in watching it at all, and if I can't watch the first episode, there's no point in watching the second or third.

If they were rerunning the pilot later that week, or if it had been offered on iTunes or something, I would have had a chance to catch it. But, since I didn't, it doesn't matter if it's the greatest show in the history of TV. I'll never be able to watch it. At this point, I'm really hoping it's a bad show and actively wishing for its demise so that I won't feel like I'm missing anything.

So, congratulations KWBA. Your incompetence lost your network one potential viewer of this show.

Journeyman

Journeyman chronicles the adventures of a man who leaps back in time in order to make right something that's gone wrong in the past. Along the way he's assisted by a dude named Al his former fiancee who was previously thought dead.

I liked Quantum Leap as much as the next guy, so I figured I'd probably like this. The pilot was good, with the right amount of suspense and mystery to keep someone wanting to come back the next week.

The pilot included a really sappy bit where the lead buries his wife's wedding ring under the porch while in the past so that he can dig it up in the present and prove to his wife that he's really travelling in time and not going off the wagon or something. In the scene where he retrieves the ring, music is swelling while he starts to bust up his porch. His wife gasps, "What are you doing?" He responds, "Saving my marriage". This is a fairly typical TV or movie climax up to that point, but then the writers have the wife respond with "Uh, not really", which took me by surprise and made me laugh out loud. Little things like that really go a long way with me, so thanks, Journeyman. I will watch you again.