Mon, August 28, 2006
Into Thin Airwaves
Why do you start a new television series? To me, there's one reason: a great story idea, with a great plan for making it into an interesting show. For a broadcast network, it seems a few other reasons are equally valid. Among them: existing development deal with producers or talent; gap in the fall schedule; blind stupidity. It's not that these reasons never produce good television – but you have to get very lucky.
Vanished
(Fox, 9:00 Mondays)
It's hard to figure out why Fox greenlit this one. Ordinarily I'd guess it was a gap in the line-up, but this is Fox. They have no reservations about filling the schedule with the absolute worst in reality programming. So it's hard to imagine them spending all the money that scripted TV requires to fill a hole that could just as easily be filled with $50,000, some DV cameras, and a gay midget. It's not that Vanished is an unbelievably terrible show – it's leaps and bounds above last year's Killer Instinct – it's just low on potential, and fails to make up for it by being particularly well made.
The premise of Vanished is decent enough. It devotes a season to the investigation of one person's disappearance, like NBC's Kidnapped. (Given Fox's track record, guess which show went into production second.) It's a challenging balance to unfold one story over an entire season while keeping enough punch in the individual episodes to make them enjoyable. Fox has been successful at this with 24, and less so with Reunion. Lost pulls it off with a globe-spanning semi-supernatural conspiracy (and many, many red herrings), but the disappearance of a senator's wife may not contain the requisite intrigue. Accordingly, many possible threads have been added to the pilot, so that – while unlikely – a globe-spanning semi-supernatural conspiracy is not entirely out of the question. The senator is acting suspicious; the missing wife has disappeared once before, and apparently also changed identities at least once; the daughter's boyfriend has wads of cash and a bloody sweatshirt hidden; the mayor's wife just turned up dead after being taken a decade ago, and presumably having spent the interim in a freezer; the teaser scenes for next week indicate the involvement of a druid-like cult. Problem is, even with all this going on, there's precious little reason to care.
As Lost and Veronica Mars have demonstrated, the key to keeping your byzantine season-long mystery compelling is frequent and fascinating characterization. One thing anyone at Fox should have noticed before putting Vanished on the air is the desperate need for further character development.
I often feel like television networks are the equivalent of movie studios in the 1940s (but with considerably less intelligence or business savvy). They are empires unto themselves, and each with its own "house style." In the case of Fox, that includes a pretty superficial treatment of characters. We spend all of four minutes with Mrs. Collins before she vanishes, and during that time, she grades a second-grader's paper, has a hushed and suspicious phone conversation, and smiles at her husband. Apparently, we're meant to know she's a beautiful, special angel because she greets a child at her volunteer banquet with a big hug (and agrees to wear her gift: a cheap macaroni necklace), but this is hardly enough to make us miss her. Then there's former Noxzema girl Rebecca Gayheart as a TV reporter following the case. She's portrayed as the typical self-obsessed, career-driven power slut that we've come to expect from television, and characterized with the subtlety of a freight train. She gives her boyfriend detailed instructions during the sex act; she attempts to wrangle an interview by invoking an innocent child that an FBI agent watched blow up on his last case. Also part of the "Fox style": every female character under the age of 35 is introduced to the audience with a sex scene. Now, the topless Ms. Gayheart executes a very impressive dismount where she manages to climb off her lover and sit up with her knees to her chest in one swift movement, eschewing those L-shaped sheets we've grown so tired of – so, we can't deny they're innovating in this area. But that's still kind of cheap.
The guys don't fare nearly as well, since they're not sexy enough to be introduced semi-clad. All they do is spend the episode facing off in gruff voices. The senator doesn't trust the FBI agent; the feeling is mutual. The agent's boss wants him not to screw up; the agent is still picking kid bits off his good sweater.
A better show would envelop you in its story, too engrossed to notice how convenient things can be, like nobody ever quite having time to say that thing they keep trying to blurt out that just might end the mystery right there. Or the ever-ready fingerprint kit that just happens to be waiting in the van outside the banquet hall along with an airtight container the perfect size for steaming the prints off Mrs. Collins's chair. A better show would feature smarter people. Senator Collins realizes his wife hasn't merely wandered off, because he spots the broken macaroni necklace on the front steps of the hotel. (Remember, baddies-in-training: if you're going to randomly paw at your kidnap victims before tossing them into your getaway van, pick up after yourselves!) He immediately stoops to pick it up and clutch it to his heart, because when there's only one piece of physical evidence related to your wife's minutes-old, completely random disappearance, the key is to start touching it and moving it immediately. And, for some reason, A/V techs are still taking about 20 keystrokes to zoom in on a clip from a surveillance video. Can we get a line item in the FBI budget for a mouse?
There are a handful of excellent shows starting this season. Despite that – or perhaps because of it – I'm giving new shows a harder time. There's great stuff out there. Mediocrity will not be tolerated. Right now, the worst show I'm watching is Eureka on SciFi. It's not perfect, but that's pretty good for the worst show. (Admittedly, there aren't as many shows on now. Once the season starts, the worst show will be The Simpsons. Sometimes mediocrity has a "get out of jail free" card.) So, it may be three or four weeks before you see more than two stars on one of these pages. The shows that are bowing in this early dumping ground seem pretty much the same – they all could have used a few more weeks to get ready.
Premiering This Week
Justice: Fox, Wednesday at 9:00 
(Prove me wrong, Garber!)
You've still got five or six chances left to bask in the orgasmic delights of The Venture Bros. season two, on Adult Swim at 10:30pm Sundays. I know; I'll stop mentioning it. But if you happened to watch it, you'd be far less than sorry!
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