Tue, October 9, 2007

A lot of my frustration with this year's less successful shows is that they squander a fascinating premise, or an opportunity to explore something interesting in their execution. In this, most of this year's shows could learn from the example set by Pushing Daisies.

Aliens in America

CW, Mondays at 8:30

I've noticed this one on a couple of critics' pick lists, and I honestly can't understand it. It's not the worst sitcom in history (Will & Grace), but it is easily in this year's bottom two. The comedy rhythm is awkward and stilted, with wide gulfs of distracting silence. Usually the one reason to go single-camera is to take advantage of the extra editing opportunities and quicken the pace, but not here. It's hard to imagine whether a laugh track would improve the show (by filling the void) or make it even more unpalatable (listening to a whole audience laughing at the Muslim kid might make one squirm). There's nothing special about the show at all, so I can't figure out why people are so ready to embrace it.

I hope it isn't getting points for being "edgy" by daring to examine middle American xenophobia with its story of a Pakistani exchange student who's confronted with ignorance and fear when he enters a suburban Wisconsin high school. (I'm not sure who should be more offended by this show, Muslims or Wisconsinites.) There should be no celebration merely because a show dances with taboo subjects. "Daring to go there" is not exceptional; what you do there must make it worth the trip. If Raja were to impart new lessons about the Muslim culture to the show's host family (and, through them, the audience) it might be interesting and even relevant. Certainly all of us are guilty of some ignorance on this subject. In this episode Justin's dad is impressed at Raja's work ethic, but that's more of a joke on how strict other faiths seem than any sort of real enlightenment.

A few jokes land, poking fun at the insanity of high school life, but generally it's groaners like a teacher who refers to his faith as "Muslimism" and classmates who think he was part of 9/11. The ignorance is too ham-fisted to even be satire, and none of the performers has the chops to pull it off in a funny, relatable, human way like Michael Scott on The Office. At the end of the episode, it's revealed that Justin's hot sister is dating a black guy, which is intended to be another hilarious hurdle for the family's ignorance to overcome. Instead the scene made my skin crawl. Somehow Sarah Silverman is able to do racist material and have it come off clearly as a spoof of some people's ignorance – but every time this show tries to spoof people's ignorance, it comes off racist. Aliens in America may aspire to be All in the Family, but it comes much closer to The War at Home.

Cavemen

ABC, Tuesdays at 8:00

This is like giving the Aflac duck a Saturday morning cartoon series, or making a full-length movie with the Domino's Noid. Does someone have research somewhere suggesting these caveman characters were beloved in the GEICO ads that spawned them? Beloved enough that anyone would sit still to watch them on screen for more than 30 seconds at a time?

It's nearly impossible to figure out the point of this show. The "gag" of the ads is that cavemen are the butt of culturally insensitive jokes disparaging their intelligence, but early audiences balked at dumb cavemen characters, feeling they mocked real-life minorities (which speaks to the viewers' prejudice if you ask me – who says a dumb guy is necessarily a black guy, unless you're someone who automatically thinks of all black guys as dumb?). So now they work at IKEA and write graduate dissertations, but the original character they're based on is completely lost. What remains is an utterly toothless "social commentary" about an undecipherable social situation. We're presented with no glimpse of caveman culture – perhaps the only clash between us and them is the hirsutism? "Yabba Dabba Doo" is considered a slur, but that doesn't make a lot of sense because The Flintstones was set thousands of years ago. These cavemen aren't the unfrozen type – the Zelig-style opening montage says they've been around all along. Fred Flintstone would be their ancient ancestor (or ours, or more likely our shared ancestor), not a representation of their culture today. The cavemen "stick to their own kind" and frown on dating Homo sapiens. (They even have an awful catchphrase for this, one I won't reprint here because you've already read it in every single review of this show.) Why is unclear – the inability to produce viable offspring would seem like a bonus for casual hook-ups. I guess the point is that prejudice follows no logic.

Again, there's an interesting concept buried inside this premise. The show presents a reality in which our species is not the only one on the planet with those qualities we typically regard as "human": sentience, language, coordination of complex tasks, and awareness of our own mortality. Now, that's fascinating. Although we should know better, a lot of us think of humankind as the destined endpoint of evolution. Imagine a separate species walking among us, competing over the same resources to make it to the next evolutionary step. Who will win? How does it affect the day-to-day interaction? We don't think about evolutionary competition because our nearest competitors are kept in zoos or hunted to extinction. But what if they were our neighbors? We're too equally matched to fight them off physically; would we resort to political means of asserting our dominance? Man, I'm really starting to get excited about the alternate universe where Cavemen is an intriguing hour-long series about these issues!

In this universe, it's not. It's been retooled into irrelevance, and the jokes and characters are god-awful. I'm actually kind of surprised. Considering how terrible I was expecting this show to be, I figured it had no choice but to be at least a little better. It's worse.

Carpoolers

ABC, Tuesdays at 8:30

As I may have mentioned, this series comes from Kids in the Hall troupe member Bruce McCullough. Like his work on that show (and since), Carpoolers has an unbalanced, goofy charm – as well as a slightly unmoored capacity. McCullough's characteristically skewed perspective results in a hit-or-miss style, which makes it hard to predict what future episodes will be like. The show delivers more than a few strong laughs – particularly the kind of laughs I like: bizarre surprise moments that spring from the center of interesting, well defined characters. One character's son is named Marmaduke, for crying out loud. (Maybe this is his nickname, but even if so...) Other main characters are named Gracen, Laird, Aubrey (male), and Joannifer (pronounced like Joanne + Jennifer, not Joan + Jennifer). Again, no explanation is given. For some reason, I find this delectable.

McCullough created the show to explore the way men communicate and attempt to make sense of their lives. As such, there's a lot of potential: not only do these characters' interactions provide plenty of fodder, but the show's humor spans a broad range of comedy styles – physical gags, character beats, goofy non-sequiturs, throwaway visual jokes – so there's always a convenient place to hide a message.

In its first episode, Carpoolers displays its potential more often than its purpose. The show has some good laughs and plenty of clever, entertaining moments, but the whole is less riotous than its parts would lead you to expect. It's hard to shake the feeling that it spends the entire half hour building to something it never quite achieves. This may be cause for concern, or it may simply be that the show's style and characters will take a few episodes to be fully set up. The rhythm is quick and breezy, and the cast certainly seems up to the task. We'll have to wait and see.

Pushing Daisies

ABC, Wednesdays at 8:00

I predicted that this show might polarize people, and even though it doesn't seem to have polarized critics at all, I still predict it will have a love-it-or-hate-it effect on my readership. Certainly the group with whom I watched the pilot split pretty evenly among the two camps. If you didn't fall head over heels for Wonderfalls the way I did, you may want to regard this review with a grain of salt. (And by the way, critics, where was all this effusive praise when Wonderfalls was on?)

Pushing Daisies tells the story of Ned, who as a young boy learned his touch had the power to revive the dead. But only once, and only for 60 seconds. If he leaves them re-animated for longer than a minute, someone else will die in their stead, restoring karmic balance. And if he touches them a second time, they're dead for good. He discovers all this in a sweetly morbid scene which results in the death of his mother and his best-friend neighbor's father in the same afternoon. As a grown-up, he's a pie maker, re-animating fruity ingredients (restoring ripeness to them) for maximum flavor. On the side, he helps a local detective solve murders by bringing victims to life, inquiring about the circumstances of their demise, and dispatching them again before the minute is up.

It's this side job which causes him to re-encounter Chuck, the childhood sweetheart and neighbor whom he last saw on the day of their parents' joint funerals, when they exchanged their first kiss. She was murdered on a cruise ship, and when he sees her again he can't bear to let her go once her 60 seconds elapse. Here begins our story.

Pushing Daisies is an enchantingly romantic, vividly colored, and highly stylized world. The story is by necessity a fantasy, and the storytelling style embraces the fantastic in every way. Even the dialogue is a little too cute to be authentic but not so much as to be annoying. Lee Pace works well as Ned – powerful but painfully reserved, moral but charmingly unconfident. The ultimate beta male. And, as Chuck, Anna Friel is spellbinding. She bursts onto the screen with a head-cocked curiosity and a spunky enthusiasm that grabs Ned by the hand (not literally; that'd be the end of her) and propels him out of the bubble of anxiety he's lived in since he discovered his power. Watching her, I can't help being reminded of Caroline Dhavernas from Wonderfalls. They share an unshakable amusement at the insanity of their fantasy worlds. But gone is the sarcastic ennui of Dhavernas's Jaye, replaced by an insatiable lust for adventure. Chuck and Ned are smitten with each other, but they can never touch again or else she's toast. So the show invents ways for them to simulate kissing or holding hands, and each such moment is an explosion of tender romance.

If all this sounds too gooey for you, believe me, it is. If business names like the Boutique Travel Travel Boutique cause your eyes to roll rather than twinkle, this isn't the show for you. If you're irked by kooky characters like Chuck's adoptive aunts Vivian and Lily, the retired synchronized swimming team (the Darling Mermaid Darlings) now shuttered reclusively in their home filled with stuffed birds, Lily's right eye lost to a freak incident with a kitty litter box, then by all means find another way to spend your Wednesday evenings. But if you're impressed by a show that can wrap all those eccentricities together into a satisfying conclusion to the week's mystery – one that couldn't have happened without Lily's diving experience or monocular world view – then please join us. It's impossible to guess what will happen next, but you can bet it will be offbeat, charming fun. And narrated with down-to-the-second precision.

Life Is Wild

CW, Sundays at 8:00

As part of my research to provide the pre-ratings on the downloadable ATGoNFP guides, I watched preview clips of this show on the network's web site. (Same with all the new shows, except for Women's Murder Club, which offered very limited clips: basically just a muzzle flash and a shot of Angie Harmon's eyes.) This means I watched the veterinarian dad move his patchwork step-family to Africa to work at a game lodge, and watched the asshole stepson get all in the face of Brett Cullen (The West Wing, Friday Night Lights) as the stepdad. Then Cullen and the actress playing his wife were replaced by D.W. Moffett and some new lady, who reshot the scene. So it airs in the show, identical to the scene I watched, but half the people are different. The result is eerie like some kind of Manchurian Candidate mind control, but I admit it always makes me giggle.

Presumably the crew didn't travel all the way back to Africa to film the replacement scenes – a presumption supported by the changing background in some scenes. Also, sometimes the film stock changes in mid-sentence, so people go from a warm, soft look to a more contrasty, hard-edged appearance in a split second.

I'm not trying to give Life Is Wild a hard time. Things change. Sometimes you go through a rigorous casting process, then fly all the way to Africa and film a bunch of scenes, then sell them to a network who puts them on their web site and everything, and you still find out you fucked the whole thing up and have to half start over. These are the things that make the Annual TiVo Gauntlet of New Fall Programming so much fun. I would miss this stuff if I only watched shows I thought I had a better-than-zero chance of enjoying. But despite all this inconsequential backstage drama, the show itself is perfectly fine. It's a little heavy on the standard teen-drama tropes. The burnout kid with the skateboard (despite the fact that the African bush is all dirt paths); the earnest stepdad who just wants the family to come together; the high-powered lawyer (whom in this case is actually referred to by another character as a "high-powered lawyer" – out loud!); the kids who miss their dead mom. However, I think the story will hold the interest of its target demographic, teenaged girls. So, of course it isn't designed to appeal to me – although I still might watch it if it meant hanging out with teenaged girls.

Despite everything else, the show has Leah Pipes in its corner. Pipes, 19, plays Katie, the narrator of the show and the center of the family. It's her dad who's moving the family to the lodge owned by his late wife's father. She has to look out for him, as well as her younger sister and brother, while trying to get along with her burnout stepbrother and new stepmom, reconnecting with her grandfather, and mourning her mom. To date, Pipes has mainly bounced around doing guest roles on TV, but I predict big things for her. She proficiently assimilates Katie's sweet sarcasm, stiff upper lip, and hidden vulnerability. She plays well with Moffett, whom I've always adored. She generally exudes the kind of fresh-faced charm and poise that I think will be very popular in post-Lohan teen Hollywood. Alone, she's no reason to watch the show. But keep an eye on her.

I'll TiVo Another Episode Of...

Carpoolers, which hasn't delivered as many big laughs as I hoped for, but honestly seems to be on its way there. The Bruce McCullough pedigree earns it at least three episodes before I make a final decision. And Pushing Daisies, which may become my favorite new show of the season (against stiff competition from Life). Apparently its ratings and critical reception are solid, so I have hope that my love affair with it will be a lasting one.

Returning Shows

30 Rock continues to fit 60 minutes of comedy into a half-hour time slot, often seeming less like a show and more like an illustrative exhibit in a comedy encyclopedia. There's a very good chance that this is the future of the sitcom. It takes the best of The Office and Arrested Development, but smoothes those rough edges which seem to turn off some audiences despite how much I personally happen to love them. I'm hopeful that NBC's statements of support for the show will be delivered upon – given enough time, America might discover what it's been missing. If not, it certainly won't be due to any shortcomings on the part of 30 Rock. As Mom astutely put it, the Seinfeld guest appearance was great, but the best part about it was that Jerry was still outshone by Alec Baldwin and Tina Fey. If only The Simpsons had ever been so successful at incorporating stunt casting into strong stories with relevance to the show's existing characters.

Premiering This Week

Women's Murder Club: ABC, Friday at 9:00

Returning This Week

Nothing I watch. (This means I have time to catch up on roughly 70 hours of second and third episodes that aired while I was out of town.)

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