Mon, September 13, 2004

Joey

(NBC, 8:00 Thursdays)

NBC's highest profile debut is usually its most embarrassing flop (cf. Coupling). This year, however, Joey has been spared because the hype for Father of the Pride has been so huge that it's eclipsed Joey as the show NBC is hanging most of its hopes upon, even though certainly Joey is more anticipated by its audience (to the chagrin of the FOTP hype machine). (By the way, two episodes in, the credits of Pride still list someone as a "principle [sic] character designer." Just saying.)

I'm still TiVoing Father of the Pride because this is an industry I hope to work in someday, so I'll consider it homework. I watched this last episode with the sound off. I wish I could record it without using TiVo, because I know it's sending that information back to TiVo Base and NBC is thinking people like this show. The promo I saw this week includes the Carl Reiner lion saying a female lion is "easier to get into than Florida State." Considering that the type of backwoods, Wal-Mart patronizing, brain-dead lowlifes who attend FSU are the most likely to chortle at "mountin' time," isn't NBC biting the hand that feeds it a tad?

Right: Joey.

I loved Friends unashamedly, so I have been very much hoping for good things from Joey. Not because I need shows to watch, but LeBlanc is a stand up guy and I'd love to wipe that smirk off the collective face of all the smug "Friends curse" people. I didn't get my hopes up too high, though, because NBC is still NBC – desperate, terrified people. Back when Cheers and The Cosby Show went off the air, we thought it was the end of an era. But, oh, the last ten years have shepherded in so much change. NBC isn't launching Joey even remotely the way they launched Friends. Or even Frasier, to pick a more appropriate comparison. It's an all-out blitz. You can taste the focus groups dripping off every scene in Joey and you can see the crazy amounts of money being spent, too. The sets look way, way too expensive for a sitcom. Does anybody remember the Central Perk set from the Friends pilot? A shabby sofa and a window – it was so bare. Glitzy sets are not the way to make a sitcom successful, but try telling that to NBC.

Not that Joey isn't good. I'm just worried that it'll be that much harder for it to be seen as "a success" with so much overhead already in need of recouping.

Aside from its terrible opening credits sequence and overlong, overloud, overwrought interstitials, Joey is actually off to a pretty good start. (I had hoped they'd go the no-opening route: it's damn time we did away with all but the best of the musical openings. However, I'll admit I was delighted that they worked the convertible into the opening but managed to leave out the surfboard. I've still got it, baby!) The show was slow out of the gate, bogged down in the usual pilot work of setting up characters (I hoped they'd skip that since we already know Joey and everyone else is window dressing), but by about the halfway point, they finally let Joey be Joey. We got a cute physical gag about a bee (I'm considering it a shout out – prove me wrong!) and before long he was lashing out at his nephew for trying to come between him and a meatball. Ah, Joey! There he is!

I think it'll be an okay show, as long as NBC sticks with it. Based on their contractual obligations to LeBlanc and their terrible other offerings this season (LAX? Really?) I think they will give it a little time to settle in. LeBlanc knows the character really well, and had some time to make Joey interesting towards the end of Friends while everyone else was getting wrapped up in baby/wedding/adoption schmaltz. If they'll just let him keep being the Joey we love, everything will be fine. Drea de Matteo is hardly perfect as his sister – and that chauvinist writers' room wrote way too many boob jokes – but she'll be all right. Paulo Costanzo (whom Arksie and I bumped into at the straw counter of the Burbank AMC movie theatres concession stand shortly after Road Trip) is slightly more passable as the nephew. Jennifer Coolidge serves up her usual disappointing hammery as Joey's new west coast agent. She's really not fit for the screen, this one. I've never liked her in anything other than Best In Show, in a part I'm convinced she was born to play. I just wish she'd stop trying to play it in every other role.

Yep, pull out the NBC tinkering (I swear to god, that laugh track was deafening! What, did they tape this show in a soccer arena?) and Joey will be great for another ten years. If you liked Friends at least an average amount, I think you'll enjoy Joey. If not, then you can go right on ahead and join the Taliban. This is America, dammit. We watch Friends.

(Which I only mention because Andy has asked me to review this fall's shows twice: once for the rest of us, and once for him, so he'll know which ones he should tune in for. So far, Joey is the first one that he'd conceivably appreciate less than the rest of us. Nobody could appreciate Father of the Pride less than I do.)
Andy.
The rest of us.

Medical Investigation

(NBC, 10:00 Fridays)

I just plain adore Neal McDonough. White hair! Steely blue eyes! A jaw you could carve ice sculptures with! I liked him in Band of Brothers and Minority Report and even more in Boomtown despite the fact that, unbeknownst to us, that was apparently a really terrible show or something. Anyway, NBC owes him, so they cooked up a CSI knockoff so unoriginal that its title sounds more like the label on the file drawer they found it in than an actual show. I've been calling it Television Show, because you just don't get much more generic than Medical Investigation. Anyway, I love Neal McDonough, so I prepared myself to withstand a fair amount of torture.

And, withstand it I did. Around the last two weeks of last season, I relented and watched a little CSI, and I liked it okay. But I could easily watch this instead, since it's the same show except the victims on MI aren't quite dead yet. McDonough's character is definitely a cross between the William Petersen character on CSI and his own David McNorris from Boomtown. The same mystical sixth sense for forensics, but with that edge of anti-social anger. And the supporting cast is okay by me. Never watched much Practice, so I can't vouch for that girl, but I like me the Anna Belknap (from The Handler), she's easy on the eyes and knows her way around a TV script. And I won't complain about the Jake 2.0 kid in the role of the "new guy." He's not great, but he's fine, and it goes to show: this is why you do projects like Jake 2.0.

The show doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but then what TV shows do? McDonough is constantly rushing around saying things like "get to work," but... work on what? The producers must have realized that medicine is pretty boring to watch (sign that chart! change that saline drip!), so every episode focuses more on the ambiguous detective work. The only remotely doctory thing we've seen him do so far is the defibrillator paddles, which is TV for "important doctor." Everything else is running, driving, and yelling at people. He doesn't even wear a surgical mask even though all the extras have one on. I think it's because he's so dreamy.

However, they do the rushing very well. In the opening scene, he gets a cell phone call at his son's Little League game in Bethesda, and suddenly a helicopter drops out of the sky, lands on the outfield, and whisks him away to Manhattan where people are mysteriously turning blue. Sue me, I really get into that kind of thing. And, good news for me, if the opening titles are any indication, that helicopter is apparently the icon for the NIH team on the show. It's like their Batmobile. (Although, in the second episode – we got two this week, because NBC knew better than to premiere MI in its own time slot, Friday night is death! – they borrow a huge cargo plane, which is inexplicably oufitted with a very pointy diamond-shaped conference table. You do not want to be seated at the head of that thing when the turbulence hits!)

I'll watch it, I don't care, but I don't know how they're going to sustain it. Coming up with weird mini-epidemics every week is going to be a huge pain, and I just can't believe they'll focus too much of their time on the whole ex-wife thing. So far we've had the blue people (hard to tell because the show is already shot so blue in the first place – maybe they should've turned pink) and that old prom dress urban legend where the girl gets sick from the poison in her clothes. (Also attributed to Calvin Coolidge's son.) The blue people one ended with a recall of contaminated salt (high drama!). They actually had a shot of police officers pulling over an 18-wheeler packed with salt. I wanted to see the salt-sniffing dogs and the scene where they duck behind their riot gear while the bomb squad safely detonates a big bag of oyster crackers.

Who's to say: if they start showing some other NIH teams and opening up the "world" of the show a little, it could get a bit less silly. The dialogue could use some work, too. Just have a kid read over it right before shooting and if he shoots Hi-C out his nose from how bad it is, toss a quick rewrite at it. In two episodes, we've had the infamous exchange from the promos:

Practice lady (on cell phone): You're running out of time

McDonough (shouting into cell phone): Do not tell me that I am running out of time!

(Too late!) And this, in episode two:

McDonough (caringly patting her on the back): You're doing good work.

Practice lady: Don't tell me I'm doing good work. He's not getting better.

Clean it up, people, or this is going to be "The Do Not Tell Show."

Jack & Bobby

(WB, 9:00 Sundays)

This is the show where one of the two brothers grows up to be president. (It's Bobby. I'll spare you the drawn-out tease of the entire pilot episode, drawn out for no reason whatsoever. It was painfully obvious that it would be Bobby anyway, because it's the switcheroo on the namesake Kennedys and also because they show Bobby being younger, weaker, and less confident the whole show. They wouldn't be setting us up for something would they?) God, it's awful.

The way they set it up is that we're watching a documentary made in 2049 about President McCallister and then flashing back to the present day to learn about his childhood. What a pointless premise. Is America really that obsessed with the presidency? I thought it was just that The West Wing was so well written. It could've been about anything. Like behind the scenes of a nightly sports show. Besides, the only way to make that dippy idea good is to have the documentary be set present day and the childhood be 40 years ago. How are we supposed to relate to politics in some random, vague future? It's all just an excuse to show that by then we'll have had a black president and a woman president (yeah, right; don't get me wrong, I'm all for both, but... yeah, right), there's no way the show can really paint a compelling picture of his presidency in these quick flashes of our future present. And I don't get how it makes his childhood more interesting to know that he grows up to be president. If George W. Bush and John Kerry can be president, then clearly it's not a club reserved for fascinating people. I'd sooner watch Yes, Dear than a dramatization of Kerry's childhood.

Not that it could be any less interesting than this. As his mom, a college professor, Christine Lahti is way too "academic." They've got her rattling off phrases like "circular logic" and "George Bernard Shaw" while Jack sulks about his family's inability to be like those of all his school chums and Bobby whines and plays video games and suffers asthma attacks. Did they buy these one-dimensional characters from the fire sale at Affliction? A representative scene:

Jack: Glower.

Bobby: "Space club! Space club!"

Lahti: Acty, act act.

And the documentary interviews from the future – sure there are monorails around the National Mall (yes, they actually open the show that way), but we're still making good old fashioned talking head documentaries on film! – are such insipid non-sequiturs! "Jack was always impetuous," cut to: Jack, 40 years ago, scowling at his algebra homework. Man, that's deep! (And he asks the new girl in school out to – a pep rally bonfire? Maybe they did set this show in the '60s originally and they just reshot the scene at the TV store to update it when the Kennedy family sued them.) Nothing beats old people reading stiff lines off of cue cards about "President McCallister" while coyly refusing to say his first name. We get a Paymer! We get John Aylward looking ever more like one of the creatures from Close Encounters.

The one saving grace is John "Dennis Martino" Slattery. Gotta love that guy. This time he's slightly less villainous than he was on Ed, but not quite as sassy as he was on K Street. He even manages to salvage a scene or two playing against Lahti, who's way off the deep end on this show. I've never been a fan of her acting, but I liked the idea of her continuing to be on shows because it will keep her in the public eye until I have a chance to pitch my reality-makeover show idea to her – it would be called "Lahti-Dah" and she'd pick some random housewife and give her the Queen for a Day treatment. But at this rate, I don't think she's gonna make it. Jack tells her that he can't hang out with Bobby because Bobby's weirdness cramps his style, and she belts back, "I raised him to be special!" If true, well that's just sick. You should raise your kids to embrace the specialness within themselves, but raising them to be special? No, no. What is that, anyway? "C'mon honey? Don't you want to replace your shoelaces with licorice whips? Don't you want to memorize the Dead Parrot sketch in Lebanese? Don't you want to shave a picture of the Swedish Chef into the back of your head?" That's wrong.

Or, it's really terrible dialogue writing.

The Venture Brothers

(Cartoon Network, 11:00 Saturdays)

Is this a new show? I have no idea. All of a sudden I started seeing billboards for it around town, and based on those I was interested in finding out what the show was like, Adult Swim or not. Turns out it is an Adult Swim show, which is all the better. But, really, Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends is good clean fun, and Disney's Kim Possible can be downright excellent, so it's not like animation has to be "adulty" for me to like it. (This week, I watched a Kim Possible episode where the class went on a field trip to a museum and then spent the rest of the week trying to solve a century-old mystery they uncovered there. The establishing shot back to school the next day featured the big sign over the school parking lot, which read: "History Field Trip Yesterday." That's funny at least twice, people! Plus: Gary Fucking Cole.)

Anyway, Venture Brothers is new to me, and that's all that matters. My relationship with Adult Swim is tres on again/off again. I really like Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law for a lot of reasons (I won't lie to you, Gary Fucking Cole is one of 'em) and I'm very pleased that they're airing Family Guy and Futurama and all that. I can't quite get into the anime stuff, hard as I try, mostly because the mythology is pretty thick. It's beautiful, though. I could barely stay focused for a full five-minute "Aeon Flux" vignette back on MTV's Liquid Television, so I have no chance at sustaining a 30-minute interest in Cowboy Bebop, cute as its title is. I "get" what they're doing with the other stuff: The Brak Show, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Sealab 2021. It's all sort of in the Space Ghost: Coast to Coast vein, which is a show I really loved for a while there, about five years ago. Random, goofy humor that's way to the fringe, well beyond Conan. I get that. But sometimes I really feel like I'm missing something when I watch those shows. Like I'm not in the club. They can get really random! Venture Brothers, however, is more my kind of thing. Highly stylized, semi-ironic satire of the Hardy Boys/Scooby Doo mysteries, with great weird characters and plots that can be engaging or – at the very least – followable. There was a scene in one episode where a cowboy with a flamethrower was riding a T. rex, while frogmen firing WWI-era machine guns on turrets rode in the sidecars of motorcycles piloted by angry polar bears. (Beat that!) Also, the intentionally annoying dad, Dr. Venture, is a kick. In the episode I watched this week, he was underwater in a giant robotic scuba suit, and his son Dean was talking with Brock Samson the family bodyguard (voiced by Patrick Warburton, natch) back on the ship. Brock and Dean were talking about what a ninny Dr. Venture was, unaware that their radio mic was open. Dr. Venture had to butt in at some point: "Okay, guys, I can hear all of this." (A few minutes later, struggling with his robo-suit, he muttered, "It's like trying to walk around in a giant fat kid," and I had to pause TiVo and roll on the floor laughing.)

I hope it's not a new show; that'll mean more reruns for me to enjoy as I catch up. Did I mention? Warburton, people!

Returning Shows

That 70s Show continues to mildly entertain me for no good reason other than Mila Kunis is hot and Laura Prepon is gradually hottening. (I generally don't discriminate based on hair color, and even if I did, we all know redhead is way hotter than blonde – still, she looks really cute as a blonde, maybe because her hair is also shorter, and maybe because for a fraction of a second on the World Series of Poker, I mistook her for Scarlett Johansson.) Anyway, I swear to God I'll stop TiVoing this show as soon as someone gives me anything remotely meaningful to do with my life. Quintuplets is still simply terrible. I love Andy Richter as much as anyone, but this show is just awful. I'm reasonably sure he knows it and he's just doing his best while it's still attached to his ankle. (I'm reminded of Martin Short's anecdote about pilot season: as a bankable star, you try to find the worst possible project to do because they'll pay you astronomically and you're confident it won't get picked up so there will be no public embarrassment. I'm positive this is what happened to Richter here; Fox just got desperate and greenlit his show. I'm sure the same thing happened to Adam Arkin with Baby Bob.) I watched the "season premiere" (i.e., this week's episode) of Quintuplets out of fairness, even though I knew it wouldn't suck any less than the episode I watched last month. It didn't.

On the subject of The Apprentice: this is another one of those reality shows that everyone loves and I have no interest in. We all saw how well that went with The Amazing Race. My resentment for (or rather, apathy toward) The Apprentice is stronger than my disinterest in TAR, but who can say? It does have the trademark Burnett grandeur, and the boardroom scenes are quite compelling. Besides, how can anyone not love the Donald?

That 70s Show
Quintuplets
The Apprentice

(70s gets about 3/4 of a star more than it deserves because my cousin's really cute roommate works on it. This season, she's been bumped up to post-production coordinator! Go, Dia!)

Premiering Next Week

Brandon, this is the part where you look to see if a show you want to watch is on this list, and then plan accordingly. You're welcome.

The Benefactor (with Mark Cuban!): ABC, Monday at 8:00 (9:00 on the west coast)
Las Vegas: NBC, Monday at 9:00
LAX: NBC, Monday at 10:00
Gilmore Girls: WB, Tuesday at 8:00 (not that I watch this, but maybe I'll start!)
Survivor: CBS, Thursday at 8:00

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