Sunday, September 30, 2012
Idle TV Thoughts
I know there still aren't that many people who've seen Popular (at the very least, I was pleasantly surprised by Leslie Grossman's cameo in the New Normal pilot, since none of the reviews I'd read mentioned it), but I'm kind of surprised that there isn't more Internet-talk regarding the journey from the Glamazons worshipping Gwyneth to the lady herself becoming an auxiliary member of the Ryan Murphy Players. Did he just sort of will their collaboration into being as an extra-vocal fan?
Thursday, September 27, 2012
In Which I Am Psychic, Part II
Julian Fellowes agrees: A Downton Abbey prequel would probably be totally rad.
So what's the fiercer hypothetical casting competition? American ingenues for Cora or British veterans for Violet?
So what's the fiercer hypothetical casting competition? American ingenues for Cora or British veterans for Violet?
Tuesday, September 25, 2012
On New Fall Shows
A brief rundown on what I've seen so far:
The Mindy Project - Basically won me over immediately in featuring the show's protagonist speaking dialogue along with You've Got Mail (something I've done literally dozens of times) in the pilot's early minutes. It's got a lot of good pieces in a solid cast and a well-defined workplace, but definitely needs focus in going forward to balance it all. Looking at the sheer number of characters involved in The Office, it's not really surprising that Mindy Kaling jumped in with so many people in play. I just hope she and her writers pace themselves in giving more shape to the ensemble.
Ben & Kate - Maybe the most self-assured of the all the pilots I've seen so far, and certainly so among the comedies. The pilot does a good job of mediating between its broad comedic moments and low-key emotional beats, particularly with the eponymous pair as embodied by Nat Faxon and Dakota Johnson. The show has a good foundation, and as much as I liked The Mindy Project, this is the show that made me think that Fox's Tuesday lineup could be really solid all the way from 8-10.
The New Normal - Has no command over its tone, and it is mesmerizing. The good parts are very good, or at least have the potential to be: Andrew Rannells may be the ur-Ryan Murphy avatar, skilled at both the skating-on-the-edge-of-intentional-camp cattiness and the big emotional beats; Rannells and Justin Bartha have a warm, easy chemistry that helps the show enormously and moved the plot forward without too much overly expository "Even though our personalities are so different, I still love you!" rote pilot dialogue; Bebe Wood single-handedly saved the second episode with a killer Little Edie Beale impersonation. The rest sticks out dramatically in contrast with the good: Ellen Barkin's confrontational hostile blonde does not fit with the rest of the material the way previous confrontational hostile blondes have in prior Murphy productions; periodically the show veers off into naked emotional pleas for tolerance that play extremely preachy, that make me feel like the show has broken the fourth wall, grabbed me by the shoulders and shaken me back and forth demanding to be heard. (I'm already on your side! Stop scolding me!) Like all Murphy productions (I've seen everything but Nip/Tuck), there's something compulsively watchable about this to me, and I think they've got all the pieces for something good and legitimately heartfelt. I also realize that though I was a Chuck fan, I don't have a strong sense of what Ali Adler's writing voice is, so maybe that will come out more as time goes on. (I am also really intrigued by this whole Bryan-works-on-a-TV-show thing, and wondering if it makes me a bad person to want Murphy to use it to make thinly-veiled, passive-aggressive snipes at the Glee cast, Grosse Pointe/Studio 60-style.)
Go On - A solid vehicle for Matthew Perry, and one that balances weirdness with genuine emotion well enough that it could be his Cougar Town. The show hasn't quite figured out how much of each episode should be focused on the office versus the support group, but it's laid out a good foundation for building on its characters. I don't love this, necessarily, but I'm interested to see where it will go, and the length of the show fits perfectly with the 20-minute window created by my nightly facial masks.
Guys With Kids - "Not as bad as I thought it would be" feels like damning with faint praise, but that's the truth. I don't think this show deserves some of the bad rap it's gotten from critics (a lot like last year's How to Be a Gentleman). The pilot at least seemed to deal in issues of parenthood in general rather than specifically fatherhood, and didn't feel as reductive as reviews led me to anticipate. And while I don't view laughter as a litmus test for overall quality, I did laugh several times at this pilot. Probably too bro-y for me to put it into regular rotation, but not bad.
The Mob Doctor - Well, it's all there in the title, isn't it? Two genres patched together, Frankenstein's-Monster-style. The pilot did the protagonist a disservice by circling around her motivations without really striking at the heart of them - if there's any time to indulge in a little exposition, surely it is in your pilot - which makes her decision at the end of the episode to stay in Chicago, indebted to the mob, when she's offered an out all the more mystifying (but not really intriguing.) I kept feeling like the show could do with a more frank discussion of medical ethics and the expectations placed on medical professionals, but there don't seem to be a lot of opportunities for that to come up with the morally-compromised side held apart from the doctor-who-just-cares-too-much side. Also, the pilot made it seem like Zach Gilford and Zeljko Ivanek are going to consistently be kind of stuck in the background, which will only be frustrating in the long term.
Animal Practice - Somehow simultaneously too absurd and not absurd enough. The pilot placed too much emphasis on the oddball nature of the veterinary staff, alongside a ex-lovers storyline with Justin Kirk and Joanna Garcia so by-the-numbers that I felt like I could speak the dialogue along with them through each beat. I like the idea of switching up the medical show genre with an animal hospital setting (as long as everyone's treated well), and I like Kirk and Garcia from previous work, but this show trades way too heavily in quirk.
Revolution - I started rewatching the Lost pilot to clarify a point I wanted to make about the Revolution pilot, and recalled how unbelievably good the former is, and how poorly the shows that have followed in its wake have handled the task of creating high-concept pilots with both solid character introductions and complicated mythology. In the case of Lost's first hours, the writers use the monster and the polar bear to establish the fundamental unreality of the island environment right off the bat. Revolution has an interesting premise, but introduces it in such a murky way that I couldn't help but focus on nitpicky questions instead of the sketched-in characters - what, outside of a reversal of the laws of nature, would cause batteries to fail spontaneously along with the collapse of the electrical grid? Is there still lightning? Static cling? This kind of show tends to make for very good recap reading, because recappers get so frustrated with the drawn-out mythology that they end up tapping into some very entertaining rage. But I won't be sticking with it otherwise.
The Mindy Project - Basically won me over immediately in featuring the show's protagonist speaking dialogue along with You've Got Mail (something I've done literally dozens of times) in the pilot's early minutes. It's got a lot of good pieces in a solid cast and a well-defined workplace, but definitely needs focus in going forward to balance it all. Looking at the sheer number of characters involved in The Office, it's not really surprising that Mindy Kaling jumped in with so many people in play. I just hope she and her writers pace themselves in giving more shape to the ensemble.
Ben & Kate - Maybe the most self-assured of the all the pilots I've seen so far, and certainly so among the comedies. The pilot does a good job of mediating between its broad comedic moments and low-key emotional beats, particularly with the eponymous pair as embodied by Nat Faxon and Dakota Johnson. The show has a good foundation, and as much as I liked The Mindy Project, this is the show that made me think that Fox's Tuesday lineup could be really solid all the way from 8-10.
The New Normal - Has no command over its tone, and it is mesmerizing. The good parts are very good, or at least have the potential to be: Andrew Rannells may be the ur-Ryan Murphy avatar, skilled at both the skating-on-the-edge-of-intentional-camp cattiness and the big emotional beats; Rannells and Justin Bartha have a warm, easy chemistry that helps the show enormously and moved the plot forward without too much overly expository "Even though our personalities are so different, I still love you!" rote pilot dialogue; Bebe Wood single-handedly saved the second episode with a killer Little Edie Beale impersonation. The rest sticks out dramatically in contrast with the good: Ellen Barkin's confrontational hostile blonde does not fit with the rest of the material the way previous confrontational hostile blondes have in prior Murphy productions; periodically the show veers off into naked emotional pleas for tolerance that play extremely preachy, that make me feel like the show has broken the fourth wall, grabbed me by the shoulders and shaken me back and forth demanding to be heard. (I'm already on your side! Stop scolding me!) Like all Murphy productions (I've seen everything but Nip/Tuck), there's something compulsively watchable about this to me, and I think they've got all the pieces for something good and legitimately heartfelt. I also realize that though I was a Chuck fan, I don't have a strong sense of what Ali Adler's writing voice is, so maybe that will come out more as time goes on. (I am also really intrigued by this whole Bryan-works-on-a-TV-show thing, and wondering if it makes me a bad person to want Murphy to use it to make thinly-veiled, passive-aggressive snipes at the Glee cast, Grosse Pointe/Studio 60-style.)
Go On - A solid vehicle for Matthew Perry, and one that balances weirdness with genuine emotion well enough that it could be his Cougar Town. The show hasn't quite figured out how much of each episode should be focused on the office versus the support group, but it's laid out a good foundation for building on its characters. I don't love this, necessarily, but I'm interested to see where it will go, and the length of the show fits perfectly with the 20-minute window created by my nightly facial masks.
Guys With Kids - "Not as bad as I thought it would be" feels like damning with faint praise, but that's the truth. I don't think this show deserves some of the bad rap it's gotten from critics (a lot like last year's How to Be a Gentleman). The pilot at least seemed to deal in issues of parenthood in general rather than specifically fatherhood, and didn't feel as reductive as reviews led me to anticipate. And while I don't view laughter as a litmus test for overall quality, I did laugh several times at this pilot. Probably too bro-y for me to put it into regular rotation, but not bad.
The Mob Doctor - Well, it's all there in the title, isn't it? Two genres patched together, Frankenstein's-Monster-style. The pilot did the protagonist a disservice by circling around her motivations without really striking at the heart of them - if there's any time to indulge in a little exposition, surely it is in your pilot - which makes her decision at the end of the episode to stay in Chicago, indebted to the mob, when she's offered an out all the more mystifying (but not really intriguing.) I kept feeling like the show could do with a more frank discussion of medical ethics and the expectations placed on medical professionals, but there don't seem to be a lot of opportunities for that to come up with the morally-compromised side held apart from the doctor-who-just-cares-too-much side. Also, the pilot made it seem like Zach Gilford and Zeljko Ivanek are going to consistently be kind of stuck in the background, which will only be frustrating in the long term.
Animal Practice - Somehow simultaneously too absurd and not absurd enough. The pilot placed too much emphasis on the oddball nature of the veterinary staff, alongside a ex-lovers storyline with Justin Kirk and Joanna Garcia so by-the-numbers that I felt like I could speak the dialogue along with them through each beat. I like the idea of switching up the medical show genre with an animal hospital setting (as long as everyone's treated well), and I like Kirk and Garcia from previous work, but this show trades way too heavily in quirk.
Revolution - I started rewatching the Lost pilot to clarify a point I wanted to make about the Revolution pilot, and recalled how unbelievably good the former is, and how poorly the shows that have followed in its wake have handled the task of creating high-concept pilots with both solid character introductions and complicated mythology. In the case of Lost's first hours, the writers use the monster and the polar bear to establish the fundamental unreality of the island environment right off the bat. Revolution has an interesting premise, but introduces it in such a murky way that I couldn't help but focus on nitpicky questions instead of the sketched-in characters - what, outside of a reversal of the laws of nature, would cause batteries to fail spontaneously along with the collapse of the electrical grid? Is there still lightning? Static cling? This kind of show tends to make for very good recap reading, because recappers get so frustrated with the drawn-out mythology that they end up tapping into some very entertaining rage. But I won't be sticking with it otherwise.
Friday, September 14, 2012
Trailer Thoughts
So portentous and actorly! I want to give it a nineteenth-century-style name. Lincoln; or, Totally Rad Actors in Slightly Suspect Wigs.
I was going to give this one a few days, after dealing with other posts that have been in the pipeline forever, but this one thought is nagging at me and I just wanted to get it down. I know it's a case of art imitating life from two different points, but it's really weirding me out how much Tommy Lee Jones' wig and pallor make him look like Stoneman from Birth of a Nation. And I feel like Spielberg being Spielberg, that can't possibly be unintentional, right? Like maybe there's this whole side project of challenging Thaddeus Stevens' cinematic legacy? Mind you, this is based on about five seconds of trailer. But now I'm curious to see whether that's borne out at all in the movie.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)