Mon, September 28, 2009

Busy week – let's get right to it!

Accidentally on Purpose

CBS, Mondays at 8:30

Not much to say about this one that you can't already guess. The premise is that Jenna Elfman (who I loved on Dharma & Greg, and I realize I'm entirely alone in this) rebounds from a long-term relationship with a guy much younger than she is, and finds herself pregnant. (The show's title refers to the fact that she was pretty cavalier about birth control with the new guy, and her sister thinks it was a subconscious effort to get pregnant. But that title will stick with the show for the rest of its run. Its short, short run.) The show attempts to cram the entire pregnancy into the first episode, which seems rushed to me. We begin with Elfman on the prowl for a rebound, flash back to the breakup, skip ahead to the hookup, then on to the next morning and her awkward departure from his skeezy bachelor pad. Then jump to lunch with the girls ("What have I done??"), then another booty call with the new guy. Another skip and its five weeks later so she can pee on a stick. Whenever I talk about bad sitcoms, I talk about short scenes – characters gathering for the sole purpose of tossing out two or three zingers, then dispersing. It's a problem, and it's exaggerated when scenes don't flow together, instead taking place days and weeks apart. Very dull characters result from this: people with no dimension whatsoever. (The kook, the floozy, the spastic sister.)

Elfman is capable of being charming and funny (as she was in Keeping the Faith – people actually agree with me on this one), and she's got Ashley Jensen (Extras) at her side to help shovel jokes, but unfortunately the writing on this one just isn't there. Certainly, network television can support bland, stale sitcoms without decent writing (Yes, Dear ran six seasons), but I guarantee you this one isn't worth your time. I hope it ends quickly, because Jensen has proved that she has what it takes to do great comedy, and here she's shackled to a diluted version of Kim Cattrall from Sex and the City ("Always use a condom... and an alias!" "I hate these work parties – I've slept with everyone here. Wait... yep."). Dependable for a line about problem drinking, but sadly never funny.

NCIS: Los Angeles

CBS, Tuesdays at 9:00

I was looking forward to this one just a little bit because I started hearing things about how great NCIS is and then I caught a few promos for it four years ago where it seemed like it could be pretty entertaining. On the other hand, it was spun off from JAG, so I didn't rush into the middle of an ongoing show (something I never do anyway, except for CSI and House). But if the real NCIS is anything like this, there's little danger of me Netflixing the DVDs anytime soon. (Or tuning in one hour earlier to check it out – is it weird that these are back-to-back? CBS doesn't do that with its CSI shows, and Law & Order is spread out across three nights – and two networks! Then again The Cleveland Show and Family Guy are consecutive; maybe it's a new thing.)

Chris O'Donnell was shot up pretty bad in a previous mission (this may have occurred in a "special" NCIS last spring which was also a "backdoor pilot" – kinky! – for the new show; I didn't see it) and he's just returning to the unit. This is the extent of the backstory you will get on any of these characters. It's your typical four-to-six person team of various specialists (the tech guy, the know-it-all, the muscle, the girl) and they operate out of a high-tech lair "hidden in plain sight" behind the walls of a condemned water treatment facility. If a water treatment facility were housed in a sprawling spanish-style estate that looks like someplace Rudy Valentino would've hosted pool parties. (All those breezeways and open-air verandas have got to be hell on security.) There is one room in the whole place where you can actually hide from someone in a helicopter with a telephoto lens, and it's got a 7-foot flatscreen on every wall, and you can touch them like John King at CNN, and drag around big pictures of documents and people's driving licenses. The tech kid (it's always a kid) also has one of those one-handed keyboards like Jonathan Pryce in The World is Not Enough, and he's hacking databases and searching for tax records with the flick of a wrist.

It's a procedural show stripped down to its bare essence, with absolutely no meat on the bones. Linda Hunt stars as a down-to-business operational manager, and she is, of course, fantastic. She's something like Q and M at the same time – she slaps wrists for overspending on the expense account, but she also equips O'Donnell with gadgetry (and even dresses him!). She's magnificent, and if someone does a YouTube mashup of just her scenes, the way they do with David Caruso's obnoxious opening to every CSI: Miami, I am so there. Yes, she tosses out random quotes in Latin, and then scolds the know-it-all kid on his declension when he translates – of course she does! Unfortunately, the rest of the show is just meaningless. The team splits up, rushes out to interview witnesses or break into apartments to search for clues, then hurries back to the lair to recap everything we just saw, then repeats until the big screen shows a picture of a bad guy they can go shoot. I suppose you can applaud its fearless unoriginality. Like a sitcom with a really wacky neighbor, it refuses to acknowledge that it's dealing in clichés so overworn they've become punch lines. The know-it-all kid will spout a few lines of random historical information about a certain island they've just GPS'ed, and then everyone will pause for a beat, until he says "What? I read a lot." This is like the way on NUMB3RS, every time Krumholtz (sigh...) says anything, the FBI guys come back with some version of "In English please?" – which is to say, it's extremely tiresome.

the forgotten

ABC, Tuesdays at 10:00

This is kind of interesting. My review of this show was going to be a lot worse, before I watched NCIS: Los Angeles. I thought it was the epitome of a procedural show with absolutely nothing else to it, but then I saw NCIS: LA and my eyes were opened. (It's true, I don't always watch the shows in order; I'm sorry I've failed you.)

(Quick aside: ABC is eschewing capitals on the forgotten, much like CBS goes Caps Lock for NUMB3RS – not that you will notice much on onebee, where TV and film titles are styled in all caps. I promise I did not design that to mask the fact that I've capitulated to CBS's scheme for NUMB3RS – like most things at onebee, I actually stole it from Greg Storey. But there are places where that style doesn't appear, so I'm sorry that the PDFs I sent out two weeks ago are wrong – I hadn't noticed ABC had a special style for the title of the forgotten. Not that I understand why shows do this – how does that affect anything, besides looking weird in my TiVo list? With NUMB3RS, I understand it, because a 3 doesn't look much like a lowercase "e" but why the forgotten? It's annoying, and, like the Christine problem, its own network isn't even consistent. Savvy viewers will notice that, in lower-thirds promoting NUMB3RS, CBS capitalizes only the "N" and the "3." [Insofar as there can be such a thing as a "capital 3."])

In the show, last-minute addition Christian Slater heads a group of "civilian volunteers" who take over John and Jane Doe cases when the local police detectives run out of leads. Apparently, it's policy to put a Doe case on the shelf after three weeks if no progress has been made, to free up detectives to work newer cases. And, according to the show, five days later, the body will be buried in an anonymous grave to free up a drawer at the morgue, at which point "everyone forgets about her," according to one of many impassioned proclamations from a team member trying to lend their morbid hobby some sort of karmic significance. (And there are many such proclamations. "[Jane Doe's] parents go to sleep every night worrying." "The first thing that happens when you're brought into this world [is that you're given a name]. So you should have one when you leave." And, from the victim herself, in one of many plaintive narrations: "People loved me [...] I'm not waiting to be saved; I'm waiting to be found.") Five days to do what professional detectives couldn't do in three weeks – long odds for this ragtag bunch, but fortunately they've linked up with chapters across the world in something they call "The Forgotten Network" (or possibly "the forgotten network"). Also, despite their lack of police training, they're all experts at figuring out when someone is lying, or hearing what someone isn't really saying, or jumping to conclusions. Slater left the force not long ago (why is not explained, but it was an amicable split) so he can lean on his cop buddies for assistance, and occasionally get scolded by them for tackling a fleeing suspect as if he still carried a badge.

The show might have a "hook" with the John Doe angle (though Cold Case sort of has that territory covered), but the mopey monologues really pull it under. I recently realized that repeated exposure to procedural shows has left me disinterested in how the case finally wraps up – TV shows have been forced to resort to so many cockamamie endings that I just don't care if it's plausible any more. As long as the investigatory proceedings are clever and entertaining, I'm happy. (Maybe it's because I started watching House, where I'm never going to figure out whodunit because I don't know any of the bizarre medical conditions that might be "suspects.") Shows like CSI and NUMB3RS are great for this – not much of a satisfying conclusion, but great detective work. the forgotten seems to be the exact opposite. The procedural part of the show is treated as an afterthought to the cosmic mission of restoring names to the unnamed (as the team will, repeatedly, weepily attest). For example: the old string-and-pushpins approach to solving a mystery. One lady on the team keeps a cork board with all the clues so far and a bunch of strings connecting them. How does this help? Is the victim's shirt "connected" to her high school yearbook? Does the team stare at this web and draw conclusions from its yarny insights? Also: computers. They have a photo of the girl's ankle tattoo, so they "run it through the database" (whatever that means) and get no hits. Later, when things are really turning grim, Slater says, "this time, let's run it through the international database." They actually have two entirely separate databases of tattoo images – which cannot be queried simultaneously – and yet, later, when they realize it's an unfinished devil image, one team member can sit down at a computer she's never touched before and within three seconds she has, quoting here, "a list of 15 high schools with devil mascots in Illinois and surrounding states" (my emphasis). You can't just check a box to say "search the entire tattoo database" but you can type for three seconds and get "high schools AND devil mascots AND illinois OR surrounding states"?! And not just a Google result, either – it's a column of mascot images with the high school information alongside each.

So I think you understand why I can't ever watch that show again.

The Good Wife

CBS, Tuesdays at 10:00

Julianna Margulies (who, when you straighten out her hair, looks less like the spitting image of Susie Essman and more like the spitting image of Famke Janssen – good trade) stars as Alicia Florrick, whose husband has just issued an insincere apology to the people of Illinois for some dirty dealings which have forced him to resign. He's also been liaising with hookers, which is probably the part of the story more interesting to the press (and his wife) but he's indicted for the other stuff, whatever it is. Backstage after the press conference, she gives his face a good smack – a bit late, if you ask me – and walks away. Six months later, she's returning to a law career she left behind 15 years ago when she got married and started a family. Her mother-in-law is dropping by weekdays to look after the kids between school and dinner (and drop a few hints about how her son really deserves Alicia's forgiveness). She's at the deep end at her new law firm since all the other associates are fresh out of school and much younger than she.

Sounds like something your aunt would watch, doesn't it? Kind of touchy-feely, with a lot of "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle" moments and some nice Helen Reddy clashes with the mother-in-law? But somehow it's more than that. Margulies brings a mother's patience to the pressures of trying a case, and in the process discovers things a feistier attorney might have missed. She has a great interplay with her children in a way that's realistic without sliding into "cool mom" territory. (She snatches crime scene photos away from her son, who peers at them with morbid curiosity. "I've seen worse," he says. "You're adorable," she replies flatly. "No I'm not," he shrugs. "Yes, you are.") And she's law-school buddies with a senior partner at the firm, played by Josh Charles, which means they have chummy exchanges and he stops by to shoot the breeze at the end of the day, tossing a worn baseball in the air insouciantly to remind me how much I love Dan Rydell. (Neither Charles nor Margulies appear to have aged a day, by the way – it's like they were in suspended animation pods for a decade.) These chats also humanize the law firm, which would otherwise seem like a pretty crummy place to work for a woman who already has plenty on her plate. The whole show is relatable and embracing – it's very easy to watch and doesn't trade on its ripped-from-the-headlines origins all that much. And it doesn't feel as anachronistic as some of these more heartfelt dramas can get – a show like Judging Amy seems like it's beamed in from another era. Alicia mentions during a prison visit that her husband's follies have been mocked in a FunnyOrDie.com skit which is helping their son's stock at school. It's a throwaway moment, but I liked it.

Mercy

NBC, Wednesdays at 8:00

Touted as a doctor show with a nurse's point of view, Mercy opens with a car accident and a case of tension pneumothorax, TV's new "it" emergency condition. This is the one where a punctured lung begins filling the body cavity with air, which compresses against the lung and prevents it from fully inflating. The patient will suffocate unless the pressure is relieved, which means a hasty incision in the abdomen and something snorkel-like, such as a drinking straw or the barrel of a pen, being inserted to let out the air. It looks cool on camera, makes medical practitioners seem like MacGyver, and has some big words in it – so naturally it is used in one out of four TV shows. For Mercy to begin with this is the show's way of telling you that it's not afraid to be cliché or uninspired.

The woman who rushed to the injured motorist's aid works as a nurse, so when she accompanies him to the hospital she is instantly dressed down by "real" doctors for overstepping her bounds. That's the "nurse's point of view" you've been hearing about: they're shit on by doctors and patients, who treat them more like custodians and less like caregivers. Also, they "treat the patient" while doctors "treat the disease," meaning all bedside manner is nurse-based, and they're the only ones who actually care about the patients or get to know them. All of these things are oversimplified, of course, and Mercy is not afraid to oversimplify.

Our heroine was a field nurse in the military during a tour in Iraq, where conditions didn't allow time for respecting boundaries between nurse and doctor, so she's used to having a little more autonomy and respect. A doctor from her unit became a lover while she was there, among many reasons she was prepared to dissolve her marriage when she returned from duty. Now he's signed on to work at her hospital, which means they fight over patient care in one scene and make out in a supply closet in the next – a trick right out of the Grey's Anatomy playbook. Another nurse has a hot date with a rich lawyer, so changes into her dress in the locker room and sashays through the ward in full evening wear. This juxtaposition is right out of the Grey's Anatomy credits – and Mercy is not afraid to lift a few bits from Grey's Anatomy here and there.

Despite a captivating performance from Michelle Trachtenberg (is there any other kind?) as a sunny new recruit fresh from nursing school who has to learn that the job has its ugly side, there's not much redeeming about Mercy. Unless it's built for crossover episodes with Monday night's Trauma, I don't see it lasting long. NBC doesn't have a lot of one-hour time slots open (having famously burned five of them), so if they have any replacement shows in the wings, things will get tight. On the other hand, NBC has pretty much given up and put all their eggs in the Leno basket, so maybe they didn't buy any replacement shows.

Modern Family

ABC, Wednesdays at 9:00

Hailed as "the funniest new sitcom of the season" by some critics (evidently critics who missed the Community screening, or have had the "comedy" parts of their brains removed), this show adopts the faux-documentary style of The Office or Arrested Development (with a few twists, like hidden camera footage) in its examination of three families: two grown siblings and their remarried father. The talent is considerable and the writing is pretty good, but I don't see it knocking any of my current sitcoms out of the top ten.

The first sibling is Julie Bowen, whom you loved as much as I did on Ed, or at least you'd be wise to pretend you did around here. She's married to Ty Burrell, who was the funniest part of two very unfunny sitcoms (Out of Practice and Back to You), and they have three children: a chubby, geeky little boy, a precocious and wisecracking daughter, and a 15-year-old daughter who's just an absolute bitch. Bowen is overwhelmed by all the chaos and gets no help from Burrell, who is trying to be a cool dad by texting ("I know all the lingo: OMG, oh my God; WTF, why the face?") and saying things like "chillax" but is actually more embarrassing than an uncool dad. There are a few funny moments with him and the son, and the middle daughter shows potential (we barely see her this week), but this family is pretty dull.

The other sibling is Jesse Tyler Ferguson, who played full-bore gay on The Class and Do Not Disturb, amidst terrible, terrible writing. Now, he's doing it on a show that at least supports his talents, and he's better than ever. We meet him and his partner (played by Eric Stonestreet) as they return from Vietnam with their newly adopted daughter. This gives Ferguson a chance to lecture everyone on the plane who was cooing over the little girl until her second daddy turned up and their faces went from smiling to sneering. It's actually a funny and awkward moment, as he is set off by a woman remarking, "look at that baby with those cream puffs," while his new daughter was (unbeknownst to him) snacking on a pair of cream puffs. Later, he'll have to introduce the baby to his family, which is something he's been avoiding because his dad isn't all that enlightened.

The dad is played by Ed O'Neill, as that introduction should have suggested. He's less offensive than he was on Married: With Children, but then so is mass genocide. He has recently remarried to Sofia Vergara, who brings a chubby little boy from her previous marriage. Vergara is amazing – she brings an unstoppable intensity to everything from her kid's soccer game to the big family gathering. I knew little of her before The Knights of Prosperity, a show that finally found its narrative footing right as ABC decided to give up on it, but she was great there and she's great here.

The show has a decent handle on the sort of timing that's needed to pull off comedy like this, and with all these relationships, there's certainly room for plenty of wacky stories. Burrell is getting noticed for his work, and he's plenty good, although the "cool dad" schtick is laid on so thick it gets old fast. (At the end, though, he shows he's not 100% cool. Playing trampoline basketball with his 8-year-old son, he won't stop slapping the ball away from him and trash-talking. It's pretty funny.) I think Modern Family could fill the slot left by Worst Week: a little hit-or-miss, but good for a half-hour if you've got nothing else to do.

Cougar Town

ABC, Wednesdays at 9:30

Bill Lawrence, creator of Scrubs, has started this new series with Courteney Cox, investigating the dating scene for divorcees in their 40s. It begins with Cox evaluating all her flaws in the mirror – sags and bulges and little wrinkles – which is kind of brave and marks a distinct contrast from her friend, played by Lawrence's wife, Christa Miller (The Drew Carey Show), who appears to have had even more cosmetic surgery since Scrubs. (At one point in the episode, Cox refuses the suggestion of having some work done in order to meet eligible men. She says she's grossed out by "giant collagen hot-dog lips," which I would say describes Miller perfectly, but leaves out the lack of any discernible eyebrow movement.)

Cox is raising a son, played by Dan Byrd (freed from the awful prison of Aliens in America), and he's great – with a weary, sarcastic rejoinder always at the ready. His life gets worse and worse, because Cox's assistant has attempted to buoy her real estate business by updating her listing signs to feature a cleavage-rich photo, which all his high school friends are stealing and masturbating with. Then his dad takes a job as the school groundskeeper, where he can take time out of mowing the lawn shirtless with an antique Walkman on his hip to embarrass his son at the lunch table. The timing between Byrd and Cox is great, definitely one of the highlights of the show.

Cox is aggravated that it's all so much easier for her neighbor across the cul-de-sac: a divorced man of approximately her age, who beds new twentysomethings every night. ("Stop having sex with babies!" she screams at him across the street as he helps another girl out of the car. To the girl's credit, she's not put off by this at all.) Cox actually wants to act her age, but she's being dragged into the young nightlife her assistant (Busy Phillips, of Freaks & Geeks, who's very funny). In a somewhat unlikely turn, she meets and beds a cute and eligible young guy – which makes her feel like a "cougar" even though she hates it. (She despises the term as much as I do – it's a little offensive, and it's starting to feel a lot outdated, which is why it's a strange choice for the show's title.)

It didn't completely win me over, but Cougar Town has more polish than most brand-new sitcoms (though perhaps the single-camera format is working in its favor here). If all that comes of it is that Dan Byrd gets some actual comedy on his résumé, that will be just fine.

Eastwick

ABC, Wednesdays at 10:00

Newer readers may not know this, but I went through a pretty heavy Michelle Pfeiffer phase in the years just after she wore that slinky catsuit in Batman Returns. (Today, comic book movies are so common that nobody bats an eye when Gwyneth Paltrow pops up in Iron Man, but back then it was a pretty big deal for someone of Pfeiffer's prestige to prowl the rooftops in stillettos and form-fitting latex. Not that I would suggest Gwyneth matches Pfeiffer's prestige.) During that time, I watched a lot of Michelle Pfeiffer movies on VHS (shudder) and The Witches of Eastwick might have been my favorite – though I did have a soft spot for her and Jeff Goldblum in John Landis's Into the Night. Possibly the saddest part about watching Eastwick was realizing that Pfeiffer is not played by Rebecca Romijn – she's played by certified charisma vacuum Lindsay Price. Price brought blah laughlessness to NBC's failed attempt at importing Coupling from British shores, then went on to ruin Lipstick Jungle (one assumes; I didn't watch it). However, when she's doing a word-for-word, gesture-for-gesture imitation of Michelle Pfeiffer, she's actually not that bad.

And Rebecca Romijn I can live with. Admittedly nobody without my huge crush on her found Pepper Dennis watchable, but she was excellent on Just Shoot Me! by any measure. As the third ("Sarandon") witch, Jaime Ray Newman (Veronica Mars) is also quite acceptable. But Paul Gross is just terrible as Darryl Van Horne. Certainly, stepping into a role originated by Jack Nicholson is a formidable challenge, but this guy is just all wrong. For one thing, he's handsome in a completely bland, Ken-doll way. Nicholson is a decent-looking guy, but in a role like this is what's important are all the ways he's not handsome – more interesting-looking, dangerous, or intriguing. Gross is like David Hasselhoff with dyed hair doing a very bad Robert Wagner impression. There's no sparkle in his eye, and nothing playful in his demeanor. He's like a reality show bachelor and the result is that rather than bringing danger and mystique to the town of Eastwick, he just brings dull obnoxiousness.

Basically, as a TV show, this just doesn't work. The story in the movie had a nice, tidy arc: these women meet, they discover their powers, things are fun for a while but they realize the downside, and they join forces to do away with Darryl. Now, they can hardly do that, because once he leaves, what's the show? So we can just look forward to season after season of them casting spells on people. Also, the film centered around the visceral thrill of discovering the power to act out your fantasies – something fun, but with a sinister edge. In the show, the added cuteness conflicts with the dark side, and it comes out something like Charmed: The Later Years.

All of these are reason enough to spurn the show, but if you need one more, they're shooting it on the same, tiny "town square" corner of Warners' backlot (you probably remember it from certain Gilmore Girls episodes) rather than going to an actual small town like Dawson's Creek did. Thus, every scene takes place within 75 feet of the town square, because if you go 76 feet, you're on an old west street.

FlashForward

ABC, Thursdays at 8:00

While ABC hasn't specifically promoted this show as the next Lost, they haven't gone out of their way to avoid that association, and they've been happy to highlight press clippings comparing the two. You can hardly blame them: Lost has been a successful and highly talked-about show for ABC. But it makes me a little wary, as someone who initially loved the show above all else (it's amazing to me now, but I once actually praised its "fearless ability to leave some questions unanswered"), cooled on it by the end of season one, then endured two more rocky seasons before quitting for good. That sucked. I do not want to do that again. (My heart sank when I saw a prominent Oceanic Air billboard in the back of one scene.)

On the other hand, there are many exciting concepts in FlashForward, which turned out to be quite a bit more interesting than its previews indicated. If you've somehow missed the buzz, everyone on the planet blacks out for 137 seconds (thank God it wasn't 108), and those who wake up alive recount vivid dreams that seem like memories of the future: a two-minute glimpse of what they'll be doing six months from now. These visions vary: for our main hero, FBI Agent Mark Benford (Joseph Fiennes of Shakespeare in Love), it's a vision of his future investigation of the blackout event. For his wife, it's sleeping with another man. For others it may be meetings, family encounters, or just pooping. (It's been confirmed that people who are in the same place in six months are sharing the same vision. They may only be dreams, but if they are, they're shared dreams.) Benford's partner Demetri Noh (John Cho of Star Trek and the Harold & Kumar movies) has no vision at all, and fears that he'll be dead in six months.

Needless to say, this sparks an immediate investigation into the cause of the blackout and the source of the visions, while relief efforts are also underway clearing the nation's freeways and interstates which quickly became pileups with so many unconscious drivers at the wheel. Benford starts recreating the string-and-pushpin cork board from his vision (so apparently people are still using this dumb mystery-solving device six months from now), and trying to track down the leads it suggests. One girl in his office suggests, "We should create a web site!" People would sign in and post their visions and collectively build a picture of what's going on in the future. (ABC has actually built a real site at jointhemosaic.com, where people can essentially Twitter any made-up vision they want for their future – of course, these fake visions won't align like the ones in the show do, so I'm not sure what the point is.) It's kind of cool how things placed on Benford's wall in Noh's handwriting match his vision perfectly – they'll still be there in six months. But it asks one of the interesting questions at the core of FlashForward: how did they get there in the first place? He's putting these things on the board because he saw them in the vision, but he saw them in the vision because at some point he put them on the board. One guy suggests that the visions are "Ghost of Christmas Future crap" – that by seeing the future, we can change it – and Benford's vision seems to support that. Without the vision, the cork board would've been different. It's kind of impossible not to let the vision affect your life at least a little, so in that sense knowledge of the future changes the future. But maybe that knowledge (and that change) were already predestined into creating that future. We'll just have to watch and see what happens. Also, can the visions be manipulated, like in Minority Report? There's evidence that at least some people knew the blackout was coming, so maybe they could set things up to happen in six months to alter some visions.

So FlashForward has already enticed us with plenty of intriguing reasons to watch another episode, but then right before the end an investigator shows Noh some video she's been reviewing. Security footage from various public spaces shows everyone dropping unconscious at the same instant, but she pulls up video from a Detroit Tigers game, and beyond the eerily napping infield she zooms into a corner of the stands where she reveals a guy in a black trench coat walking through the slumbering crowd. Now I'm hooked. What the hell is that?

Brothers

Fox, Fridays at 8:00

We got two episodes of Brothers back-to-back on Friday, and while I fell short of my obligation to watch the whole first week of every new show with The Jay Leno Show, I felt like I should at least sit through two episodes for you. It didn't get any better, but it didn't get any worse, either. The show centers on former NFL star Michael Trainor (played by former NFL star Michael Strahan), at a point when his savings have dried up and he's forced to move in with his parents and help his little brother (Darryl "Chill" Mitchell) run a restaurant which bears his name. His dad (Carl Weathers) is a football coach himself (though the show doesn't specify at what level: professional, college, or pee wee – a lot of his lines would be funnier if it were the latter), and his mom (CCH Pounder) is a sassy black sitcom mama.

Currently the only show with a predominantly black cast (even The Cleveland Show has a white guy voicing the main character), it's disappointing how bad the results are. But the Obama era has just begun, so there's still hope for better shows. As has been lamented elsewhere, an actress as strong as Pounder (ER, The Shield) should not be reduced to belting out catchphrases like "I know he's an ass, but he's my [son/husband] and I love 'im" a handful of times per episode. What's a real shame is that the chemistry between Pounder and Carl Weathers is actually pretty funny and entertaining (not quite Bill Cosby/Phylicia Rashad level, but fairly good) – the show is dragged down by its higher profile star. Strahan's timing is so bad he throws Mitchell off, and their scenes degenerate into the same bickering fights full of wheelchair jokes (at Mitchell's expense) and tooth gap jokes (at Strahan's). Worse, these interactions take place hours apart over the course of Michael's four- or five-day visit to the house (before he admits he's broke and decides to move in). So we get an establishing shot of the front of the house, then a fight between the brothers, then Mitchell rolls off, then another establishing shot (hours or days later), another fight, then they freeze on a "skunk eye" look at each other as we fade to commercial. And I think we're ready to let the "whatever happens in X, stays in X" line die. The Vegas Tourism Board thanks you for keeping it alive as long as you have, but it's officially tired now. (Though I'll give Brothers credit for at least taking a turn with it. Pounder consigns Strahan to the pool house so she won't have to see his booty calls wandering through her kitchen in just a football jersey and says, "Whatever happens in the pool house stays in the pool house, or else I will burn down the pool house.") Mitchell Hurwitz is credited as a producer, maybe he can take credit for that. He certainly can't take credit for much else.

(Still, they have bloopers over the credits. I do like that. Psych does that, too, and more shows should.)

The Cleveland Show

Fox, Sundays at 8:30

Cleveland Brown, the black friend from Family Guy, leaves Quahog and shacks up with his high school crush in Stoolbend, VA. Seth MacFarlane has said that spinning Quagmire off of Family Guy would've been too creepy, and apparently it wouldn't work to take Stewie out of the Griffin house (though I don't see why he couldn't be on both shows), so it's Cleveland's show. I'm not sure why Fox thought they needed a Family Guy spin-off, since they already have American Dad, but here it is, and it follows the Guy/Dad model pretty closely. Nuclear family; baby with amusing accent (Huggy Bear, in this case, or so I'm told); crazy neighbors; talking animals (next door lives a bear family with hilarious slavic accents). Plenty of quick cutaway material ("manatee jokes" as they've come to be called, not that there's anything wrong with them).

I can't remember more than three or four great Cleveland lines in the history of Family Guy, and this episode certainly didn't add any, but it wasn't unwatchable. The same could be said of American Dad which wasn't officially dropped from my TiVo list until just this year – it never quite became side-splittingly funny, the way the great years of Family Guy were, so I eventually realized I didn't need it. I've got nothing against The Cleveland Show, but I'm going to go ahead and realize that up front this time. It's fine if you're in on a Sunday and feel like tripling your Family Guy experience, but neither The Cleveland Show nor American Dad give you particularly unique reasons to tune in just for them. Brandon has a thing about the "super-sized" episodes of The Office being less funny than the half-hour versions because the comedy is diluted. I think I'll enjoy Family Guy more when I'm not watching an additional hour of half-baked Family Guy-style jokes.

I'll TiVo Another Episode Of...

FlashForward, in the hopes that, if it's going to become terrible, hacky, or annoying, it will do so very quickly. I am in danger of getting very involved in it very fast, and I'm really hoping I don't get burned again. The series is based on a book, and creators David S. Goyer (The Dark Knight) and Brannon Braga (24) insist they've mapped out a five-season plan. My go-to Lostie Brandon insists that since Cuse and Lindelof settled on an endgame for Lost, the show has become markedly better, so I'm hopeful. (They are showing clips of Kim Dickens in upcoming episodes, so at least my viewing will not be in vain.)

The Good Wife, and probably just the one more episode, but the first one worked out surprisingly better than expected so it's worth it to check out just one more. I have no room in my lineup for more one-hour shows (in fact, if anything I should lose two or three this year) but I can't help being curious.

Modern Family and Cougar Town, though I may not end up watching those recordings. It's sort of a just-in-case thing (and these are the reasons it's very dangerous to start your own TiVo gauntlet).

Community stays on, of course, and Glee gets at least another week. I hear resident Glee superfan Joe was down on the latest episode, but I loved it! Admittedly, the fake pregnancy subplot has worn out its welcome, but that was brief and easily forgiven since they had multiple dance numbers for Beyoncé's "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)" which isn't my favorite song in the history of ever, but I bought like half a dozen songs off iTunes in the last 12 months and it was one of them. (Plus, Kurt! Less Rachel and more Kurt is a recipe for a happy Jameson.) I don't think I've ever liked Mike O'Malley so much (faint praise, I realize).

Returning Shows

How I Met Your Mother is as funny and unique as ever;
House had a brilliant season opener, exploring House's personality (Is his crankiness a condition, to be medicated away? No!);
Castle , well, Nathan Fillion, my offer still stands; The New Adventures of Old Christine is never as good in the premiere or finale of a season as it is the rest of the year, but it's still very funny (and Clark Gregg is fantastic); CSI has brought Jorja Fox back (for now), which is awesome, but the show still hasn't regained its post-Petersen footing; The Mentalist is creative, sublime fun, with crimesolving to boot; the jury is still out on Dollhouse ; NUMB3RS didn't fit into this week's viewing schedule, and the show's structural gaffes of last year aren't soon corrected, it'll be off the TiVo for good; The Amazing Race pocketed another Emmy, and launched another great set of teams; Family Guy launched with a hit-or-miss episode in the always fertile Stewie-and-Brian-have-adventures series (still, if you only watch this show on Fox Sundays, Seth MacFarlane is a very funny man); Dexter remains the #1 reason to watch TV.

Premiering This Week

Trauma: NBC, Monday at 9:00
Hank: ABC, Wednesday at 8:00
The Middle: ABC, Wednesday at 8:30
Three Rivers: CBS, Sunday at 9:00

Returning This Week

Lie To Me: Fox, Monday at 9:00

© onebee · all rights reserved