Mon, October 5, 2009

It's fitting that my notebook which begins with Back to You from 2007's Annual TiVo Gauntlet of New Fall Programming should end with Hank from this year's. It's filled with two ATGoNFPs and Survivor season 16, and now it can go on my shelf with all those memories tucked away inside it, where normal people might store pictures of their loved ones or mementos from activities that took place outside.

Trauma

NBC, Mondays at 9:00

ER isn't on NBC any more, so if you've been missing the random explosions and crashes, and the revolving door of personal crises amongst the people who clean up the human wreckage after such startling disasters, Trauma is where you'll want to turn. (Also, please don't think the lessons of Grey's Anatomy have been ignored. You can rest assured everyone is having risky sex with everyone else.)

Trauma follows a team of paramedics in San Francisco, as they respond to grisly emergencies day by day. There are a bunch of them, but the only ones you need to pay attention to are Nancy and "Rabbit" (real name not given). She's meant to be a simmering sexpot in the vein of Heather Locklear on T.J. Hooker, with her uniform shirt always unbuttoned. Four minutes after we meet her, she's having sex with her driving partner in the back of their ambulance. Later we learn that she and Rabbit have also shacked up in the past. The problem with her is that there's nothing going on behind her eyes (not that this is necessarily an issue for a simmering sexpot character). Most of the episode takes place on the one-year anniversary of a deadly life flight crash that exploded two helicopters, injured Rabbit, and killed that guy she was screwing. So her entire motivation is to save a life today to make up for that awful tragedy. (And yes, she's now sleeping with her new driving partner.)

Rabbit is Maverick - cocksure, brash, dangerous, obsessed with taking risks. He flies the life flight helicopter, but in the big crash he was lucky enough to roll out of it and land safely (though bruised) on a skyscraper rooftop as his chopper was flipping across the building and the other one was smashing into a conference room window and sliding down the outside wall. Now, convinced he cannot die, he never drives his vintage Mustang at any speed less than 70mph. Today, he returns to the air after spending a year grounded, recuperating from his injuries. And it's a good thing, too, because there's a massive pileup on the freeway, caused by some asshole texting while driving. (Text if you must, but in a show like this, shouldn't you know better than to text while passing an oil tanker?) So we need someone like Rabbit to swoop in and brashly inject one guy with a sedative to shut him up (before assessing whether it'll compound any trauma he's experienced), then grab a kid with a neck injury and fly him to the hospital while performing an emergency tracheotomy with the help of the wailing mother. ("Rabbit, you can't do that!" "He's not dying on my watch!") So it's that kind of show.

Trauma does a great job of keeping a pace of constant chaos and emergency. Car crashes are fun to look at, just ask the rubberneckers who slow the 10 to a crawl anytime there's a fender bender in the breakdown lane. The show might even work, if it focused only on this and ignored the backstage drama between all the medical workers. An hour of non-stop explosions could be pretty fun – but I suppose Discovery's Destroyed in Seconds is cheaper to produce and equally thrilling. Certainly the acting is better.

And that's it from NBC this year: Mercy and Trauma (essentially the same bad show twice); The Jay Leno Show (essentially the same bad show as last year); and the excellent Community. Pretty much sums it up for NBC, which has basically ceased to be a television network, with the exception of a Thursday night comedy lineup ranging from "hilarious" to "Amy Poehler."

Hank

ABC, Wednesdays at 8:00

Promoted as "a side of Kelsey Grammer you've never seen," this show features a side of Grammer previously unknown only to people who've never seen Cheers or Frasier (or that one episode of Wings). Grammer is Hank Pryor, former head of a major company, and he's been ousted in a hostile takeover, his savings (inexplicably) depleted, and forced to move home to River Bend, VA. (How far from The Cleveland Show's Stoolbend, VA, is this? It's not specified.) He's still doing what he does second-best, portraying a pompous, egotistical windbag. (His best work is Sideshow Bob on The Simpsons, the only character I've seen him play who doesn't seem like a rehashed Frasier Crane.) He still puts his foot in his mouth due to simple misunderstandings (in this case, accidentally revealing his wife's unflattering nickname for their daughter). He still has trouble relating to his nerdy son (though Hank's son is directly from the "nerdy kid" sitcom toolkit – he has huge glasses like Minkus on Boy Meets World and he talks almost exclusively in Yoda-esque backwards sentences). He barks stentorian proclamations, and refuses to admit when he's wrong.

Now, if you're going to put Kelsey Grammer in a sitcom (rather than let him graciously retire), there's precious little reason to ask him to do something else. Clearly this is what he does, and he doesn't do it badly. Unfortunately, watching him in any sitcom since Frasier mainly serves as a reminder of how good the writing was on Frasier. Minor adjustments to make his characters not quite identical to Frasier Crane only make it clearer how much the rest of him is exactly like Frasier Crane. I'm not saying Kelsey Grammer shouldn't be allowed to continue acting, if that's what he wants to do. I'm just saying a sequel to Down Periscope would be better than this.

The show's creator is Tucker Cawley, who was on Everybody Loves Raymond for a lot of years, and – as readers of this site know – Raymond was the last studio-audience sitcom that actually got it right. So, a trustworthy writer is at the helm here, but plenty of things can still get in the way. Grammer is a heavyweight, but not exactly someone you think of as stable (emotionally or physically): it's likely he demanded changes to make the character play to his strengths. Also, it's a pilot, which means the temptation to explain a lot of backstory. Backstory shouldn't be that necessary for a sitcom: just introduce the characters and show us why they're funny, and we'll pick the rest up as we go along. But the temptation is there, and it's powerful. Thus, one hacky opening scene at the front of their Manhattan apartment building as their belongings are loaded into a truck and the show's backstory is loaded into joyless expository dialogue.

But the main problem is the concept. This is a show about a big-time powerful rich guy having to deal with losing all that power and wealth, and being forced to spend time with his family, rather than being what it should be: a show about nothing. (Seinfeld claimed credit for this, but really almost every lasting sitcom is about nothing: Friends, Cheers, Everybody Loves Raymond, The Office, Roseanne, the list goes on and on. They may involve certain relationships and settings, but they don't hinge on any specific concept, like a guy having to make a huge adjustment, mainly because at some point the adjustment is made and then where do you go? Frasier, of course, is the obvious exception – Frasier gets divorced, moves across the country, and his retired father moves in with him.) Maybe Cawley had a great idea for a show about a family, and some giblet-head at ABC said, "Yeah, but what's the hook?" Whatever the reason, the show is saddled with this concept and it means (at least for the pilot) that every joke is in service of underlining the concept, and that sort of thing is just comedy poison. Also, the show has some tired clichés like the wacky neighbor (played, as wacky neighbors often are, by David Koechner, and written as Hank's foil in a way that's eerily reminiscent of the Randy Quaid/Chevy Chase dynamic from the Vacation movies), and the "Gilligan cut," which is among those things an established sitcom can get away with, once you've grounded the characters so well that you can do a really great version of it. But this is not a really great version of it:

Hank (arguing with his wife as they try to go to bed): There's nothing more important to me than you and the children!

His Son (emerging sleepily from his bedroom): Dad?

Hank: Not now, Henry!

Come on, new sitcoms. Don't make me sit through this stuff.

The Middle

ABC, Wednesdays at 8:30

The Middle is headlined (and, unfortunately, narrated) by Patricia Heaton, who co-starred with Kelsey Grammer in the 2007 non-starter Back to You, and whom you may have noticed in a little show called Everybody Loves Raymond. (She was the mom.) She's married to Neil ("Janitor") Flynn, and they live with their three children in the midwest, "the middle of nowhere," as she describes it, which means the show is angling for a working-class vibe. Heaton was excellent on Everybody Loves Raymond and deserved every Emmy she won for it, but I think the writing deserved a lot of the credit, too. The Middle would be better as more of an ensemble piece (especially with Neil Flynn in that ensemble!) which is one of many reasons I'm sorry it carries Heaton's narration.

The title and the working-class vibe are just a couple of the attributes the show shares with Malcolm in the Middle. Another is the youngest son, Brick, played by Atticus Shaffer (whose parents were apparently trying to one-up Bruce Willis and Demi Moore). Shaffer is a dead ringer for Erik Per Sullivan, and Brick is exactly as strange and detached as Sullivan's Dewey was on Malcolm. He tends to pull his pants down before entering the boys' restroom at school, he reads mystery novels to himself while his friends are singing him the birthday song around a cake full of candles, and his backpack is his best friend. He's precocious and he's hilarious. Of course, Neil Flynn is very funny as well. (After a fusillade of emergencies each starting with, "Mom!..." Heaton asks him, "We did teach them the word 'Dad,' didn't we?" He responds with a "Ha ha ha!" delivered exactly as perfectly as you'd expect.) Other than that, the show is kind of a clunker. Heaton's character is too pathetic to laugh at – at least Jane Kaczmarek had that fire in her belly – and most of the story seems a little too affected to take seriously. If you're still on the fence about this one, one of Heaton's co-workers is played by Chris Kattan.

Three Rivers

CBS, Sundays at 9:00

Alex O'Laughlin returns to CBS! This is apparently news, but has anyone even heard of him, beyond the circle of housebound cat ladies who wrote angry letters to CBS for canceling his utterly awful vampire detective story Moonlight? Now he's a transplant surgeon at Three Rivers Hospital in Pittsburgh, so that blood all over his front is from a heart transplant, not last night's meal. The premise of the show is that a transplant makes a huge difference in a patient's life, but the premise of any medical drama is that a [medical procedure] can make a huge difference, so the show feels a lot more generic than it obviously thinks it is.

The only other doctor we really meet is played by Katherine Moennig, whom I last saw on Showtime's The L Word, with her face buried between Sarah Shahi's thighs. I never liked her character on The L Word one bit, but still, that's a lot to live up to. At least on this show, she has a female-length hairstyle. She doesn't seem to work in transplants, further underscoring the aimlessness of the show's premise; this week, she deals with a case of pica – a young man, improbably named Auden Drinkwater, who compulsively eats metal things like staples and tweezers. When we first meet her, she's cursing the hospital's new medical records database and making sarcastic comments about medicine's "paperless future." I have no choice but to see this as a right-wing attack on Obama's health care plan, which makes online records a cornerstone of its cost-cutting measures. Certainly it makes no sense in the context of the show, because the rest of the episode is filled with touchscreen tablet computers and other technical wizardry that depend vitally on the medical records database. For instance, AOL (har!) is in a conference room with other doctors, and needs to present the case of a young mother-to-be who's having heart trouble. He presses a spot on the plate glass wall separating them from the hallway, and the entire glass wall becomes a touchscreen interface displaying all her medical records, including a 3D animation of her beating heart. I never understood this in Minority Report and I don't understand it here – why is it assumed that the future of technology is transparency? Isn't it easier to read medical records when they have a background? Wouldn't her heart animation be clearer without seeing the intern's face from the next room in the middle of it? Also, isn't it sort of a breach of a patient's privacy when all her information is projected in six-inch letters so that anyone walking by can read it backwards?

When I get bogged down in minutiae like this, it's a sign that ATGoNFP fatigue has set in. And why wouldn't it? This is another generic doctor show – not the worst ever, but certainly not special enough to bother putting on TV. The main organ donor from this week's episode dies in Cleveland, so we're in for some dazzling overhead shots of The Cleve, but other than that, there's no reason to watch. Also, the intercom tone they use in the background to page doctors is very similar to the sound my dad's office computer makes when Quickbooks causes it to crash, losing hours of important work, and guaranteeing a profanity-filled tirade. So whenever the sound mixer puts it in a scene, it makes my heart rate jump, just like when Pillsbury put my alarm clock noise in one of its ads a few years back. Thank God I have an iPhone now and my alarm clock noise is a They Might Be Giants song – nobody's going to put that in the background of a TV show. (Not if they know what's good for them...)

I'll TiVo Another Episode Of...

The Middle, with serious reservations. It doesn't seem poised for the long haul, but it's hard for me to say no to Neil Flynn and his youngest kid really is excellent.

The Good Wife bought itself another week, which is among the many hazards of running a TiVo gauntlet every year – you get hooked on a show you have no business watching and never would've seen if you watched TV like a regular person. Modern Family is hanging on for now, and of course Community and FlashForward won't be going anywhere for a while. Glee remains on the bubble, and I think I actually scheduled one more recording of Cougar Town – despite its many flaws, Dan Byrd and Ian Gomez keep winning me over. (Never run a TiVo gauntlet, people...)

Returning Shows

Lie to Me is well made but it treats you like an idiot. Every time someone's facial tic exposes them in a lie, Tim Roth (or one of his cohorts) sits and explains to them how he knows they're lying. I'd prefer if we could just accept the premise of the show and when he says he knows someone is being untruthful, we'll just take his word for it. As it is, it seems like the show is constantly reminding us what it's about. Like NUMB3RS, it will stay on the TiVo until MaryBeth gets tired of it. She puts up with all my shows; the least I can do is extend her the same courtesy. (But not Grey's Anatomy. In case she's reading this: No! Not Grey's Anatomy.)

Returning Next Week

30 Rock: NBC, Thursday 10/15 at 9:30

Premiering Many Weeks Hence

V: ABC, Tuesday 11/3 at 8:00

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