Mon, September 25, 2006

This week was really the epicenter of premiere season, but it wasn't as huge a week as it had seemed. I think it was initially daunting because I feared I'd like too many new shows and end up exceeding the amount of viewing time I have for prime time TV each week. However, looking at the pre-ratings for this week's shows, there's only one show I'm in any danger of liking – and my only fear regarding Studio 60 is that NBC will take it away from me. It's really the Studio 60 show this fall, which makes it somewhat surprising the other shows didn't debut last week. After Sorkin & Schlamme's Monday bow, it's kind of hard to take any other television seriously. (Or anything in life, for that matter.)

The Class

CBS, Mondays at 8:00

For the longest time, whenever I'd see a directorial credit for Jim Burrows on a new sitcom I'd think, "Ah, this must be pretty good; it's attracted the godfather of TV directing." Now I've finally realized Burrows just really likes money. It could be more than that – maybe he really wants to help these new shows get their start or something. But it's clear he's not vetting their scripts and deciding to throw his weight behind the best shows each season. One trip to his IMDb profile will make that clear.

Interestingly enough, the directing is one of the best things going for The Class. The shooting and staging look a lot more like the second season of an existing show than the typical pilot awkwardness. Some of the writing is passable also, though most of it is pretty lazy. (For example, as the classmates gather for the impromptu reunion/surprise party, Holly reveals that on her prom night she discovered Kyle, her date, in bed with another boy. It took years of therapy, but now she's over it and happily married. Enter: her husband, a flaming homosexual. It's a cheap joke, and now she's stuck with a gay husband for the rest of the series.)

If you put a gun to my head and told me I had to watch a studio audience sitcom from this year's crop, The Class would probably be my pick. (Quite possibly the gun would distract me enough that I wouldn't be able to predict half the punch lines.) Its premise is not that bad – just a shared backstory for all the characters, not a thematic backbone for the show – and it has a fairly decent cast of interesting characters. It's a shame they dove in with two romance stories right from the start, though. It's irksome enough when sitcoms resort to that sort of drama in later seasons, and it's absolutely unnecessary to front-load your show with so much of it. Let us laugh for a few weeks; by then we'll have bonded with the characters enough to start caring who they make out with.

Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip

NBC, Mondays at 10:00

Is it too early to call this the best show that has ever been produced for television, ever? Yes, it probably is. But it does lead me to wonder whether NBC's audience research department has begun to target individual viewers, one by one. If you'd have asked me beforehand, I probably wouldn't have consented to having a TV network scan my brain with some sort of mind-reading satellite. But considering the outcome, I'm tremendously glad they did.

Admittedly, a big part of this is that there are so many TV shows that fall short of their potential. So, when Sorkin steps in and reminds us what true mastery of the art of television looks like, it makes for a dramatic contrast. I guess it depends what you watch television for. If you're looking for smart dialogue, interesting and complex characters, and meaningful stories, shows like Studio 60, Deadwood, and Veronica Mars appeal to you. I suppose if you don't care for that kind of TV, you watch something else. The War at Home is still on.

For me, you just can't beat Sorkin when he's writing about something he cares about. That's why Sports Night got so much better right toward the end, and why West Wing floundered a little right before he left. Pair him up with Schlamme, who directs TV like absolutely no one else, and you have a distinctive and riveting show. And the cast – well, enough has been said about the fantastic ensemble assembled here. I don't need to keep gushing.

Sure, the episode has its drawbacks. The new president of NBS, Jordan McDeere (Amanda Peet, fulfilling Sorkin's "Mc" quota), is fantastic, inspiring, and utterly implausible. She's a TV exec who also gets comedy – in that case, why be an executive? And, how the hell did she get there, when the apparent requirements for the job are gutless toadyism and a tin ear for decent television? On top of this, the show fails to offer much in the way of obstacles for Ms. McDeere right off the bat. Allusions are made to the network's faltering status, and it's apparent they're bringing her in with desperate hopes of turning the tides. There's an offhand line about the conglomerate's stock price dropping when she took the job. But her path would seem riskier if we were given specific scenes showing her acidic, egotistical boss (Steven Weber) acquiescing to her strategies not because he's confident in her, but because he has no other options. (Sorkin says, "That was cut for time.")

But the sparkling dialogue and excellent characters make it clear that Studio 60 has the potential to transcend a few missteps here and there. Matthew Perry and Bradley Whitford are spectacular as the writer-director team that returns to helm the show, and their interplay is spot-on. (Is it weird for me to admit I get a lump in my throat watching them, because this is sort of the working relationship I always fantasized having with Arksie? If so, just kidding!) And I'm very pleased with the Sarah Paulson character – a representation of a deeply faithful Christian who still manages to have a sense of humor and a realistic world view. It can be assumed that many, many Christians share these qualities and they should come as no surprise. But she's the first we've seen on TV or in the movies, so good for her. I like her because she holds her own in a fight with Matthew Perry where he's saying a lot of the things I would've said.

For me, the toughest challenge will be accepting that not every episode will have as much time to devote to specific jabs at how bad Saturday Night Live has become. Studio 60 appeals to me with laser-beam precision because it picks exactly the right weak point to focus on television's disappointing downturn. (Second only to The Simpsons – now that would be a great behind-the-scenes show!) I was lapping up every snarky zing they fired about how longer sketches aren't funnier sketches and ridiculously tiresome recurring characters are terrible. But the show has to be about the characters and their struggles, not about cutting the legs out from under SNL. So, I'll cherish these barbs for now, and I'll just have to live with the best writing on television and one of history's greatest ensemble casts to get me through the rest of the episodes.

One criticism I won't let stand is that the stakes were higher in The West Wing because it involved the leader of the free world, and audiences can't be expected to care as much about the fate of a lackluster sketch comedy show. Wrong. By that logic, the issue Americans care most about is the creative murders of random Las Vegas thugs. (Work it into your midterm stump speeches, Democrats!) The reality is, a TV show is enjoyable not because millions of lives would be affected by its events if you translated it to real life – it's enjoyable because the characters and situations are interesting and the stories are well told. And Sorkin has a trademark on that, so his shows will be watchable whether they're about the President of the Galaxy or a guy in a basement with a soldering iron and a Cheeto.

With Studio 60, he shows up to play. The characters make the point that TV is dull and unchallenging, and Sorkin's writing refuses to insult the audience's intelligence by talking down to them or seeking the lowest common denominator. On both NBC and NBS, Studio 60 aims to be the show that turns things around.

Smith

CBS, Tuesdays at 10:00

I was afraid my recent (astonished) disappointment in GoodFellas might make it harder for me to appreciate Ray Liotta in Smith. That must be it, because I sure didn't appreciate Smith. But there's no way to be sure, because I can't unsee GoodFellas (although, if I could, I'd pay any amount of money to).

My concern about Smith boils down to a problem of capacity: can they really come up with enough material to fill a weekly show about high profile thieves? The answer is a resounding no: they can't even fill one episode. In order to pad out the hour, they must resort to showing the heist twice. The episode opens with the very end of the caper – a speedboat escape with one team member wounded – then flashes back 60 minutes to the start. Then it flashes further back about a week to reveal the personalities and the planning, and ends with the heist all over again. Not shot from new angles; not revealing new information. Just repeated. As I once quipped about Shattered, it's one of those rare projects with a negative shooting ratio.

I'm delighted by the casting of Amy Smith (and even more delighted by the cameo appearance of Valerie Azzlyn from Spike TV's Joe Schmo 2!) but the show offers little else of value. Mostly, it fails to make sense. Liotta and his thugs go through the trouble of donning a fake tattoo to throw off eyewitness accounts and planting an exploding truck in case they need a distraction during their getaway, but when they finally pull the speedboat over at an abandoned dock, they just blow it up right then. Having gone through all that preparation to shake their pursuers, shouldn't they wait until they're farther away before creating a giant fireball? Or maybe sink the boat with a small charge that doesn't echo through the night like a beacon of criminality?

If all this weren't laughable enough, Liotta wraps up the episode by approaching his boss (Shohreh Aghdashloo, as delectable as she is unpronounceable) to tell her that he wants out of the stealing game. But these writers are crafty enough to know that we've all heard "one last big score" way too many times. So he tells her, "just three or four more, and I'm out." That's innovation – they're turning the genre on its ear! Plus, it buys them a few more episodes before they have to think up something to force him back in. Shame on CBS if it doesn't cancel the show long before that.

Jericho

CBS, Wednesdays at 8:00

Skeet Ulrich returns from obscurity just in time to see the world blow up. I'm sure he's run this scenario plenty of times in his mind already, but this time he's playing a character who does those things. Jericho seems to have some potential, but it's not clear in the first episode whether the series is going to actually be interesting or just repeatedly indicate that it could be interesting. It's got a bunch of tediously familiar elements (busload of kids in peril! mob rule at the only gas station! TV's 4,000th emergency tracheotomy!) but also plenty of mystique (what's the deal with the self-described former cop who's new in town, and why does he think he has all the answers? is this a large scale attack or maybe just an accident? seriously, Skeet Ulrich?).

For now, there are only looming mushroom clouds and lots of ineffectual bickering and panicking – the way you'd expect a group of people to act when they come from an educational system that's banned evolution. The mayor (Skeet's major dad) gives a rousing speech, beginning with, "Shame on you for looting! Bad town!" and ending with, "If we have to, the people of Jericho can fight all enemies." Which would be a pretty awesome way to handle the war on terror – attack town by town like those silly ninjas.

None of the big questions have been answered, so it's unclear where the show will fall on the spectrum from The Trigger Effect to The Stand. Insightful and timely evaluation of how ordinary Americans react to a state of emergency, or uninspired faux-suspense with fabricated "twists" and nothing to say? We'll have to wait and see. The problem I have is that the show seems ready-made to deliver a soapbox argument about the current state of world affairs, and that will be tiresome no matter which side of the hawk/dove, red/blue debate it comes down on. That sort of message isn't the sort of thing I'm interested in watching on TV. I want to watch someone tear Lorne Michaels a new one!

One thing is fairly clear: the new fiance of the Ashley Scott character will almost certainly have died off-screen before we ever meet him. Which means a rekindling of her past relationship with Ulrich, which means she'll probably show up in her undies at some point. No matter how bad the show is, it's worth fast-forwarding through once a week for a glimpse at that.

Kidnapped

NBC, Wednesdays at 10:00

Of the shows I'm not that enthusiastic about, Kidnapped certainly has the best chance of being quite good. It tries to throw us off the scent, with regrettable choices like introducing the Delroy Lindo character during a gold watch ceremony marking his last day at the FBI's missing persons unit. This seems like the sort of cliché that should henceforth be reserved for parody movies. "One last score." "Three days 'til retirement." "You're off the force – hand in your badge, your gun, your gun's badge, and your badge's gun."

If we look past those errors, there are other parts of the show that are slick and interesting, even if not entirely innovative. For starters, they show us the bad guy right away – the guy masterminding the kidnapping plot. Maybe he's not the ultimate boss, but at least we know who he is. This helps set the show up as being about something – which was sorely lacking from Smith. We don't know why they're kidnapping this kid; we don't necessarily know who all is working for them. (Could it be some of the people whom we've already met as "good guys?" Aha!) But, we can easily wrap our head around the main players in the show's central conflict. Also, Ricky Jay is in it, which is a good way to determine if anything is pants-crappingly awesome. And I shouldn't neglect to mention Dana Delany. She's got the goods and she delivers reliably. These are the "TV goods," not the Meryl Streep goods or the Natalie Portman goods. But she's got 'em, and she shows up to play. There's a reason we've all heard of China Beach, and it certainly isn't China Beach. Timothy Hutton also appears, largely as a blank backdrop that things happen in front of. I like him fine, but I can't remember a role in which he did anything other than that.

The show does a great job of setting up some very satisfying scenes of the kidnapping team being awesome at stuff. Snatching the kid away from his well trained bodyguard with a violent, choreographed blitz; baiting a trap for Lindo's FBI underling with the itchy trigger finger – the sort of stuff that makes you root for the bad guys in Ocean's Eleven. As a result, you respect both sides of the dance, and it makes the show a lot more interesting. Jeremy Sisto (whom I last saw as a drooling yahoo on Six Feet Under, but I'm sure he got clean between then and the end of the show) is not that bad as the freelance person-finder that the rich family hires to retrieve their boy. He's even got a helper girl, who's pretty cool.

The challenge will be to keep an appropriate number of mysteries going all season (obviously, recovering the kid in week three would be a mistake) but not so much that it becomes absurd, like the druid cult and the tarot cards on Vanished. So far, some nice seeds have been planted. Where are they keeping Virgil the bodyguard? (It can be assumed we'll see much more of him, since he's played by series regular Mykelti Williamson (Boomtown, Forrest Gump).) Why are they drugging the kid? Who's behind all this? What exactly does Timothy Hutton do? It's worth finding out.

Also, Dana Delany wraps up the episode by standing on the rooftop terrace and explaining to Sisto how confusing it is for the world to continue spinning as though nothing is wrong. People down below continue going about their lives, and she doesn't understand how it all doesn't come to a halt. It's a superbly acted scene, and it's an entirely relatable feeling. When I get my heart broken by some chick, I'm usually shocked that I'm still expected to show up for work the next day. I can't even imagine how much harder it would be to lose your kid.

Shark

CBS, Thursdays at 10:00

I still haven't forgiven the Academy for snubbing James Woods in his brilliant performance in Kicked in the Head. (I haven't seen the movie, but if the trailer is any indication, he's dynamite!) So I really wanted to give the benefit of the doubt to Shark, in which he plays Sebastian "the Shark" Stark. And benefit it did!

Stark is a pricey, unscrupulous defense attorney who leaves the high life to run the District Attorney's new High Profile Crimes division and put away the celebrity murderers and wealthy rapists he was formerly paid to protect. This allows the character to be smarmy and irascible, but still have a soul. So far, these two sides of his personality have not been reconciled altogether smoothly. He yells at his underlings and plays to win, yet he solemnly vows to the mother of a murder victim that he'll clear her son's reputation (seeking acquittal on self-defense, the other side is calling him a rapist). Stark comes from one of those firms where they don't care if you're guilty as long as you pay their exorbitant fees, but when he frees a wife-beater who returns home to beat his wife to death, he goes into a week-long funk (which allows the mayor to goad him into becoming a prosecutor). These extreme mood swings have not yet been convincingly explained.

The saving grace of the show is Woods's terrific performance, which takes James Spader's Alan Shore, strips out the sexual innuendo, and replaces it with even more yelling and passion. Also, Woods's adorable, spunky, wise-beyond-her-years daughter (think of a brunette Veronica Mars) has just turned 16, so she has to decide whether she'll live full-time with Dad in LA or Mom in New York. She chooses Dad because she's never known him (he always put work before her – those damn TV dads!). Their relationship is fantastic, and it's reason enough to watch the show. It's my sad duty as a Victor Garber fan to report that the wheels have come off Justice. Watch this one instead.

(Shark can pick up one more star if they let Sarah Carter wear her hair down in future episodes.)

Six Degrees

ABC, Thursdays at 10:00

When do you, as a network, know you've hung too many hopes on the talent of one executive producer? For CBS, it's when Bruckheimer delivers you a pointless dud like Cold Case. For ABC, it's when J.J. Abrams is asked to create so many shows that he has to start mining ideas from past movies he's been in. (Stay tuned for the Regarding Henry sitcom next fall.)

Six Degrees certainly has a terrific cast. Campbell Scott and Hope Davis are effortlessly compelling – they never aren't. (If you haven't seen The Secret Lives of Dentists, you really should. It does a few things that don't seem ideal, but by the end I was embracing every bit of it.) Bridget Moynahan, always fun to look at, delivers quite a performance here, which is even more fun. And some able supporting players round out a cast that's talented enough to drown out Erika Christensen (someone I often fantasize about drowning). But, even with all that, I'm struggling to understand why this needs to be a show.

The central idea stems from the familiar aphorism that gave Six Degrees of Separation its name and quadrupled Kevin Bacon's Q rating for free: with a trail of just six other people, anyone on the planet can be connected to anyone else. However, unlike the Six Degrees play and movie, the show takes the concept literally, following the unconnected stories of six Manhattan residents whose paths begin to overlap. Moynahan is Whitney, promoted to partner in her ad agency the same week she gets engaged to her douche bag boyfriend; Scott is Steven, formerly a famous photographer, currently getting back on his feet after kicking drugs; Davis is Laura, newly single mother to her adorable, charming eight-year-old daughter, who seeks closure by repeatedly watching TiVo footage of her war correspondent husband dying on live cable news; Christensen is Mae, who's in the middle of something sinister and constantly changing her identity; Dorian Missick is Damian, trying to extricate himself from a gambling addiction and fielding offers to join his brother's crime syndicate. And Jay Hernandez (crazy/beautiful) is Carlos, a public defender who works in the next cubicle over from– Sarah Fucking Vowell?! Nobody told me! This is definitely the Peter Dinklage Bitchslap of this season. (Although it seems like an unfortunately small part, I still don't understand how this happened. Nevertheless: yay!)

The strange thing is, for a show that's supposedly so mystified by the strange and wonderful ways we come together, Laura and Whitney become instant best friends after sitting next to each other at the nail salon. If you're going to have characters who jump from stranger to confidant with so little nudging, you can go ahead and call the show "Fifty Degrees." (Or, hell, "98 Degrees" – whatever happened to Nick Lachey's ABC development deal?) I was expecting a lot more connections like Mae pitching herself to be Laura's nanny than this "yeah we met yesterday; I still choose you to take me out on the town to forget my dead husband" stuff. Not that this is the primary reason to avoid Six Degrees. For me, the primary reason is that there's not much to care about, even with all that's going on. Despite the winning cast, it winds up seeming like any other soap opera – and, for me, that's not the sort of thing I look for on TV.

Brothers & Sisters

ABC, Sundays at 10:00

I'll begin by answering the burning question: No, they have not invented lighting soft enough for Calista Flockhart's return to television. (I'm reminded of the fake trivia for Comedy Central's airing of Back to School in the '90s: "Sally Kellerman insisted on being photographed through a mattress.") Bringing in the brilliant Sally Field is excellent casting, because she and Flockhart really do have a resemblance – the thing is, Field should be playing the daughter.

It's drama of the highest order as siblings spar over their self-destructive life choices and the challenges of running their family business. Grab any three family members at random, and at least two of them will be having affairs (or just stopped having them). The Flockhart character is estranged from her liberal southern California family because she's a neo-con Manhattanite with a right-wing radio show. She's in town to interview about taking the red chair (literally) in a new TV show called "Red, White, and Blue." One of those preposterous pundit shows in which it's dictated that the panelists must always disagree; that there's a "red" and a "blue" opinion to have on every topic; and you must automatically espouse that viewpoint if you're in that chair. There's no reason to include a show like that in your TV show, unless it's there to point out what a terrible and destructive idea it is. Perhaps the most disappointing thing about the utterly shameful Brothers & Sisters is that they're not making that point. "Red, White, and Blue" is just there to give Flockhart's character something to do.

Maybe it's just me, but I don't think we need melodramatic prime time soaps on TV. (We certainly don't need two on ABC.) The Walker family – which spawned all these brothers and sisters, and loses its patriarch Tom Skerritt at the end of the pilot – lives very well and wants for nothing, yet still finds itself in a constant spiral of dysfunction. We should empathize with these crybabies? I can't.

One note in closing: I have to agree with smug, self-satisfied, former sitcom writer Ken Levine: Stop The Music! Every hour drama on this page employs the same overused, ham-fisted music montage to deliver the emotional denouement of each episode's arc (sometimes followed by a quick dialogue scene to deliver a pithy epilogue). (Except Studio 60 of course; too busy being awesome.) It's madness. And whether or not it sometimes fits well with a particular episode, I can't understand why TV producers are still using it now that it's so ubiquitously trite. Move on, folks! Show us you can do it with dialogue and "regular-mo" footage, and then maybe we'll forgive the occasional montage.

The other epidemic – showing characters developing film in rooms with more lighting than most football fields – is so far restricted to only The Class and Six Degrees. So, no need to go "red alert" on that yet. I'll keep you posted.

Returning Shows

How I Met Your Mother got its lead couple together at the end of last season, so now we're able to bask in their glow for a while, which is a nice feeling and almost allows you to ignore their impending breakup (the pilot told us, she's not the Mother in question). Of course, the comedy gold and silver go to The Office and Earl. Earl continues to solidly entertain, and The Office is the reason it would be far too hasty to declare Studio 60 the greatest show in TV history. It takes the baton from Arrested Development and just keeps running. For me, the show has done the impossible and actually exceeded its excellent BBC ancestor – they're doing everything right, and that includes making us squirm with discomfort and making us wait for the romance to pay off. If they're smart, they'll pit Jim against Roy in season three and let Pam challenge both of them to confront their selfish ways. In the meantime, her "I can't believe Jim is missing this" face is simultaneously gleeful and remorseful, and she's the best actress on TV.

It was sad to see Parker Posey go from Boston Legal, just as they had let her performance break free, but it had to happen. From the scenes, it looks like Constance Zimmer (Entourage) might be joining up, which would be a delight – even if only for a guest spot. The once-great NUMB3RS is suffering a little, with the math becoming less and less plausible and the action taking up more of each episode. I think it's time to play down the numbers a bit, wrap up a few crimes with old-fashioned police work, and focus on the stories outside the office. Charlie and Amita, Megan and Larry. Fortunately, the scenes include this line from Don in next week's continuation episode: "I don't care about your theories!" Exactly. (Don't get me wrong, the show still has its moments. In a conversation with Megan, where anyone else would say, "It sounds like you have personal experience with this," Larry (Peter MacNicol) says, "I am detecting here an authority that transcends the theoretical." You have to love Dr. Larry; it saddened me to read that MacNicol was leaving mid-way through this season.)

CSI seems to be doing a new thing where new crimes crop up near the end of each episode so you have to watch next week to see how they play out. Maybe this is a one-time thing for the season opener, but I like it. I continue to adore Without a Trace (as I have from the very start, you johnny-come-latelies!) but I'm frustrated that it's moved to Sunday where its exposure seems more limited. I hope CBS has a better reason for this than wanting all of Sunday night's shows to rhyme with each other.

How I Met Your Mother
Boston Legal
Criminal Minds
My Name Is Earl
The Office
CSI
Grey's Anatomy
NUMB3RS
Without a Trace

Premiering This Week

Heroes: NBC, Monday at 9:00
Runaway: CW, Monday at 9:00
Help Me Help You: ABC, Tuesday at 9:30
Ugly Betty: ABC, Thursday at 8:00 ("EW Pick!")
The Game: CW, Sunday at 8:30

Returning This Week

Smallville: CW, Thursday at 8:00
Everybody Hates Chris: CW, Sunday at 7:00

POLL:

Alternative Viewing

Aside from Studio 60, which was your favorite new show this week?

	The Class
	Smith
	Jericho
	Kidnapped
	Shark
	Six Degrees
	Brothers & Sisters
	Slamming my hand in a door.

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