So you have movie producers (Mel Gibson/Bruce Davey) teaming up with soapies (Aaron Spelling/E. Duke Vincent) and a dash of drama (Ken Topolsky, who learned his trade when producing for Party of Five) mixed together. What do you get ? High production value with halfbaked substance. A nice shell of a half filled egg.
It’s another single mom with two children series, where the boy gets to be a batboy for the New York Empires, a fictive major league baseball club. We see a bit of family drama, school stuff, and of course lotsa baseball.
But I see mediocrity from a mile away, try to imagine when I saw this show just 2 feet away from my LCD screen. The acting is mediocre. The characters are stereotypes with a hollow echo to emphasise that. The dialogue is simple and predictable. The story line has perfect S turns everywhere. It’s like a scriptbook template with the correct words replaced to match this show. Sure the show has a bigger budget than most can ever hope to receive, but everyone is on auto-pilot, the writers and the actors, including Dean Cain and Christopher Lloyd.
Luckily, this series has no future for export (nowhere in the world can it be sold, only in the States is baseball a major sport), so hopefully, a well deserved demotion to the minor league (i.e. cancellation, though CBS probably needs the demo this show is targeting to break away from the “old” network status) will follow soon.