Kimputer's Weblog

Time to start reviewing the individual new shows for this season, and I’m actually starting with one that I’m going to drop. It’s another JJ Abrams produced series, and this will be the second one in a row from this usual genius that just didn’t make the cut (last year’s What About Brian starts its second season this fall, which I also dropped after a few episodes). You can actually compare this quite good with that show, it has it’s drama bit going, but it’s just not enough. The six degrees twist adds something, but it’s too contrived (with the same people bumping into each other every day or so). There are also a few mystery story lines unveiling, but it lingers on a bit too long. All in all, not too interesting and a bit too slow.

With almost all of this season’s new pilots rolled out, I’ve gotta be harsh and cut corners already, mainly because time seems to be an unbudging variable.
While ratings look pretty bad all across the board for all the big fours, my cuts are purely based on specialty, quality and longevity of the shows.
Of course, the comedies are the easy targets, offering nothing new, while also not really being laughing matter.
So it’s bye-bye to:

Happy Hour (Comedy. Riihiiight)
Til Death (Hope it dies really soon)
Vanished (serialised, but boringly infused with half-revealing hints and clues that lead nowhere)
Kidnapped (serialised, but boring, feels miscast and uninteresting)
Friday Night Lights (Sports docu style filming. Peter Berg on a digicam frenzy)
Help Me Help You (Nice try mr. Ted Danson)
Men in Trees (Light-hearted Everwood for females. Nice effort, but really isn’t missed when gone)
The Unit (A bit too much of the same)
Dexter (too weird and unbelievable outline, that will only become worse in the future)

This still leaves me with some 20 shows every week. Next round of the axe in a few weeks.

Fox tries to cash in on their success with serialised drama series (24, Prison Break), and this title speaks for itself. In this case, they want to keep us a few seasons busy with the suddenly vanished wife of a senator, making it a high profile case.
Mystery ensues, and everyone seems to have a part, a stake and/or motive. Sounds exciting ? Well, somehow, it isn’t. As urgent as this matter sounds, while watching it, you don’t feel it. Maybe it’s the structure, maybe it’s the story writing (chaotic, uninteresting twists). Maybe it’s just the basics that don’t fit. Maybe Mimi Leder lost her touch (she got her big break under Steven Spielberg’s wings, starting with ER, followed by movies like Deep Impact, Pay it Forward and The Peacemaker), because last year’s Jonny Zero was a disaster (also on Fox). This one isn’t that bad, but with a big “Mediocre” badge hanging on your shirt, you pretty much pale in contrast to your bigger brothers (the aforementioned 24 and Prison Break).

These 3 episodes are enough to get a clear picture of how the rest of the season will go. After all, season 1 proved to be consistently thrilling, involving all characters, and slowly deepening the story lines.
If you utter the words adrenaline and TV, the only association possible is Prison Break. It’s the only show where an average viewer produces enough adrenaline during one episode to stockpile enough of it to feed a whole intensive care unit of a medium sized hospital.
This show is hard to beat for many years to come (even though many new series premiering this season try to mimick this kind of serialisation, which of course itself is a derative of the same net’s 24).

With most cablers winding down their half season (resuming January), it’s time to re-assess my TV schedule.
As always, every year, some TV shows launch bigger, with movie stars attached to it, but only time will tell if they’re worth my time. So here goes:

Continued from last year (slightly sorted according to quality):

Prison Break
Battlestar Galactica
Lost
CSI
Boston Legal
Grey’s Anatomy
My Name Is Earl
Everybody Hates Chris
Criminal Minds
Smallville
The Unit

New shows:

Fox (smartly starting most shows early, out of competition, so to speak):
Vanished
Justice
Standoff
Til Death

NBC:
Heroes
Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip (Amanda Peet)
Friday Night Lights (exec. prod. Peter Berg, writer/director Friday Night Lights and Very Bad Things)
Kidnapped (Delroy Lindo, Timothy Hutton)
30 Rock (Alec Baldwin)
20 Good Years

CBS:
The Class (creator David Crane of NBC’s Friends)
Jericho (director Jon Turteltaub of National Treasure (and sequel), Phenomenon, Cool Runnings)
Smith (Ray Liotta, Virginia Madsen, Amy Smart)
Shark (James Woods, director Spike Lee)

ABC:
Six Degrees
Brothers & Sisters
The Nine
Ugly Betty
Knights of Prosperity
Help Me Help You
Men in Trees (Anne Heche, director James Mangold (Copland, Walk the Line))

CW:
Runaway (Donnie Wahlberg)

So, there you have it. A solid 30 hour week. For my own sake, I hope the quality isn’t that overwhelming, otherwise I’ll have no time to sleep.

Since tomorrow, the fall schedule will officially start (Season 2 of Prison Break), I think it’s about time to do an all-round summer review, roughly sorted from good to bad:

The 4400: Grown from two season, it’s really REALLY heating up. Tension is tangible, while drama is developed on a personal level. With one episode left, you know a big cliff hanger is coming up, and season 4 will not be a winding down road.

Monk: Consistently hilarious, some jokes just don’t get old. But the stories put forward keep being surprising, meaning I see some more Emmies coming this neurotic’s way.

Psych: Outline might put you off, thinking it’s a Monk copy, but early on, it proves to be able to stand on its own quite well. Pretty funny by itself, and story-wise, it’s pretty okay. A keeper, for now.

The Dead Zone: As I feared, it’s back to episodic story telling, and supporting characters are pretty much paper weights now, instead of assets, like the previous seasons. Still good enough to be on my weekly schedule though.

Weeds: Season 2 just premiered, but it looks like another promising start, for this short (only 12 eps) short (did I mention it’s only a half hour show ?) dramedy.

Last Comic Standing: As per previous seasons, quite a laughing fest, with a solid line-up and a well deserved winner.

Chappelle’s Show: With less than a handful of episodes, you can’t even call it a season. Also, you wonder why his DVD’s broke sales records. Some skits are funny indeed, but mostly, it gets old pretty fast.

The Contender: Business as usual. Train, diss your opponent, and call him out, concluded by a punching game (and a loser featurette). Testosterone filled reality tv. An excellent time filler.

The Closer: Continuing with last season’s trick, nothing much has changed. It’s an able time filler, since you’ve only got the weekly murder to rely on. Seems like nothing will grow further, but at least you know what you’re dealing with. Mildly funny, and mildly dramatic.

Brotherhood: Pretty slow character developing show, which has strength in subtle drama. Might be a bit too slow for some, but I see potential here and there.

Eureka: Nice try at a light-hearted sci-fi series, focuses mainly on the gagdet of the week and a bit of story recycling (if you’ve watched a lot of sci-fi before). Character development is not high on the check list, so it’s a time filler at best, since it doesn’t reach hilarity levels yet. Maybe the writers still have to hone their skills to adept to this small town setting, but I’m not betting any real money on it.

Nightmares & Dreamscapes: 8 seperate short stories by Stephen King. I fell asleep during story 2. Didn’t even finish them all. He might be able to write books, but the translation of his short stories to the small screen 45 minute format just isn’t something to write home about. Period.

Who Wants to be a Superhero: If this is called a reality show, then Superman eats Kryptonite for breakfast. There’s more acting involved than many badly scripted dramas combined together. It might be fun for some to laugh at freaky contestants, but in the long run, it can’t hold any real interest.

Blade – The Series: As much as the movies were brainless but entertaining, the series just isn’t able to capture anything positive from it. Low budget causes a lot of the damage, while uninteresting story lines and characters does the rest. This small screen daywalker version isn’t appealing on any level.

With the last review of the normal TV season out of the way, it’s time to bring on the summer schedule. Mostly cable shows now, quality-wise, it’s pretty much up there.
So here it is:

MUST-SEE:
The 4400 (Season 3, USA Network)
Monk (Season 5, USA Network)

Pretty good:
The Dead Zone (Season 5, USA Network)
Weeds (Season 2, Showtime (they must be high on something, starting late August!))

Late Night:
The Colbert Report

Time-filler:
The Closer (Season 2, TNT)

Gonna-try:
Psych (Season 1, USA Network)
Blade: The Series (Season 1, Spike TV)

Update: still more series are starting this summer, so here are a few more shows:

Pretty good:
Last Comic Standing (Season 4, NBC)

Time-filler:
The Contender (Season 2, ESPN)

Gonna-try:
Brotherhood (Season 1, Showtime)
Eureka (Season 1, Sci-fi chan)
Knights of Prosperity (Season 1, ABC)
Who Wants to be a Superhero (Season 1, Sci-fi chan)
Nightmares and Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King (Season 1, TNT)

Spike TV is diverting a bit of its (usually male oriented reality shows) budget to original series, and this is the first of the batch. Trying it safely, it’s a continuing of a Marvel Movie franchise, with Avi Arad still attached as producer.
Of course, the basics are the same, but they’re trying new things as not to rehash the old stories. Also apparent are a set of arch-enemies recurring throughout the series (even featuring as the A-story for now). Looks promising ? Well, one series who followed the same formula was Highlander. And if you’ve paid attention, the quality wasn’t really that good (though it lasted 6 seasons on syndication). This is about the same, budget doesn’t seem to be high, but they try to make the most of it (unflattering sfx and choreography). Hiring cheap actors is another budget saving measure.
All in all, for now it’s filling the low season TV schedule, but come overlap time (when the summer series are finishing up in Sept/Oct, and the networks are already starting their new TV season), Blade will be the first to be cut off.

After a joyful inauguration (16 million viewers premiere), it was quickly faced with dwindling ratings. A quick decision to replace creator Rod Lurie with a seasoned producer (Steve Bochco) didn’t help either. Drama seemed a bit distant, and story lines weren’t world changing. The mushy mix of feminism and patriotism isn’t something must-see week in week out, and the backdoor politics seemed highly predictable. Exit Geena Davis as Commander-in-Chief seemed like the right choice for ABC, and in this case, though the series was not half bad, I agree, so it can make way for new blood next season.

And with the last episode of Huff, I’ve almost cleared my backlog of TV episodes I still had to see. And it ends on an extremely sour note, as the end was a cliffhanger, after which I found out Huff was canceled due to extremely low ratings (something that was already evident last year). Emmy nomimations (and wins) didn’t help it either, even though it continued this season with the same kind of excellent writing. As always, ratings (which translates to money) decides the fate of every series, but I’m still glad it had a chance for its short existence on paid cable.

Pretty much a tradition by now, while some major things have happened during the season, they save the best for last, and of course, the beginning. In a sense, if you’ve already figured this out, it lived up to its expectation. This somehow creates an artificial and contrived atmosphere (especially during those low days in the middle of the season), where you’re almost apathetic to most events, only suddenly waking up from a slumber when the b-story, the story arch which is the reason you actually tuned in for, continues, although with certain amount of stuttering.
With the WB combing powers with UPN next season, let’s hope they can manage to up the quaility of the whole season instead of only the few strategically placed episodes.

While Everwood’s quality has been at a respectable level for quite a while, it seemed it slumped a little for this season. Things didn’t move forward, and the topics we’ve seen have already been handled before. This muddling through kept going on till almost the end, where things took a wrong turn with writers knowing the pending end was now nigh. In a desperate writing spree, they didn’t even figure out how contrived it is to have three principle characters land in the hospital in one episode.
In the end, it wasn’t really cutting edge drama, but at least it was a satisfactory.

A short season for sure, but luckily already renewed for a second season. Between the hilarious family quibbles and drama, stories continued to unfold and characters are still developing. It even ends with a smashing cliffhanger. This is definitely one to hold on to (a long wait though, probably resuming somewhere next year).

I feared it would be a bad season for Alias, but at the exact point of my last review, it started picking up again. Of course, the looming end was in play now, and the producers had quite a treat for us (though crunching it all in such a short time does come with its flaws). But with 4 years of building up a mythical legend as big as Ramboldi, you can’t help but feel disappointed at some aspects of the big end-game. Alias ends admirably though, while maybe a few unnecessary sacrifices were made, some poetic justice has been served. Alias was truly one of a kind, so let’s hope J.J. Abrams has more up his sleeve the coming years. Until then, I’d quite happily recommend you buy this series as a DVD box.

ABC is definitely the network that gives the most bang for its bucks. Not only by quality (and variety), but also in quantity. Most series will have 22 episodes locked per season, but at this network, most have seen 24 pass by, with 28 eps of Grey’s Anatomy, and 27 for Boston Legal to top things off.
This being David E. Kelley’s only current running TV show, the basis was already strong, but the addition of Candice Bergen to the cast was a smart move. With its own unique whackiness building steady, the keen sense of drama isn’t left behind either, a marriage between the two that only David E. Kelley can accomplish. ABC luckily knows this, and renewed it for a third season, even though this isn’t the ratings buster they hoped it would be.