Mon, September 11, 2006
Standoffish
I can only imagine the thrill of having a show idea of mine picked up by a major network. But, what would you do if that network were Fox? You know that they're only buying shows to use as filler between episodes of American Idol. Do you politely decline, and risk squandering your showbiz dreams? Do you give it your all and hope to have a hit show anyway? Or do you embezzle half the production design budget, farm out the editing to remote aboriginal tribes, and turn in a half-assed product, knowing that nobody will care?
If you guessed answer C, you can have a job right now on the staff of one of these hit shows.
Standoff
(Fox, 9:00 Tuesdays)
It's hard to say much for a show that peaks in its first four minutes with a Tom Wopat cameo. Ron Livingston (whose cheek fat wants to know if you're going to finish that) talks Luke Duke out of shooting his kids, and it's all downhill from there.
In case you're not familiar, the concept of Standoff is that Ron and his special lady are partners in the hostage negotiation unit, and also having a secret ('til now) affair. Fox's promotional tag line for the show makes a very convincing case that the show is a put-on: "There's no crisis situation they can't handle ... unless it involves each other." Must be a joke, right? In fact, every part of the show would play a lot better if they made it a Lookwell-style spoof of shows like this. It would make the show's logo – in which silhouettes of the two main characters stand back-to-back in the 'ff', with spunky elan – funny instead of very sad. And it would really make sense out of how poorly the female character is written. In the opening standoff (you saw it in the promos), Livingston reveals that he's sleeping with her, in violation of department protocol. This places their livelihoods in jeopardy, exposes them to ridicule from their colleagues, workplace awkwardness – but no, she's all huffy because he mentioned it to Wopat in the context of empathizing with his stress. If Livingston is stressed by the relationship and hasn't brought it up before, she thinks he's not invested enough in the kind of communication that will make for a long term partership. Seriously! With a straight face! In S.W.A.T. garb!
Which is the biggest gaffe in the show: she's such a miserable, irritating harpy that a workplace affair just can't be the center of the show. It strains plausibility that anyone would voluntarily talk to her, much less fuck her.
But his character is just as badly conceived. He's cool if the guys want to bust his balls about it later at the station, but if someone casts aspersions on his lady, it's time to throw down. After another burly S.W.A.T.-type guy holds him back from cussin' and brawlin', someone actually holds up a training rifle full of paintballs and says, "Let's settle this in the kill house." Because that's what real guys do. Have a disagreement about what's an inappropriate comment about a relationship partner? Don't trade blows; grab a helmet and paintball gun and run through a simulated hostage environment. Whoever gets the least paint on his clothes was right about the crass remark!
The rest of the episode focuses on a teenager who straps a bomb to his chest and walks into a Starbucks, threatening to vaporize it in the name of Allah. (Ah, Arabs – universally despicable evil, and if you whine about the media scapegoating them as bad guys, you're a traitor. Al Qaeda is a bigger gift to today's Hollywood than the soviets were to the entire James Bond series right up to Timothy Dalton.) There's only one way to escalate the intensity of a hostage negotiation once you've already taken the step from phone up to megaphone: the negotiator must offer herself as a trade for the hostages. Expect this to happen at least every other episode, as it does here. Problem is: we know she lives. If she doesn't, who's going to nag Livingston to pick up his socks off the carpet? All that paintball was for nothing! So she's never in credible peril, which means the last act of the show is neither interesting nor suspenseful. To fix this, they'll need to raise the stakes by making the audience care a lot about the hostage-taker each week, which should be tough to pull off since you don't have a lot of time to get to know them when you take out the time for commercials and the obligatory relationship squabbling and meaty-faced smooching.
Despite all this, the show is actually a lot better than the commercials made it look. They were that awful. (PS: Gina Torres, no complaints.)
'Til Death
(Fox, 8:00 Thursdays)
Another weak, "premise-based" sitcom, another deafening laugh track, and more excruciating comic timing that approximates the delivery of high school theatre. Brad Garrett proves that you can actually be pretty decent in a performance that is entirely phoned in. He and Joely Fisher play Eddie and Joy, whose marriage has become routine, so they bristle at the introduction of their bubbly, newlywed neighbors. The neighbors – who will forever be saddled with the last name "Woodcock," just so the writers could throw in one cheap joke – are played by Eddie Kaye Thomas doing an impersonation of Harland Williams, and Kat Foster doing an impersonation of someone who should never be on television. If you've ever seen a hacky stand-up comic do ten minutes on marriage, you know the jokes in this type of show write themselves, and not in a good way.
Many scenes are quick – three lines or fewer – just to bridge between one easy setup and the next. It's pretty easy to fill out a scene that starts with the new husband walking right into a fight over a proposed pool table on their second day in the new house. Here's a fun game to play with sitcoms like this: try to imagine what the characters were doing two seconds before the start of any scene. In this case, the only reasonable guess would be: standing frozen in place like the extras in The Truman Show.
Additionally, Fox has evidently decided that the key to a successful sitcom is web-based verisimilitude. The Woodcock character, a vice principal, has set up mywoodcock.com, which Fox has made into a semi-actual site. (Half an hour later, the Lex Medlin character on Happy Hour will blurt out tshirtsahoy.com. Apparently, Murdoch's newfound Internet obsession runs deep.) Focus on writing characters we don't hate, then worry about add-ons like giving each his own blog.
Happy Hour
(Fox, 8:30 Thursdays)
This is a difficult one, because I don't like the show much, but I do respect what it represents. If you're going to continue to do laugh-track sitcoms, you should be doing them in this style – a handful of archetypical characters interacting humorously without any hackneyed theme to get in the way. (e.g., "Steven Weber is cursed!" or "the whole show is a flashback!") Happy Hour pulls this off, but it does it in the Fox style, which means it's a slapdash affair. There are some decent laughs – and mercifully few outright groans – but the episode feels patched together. There are many little "scenelets" of 20-40 seconds which could be arranged in any order without affecting the story – unconnected moments hastily constructed to serve as vessels for a single one-liner. The characters are fairly funny, if a little blah. (Beth Lacke is great as the "gal pal" and her stilted, midwestern delivery make her character even funnier.) The secondary characters (ex-roommate, ex-girlfriend, ex-roommate's girlfriend) are more dynamic and interesting because they have the liberty of contradicting themselves; the core threesome are too busy establishing their personalities.
I'm on the record proclaiming the death of the laugh-track sitcom (puzzling, since I laugh at those who think 2D "hand drawn" animation is dying). Shows like Happy Hour demonstrate exactly why I think the format is headed for extinction: too much of a show's structure – from set design to the rhythm of the performances – is dictated by the live audience. It's getting harder and harder to fit in story and character development and still have time for enough comedy to stay fresh and entertaining. Shows have to decide what to cut. Trim the comedy and your show fails because it's not funny; go the other way and all the characters become flat and uninteresting: their sarcastic barbs could be interchanged from character to character or episode to episode. You don't build the sort of characters an audience can identify with, and you lose those character-based jokes that are the heart of real comedy. In today's post-ironic mediascape, it's almost impossible to create a sitcom where the characters love each other. People want to see snarky and mean – characters laughing at each other's expense. You're not going to get an audience to cozy up to a cast of characters the way we did with the Cosbys and the Cheers gang. So you end up with sitcom episodes that may make you chuckle, but the laughs are shallow and unfulfilling. (Or, you get smart and hire Phil Rosenthal.)
Happy Hour doesn't necessarily do anything wrong – it just fails to innovate in a situation where the deck has been stacked against it. It's hard to imagine the show lasting very long if it doesn't get any funnier, but I'd have said that about Yes, Dear and it's now in syndication.
I detest shit like Celebrity Duets more than I can possibly put into words, but I must admit it's kind of nice to have an at-a-glance celebrity career barometer right at your fingertips. Curious whether Lea Thompson has spiraled into the obscurity and ignominy she deserved for having signed onto Caroline in the City? There she is, accepting money for an appearance on Celebrity Duets! That settles that.
Returning Shows
Cultural references on The Simpsons used to take the form of subtle spoofs of moments or ideas from movies or TV shows. Having the Sopranos permeate an episode all the way from guest appearances to the marketing is just further proof of how far they've fallen. Even further proof, the list of guest voices the producers are proudest of this season, as touted to "Entertainment Weekly": Tom Wolfe, Gore Vidal, Michael Chabon, Jonathan Franzen, Stephen Sondheim, Dr. Phil, Sir Mix-a-Lot, Richard Lewis, and Fran Drescher. That's two actors (if we're generous) out of a list of nine. Wrong, wrong, wrong. As Otto says in this week's episode, "This is about 90% less funny than you think it is."
Yet I continue watching American Dad – evidence that I'm a lot less demanding of shows that never broke my heart by leading me to expect excellence in the first place. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that its exhumed cousin, Family Guy, continues to be unflinchingly awesome. Back when Family Guy was dead, American Dad was cloned from its DNA, and even when the clone is a freakishly mangled version of the original, your love for the original compels you to humor the copy. Sure, you make it sleep in the barn, but you still watch its awkward, self-choreographed dance routine (complete with ill-fitting Lovey Howell costume) and give it an encouraging pat on the head.
The Simpsons
American Dad
Family Guy
Premiering This Week
I've updated the Premiere Guide PDFs to reflect a few minor changes by ABC. The first of which is moving Men in Trees up a week, to debut this Friday, and offering an early peek at its pilot episode in a special time slot Tuesday night.
Men in Trees: ABC, Tuesday at 10:00 
Men in Trees: ABC, Friday at 8:00, followed by its second episode in the show's regular time slot at 9:00
Returning This Week
Survivor: Cook Islands: CBS, Thursday at 8:00 
The Amazing Race: CBS, Sunday at 8:00
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Brandon — Mon, 9/11/06 4:49pm
Yeah, the debut of The Simpsons made it clear that nothing has changed. Watching the show just feels like marking time now. There's really no reason for me to keep watching. Perhaps I need an intervention.
It's not just that the cultural references aren't subtle anymore; it's also that they're often tin-eared and bizarre, as though written by people who only have second or third-hand familiarity with the actual item they're referencing.
As I've said before, the last few seasons of The Simpsons would make an interesting study, as the comedy isn't so much bad as it is just strangely off the mark. It's like the writers are the offspring of the old Steve Martin stand-up bit about teaching a baby the English language all wrong, so that when he goes to school and needs to ask to go to the bathroom he says "May I mambo dogface to the banana patch?"
Family Guy though, you got no complaints there. Great way to kick off the season.
Joe Mulder — Mon, 9/11/06 6:25pm
(it should be noted that Gore Vidal's acting resume for the last 15 years, while sparse, probably rivals Fran Drescher's and Richard Lewis's)
I pretty much agree about "The Simpsons," although I'll never lose hope. I've stopped watching (except for the odd episode, like last night's premiere), but I'll never lose hope. If "Saturday Night Live" can come back – and the Julia Louis-Dreyfuss and Kevin Spacey episodes last year suggest that it's a possibility – then anything's possible.
Bee Boy — Mon, 9/11/06 10:00pm
"Girls, Lisa. Boys kiss girls."