Mon, September 19, 2005

The first real week of TV premieres, and the results are... shall we say, mixed? All I know is, the multi-camera sitcom format must be sleeping with someone very powerful considering the kind of exposure it's getting despite so many high profile fumbles.

The War at Home

(Fox, 8:30 Sundays)

What do you do when your sitcom writers are too lazy to write scenes around the lame one-liners they dream up? If you're The War at Home, you place the characters in front of a white cyc, and let them frequently interrupt ongoing scenes to bark the one-liners directly into the lens and then disappear. The drawback is, this breaks up the show's already choppy narrative rhythm, and results in a sitcom that doesn't tell a story at all – it's just a rapid-fire list of half-formed jokes around one or two concepts (daughter dates black guy; son tries on mom's bra). Sitting in a sitcom taping audience is already a six hour ordeal that approaches Gitmo-level torture for unsuspecting tourists and college students in LA. Having to endure this show – six-second scenes interrupted by four-second video clips – would have to melt their brains. (Which might explain why the laugh track sounds so forced.)

The multi-camera sitcom is dying only because its practitioners insist on tinkering with its format – invoking gimmicks like this "mindscreen" device – rather than focusing on what works. Shows like Still Standing, The King of Queens, and – to a lesser extent – Two and a Half Men still manage to be funny in front of a live audience. Like Cheers or Friends, they have no kooky gimmick – they've got interesting, well rounded characters, and they play to the strengths of their setup: universally relatable stories about simple situations, not flamboyantly archetypical fantasies with crazy consequences. Not every sitcom has to be Everybody Loves Raymond, but they should all be a damn sight better than The War at Home. It's completely unwatchable and entirely derivative – which of its lines or character descriptions couldn't have been lifted from the waste bin of the writer's room at Roseanne? (Even its "hook" has been previously used to run Herman's Head into the ground.) And let's not forget, it's offensive to boot: in order to give the show that Fox "edge," the dad (Michael Rapaport) combines the worst of Al Bundy and Archie Bunker, then dials it up to 11. (There goes Rapaport – trying again to fill the shoes of Stacy Keach.) Centering yet another family sitcom scenario around the fear that a son might be gay is a cynical capitulation to a lazy, distorted concept of "red state values," and TV shows need to stop doing it. For once, I agree with Jackie Harvey: this show is an absolute disappointment.

Bones

(Fox, 8:00 Tuesdays)

This show had one thing going for it right away: the heretofore unrevealed Other Deschanel Sister in the title role. Emily is no match for younger sister Zooey in terms of looks or acting chops, but that's – as Arksie likes to say – praising with faint damnation. As it turns out, Bones follows in the footsteps of NUMB3RS: an FBI agent is paired with a quirky genius (in this case, an anthropologist), and although they distrust each other, they still kick ass as a team. It's yet another branch off the evolutionary trunk that started with CSI, but it has the potential to outgrow this contrivance and turn into an enjoyable show in its own right, just as NUMB3RS and Without a Trace have done before it.

I never had much respect for David Boreanaz, because his brooding good looks kept distracting Buffy Summers from quitting the vampire game and moving in with me. But now that he's on his own (as Bones's FBI taskmaster) and there's less risk of him developing prosthetic fangs, I have to admit that he's not as wooden or awful as I would have expected. His chemistry with Deschanel is nothing spectacular, but she's such a hoot, you'll hardly miss him. She's plucky and fun, and her character is fairly well realized (which is good considering she's based on a real person). I could do without the kickboxing skills (does every science expert on TV have to be a frickin' superhero?) but I love her slightly off-kilter conversational skills, the way she says "I don't know what that means" a lot. Rather than bantering endlessly on any number of arcane pop-culture topics, she just admits that she's out of the loop and doesn't care to be in. It's funny.

The science is akin to anything you'd see on CSI or Cold Case – a lot of looking at skeletons and determining their gender, age, weight, favorite color, high school locker combination, etc. This all passes muster by incorporating enough random jargon to make it sound believable. But the sexy computer nerd at the lab has built a computer program which will extrapolate a victim's facial structure from the skull, and then project it as a giant rotating 3D hologram. This is completely absurd. It makes sense that the show would want to speed up the typical method of fleshing out a skull – which involves a lot of hours with modeling clay – but why can't the computerized face be presented on a monitor instead of by hologram? It could still rotate, and you'd have much better resolution because the surfaces would be opaque instead of see-through, and you wouldn't have Boreanaz jamming his hammy fist into it all the time to see what happens.

Overall, we need another procedural cop show like we need a hole in the head – which, considering the angle and size of the exit wound, suggests a trajectory... I digress. The point is, the CSI finale was too good for me to dump that show now, and you can pry Without a Trace from my cold, dead hands. Bones is plenty cute, but hardly special enough to merit a regular spot in the rotation.

Supernatural

(WB, 9:00 Tuesdays)

Every year, there's a tiny number of shows (almost always on the WB) whose hype I just randomly miss, but this year there seems to be a lot. Partly, I guess it's because there's no hotly anticipated new show this year, the way Lost was such a phenomenon last year even before it aired. Commander in Chief is the only one that comes close, and that's just because a) it has a big, two-word gimmick and b) Hillary.

So Supernatural was a blank slate to me – I had a hunch there'd be a supernatural element (See that? I'm sharp!), and the poster seemed to indicate two brothers in a possibly rural setting, but that's about it. As it turns out, it's the story of two brothers (Yes!) who lost their mother to some sort of poltergeist at a young age, and then followed their father in search of her killer (and other beasties) for years until the younger bro, Sam, started on the law school track and sort of drifted off on his own. The show opens in typical WB fashion at a college party, with Sam's hot blonde girlfriend dressed in a skimpy nurse outfit. (The WB knows its target audience, and their in-house clone farm is turning out blonde hotties at twice last year's yield, so strap in!) Later, they're at home in bed and the covers have strategically slipped off to reveal her extremely adorable panties. Soon after that, the older brother, Dean (Lana's psycho boyfriend from Smallville), shows up unannounced and starts making a lot of cryptic statements while the girlfriend slumps hotly in her panties nearby. This goes on until Dean convinces Sam to come with him and help track down their father, who seems to have gone missing while investigating a supernatural mystery in a small town. (The show likes to mask its long expository passages within fights between the brothers, so whenever they start bickering the backstory just pours out all over the place.) The boys head off, and with the girlfriend out of the picture, WB viewers across the country poise their thumbs over the remote until – guest star Sarah Shahi as a hot ghost/temptress! Well played, WB.

The story here is kind of meaningless, but if anyone's going to seduce you into rehashing the old sweater-on-the-gravestone urban legend, it's going to be Shahi in a willowy dress. (You may have seen her as the cute assistant of Alias dunderpate Will Tippin, or you may have seen her buried between the thighs of multiple nubile starlets on Showtime's The L Word, the only show more bald-faced than the WB about delivering fratboy fantasy fodder.) Much like all of Jennifer Love Hewitt's new friends this year, she's trapped between this world and the next because of some unfinished business. The boys tidy this up just in time for Sam to get back for his Stanford Law interview, and it seems like this is going to be a very short series indeed, until Sam discovers his girlfriend pinned to the ceiling and engulfed in flames just like his mom was all those years ago. (No! Those precious panties!) It's a damn fine way to motivate Sam into the open arms of his brother and propel them forward through the first season. The show does a better than average job of building suspense and delivering creepy thrills, but I've already had enough of Lana's boyfriend, and I don't tend to get into scary supernatural stuff. If I want a suspenseful thriller, I'll probably go with Threshold (see below), and if I have to watch ghost stories, I'll skip the hottie-of-the-week approach and just go for the built-in appeal of Jennifer Love Hewitt as CBS's titular (and I do mean titular) Ghost Whisperer.

Head Cases

(Fox, 9:00 Wednesdays)

The unbelievably cheesy premise here is that Chris O'Donnell suffers a nervous breakdown and as a condition of his therapy he's paired with Adam Goldberg, who has serious rage control issues. What makes this mismatch even more ironic is that O'Donnell is a (say it with me) "high powered attorney" and Goldberg is a shady shyster.

Me, I'm always glad to see Chris O'Donnell in the public eye, because back when I only had one chin, people would frequently tell me I reminded them of him – so more face time for Chris increases the chances of a random stranger flattering me. However, despite fine performances from both leads and the surprise appearance of Rhea Seehorn (my favorite part of I'm With Her) as O'Donnell's former assistant (and future crush, you can just see it coming), the show has a hard time establishing a workable rhythm, and I understand the ratings were just terrible. Richard Kind is joining the show in episode two as the ex-con who serves as a paralegal for the newly paired lawyers, and Rhea Seehorn is nowhere to be found in the show's IMDb record, but all over its Fox website – methinks a bit of retooling is afoot.

Also, does it strike anyone else as strange that we have plenty of half-hour comedies and plenty of hour-long dramas, but any hour-long "dramedy" always incorporates lawyers? Ally McBeal, Ed, Boston Legal, Just Legal, Head Cases? Weird.

Twins

(WB, 8:30 Fridays)

The WB (no stranger to packing hot girls into shows) deploys an ingenious approach of pairing veteran sitcom actors with complementary hot girls (or in the case of Melanie Griffith, "hot" girls) in this story about siblings poised to take over their parents' lingerie company. The twins are Molly Stanton (young, hot) and Sara Gilbert (Roseanne); their parents are Melanie Griffith (old, plastic) and Mark Linn-Baker (Cousin Larry). Unfortunately, during her years in hiding Sara Gilbert has lost too much weight to make convincing jokes about her sister's unattainable feminine ideal, and Melanie Griffith is too full of botox to smile convincingly, or cry convincingly, or speak coherently. The show makes some interesting decisions (like sepia footage of octogenarian identical twins for its interstitials between scenes), but these days if you're going to have a multi-camera sitcom, you need to drop the cute stuff and just focus on fun and interesting characters. Gilbert is given very little to do (she crushes on the new guy at work, who crushes on – wait for it – the hot sister). Linn-Baker is given almost no screen time (to the typical WB viewer, he's older than Mike Wallace and slightly less funny). Both work a few miracles and deliver some laughs, but the show feels just a little too "developed" to ever hold an actual audience.

Threshold

(CBS, 9:00 Fridays)

Karen Sisco is my second-favorite Karen in the world, and Carla Gugino won my heart with my second-favorite portrayal of her, in ABC's unfairly short-lived Karen Sisco. So, even though I knew nothing about Threshold except it stars Gugino and she chases aliens, I was hopeful that I might like it.

Then the show cold-cocked me out of nowhere with a bitchslap full of Peter Dinklage, from which I am still recovering.

The show ends up combining The X-Files with Contact in a mixture that favors the latter: there's mysterious contact from some otherworldly device or vessel off the coast of Washington, DC, and Molly Caffrey (Gugino) is called in to manage the investigation because she wrote up a plan (called "Threshold") in her capacity as a "contingency analyst." So, she's out walking her hideous bulldog after work one night, when suddenly a helicopter drops out of the sky, lands on her backyard, and whisks her away to the Threshold command center. (An awesome kickstart to the show, and proof that someone read my review of Medical Investigation last year.) Within minutes, the rest of her Threshold "red team" has been assembled: Peter Dinklage is Arthur Ramsey, a brilliant mathematician who enjoys gambling and strip joints, and a renowned linguist who frequently employs Pig Latin; Brent Spiner is Nigel Fenway, a microbiologist and genetic expert; and The Guy They Could Afford After Paying For Dinklage And Spiner is a rocket scientist from NASA named Lucas Pegg. They investigate the ship where the contact took place, finding bizarre evidence like deformed bodies, fractal patterns on the radar equipment, cockroaches that swarm in that same pattern, and only one survivor among the crew. The survivor is named Gunneson, and he's played by the same guy as Ethan from Lost – who's quickly building up quite a resume of being riddled with bullets in the rain in a T-shirt. This time, though, something about the alien encounter has left him invincible, so he shakes off the gunfire and dives off the ship into the murky depths, just as the Threshold team evacuates the boat and blows it to smithereens to prevent the North Koreans from getting a look at it. (I hear ABC is doing the same thing with the Freddie pilot.)

The ship's explosion isn't much in the way of visual effects, but it propels the story forward (and into the lab) nicely, and provides for future episodes where the team must piece together the few clues they were able to gather before it went down – or, better yet, must pack into a mini-sub to recover some additional evidence from the wreck. It's a tantalizing, high-energy opening to a show that mixes suspense and mystery nicely with its government paranoia and science talk. And, since Caffrey, Pegg, and their mercenary escort Cavennaugh had their brain waves adjusted by exposure to video footage of the alien craft, the mystery twists in on itself: they've been exposed to the very thing they're studying, but with so much unknown about its origins and mechanisms, there's no way to know whether this exposure is innocuous or harmful. It breeds suspicion between the rest of the team and these three, and it provides excellent motivation for the three of them to skirt department protocols. For some reason, every investigative show on the air these days incorporates a huge amount of "bending the rules," "ignoring the brass," and "going off the reservation" – now there's finally a justified reason for doing it: if these three reveal all the strange things that have been happening since they saw the tape, they might be locked up or kicked off the team.

Spiner and Dinklage do a great job of running down the obligatory leads of "Fuck this, I'm leaving!" and "Do I have rights, here?" They clash with Cavennaugh and Charles S. Dutton (Caffrey's boss, second in command at Homeland Security), providing a necessary look at how real people might react in such extraordinary situations; and, whether it's professional jealousy or Armageddon-style accommodations from the highest levels of government, something manages to convince them to stay on. Then, right before the two-hour premiere fades to black, a whole new level of intrigue unfolds, guaranteeing quite a bit of tantalizing mystery to come.

Threshold exposes very few flaws over the course of its dense and fast-paced premiere, and shows potential to develop quite nicely. Besides, an ensemble this impressive is rare for a TV show. Firefly did it, and maybe ER, but in both cases they lucked out with mostly unknowns. (Sure, Lost you say, but in my opinion that's one or two top performers propping up a big surrounding group. Besides, the main character on that show is the island, and it still needs to prove itself.) I don't know how it was possible to get Peter Dinklage on a regular TV series, and I don't hold out hope that it'll last long. But he's categorically fucking excellent (in this show, or in anything) and I aim to soak up as much of it as I can before it's all over.

Premiering Tonight

Arrested Development: Fox, 8:00
King of Queens: CBS, 8:00
Surface: NBC, 8:00
Kitchen Confidential: Fox, 8:30
How I Met Your Mother: CBS, 8:30
Two and a Half Men: CBS, 9:00
Las Vegas: NBC, 9:00
Just Legal: WB, 9:00
Out of Practice: CBS, 9:30

Hoo boy! So, that should be pretty busy! Also...

Premiering This Week

My Name Is Earl: NBC, Tuesday at 9:00
The Office: NBC, Tuesday at 9:30
(reports indicate The Office got good after I quit watching it last season – we'll see)
Still Standing: CBS, Wednesday at 8:00
Lost: ABC, Wednesday at 9:00
E-Ring: NBC, Wednesday at 9:00
Invasion: ABC, Wednesday at 10:00
Joey: NBC, Thursday at 8:00
Everybody Hates Chris: UPN, Thursday at 8:00
CSI: CBS, Thursday at 9:00
Criminal Minds: CBS, Thursday at 10:00
Ghost Whisperer: CBS, Friday at 8:00
Killer Instinct: Fox, Friday at 9:00
NUMB3RS: CBS, Friday at 10:00
Inconceivable: NBC, Friday at 10:00

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