Mon, October 15, 2007
Not Without My Slaughter
I read in EW that networks are pleading with people to take this fall's overnight ratings numbers with a grain of salt, because it takes time to factor in those viewers who "time shift" programming with TiVo and other DVRs. Pleading with whom, I'm not sure. I always thought it was the networks themselves that were overly reliant on Nielsen numbers when deciding which shows to back. Not that I am complaining. Delaying ratings feedback was one of my ideas to save television. (Another idea was televising the skeletal frame of Kim Raver unclothed, so I'm not saying these ideas were all winners.)
At any rate, perhaps this explains why we're so far into the new season and no cancellations have yet been announced. Or, like everything else, maybe that looming strike is to blame.
Women's Murder Club
ABC, Fridays at 9:00
There's nothing glaringly wrong with this show, based on a series of books by James Patterson. In fact, the only negative thing you can say about it is that it shares with Patterson's books a certain unchallenging quality. Most of what's on network TV these days could be described the same way, so I'm not going to give Women's Murder Club a hard time over just that. It's not much different from any other crime procedural you could watch, except that it's based around four women. As a result, there's a little more relationship gossip than you usually get, and in one scene the gals evaluate the state of a murder victim's bikini wax as a way of gauging her relationship status at the time of her death. Also, the detective's ex-husband has just become her new boss, so there's a twinge of that McSteamy vibe you get on shows like Grey's Anatomy.
The head of the ensemble is Angie Harmon, who's probably best known for spending a few years on Law & Order and marrying former footballer Jason Sehorn. I like her a lot; for me, she's still riding on goodwill from C-16, which was a sort of precursor to Alias. I ate it up for its short run on ABC ten years ago, after which D.B. Sweeney was sadly never heard from again. Harmon does a fine job portraying Detective Lindsay Boxer as devoted, overworked, and distracted. She's joined by Paula Newsome as an ME, the scary-looking Laura Harris as a prosecutor, and Aubrey Dollar as the club's newest member, a journalist. Dollar comes from soaps and resembles the TV version of New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis, with her expressive lips and large, wide set eyes.
Dollar plays a reporter at the San Francisco Register, the same fictional paper Dan Vassar writes for on Journeyman. I love this sort of thing – this commingling of fictional universes – the way Hiro and Ando from Heroes end up at the Montecito casino from Las Vegas, which at one point hosted a conference for Dunder Mifflin employees. Or, when Chuck from Chuck starts spouting the government secrets stored in his brain, he mutters something about Oceanic Flight 815 from Lost. I wish shows would do more of this – in fact, I would really like to see them all share the same web search engine. Veronica Mars, Moonlight, and Dexter are among the many shows that cook up phony Google-like interfaces for their characters to use. On Journeyman, a web-enabled iPhone takes the place of Ziggy from Quantum Leap, as Dan consults the fake "Fynder Spyder" web search to check his progress whenever he zaps back to the present. I suppose it's a matter of control: if your show depicts someone Googling a certain search term, you'd feel bad if someone later Google bombed that term to direct it to something inappropriate. Still it would be nice if the shows could all agree on one fictional Google service, the way they all use 555 as a fake phone exchange. Fynder Spyder in particular is atrocious. But I'm way off the topic now.
Back in the vicinity of discussing Women's Murder Club, the banter between the club members is a little overly crafted. Watching Harris quip that she loves Harmon "like an annoyingly pushy, emotionally stunted sister," I found myself longing for the unrehearsed stammer of Emily Deschanel from Bones. (Admittedly, for a worshipper of Pushing Daisies this is an odd nit to pick, but Women's Murder Club lacks that show's element of fairy tale fantasy.) The resolution of this week's mystery was a bit quick and tidy, as though they spent too much time with various twists and turns and had to wrap it up fast at the end. But pilot episodes are always tight on time. I'll say that they have some beautiful establishing shots of San Francisco. Better by far than Journeyman or Bionic Woman (which has so far declined to reveal its fictional newspaper – I'm rooting for some variant of Picayune).
I doubt Women's Murder Club will make anyone's top ten list this year, but if you're bored with the current crime shows and looking for mysteries that are easy to follow while you're doing something else on a Friday night, you could do a lot worse than this show.
I'll TiVo Another Episode Of...
Probably not this. But in other "I'll TiVo Another Episode" news, I'm sad to report that Reaper, one of the strongest pilots this year, is already on its last breath. Episodes 2 and 3 were powerfully disappointing, and I'm only recording episode 4 because the pilot was so damn enjoyable. At the end of the first episode, Sam was almost embracing his new role as Satan's bounty hunter, feeling it would be an opportunity to be successful at something for the first time in his life. Since, he's whined and complained each week, and the devil has been forced to drag him kicking and screaming into battle. It gets old surprisingly fast. If Sam's attitude doesn't turn around this week, I'll be done with him.
I'm letting go of Journeyman, as I probably should have weeks ago. Too much melodrama around his weekly projects, not enough focus on the time travel. But keep your eyes on Gretchen Egolf – her performance as Dan's wife is natural, understated, and positively riveting. Expect good things from her in the future. (The one place Dan can never go – and Journeyman likely won't either, ha ha.) Dirty Sexy Money gets one more week; it's dangling by one of Natalie Zea's lustrous lashes.
In better news, Chuck and Pushing Daisies have definitely lived up to their early episodes, and are cruising toward Season Pass status. And I finally completed the Dexter DVD set, which allowed me to dive into season two, already in progress on Showtime. Dexter tested my patience like Sam from Reaper for a couple of episodes there, but he seems to be back on his game now, so I'm eagerly anticipating each week's new episode.
Premiering This Week
Samantha Who?: ABC, Monday at 9:30 
Viva Laughlin: CBS, Thursday at 10:00 
Viva Laughlin: CBS, Sunday at 8:00 – regular time slot
Returning This Week
Nothing for me. In fact, I don't think there are any more season premieres except Scrubs, which returns once The Office lamentably returns to a half-hour show.
Entirely Random Excursus Re: C-16
When I look at that one hilarious photo of Jason Bateman in The Kingdom, it makes me think of D.B. Sweeney on C-16. If C-16 were casting today, Bateman would surely be on the short list for the Sweeney role, because he was sort of the "dashing cut-up" of the team. Just now, I realized that if you were to make a 1997 TV show of the team from The Kingdom, it would be pretty much exactly the ensemble from C-16. Angie Harmon is easily the poor man's Jennifer Garner. If Eric Roberts isn't the first guy in line to play a Chris Cooper type on TV today, he certainly would've been a decade ago. I don't know a lot about Morris Chestnut, but he seems like a good fit for Token Black Guy Who Costs Less Than Jamie Foxx. Perhaps Peter Berg and I were both watching the same show back in '97. (Clearly no one else was.)
© onebee · all rights reserved
Brandon — Mon, 10/15/07 11:05am
When I read this, I was like "No, that can't be true." But a trip to IMDB shut me up. Goosed? Superfire? Heatstroke? These are movies? Did he lose a bet??
I'm eager to get back to the half-hours. I'll admit there's some nice things they're able to do with the background characters in the hour-longs, but there's still too many dead spots, and that feels wrong for a show that's normally written so tightly, with a comedy-per-square-inch ratio that's second only to 30 Rock.
Bee Boy — Mon, 10/15/07 4:24pm
You know we disagree on this. There are ways you're absolutely correct, but I'm sorry, I'll always embrace the maximum number of minutes of The Office I can get. Especially if the trade-off is 10-15 minutes of less-than-stellar Office vs. 22 minutes of Scrubs.
Joe Mulder — Mon, 10/15/07 6:59pm
Just thought I'd drop by to say that I couldn't agree with you more about REAPER. I barely finished the second episode, and didn't bother to watch #3 before taking it off my Season Pass list.
[shouldn't they explain why the Devil doesn't do the bounty-hunting himself? And, once that's out of the way, why on earth would the Devil, if he wants it done so bad, be so damned (har!) inscrutable all the time? Why not just say, "the guy's here; capture him exactly like this." You can't really buy into the world of a show when it doesn't make any sort of sense]
As far as the 2007-2008 season goes, looks like it's CHUCK and LIFE for me (your comparison of PUSHING DAISIES to WONDERFALLS having warned me off of the former).
Joe Mulder — Mon, 10/15/07 7:00pm
Oh, and also: "Werewolf Bar Mitzvah"... funniest thing in history? Or just this millennium?
Brandon — Tue, 10/16/07 12:09am
Yeah, but that trade-off is always going to be for a lesser show, unless NBC suddenly goes to an all 30 Rock/Office Thursday night. The real trade-off is The Office vs. The Office, quality vs. quantity. It's a large amount of Pizza by Alfredo vs. a smaller amount of Alfredo's Pizza Cafe. I, like the majority of the Dunder-Mifflin Scranton employees, would rather have a smaller amount of Alfredo's Pizza Cafe.
You're absolutely right about the 10-15 minutes though, because I've never had a problem with any of the super-sized episodes.
Bee Boy — Tue, 10/16/07 12:23am
I'll take it!
(As to why I'm so personally invested in the TV preferences of my power readers, that's a matter for another time. And probably extensive therapy.)
Brandon, your pizza analogy implies that it's one or the other. I think an hour-long Office episode is a great half-hour Office episode with at least 10 minutes of additional great Office, plus maybe another 10 minutes of not-their-best-stuff but nothing gag inducing. (So, five slices of Alfredo's Pizza and – on a bad night – two or three from Pizza by Alfredo.)
You're not saying that just making an Office episode 30 minutes longer automatically makes the entire episode less good, are you? I don't think you are – but if so, I respectfully disagree.
Brandon — Tue, 10/16/07 1:08am
No, not automatically, or inherently. But if an hour-long Office has 10 not-so-great minutes, I do consider that be an inferior episode to a spotless half-hour one.
The pizza analogy doesn't have to imply that it's one or the other; it's not that Pizza by Alfredo will automatically be worse than Alfredo's Pizza Cafe, it's just that in the experience of its customers, it usually is. I suppose a better analogy would be comparing two pizzas from the same place, with one having extra cheese. (And don't even try to tell me that extra cheese is inherently better – there is absolutely such a thing as too much cheese on a pizza! I will not argue this! I'm yelling about hypothetical pizza!)
(By the way, during the course of digging up those pizza place names, I learned that Alfredo's Pizza Cafe is a real place in Scranton; they've got to be pretty pleased with the endorsement.)
Bee Boy — Tue, 10/16/07 9:16am
Hm, yeah. My enjoyment of the 30-40 good minutes is untarnished by the other minutes. I always order "light sauce" and "extra cheese." (But I'd never order the "cheese baked into the crust" kind, so I suppose there is a hypothetical point at which we agree.)
"kotc" — Tue, 10/16/07 10:32pm
Chuck & Daisies for me... I was gaining some interest in the Bionic Woman until she invoked the "H" word. I couldn't change the channel quick enough. However, you did give me a "bee"ware on that one. I'll pay more attention next time.
Bee Boy — Wed, 10/17/07 9:09am
Oooh, you are an enigma! So attached to the dark side that you'll snap at the mere mention of Halliburton, yet dear enough that you can sit through Pushing Daisies. I'm intrigued, mystified, and depressed. Someday we'll be married.
An idea for Reaper: maybe the devil can't control when he pops in and out of Sam's life. Or maybe our Earth oxygen burns his lungs like the sulfurous stench of hell would burn ours. So every second he's up here, he's in agony. Which explains why he's in such a bad mood, and often resorts to quick, cryptic messages. That's off the top of my head, and it answers a lot of the problems Joe has with the show. And I think fixing those problems fixes my problems, too, because if the devil is legitimately hostile and obscure, it makes a little more sense for Sam to still be resisting him at every turn four weeks in. Too bad the girls who got paid to create the show didn't think of something, because I'm really going to miss Missy Peregrym. She's doing excellent work and she's none too difficult to look at.
"kotc" — Mon, 10/22/07 12:03am
"I'll see if I've got some plastic wrap" hmmm... none at the moment.
Joe Mulder — Wed, 11/14/07 2:06am
The following is an excerpt from a private e-mail I sent our dear Bee Boy earlier today, reprinted with his permission (his coercion, actually):
If you're not watching this show, you need to be. If you threw Tim Burton, Dr. Seuss and Earl Hickey in a blender, hit puree, and were somehow able to avoid prosecution for triple homicide (since the blender would almost certainly kill all three), you'd end up with PUSHING DAISIES.
[PS: just throw Tim Burton's sensibilities in the blender. Not any of his movies from the last ten or twelve years]
Brandon — Wed, 11/14/07 2:15pm
Welcome aboard, Joe!
Bee Boy — Wed, 11/14/07 3:04pm
Ten or twelve years... it's hard to believe Burton has already been disappointing us for that long. What seemed like a momentary hiccup has just kept going and going. (Not that my hopes for Sweeney Todd are diminished one iota.)
I'm not sure it's possible to be prosecuted for the murder of a dead guy, a fictional character, and a person's sensibilities – but even if not, I expect to see James Spader defending someone for it on an upcoming episode of Boston Legal. (And don't give me "writers' strike" – that episode literally writes itself!)
I'm thrilled you're enjoying Pushing Daisies. Let this be a lesson to any of you ATGoNFP-doubters...
"kate" — Tue, 1/8/08 2:01pm
I find JOURNEYMAN one of the best shows on TV this year. I like how Journeyman has you thinking fast on your feet going back and forth in time. There's always a new twist. Sometimes it may be overkill, but at the end of the show, it always leaves me wanting more.