Mon, October 4, 2010

I can't help being really, really confused by the cancellation of Law & Order and the launch of Law & Order: Los Angeles in the same year. The former was a lifeline for working actors in New York, and a stalwart of NBC's lineup. Its revolving-door cast means there's no reason the cancellation had anything to do with the story lines going stale or the principals demanding too much money, because they could all be switched out. So, after pondering it as hard as I could for as long as I cared to (nine minutes), my best guess is that the grips and gaffers were starting to demand too much money, or that the show had simply run out of New York addresses to put on those interstitial "thunk-thunk" title cards.

Presumably, the change of venue will not mean that all the cases are related to Hollywood starlets or the excesses of celebrity culture, but that's all this first episode is about. Everyone on the case spends the episode rolling their eyes at Danielle Panabaker (preposterously miscast as a vapid media sensation whose stage mother uses her for access to nightclubs and money – akin to Lindsay Lohan if Lohan had never had talent) and her chums for being superficial and untalented. Kind of ironic when Skeet Ulrich, star of Jericho, is getting huffy about who is a subpar actor. I haven't watched enough of the Law & Order franchise to say whether this version is better or worse than average, but it seems like a lot of very grumpy people constantly sneering at witnesses and suspects in the most cynical way. It lacks the procedural 'zazz of CSI or the clever deductive leaps of Castle/The Mentalist/Psych or the courtroom antics of Boston Legal. Which makes it pretty much cut-and-dry police work – essentially a successor to Dragnet. Kind of makes you realize what an important element Jack Webb was. As always, Alfred Molina classes things up. (Molina: the anti-Meloni?) It was nice to see Shawnee Smith (Becker) in a guest role, along with a couple of girlies from my Ones to Watch list: Leah Pipes (Life is Wild) and Danielle Panabaker (Shark).

Danielle's little sister Kay (by way of the most forced segue ever), turned in a fantastic guest performance on an episode of Boston Legal a few years back, but can normally be seen mouthing off as Marg Helgenberger's daughter on CSI. Now she's playing a similarly surly teen on ABC's No Ordinary Family – in a family that is startlingly ordinary (bitchy, boy-crazy daughter, dim-witted son, blockheaded dad) except that the mom is a research scientist. The gist of the show is that they're going to rip off The Incredibles and pair each of these four up with a superpower that fits his or her station in life: so the mom, who feels like she's stretched in all different places at once – well she can't stretch like Elastigirl because that would be obvious, so she'll have super-speed, so she can very nearly be in all those places at once. The son, who can't master the quadratic equation (and really, who could?), is suddenly a math whiz. The daughter, who is dealing with gossipy backstabbing at school, gets telepathy. And the dad – well, they still couldn't think up anything better than "super strong." The key problem is that, by the show creators' own admission, they're trying to fit four or five different shows into one show here. A family melodrama, a police procedural, an effects-driven superhero show, a conspiracy thriller, and some buddy comedy stuff, too. And they didn't even bother waiting until episode two to start layering some of that stuff in. (I'd have at least waited on the conspiracy stuff, which is not going to be the hook that grabs someone who was otherwise on the fence.) Given all that material, why waste a third of the show establishing the personalities of four characters who are so unidimensional? Skip the origin story and do that thing I hate where you just throw us into the middle of some kind of superhero derring-do, and then a title card pops up that says "three days earlier" and you explain a little bit about how they swallowed some green goo in a jungle plane crash.

I could go on and on about how poorly the show is put together, and inconsistent within its own set of rules but that stuff gets boring fast. (Still, the most preposterous part of the whole thing is a minor character, in Los Angeles, telling Julie Benz: "I'd take the freeway at this hour; the surface streets are a mess." What?!) Instead, I just want to make fun of the logo, because someone at ABC marketing is really excited about it, and I think it's ridiculous.

It shows a suburban home with a dormer window and a curtain blowing out of it. (Out instead of in, as though there's a wind storm inside the room. And the curtain is so long it would drag all over the floor. And, for some reason, the adjacent window in the same frame is treated with venetian blinds instead of another curtain! But whatever.) During the two-month marketing blitz for this show, I've been exposed to this image repeatedly, and I have never understood it. Obviously, the pleasant little house is supposed to mean "family," but what's the deal with the curtain? They clearly went to a lot of trouble, and they're bashing us over the head with it, so they're trying to tell us something. Finally I just paused it and stared at it, and this is the best I could come up with: it's supposed to look like a superhero cape. Despite the fact that none of the characters wear superhero costumes, with or without capes. And even though the implication here would be that the house is wearing the cape, and therefore flying around the sky with this enormous lumbering roof and this itty bitty white curtain flapping around behind it. Well, I'm sorry, but... Fuck the heck? Why not at least put drapes on both windows?

Obviously, this isn't the top reason not to watch this show (it's 47th on my list), but you really don't want to hear about the stilted narration, marriage counselor frame story, anti-working-mother angle, and preposterously naïve concept of how the inside of a pitching machine works. (It's not my fault, people. They targeted The Incredibles.)

Also new this week was The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret. (I thought they shortened the title, but it's just shorter in the TiVo program grid. I said something about how the shorter title might mean it was a little better. Let's just keep that in mind – it turned out the title wasn't shorter.) If you're familiar with the kinds of characters David Cross creates, you'll find Todd Margaret familiar: hapless, befuddled, and incredibly weak. I thought the show was pretty funny; I'd watch it, but I wouldn't pitch a fit if weather caused 40-60 seconds of it not to be recorded by the satellite dish. (To pick a completely random, hypothetical scenario that my fiancée will not recall from the Jennifer Aniston episode of 30 Rock.) It's kind of like if Will Arnett brought his Will Arnett action figure and David Cross brought his David Cross action figure, and instead of putting them on the Running Wilde playset in the scenario of oil tycoon vs. grungy protestor guy, they put them on the Todd Margaret playset in the scenario of conglomerate tycoon and lowly sales guy. Cross gets shipped off to Britain to sell Thunder Muscle, an energy drink his company mistakenly thinks Brits have a thirst for, and gets paired up with a sadistic intern who spends the episode creating situations to embarrass him. Cross refuses to admit when he's in over his head, so he lies a lot, which endears him to people who take pity on him, but just makes the intern want to shame him more. There are a fair number of genuinely clever moments, and a fair number of moments that go on too long. I'd put it in front of the Running Wilde pilot by a nose (which is currently my standard of what Running Wilde can do, since the second episode – with the Mulder-approved title "Into the Wilde" – was so strewn with Melonis it was like that slow, silent aftermath shot of Omaha Beach in Saving Private Ryan; a couple more like that, and it's a sad farewell to Running Wilde for me). After reading David Cross's discussion of the show, I'm intrigued to see how it unfolds – I can probably spare two and a half more hours for that. (You don't have to fast-forward through commercials on IFC. I like that.)

Law & Order: Los Angeles
No Ordinary Family
The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret

Returning Shows

Nothing much to report. The Good Wife is still a surprisingly good show (and I almost wish it weren't, because if our household cut it I could almost give its slot to The Defenders, which I have no business watching but can't help being charmed by). Other than that, Fox duped me by playing a House re-run where the Human Target season opener was supposed to air – now rescheduled for November 17. (And the sucker punches don't stop there – keep reading!)

The Good Wife

Returning This Week

Lie to Me: Fox, Monday at 9:00
(So long, Lone Star!)
(Hello ...Defenders? No, I can't possibly.)

But this brings up an interesting point: Last week, Miss Alli laid a guilt trip on the TV-watching public for the terrible state of network shows, arguing that shows would be better if we watched better shows. But we would watch better shows if they would let us. We can't very well watch Lone Star if Lone Star isn't on, can we? Between forum postings and people I personally know, I'm aware of a growing trend of people who will steer clear of any new show until at least episode six, because they're so tired of networks yanking shows off the air just as they're getting hooked on them. The more often shows get pulled after two freaking weeks, the more often people don't bother to tune in, figuring they'll only get burned again. A show like Lone Star (while far from perfect, let's remember) was designed to build an audience through word of mouth (and it'd have to, because the advance promotion was virtually non-existent; I watched zero NBC over the summer and I knew about Undercovers three months ahead of its launch – I found out Lone Star existed about a week before it aired). Chatter, Facebook, and Twitter would drive people to catch up with the show online (or on their own TiVos), and then the show's numbers would start rising on Fox Mondays. Or maybe not, but you're never going to find out using the model where you pour all the money into producing a handful of episodes and then throw them away.

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