Mon, October 2, 2006

More new shows for your viewing enjoyment. Thankfully, while I appreciated a few of this week's offerings, I'm not obsessively in love with any of them. So I won't have any reason to throw down against any of my fellow TV-nerd bloggers in a protective spat. (Not that it wasn't fun; it's just at this point I need to save my strength to start watching Survivor.)

I got a lot of positive feedback from my list of TV pitches created, Men in Trees-style, from road signs. So here are a few more entries from the Fall Season That Might Have Been.

Soft Shoulder (CBS)
Miriam McWilliams was born with an all-cartilage clavicle, and her overprotective mother shielded her from all outdoor activities. She secretly joins the powder puff football team in high school, and discovers her physical fragility is surpassed by her emotional vulnerability. With the help of a humpbacked equipment manager, she triumphs over the bitchy popular girls.

Merge (Fox)
Cutthroat attorney Ian McIan is king of the hostile takeover. When the day comes that he takes over his mother's booming notions store, he can't escape the clause that stipulates his brother must stay on as Chairman of the Board. The two butt heads over every issue, but somehow the stock price keeps soaring.

No Outlet (Sci Fi)
Starship commander Gerfleet McMandible navigates his ship too close to a black hole, and must spend eternity with his mutinous, immature crew – all cramped together inside a microscopic speck so dense no light can escape.

Deer Crossing (ABC)
The environmental lobby forces a highway project to include a grassy overpass for animals whose habitat is divided by the new road. Libby McHeartswell is the naturalist assigned to maintain the bridge and care for the nearby animals. Each week, another animal friend needs her help.

Heroes

NBC, Mondays at 9:00

With a filmic look, a half dozen locations around the world, and lots of moody lighting, Heroes certainly sets out to be a slick, serious show. Trouble is, with its first episode devoted entirely to people's potential for superhuman achievements, it's hard to get a feel for what the show will be aside from its potential to be stunning and interesting.

So far, it's mostly a lot of mystery. Only a couple of characters are using their superpowers: Claire is the cheerleader who can withstand fire and heal injuries quickly (a hotter version of Wolverine, but nowhere near as hot as Michelle Trachtenberg) and Hiro is a Japanese cubicle dweller who learns he can bend space-time and teleport. Peter thinks he can fly, but he's not sure yet, and Niki... she doesn't know what the hell is going on with her, and frankly, neither do I. (But she is a stripper, and that's worth something.) We haven't even met the Greg Grunberg character yet – which is a shame, because he's the cuddly-cutest of all!

As a concept, the show has nothing but potential. It could be really amazing and last a number of years. As a pilot, it's a fairly sloppy operation – shoveling exposition into random conversations with Mohinder Suresh, the professor from India who seems likely to become the Professor Xavier to this band of brand-X X-Men. He's picking up the genetics research of his recently-AWOL father, and he believes that there are certain incidents – including solar eclipses, apparently – that catalyze the next step in human evolution, leading to extraordinary abilities coincidentally quite similar to those we see on comic book pages. (Sounds plausible – we saw what it did in Little Shop.) We're brought up to speed on all this via a rushed conversation with a university colleague in India, followed by a bizarre monologue he spouts while driving a Manhattan taxi to make ends meet while he tracks down his dad. (It just so happens Peter is his fare at this point, so his words really hit home.) Claire's adoptive dad (another fare) appears to be part of the government investigation that's disappeared Suresh's dad and is trying to root out the subject of his research, but so far that hasn't been explained.

The show needs time to fill in these gaps and blaze its own path (hopefully in a direction not too well trod by the X-Men before it), so I'm not giving up on it for at least three more episodes. It's certainly engineered for endurance: when Ali Larter is your most expensive "get," you're really budgeting for the long haul. (And she's worth every penny, by the way!) But it can't survive on its concept alone; let's hope it has more to deliver.

Runaway

CW, Mondays at 9:00

It's a "rebuilding" year for CW, with only one new drama and one new sitcom on their slate in order to accommodate all the shows (and wrestling) that resulted from the merged lineups of and UPN the WB. (This is great news, because if they'd bought two dramas, there's every chance they'd have dropped Veronica Mars to make room.) Runaway aims to be a much more serious show than we've seen before from either network. The CW may be making a play for viewers over the age of 19 – lock up your mothers!

The show opens with a bemulleted Donnie Wahlberg hiding his Volvo station wagon by rolling it down an embankment into a lake. (In-Joke of One Alert!: It's eerily reminiscent of a Qantas air disaster.) Through jittery flashbacks, we later learn that Wahlberg is basically the lawyer equivalent of Dr. Richard Kimble: a pretty associate in his office was murdered, he's being framed for it, and now he's on the run while he tries to track down the real killer and clear his own name. The twist is, he's brought his wife and three children with him.

He and his wife help the kids rehearse their new identities and backstories and impress upon them how important it is to blend in and not draw the attention of authorities. Then, Mrs. Incognito runs a stop sign right in front of a cop. D'oh! She pretends the family are Katrina evacuees to explain their lack of documentation, and gets off with a warning (later using the same excuse to enroll her teens in school with no paperwork). This family of nobodies is generating more sympathy for Katrina victims than Spike Lee has. (Small-town America: "You mean white people were affected by the tragedy?! [sound of doors being thrown open]") Later, the eldest son runs away because he misses his girlfriend (can you run away from a runaway?). And he really does miss her: in an early scene, when the two teenaged siblings are fighting over who has to share a room with the little brother, his sister snapped that he only wanted his own room so he could "play with himself." (Right in front of everybody! Snap!) Meanwhile, the sister is immediately involved in a love triangle at her new high school – forced to shoulder the entire WB part of the show herself.

In the end, the boy returns home at the same time the U.S. Marshals storm the house following a lead they found in the Volvo. It turns out, the show pulls that old "different houses" trick from Silence of the Lambs, making it seem like the Marshals are on the front stoop, but really it's just Jason ringing the doorbell and the Marshals are disturbing some innocent lady two states over. Shame on you, Runaway! Gutless trickery! He hugs his mom and mutters that he's making his own room in the basement. And we all know what he'll be doing down there!

The show fails to set up any major tension, because the family really can't afford to leave again too quickly. All the cameras and sets are here. So they should be safe in their current lives for at least the majority of season one. Which means all the show can really do is deal with the family struggle, the teenage love triangle, and Wahlberg's attempt to crack the case wide open remotely using his Blackberry. (Seriously.) Not a lot to go on; but, give them credit for trying.

Help Me Help You

ABC, Tuesdays at 9:30

Jere Burns makes his triumphant return to group therapy, trading in the lovely Jane Carr for the even lovelier Ted Danson. (Who's apparently lovely on the inside as well.) He's joined by a handful of lesser character actors with their own foibles – all seeking redemption at the hands of Danson's charming brand of tough love.

I hadn't realized this was going to be a single-camera show, which is good news. It takes a pretty amazing show to really rise above a studio audience (and sadly, we haven't had any since Raymond) – so subtracting the laugh track is always a step in the right direction. Danson is better used here than he was in Becker, where he played another irascible doc, but a little too heavy on the abrasiveness and a little too light on the laughs. However, the show overlooks a couple of key aspects of the successful single-camera sitcom: tightly paced editing and quick comic timing. Most of the punch lines play like they would've on Chicago Sons or Union Square – a little too much breathing room and far too few surprises.

Ted Danson is very enjoyable to watch on TV. None among us can deny the genius of Cheers, and he's great on Larry David's HBO gripefest Curb Your Enthusiasm. In this show, he continues to be enjoyable. The show itself is not quite ready to come out of the oven. (I assign serious demerits for sitcoms that, in this day and age, still opt to play homosexuality for yuks. You know, the "mistaken for gay" or – in this case – "gay in denial" jokes. It's offensive, and it's extremely trite. In comedy, the former is no sweat, but the latter is a grave sin.) I'll be tuning in at least once more, but it will have to show serious improvement to make it into my sitcom stable. At this point, the standard for new inductions is "funnier than the worst episode of NewsRadio," which is a pretty high bar.

Ugly Betty

ABC, Thursdays at 8:00

Blah, blah, blah... it's what's inside that matters! A noble ideal, to be sure, but hardly one that's likely to be a strong lead-in to Grey's Anatomy. The eponymous uggo is genuine, independent, altruistic, and so far hasn't had self-destructive vengeance sex once. And ABC thought the people who root for her would have any interest watching the dregs of human scum that populate the cast of Grey's? I think she might've been better off remaining in that Friday slot – at least Men in Trees has a cute raccoon.

I've been giving America Ferrera a hard time because she also starred in Real Women Have Curves, which title sounds like the moral to every episode of Ugly Betty. But she turns out to be pretty great, and she makes Betty enjoyable and relatable – very easy to cheer for. The rest of the cast tends to play things a little over the top, which is de rigueur for a telenovela like the one that inspired Ugly Betty, but this show really isn't done in that style, so they should tone it down. (As television's most inclusive in-joke, there are a couple of quick clips from a telenovela-within-the-show, featuring Betty's exec producer Salma Hayek, which are pitch-perfect and very funny. The funniest fake Mexican TV we've seen since the Desi Awards on Arrested Development.)

The plot of the first episode feels patched together. Betty suffers a few early indignities as her boss tries to force her to quit. (He's the magazine's new editor, promoted against his will by his publishing magnate father – the same father who forced him to hire the ugly girl so he wouldn't be tempted to sleep with his secretary.) But she's devoted to her job unlike anyone else, so by and by she saves the day and wins her boss's support. Along the way, the show takes some missteps, like having her quit in frustration. The point is supposed to be her independence, grit, and determination: the working-class girl in pursuit of a dream, unable to be swayed from her path. I would have preferred if she remained defiant and her boss eventually came around, as opposed to giving up on her dream a few days in, and being lured back only after he realizes he needs her. Also, the central conflict is resolved by the end of the first episode, so future episodes will have to fall back on fairly familiar office backstabbing and power dynamics – not quite as much fun.

But, in spite of his rueful performance, I liked the fact that her boss is the victim of a similar conspiracy, at the hands of those who resent his nepotistic ascension. It's a good way for him to realize what Betty is going through, and in the end he realizes she's the only one he can trust, so it sets up a great relationship for them, going forward. The show overdoes it with the editing and the "ploompa-doomp" cartoon-style music, but it does have a pretty solid and workable core. It's not the sort of show I'd watch, but I can understand how people would enjoy it – which is much more than I can say for Grey's Anatomy.

The Game

CW, Sundays at 8:30

I'll admit it: I don't watch a lot of black sitcoms. I feel kind of bad about it, but I don't think it's entirely my fault. The entire (former) UPN lineup supports the idea that there are "black sitcoms" and "white sitcoms." I don't necessarily like it, but there it is. I was ready to become an Eve viewer, but it didn't make me laugh. (As Marina Franklin can tell you, some people fall back on the easy laugh when they're playing to an all-black crowd.) The same scenario has unfolded with many of UPN's offerings during each year's Annual TiVo Gauntlet of New Fall Programming.

So I was really excited when the preview clips for The Game were pretty funny, and I'm pleased to report that the pilot lives up to the same standard. The show focuses on the wives and girlfriends of football players for the fictitious San Diego Sabers. In the pilot, they welcome Melanie, the girlfriend of rookie Derwin. They indoctrinate her into their customs, including spying on their husbands during away games. Their banter is fresh and funny, and the little moments of the clandestine hotel room check are entertaining (make sure the pretty soaps are untouched, sweep the bed with a CSI-style blacklight, etc.). Tia Mowry (Sister, Sister) and Pooch Hall have adorable chemistry as Melanie and Derwin, and the other wives are a nice mix of sassy and sincere. Stealing the show is Wendy Raquel Robinson as Tasha, the mother/manager of the team's quarterback, Malik. She's a protective mom and a cutthroat manager, facing off with unscrupulous agents who want to exploit her son and shutting them down. She plays "attitude" hilariously, and she's definitely the highlight of the show.

The show's setup is a tad conventional by today's standards. It's pedestrian when compared with something like The Office, but it delivers decent laughs and funny characters. I'm particularly pleased by its integrated cast. A couple of the wives are white, and one of them is even married to a black player, which is both progressive and a nice source of future comedy conflict. ("Okay, 'white shows,'" the show seems to say, "we'll meet you halfway. Your move.") The key is: interesting subject matter and fun characters. That's how you overcome the limitations of the studio-audience sitcom, and The Game gives it as good a try as I've seen in recent years.

Also, big points for a quick and creative title sequence – getting the point across without any fluff – and for a smash cut with that all-too-familiar "needle scratched across record" sound, which turns out to be the sound of the zipper on Melanie's carry-on bag as she decides last-minute to travel to the Miami game in case Derwin's sexy and aggressive "image consultant" should try to move on her man. Well played.

Returning Shows

Due to conflicts with NBC's must-see sitcoms and Survivor (the things I do for you people...) I haven't been able to watch Smallville for years. But good for it for existing, and for (almost) spinning off an Aquaman show. I'll catch up on DVD someday, right after Deadwood, House, Rescue Me, The Wire, and Huff. In the meantime, Lana, as Omar G says: you BROKE UP! Go away!

Smallville
Everybody Hates Chris

Premiering This Week

It's bizarro-week in this year's fall premiere season. Friday Night Lights on Tuesday and The Nine at ten. (Har!)

Friday Night Lights: NBC, Tuesday at 8:00
The Nine: ABC, Wednesday at 10:00

Returning This Week

Veronica Mars: CW, Tuesday at 9:00
Lost: ABC, Wednesday at 9:00

POLL:

Hero Worship

Which was your favorite new show this week?

	Heroes
	Runaway
	Help Me Help You
	Ugly Betty
	The Game

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