Mon, September 14, 2009

Okay, I'm still not convinced that Glee is the best show on TV, but it's certainly a welcome break from the dreck the CW network is serving up this week. A rehash of yet another teenage vampire book series and a remake of a decade-old series about apartment dwellers who are not high school vampires, but if they were it would certainly explain their behavior. There are things about Glee that could be better, but it's a lot more original than most TV shows, and it deserves credit for that.

Melrose Place

CW, Tuesdays at 9:00

There's a certain kind of television show which just boggles me – and the CW network has had plenty of success with it, as had both of its first-cousin parents, UPN and the WB network, so I guess we shouldn't knock it. All the characters talk and behave in this stilted, semi-coy, archvillain manner (even the good guys), nothing remotely realistic ever happens, and events interweave with no real correlation, just random sound-bite-length exchanges about various fleeting personal dramas. Are the viewers of these shows too dumb to realize they're watching soap operas, or am I too dumb to realize that people really like soap operas, they just need them with a hip soundtrack so they don't feel like those shut-ins who believe that kid from Passions really was a robot?

Also, I never watched the original Melrose Place, but from what I can tell this remake or continuation or spin-off – whatever you'd call it – is like making a follow-up to Two Guys, a Girl, and a Pizza Place which catches up on what the pizza place has been up to the past ten years. Or a new show about whatever family happened to move into Cliff Huxtable's old brownstone. Can you really base a remake around a setting? Is it possible I'm putting too much thought into the reasoning behind a CW show? (Did I mention the catatonic half hour I spent after finding out the pilot was directed by Davis Guggenheim, who helmed the Academy Award-winning An Inconvenient Truth?)

You can pretty much assume what happens on a show like this. We open in an extremely noisy nightclub with expensive lighting and lots of beautiful people grinding against each other and ordering drinks with components like "citron." Everyone is hooking up, and everyone has secrets and grudges. Most of our characters seem like young people starting out, or middle class couples struggling to make their way in the world – but of course they live in expansive Los Angeles apartments with the finest furnishings. They throw out terms like "text-bombing" and "Malibuski." There are some quick attempts at blackmail and betrayal, then the landlady shows up dead in the pool, Joe Geddes style. Everyone's a suspect, but everyone is also ridiculously hot. (Even Ashlee Simpson, in a way, and with dialogue this terrible her woefully underdeveloped acting skills blend right in.) It seems nearly everyone at Melrose Place had a reason to want the victim dead (she's Syd, played by Laura Leighton, a holdover from the original Melrose Place, if you follow that sort of thing – there may be others, but none of them are Heather Locklear so I have no way of recognizing them). We enter some grainy flashbacks revealing various manipulations and betrayals that would make Syd a good candidate for some fatal stabbery, and the great thing about these flashbacks is that the characters who are having them actually black out during. They snap out of it, and they've lost time – in one case, while driving! That's some dangerous backstory.

By the end of the episode, one guy is stealing a million-dollar painting from his rich father, while one girl is engaging in self-pity sex with a nymphet at a nightclub and another is having sex with a guy she just met because he's offering $5,000 to offset her student debt. Then Ashlee steals a photo of Syd from a little shrine in the apartment courtyard for some reason, and another guy burns some bloody clothes. Oooh, we haven't seen his flashback yet, but it's going to be the best of all! He better set TiVo to record Lost because he's going to be out for a while. (I won't be sticking around to find out, but I'd bet a lot of money he's covering up for someone. No way does a show like this give up its mystery murderer's identity that easily.)

The CW network's latest slogan is "TV to talk about" (although the cutesy lower-third graphic cycles through "TV to [text/chat/blog/talk] about" – thank God they stopped short of "tweet" or I'd have had to gouge the corner out of my flatscreen). If a show like this meets that threshold, it's barely. The characters are on a conversational roller coaster the entire time – from quickie marriage proposals to first dates to financial woes to murder theories in the space of under a minute. Plenty to talk about, I guess, but all of it is here-and-gone before you know it. How do you get gabbing about something with your friends when it's already forgotten the next time you see them? (Am I revealing my age, here? Do kids text about these shows while they watch them? I can't imagine that – if only because it implies anyone is still watching live TV.) I don't get it, and I think the main reason is that watching this type of show reminds me of what it must be like to watch The Hills, though I have been fortunate enough to avoid that fate thus far.

Glee

Fox, Wednesdays at 9:00

High School Musical for people who think they're too cool for High School Musical – Glee tells the story of Will Schuester, a teacher who takes the reins as the director of the glee club because he sees it as a way to recapture the sense of excitement and belonging he felt back when he was "in glee" as a student at the same school. In the process, he meets the two lead voices of the club: Rachel Berry and Finn Hudson. Rachel is desperate to be liked (or, failing that, famous) and her type-A personality is focused like a laser beam on riding glee club to eventual stardom, even if it means getting her hands a little dirty. Finn is a star on the football team, and is starting to realize that maybe what he really wants to do is sing, and who he really wants to make out with is a "real girl" like Rachel, rather than his cheerleader girlfriend who also heads up the school's celibacy club as a way to manipulate men by alternately teasing and withholding sex. (Rachel is shown lying and backstabbing as often as the cheerleader is, but it's different because a) she likes sex; b) she sings great; and c) she's kind of a loser, so we should sympathize with her even when she says something obnoxious like "it's worse to be anonymous than poor," and seems to genuinely mean it.)

Fox aired the Glee pilot back at the start of the summer as a "sneak preview" and the results looked promising if far from perfect. One of the strengths was that it was not a traditional musical, in that characters did not spontaneously break into song, but you still got some fun musical numbers when the glee club was performing, rehearsing, or watching other teams perform. Unfortunately, that already shows signs of crumbling, as Rachel slips into a little bit of character-singing in episode two. It's cleverly disguised as a montage in the middle of her rehearsing a song, but she's lip-synching in the montage so it seems like they're crossing a line. This is like having a dream sequence in The Office: it just feels out of keeping with the style of the show. (In the case of Glee, it's a brand new show, so obviously this is its style – it's just not the style I was hoping for.)

Every character in Glee is enjoyable on some level, but it's as though they've all been worked on for a little too long. Mr. Scheuester, the director, is married to a caricature of an upwardly mobile suburbanite wife. She has a "crafts room," she shops compulsively at Pottery Barn, she really believes they should mortgage their future to the hilt for a bigger foyer and a breakfast nook. She's even willing to lie about being pregnant in order to keep him invested in the marriage. Rather than giving him a home life that contrasts to the passion and self-expression of glee club, the show has made his wife into a villain. It's impossible to understand how a guy as fun and interesting as Mr. Scheuester could end up with someone like her – and they were apparently high school sweethearts, which makes his return to glee club a little hard to figure. What if returning to this aspect of his awesome high school experience turns out like the last one did: a few years later and it feels like an albatross around his neck? Luckily for Mr. Scheue, he's already got a replacement lined up, the doe-eyed and supportive guidance counselor Emma, who has a huge crush on him. The show seems to be building a head of will-they/won't-they steam behind these two, which is sort of appalling because it's going to come down to adultery or homewrecking, and it's all happening way too fast. (Yes, the fake pregnancy is putting the brakes on things now, but these two almost kissed in the second episode! She needs a little time to ruminate over her obsession with him, and he needs a nice long while to start realizing how much fun he has when he's around her and how it contrasts to things at home, where he literally sits with his wife and puts together an American Gothic puzzle.) Emma, too, is more than just a sweetie and a sounding board, she's also a compulsive neat freak, which gives her little bits of business to do in every scene. Similarly, the three backup voices in the glee club each have a little too much "character" to them – just enough to distract from the main story, which at this point needs to be Rachel and Finn, the fate of glee club, and Scheuester and Emma on the side. Developing a rich stable of supporting characters is a beautiful thing, but you work on it – like The Simpsons, Arrested Development, and 30 Rock – don't jump into it all at once.

Adding to the mishmash is a mercurial principal who regards his budget above all else (he actually wants Scheuester to pay to keep glee club alive, since he could make a mint renting out the same auditorium for AA meetings instead) and a cheerleading coach who's kind of a uni-dimensional hyper-competitive megabitch, except she's played by Jane Lynch so at least we get the most awesome possible version of that character. She's been cock of the walk at the school for a while (though she'd object to that term), so she basically runs everything. Her cheerleaders garner national attention, so the principal okays a budget in which their uniforms are shipped to Europe for special dry cleaning. Now, though, Scheuester is gunning to make glee club relevant again, so her grip is starting to slip. The conflict between them hasn't gone anywhere too great yet, but I'm rooting for more, because it's the only non-romance story arc Glee has going so far (plus it has Jane Lynch in it).

Glee will probably turn out to be a pretty entertaining show and earn a decent-sized fraction of the crazy press it's getting. But it needs to figure out which show it's trying to be before too long. The first half of this week's episode seemed pretty awesome, but the second half became downright confusing, with the fake pregnancy and Rachel's musical montage about yearning for Finn. Also, in the pilot, all the glee performances featured original singing but most of this week's songs are just lip-synched from the prerecorded version. Something about this makes it a lot less fun – but I'm hoping all of these problems are related to the challenge of having to make your second episode a sort of recap of the pilot in a lot of ways, since many viewers could've missed the first episode or forgotten the key points over the weeks and weeks of hiatus. I remain optimistic about episode three; I just wish I were as optimistic as I was when I was only halfway through episode two.

The Vampire Diaries

CW, Thursdays at 8:00

Oh my God with the vampires! Can I just forgo this review and refer you to the South Park episode that covered this? The "real" goth kids lash out against the onslaught of phony vampire freaks jumping on the bandwagon of the Twilight books, etc., etc. I've never been into vampires, but I have to think that if I were I would be offended by the fact that every vampire in pop culture today is completely neutered: he's the one vampire who's really a sweetie and doesn't want to drink human blood, he'd really just like to be super chivalrous to a girl half his age (well, 1/20th his age, but half of how old he looks) and kind of just hang around not really being a vampire. Isn't the whole vampire appeal supposed to be about the occult and blood rites and all that? If it's just about how the only real gentlemen are antebellum gentlemen and romance transcends time, then aren't we just talking about Kate & Leopold? I get so tired of culture warriors whitewashing the 1950s and pretending that all of life would be better if we could just live like we did back then, ignoring the fact that Leave It to Beaver is a poor overall representation of the era – but at least the 1950s make more sense than the 1850s! (Although, yipes, that would be right before On the Origin of Species came out – I suppose pre-Darwin really was the ideal era to some of those people.)

It is possible I have strayed from the point.

The point is, the CW network is too lazy to create its own rip-off of the Twilight frenzy, so they went and bought up whichever property was still available (in this case, yet another series of books) and squished it into the mold that forms all of their shows, which is: surly, overbeautiful teenagers acting like anything in their lives actually matters. Reading the John Hughes memorial retrospective in EW, it really highlights the contrast between his insights into the minds of young adults and the insights of Kevin Williamson (the Scream and Dawson's Creek scribe who's on the team that brings The Vampire Diaries to TV). The CW version of teenagerhood is a homework-free, obligation-free non-stop social engagement revolving around the anguish and tribulation of one self-reliant yet vulnerable heart-faced girl and the hunky dude she pines for. Nina Dobrev is that heart-faced girl this time, and they've buffed her chin down to a razor-sharp point. (Move over, Kristen Kreuk!) Her parents are recently dead and her brother's a burnout, but she's got a new admirer following her around and appearing out of clouds of mist, because she looks just like a girl that our vampire liked in the nineteenth century. And she keeps a diary (oooh, so brooding!), and the vampire guy keeps a diary (just like the title says) – for all of CW's up-to-the-minute lingo and hip attitude, why the hell aren't they blogging?

Also, you could make a very comfortable living as a band without ever releasing any albums, just cranking out cheap Coldplay knock-offs and licensing them to play during CW shows. It's like someone left the car radio on "scan" mode in Emo Town. (Ah... pretty soon "fiddling with the knob on a radio" will take the place of "needle scratching off the surface of a record" as the sound effect people only ever hear metaphorically.)

I'll TiVo Another Episode Of...

Glee. Sure, why not? It's charming as hell most of the time, and I really hope it has some success nailing down what show it wants to be. 80% of the musical numbers are great, and 70% of the cast is enjoyable to highly enjoyable. But I'm TiVo'ing it in its Friday rerun slot because Wednesday at 9:00 is the Wipeout finale and the premiere of The Beautiful Life: TBL on the CW network. (That's actually what they call it: The Beautiful Life: TBL. It's like CSI: Crime Scene Investigations, only backwards. For a show to desperately pimp its own acronym in hopes of luring tweens into tweeting about it is so sad it's almost paralyzing.) What I'm saying is, Glee is less important to me than Wipeout and I take it less seriously than my solemn duty of chronicling the CW's absurd offerings for the ATGoNFP, but Fox is pushing Glee so hard that I get a chance to watch it later without even having to go to fox.com – a person would have to be pretty crazy not to TiVo that.

Returning Shows

Sadly, vacation took me away from TiVo before either King of the Hill or Sit Down, Shut Up could air, so I'll have to catch up on them this weekend. Still, I'm sure they were excellent. You've lost your chance to start watching King of the Hill at this point, but Fox is airing at least one more episode of SDSU by my count, so if you have any appreciation for Jason Bateman or the every-line-is-a-throwaway-line delivery style of Mitchell Hurwitz, by all means check it out.

Premiering This Week

The Jay Leno Show: NBC, Monday at 10:00
The Beautiful Life: TBL: CW, Wednesday at 9:00
Community: NBC, Thursday at 9:30

Returning This Week

Parks and Recreation: NBC, Thursday at 8:30
The Office: NBC, Thursday at 8:00

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