TV Series Review: Perception

I love Oliver Sacks’ popular psychology books, which showcase oddities like a man who tries to put on his wife’s head like a hat or a man who falls out of bed while trying to hurl away his own leg, thinking it is a severed limb.

You know who else loves Oliver Sacks? My guess is, everyone working on Perception, a TV series featuring a psychology professor/detective whose cases revolve around prosopagnosiacs (people who can’t recognize faces), aphasiacs (people who have lost the ability to understand human speech), and anterograde amnesiacs (people who can’t form memories).

I should add the caveat that these are all worst-case scenarios; some aphasiacs just have trouble thinking of words, some prosopagnosiacs just have trouble with strangers’ faces.  But Perception has no interest in those people. It is only interested in the guy who can’t recognize his own wife and the forty-something woman whose brain is trapped in a single day in 1986.

The psychologist is Dr. Daniel Pierce, played with jittery intensity by a slightly disheveled Eric McCormack.  Pierce is not just an expert on psychological anomalies; like the president of the hair club for men, he’s also a member; a schizophrenic prone to hallucinations. He even employs a live-in teaching assistant whose main responsibility is to tell Daniel whether the person he’s talking to is really there.

When he’s not teaching his students about the vagaries of the mind, Pierce works as a consultant for the FBI alongside special agent Kate Moretti, played by Rachel Leigh Cook. He’s a little sweet on her, and she’s a little sweet on him, but he doesn’t consider himself good dating material and lives in fear that she will witness one of his “episodes.”

I generally think of schizophrenics as tattered people talking to themselves on the street, but like everything else I’ve googled in Perception, the functional schizophrenic turns out to be slightly less far-fetched than one might expect; a schizophrenic law professor teaches at USC.

Still, I suspect most schizophrenics don’t have symptoms as helpful as the professor’s. During each case, Pierce is visited by at least one hallucinatory person who will plead with him, threaten him, cajole him, or just try to run him over with a bicycle. Conveniently, these hallucinations act as clues to each mystery; offering egress to Pierce’s subconscious observations. 

While this is a bit ludicrous, it works well as a mystery-series device, offering a new way to dole out Agatha-Christie style clues. Much of the mystery is figuring out what these hallucinations represent, and in classic whodunit style, the viewer always feels on the verge of solving the mystery before the detective, but never does.

McCormack is quite good as Pierce; one moment clever and thoughtful, the next ranting about the radiation in a security scanner. The rest of the cast is also quite likable, with Cook maintaining her professionalism while staying alert for a romantic signal from Pierce and Kelly Rowan yoga-teacher-soothing as Daniel’s favorite imaginary friend.

The Oliver Sacks influence suffuses the series. At one point we see an aphasiac man laughing as he watches video of George W. Bush’s Saddam Hussein/WMD speech. Daniel explains that as the man has lost the ability to understand speech, he has become a human lie detector who finds lies very funny, an allusion to a Sacks report of a roomful of aphasiacs laughing at a speech by Ronald Reagan. The scene upset some Republicans, even though the series ends with the same guy laughing as Bill Clinton denies having had sex with Monica Lewinski.

As the latest of many series about brilliant but unstable detectives, Perception can be quite entertaining, using psychologically-damaged characters to craft elaborate, sometimes convoluted mysteries. But as a show about mental illness, the series is decidedly shallow. What makes Sacks’s writing so intriguing is his use of aberrant psychology to ponder on the nature of reality and explore whether personality is inherent or is simply the result of activity in the brain that, if diverted, can change us into someone entirely new. But Perception trots out its brain-damaged guests like a series of parlor tricks; every time McCormick introduces us to a new oddity one expects him to shout out voila! and take a bow.

To be fair, Sacks himself has been accused of putting on “a high-brow freak show.” Unfortunately, that seems to be what Perceptions’ writers like most about him. 

TV Series Review: Bunheads

Watching Bunheads is a lot like mistaking someone on the street for a friend.  You catch site of a woman down the block and say, is that Susan? You get closer. It looks a lot like her, but isn’t the hair a little shorter? Would she wear that hat? You get closer still. No, that’s not her. Pretty definitely not. Then you yell out “SUSAN!” to see if she turns around.

From a distance, Bunheads is The Gilmore Girls. Both shows were created by Amy Sherman-Palladino, so they unsurprisingly have her trademark sharp, witty dialogue and quirky, engaging characters.  But it goes beyond that. Sutton Foster, who plays a Vegas showgirl transplanted to a small Californian town called Paradise, bears a notable resemblance to Lauren Graham, who played Lorelei Gilmore. They even have similar voices. Kelly Bishop, who played Emily Gilmore, shows up as Foster’s mother-in-law, while the spunky daughter of the old show has been supplanted by a quartet of teen dancers in the new one (one sweet and unsure, one prickly and arrogant, two generic).

At times, the series seems to just be Gilmore Girls with some dance numbers thrown in.

Bunheads began oddly, with Michelle, a dispirited Vegas showgirl, drunkenly agreeing to marry a gift-giving admirer she never particularly liked. He takes her to Paradise, where it turns out he lives with his mom and her gaudy tchotchkes. While we are assured over and over that this guy is a really, really nice guy, one can’t help thinking that a nebishy man becoming obsessed with a showgirl and luring her to the oddly decorated home he shares with his mother would make a good foundation for a horror movie.

If you don’t like the premiere episode’s premise don’t worry about it, because it has pretty much nothing to do with the series itself, which turns out to be about the relationship between Michelle, her ballet-teaching mother-in-law Fanny, and four of Fanny’s students.

Like Gilmore Girls, Bunheads is mainly about relationships. A big difference between the two shows is that while Lorelei was comfortably ensconced in a world of friends and family, Michelle finds herself dropped unceremoniously into a town of strangers; one of the first townspeople she meets is her new husband’s hostile, fiercely disappointed ex. While Lorelei always seemed to have a strong idea of where she was going in life, Michelle is lost and scattered, and while the series is developing its plot points slowly, it appears to be a show about someone finding her place in the world. It’s a journey that is looking to be filled with missteps and confusion.

While you can easily discover differences between Sherman-Palladino’s two pretty-lady-in-a-small-town series, these are less obvious than the similarities. And that’s fine with me. After contract negotiations fell through, Sherman-Palladino left The Gilmore Girls, leaving the final season in other hands. If Bunheads is like your friend’s doppelganger, the last season of Gilmore Girls was like the mother at the beginning of Invasion of the Body Snatchers whose son insists that, even though she looks like his mom and has her memories, she isn’t his mother. That last season was disturbing, with a Lorelei Gilmore who had the look but had lost the spirit of the woman I had loved so much that I could never decide if I wanted her more as my girlfriend or my mom.

For me, Bunheads is the sorely missed Gilmore Girls come back to life. If I may indulge myself in one more comparison, it is like losing a loved one, and, years later, having her knock on your door and say, it was all a mistake, I never really died. And even though her hair is different, she’s wearing glasses and she walks with a limp, you’d still recognize her anywhere.

Welcome back, Gilmore Girls, welcome back.

Midseason 2011 New TV Series Capsule Reviews

Once again, I am posting little reviews of TV shows, because why have opinions if you aren't going to blog them? I’ve seen all the new shows since January except Harry’s Law, which for some reason I have not seen but which my mom claims is pretty good, for whatever that’s worth. Here's what I think of the one's I have seen:

Fairly Legal

Premise: Cute legal negotiator negotiates cutely.

Review: Fairly Legal is a cute legal drama whose twist is that the lead is not a lawyer. Instead she’s a negotiator who tries to bring partners to an amicable settlement (a talent she also brings to virtually ever personal encounter). The show is very predictable, with a lead who works pretty much 24/7 to make every case turn out well and the sort of magic bullet wrap up of shows like The Good Wife in which the problem is solved because something is discovered or proven that makes it all black and white. This seems inappropriate for a show about negotiators, who by definition must have to come up regularly with rather messy solutions. But the lead is personable and attractive so what the hell.

Will I keep watching it? Yes, for now.

Mr. Sunshine

Premise: Curmudgeon manages arena.

Review: This is a formulaic but fairly amusing show staring Chandler from Friends as the manager of some sort of arena for sports and concerts and what not. It’s got a solid cast and is decently written, but probably would be a just-miss if not for Alison Janey’s very funny turn as the batshit crazy owner of the arena.

Will I keep watching it? Sure

Traffic Light

Premise: Friends chat on the phone while driving and lie to women.

Review: Traffic Light is a show I instantly disliked from the opening scene of some ex-hipster-looking asshole chatting on his car speaker phone with his buddies. There is something very distasteful about the show, which has this weird “battle of the sexes” vibe that feels like a throwback to comedies of the early 60s. It’s about three guy friends, one just moving in with his girlfriend, one who’s married, or in a long-term relationship or whatever, and one who goes from girl to girl. The first episode focuses on the married guy’s attempts to come up with a warning system for his car’s speaker phone for when his wife is in the car so he can keep his life secret from his wife, who is far smarter and nicer than any of the guys. That episode ended with this weird sappy speech at a funeral that came out of nowhere even though it gives the series it’s title.

The annoying thing is, it’s a pretty funny show, which has kept me watching it. Some of the battle of the sexes stuff is quite clever. The footloose fellow always cleans his apartment of all traces of women after they’ve stayed over out of fear they’ll move in lipstick by lipstick. When his current girl asks about the toothbrush she left that he threw out, he feigns ignorance. She keeps searching, and then suddenly says, “oh, here it is” and holds up a toothbrush, and of course he can’t say anything even though he knows she snuck it in. It’s really quite funny, even though the premise is unpalatable.

Will I keep watching it? Yes, until one episode isn’t funny and then forget it.

Perfect Couples

Premise: Three couples who are friends do couply and friendly stuff.

Review: Perfect Couples is Traffic Light’s opposite in terms of showing relationships. Here you have three couples, one tempestuous, one normal, middle-of-the-road type and one just odd couple in which the wife in one episode decides her husband needs a “man cave” where he can express his masculine side. This shows a more nuanced version of the battle-of-the-sexes concept, in which sometimes the guys might want to hide something, or get away with something, or in some way conspire with the other guys, but just as often work alongside their partners. It’s like real world politics in which alignments can shift depending on the objectives. Also, unlike Traffic Light, the characters are all very likeable and real. And it’s funnier than Traffic Light.

Will I keep watching it? Absolutely

Lights Out

Premise: Boxer loses career, joins a collection agency.

Review: It’s like most shows on the FX network, something that seems pretty intelligent and well done that I just can’t get into.

Will I keep watching it? No.

Mad Love

Premise: Couple falls in love at first sight and takes it from there.

Review: Mad Love is going to make me mention Traffic Light one more time, simply to say that it too is an opposite of that show, but in a different way. Because while Traffic Light is funny but unpleasant, Mad Love is likeable but not particularly funny. It follows a young couple falling in love assisted or opposed by their “wacky” friends. It is very formulaic, and kind of dull, but also kind of sweet. That makes me hope it succeeds even though I’ve stopped watching it.

Will I keep watching it? Naw.

Bob’s Burgers

Premise: Guy runs a burger place with his family.

Review: This show is somewhat reminiscent of Dr. Katz, with the same shaky animation and skewed, sardonic humor. It’s not as funny as Katz was, but it’s funnier the also-similar Home Movies.

Will I keep watching it? Sure, why not.

Episodes

Premise: Brilliant British sitcom is remade Hollywood style.

Review: I enjoy series like The Larry Sanders Show that mock Hollywood, and Episodes does it very well. The series revolves around a couple who created a successful, admired British sitcom and is lured to Hollywood where their vision is compromised at every turn and their lives fall apart. Funny and clever, with a biting wit and a lot of hostility towards Hollywood phonies, which according to this show means pretty much everyone.

Will I keep watching it? Absolutely.

The Cape

Premise: Some sort of superhero crap.

Review: I watched a little of this. Some guy has a cape that makes him a superhero or something. Aims for a gritty, tough thing, just achieves being dark and lifeless. Didn’t make it through the pilot. I really like superhero stories, but Hollywood’s attempts to recreate the success of Heroes have foundered horribly.

Will I keep watching it? No. I don’t even know if it’s still running.

Shameless

Premise: Drunk dad, precocious kids, something like that.

Review: Watched about half of the first episode. It seemed decent, but I just couldn’t get into it.

Will I keep watching it? Naw.

Off the Map

Premise: Gray’s Anatomy in the jungle.

Review: I didn’t see the premiere and only wound up watching this when I was looking for something to watch on my girlfriend’s free-tv-on-demand station. It’s something about doctor’s working in a little town in some foreign place. I’ve seen a couple of episodes, and you know, it’s kind of decent. Although since I haven’t watched the episodes sequentially, I’m not sure who anyone is or what’s going on.

Will I keep watching it? Maybe.

Being Human

Premise: Vampire, ghost and werewolf become roommates.

Review: I watched the first season of the British version of this series, which was quite good, even though I lost interesting in the second season. Much of what made the show good were the appealing leads, a conflicted vampire, nerdy, depressed werewolf and hot, charming ghost. Unfortunately, the cast in this one is markedly blander, with only the ghost offering any personality. I watched one episode and that was it.

Will I keep watching it? Nope.

The Chicago Code

Premise: Chief of police and friend cop battle corruption.

Review: This was decent, but after two episodes I felt like the show was already running out of steam. To be fair though, I don’t think I’ve stuck with a dramatic cop show for more than a few episodes for years.

Will I keep watching it? No.

Fall 2010 New TV Series Capsule Reviews

As a lifelong TV junkie, I always feel an obligation to check out every fall television series. I skipped a few this year – Outlaw, because of its bad reviews and absurd premise (supreme court justice decides he can do more good in private practice), S#*! My Dad Says, because William Shatner is a joke and the commercials looked awful, and My Generation, which also looked painful from the commercials. But I saw at least part of an episode of everything else, and here’s what I thought.

Raising Hope

Premise: Young guy raises a baby.

Review: When I saw the commercials about a young doofusy guy raising a baby, I thought, there is a show I don’t need to see. Then I heard it had been created by the guy who created My Name is Earl, so I had to check it out after all. Like Earl, Raising Hope deals with poor people living in the margins who happen to all be really interesting, good-hearted characters. Also like Earl, the show is riotously funny.

Will I keep watching it? Absolutely

Follow-up: Still very funny. I showed an episode to my girlfriend and now she insists I keep the episodes for us to watch together on weekends.

Running Wilde

Premise: Spoiled millionaire woos do-gooder.

Review: Running Wilde was co-created by Michael Hurwitz, who made the brilliant Arrested Development, so of course I had to watch it even though the commercials were pretty dumb. Its opposite-attracts formula, in which a snarky millionaire still has a crush on a long-time love who is repelled by everything about him but still can’t resist him, is kept going by a lot of very clever humor, and while it’s not quite as good as Arrested Development, it’s definitely one of the better sitcoms this fall.

Will I keep watching it? Absolutely.

Follow-up: Still lots of fun.

The Event

Premise: Government conspiracy. Kidnappings. Aliens. That sort of thing.

Review: Interesting attempt at a Lost-style collection of mysteries each wrapped in their own enigma. Like Lost, The Event uses a lot of flashbacks, but they are shorter, hop around more in time and are used less to explain character and more to explain what is going on. So something will happen, and then you’ll have a flashback from a week earlier, and then that might go to a flashback a year ago, and eventually you wind up back in the present with a slightly better idea of what is going on. So far I’ve seen two episodes and while it’s not as good as Lost was in the beginning, it’s better than shows like FlashForward and The Nine that attempted the same sort of high-concept mystery but wound up creating more boredom than intrigue.

Will I keep watching it? Yes.

Follow-up: So far this has kept up my interest and left me curious and wanting more.

Mike & Molly

Premise: Ordinary people fall in love.

Review: This looked cute and funny from the commercials and turned out to be just that. It’s simply about two people beginning a relationship, and I’m going to assume they will just follow that straight through, with the two characters, who met at an OA meeting, getting to know each other, falling in love, getting in tiffs, and, if the show lasts long enough, getting married, having a baby and eventually (since the show is nice with a capital “N”) dying and going to heaven.

Will I keep watching it? Absolutely

Follow-up: This episode and the next one I saw were both quite funny. Then the two after that were unwatchable. Then I got around to watching the pilot episode, which was also terrible. It's a shame, because when it worked, it was good, but it's way too hit or miss, so I've stopped watching.

Chase

Premise: Lady chases down bad guys.

Review: Watched about 10 minutes of this, which mainly involved good guys running after bad guys. It didn’t grab me.

Will I keep watching it? Nope

Hawaii Five-O

Premise: Hawaiian cops or something.

Review: I’m old enough to remember the original Hawaii Five-O, and its success always puzzled me. It was just this square-jawed cops capturing generic bad guys sort of thing. I watched maybe 10 minutes of the first episode of this revival, which gives the main character a little macho back story but which looks to be similar in tone to the original, and then I turned it off.

Will I keep watching it? Of course not.

Hellcats (HS cheerleaders)

Premise: Girl who despises cheerleaders becomes one to win a scholarship.

Review: Hellcats is a real mixed bag. The actors are good and some of the dialogue is sharp and witty, but at other times the first episode was almost unbelievably moronic. For example, the protagonist tries out to be a cheerleader and completely screws up the choreography, instead just winging it. But the coach gets excited by her brilliant dancing and insists that all the cheerleaders start winging it. Seriously? I turned it off before the end; even the pretty girls in half-shirts weren’t doing it for me, as they all seemed oddly sexless. I could also do without the super-bitch who always has to be a part of these soapish shows.

Will I keep watching it? Nope.

Terriers

Premise: Slacker detectives.

Review: I watched a little of this. It looked like it was trying for a Big Lebowski vibe. Honestly, I’m one of the few people who didn’t love Lebowski, so this show would have had to be much better than it was to keep me watching.

Will I keep watching it? No.

Nikita

Premise: Ex-assassin/spy decides to destroy her former employer.

Review: This is an interesting way to revisit Nikita, the protagonist of two movies and a previous TV series, all of which involved her being forced to work as an assassin for a secret and often evil government organization. This time around, she has escaped the agency and is bent on ending its bloody career. The most interesting aspect of the pilot was the way she played cat and mouse with the agency. It was absurd but entertaining.

Will I keep watching it? After the first time I saw it I thought I would probably watch it again, but then when it came on a second time I just didn’t feel like it. For me it’s really borderline, so unless I hear really good things I probably will let it go its merry way without me.

Boardwalk Empire

Premise: Mobsters rule Atlantic City.

Review: Created by Martin Scorcese and starring Steve Buscemi, there is no way I was not going to check out Boardwalk Empire. The first episode was very good. I didn’t feel it was quite great, but it could easily become great. It’s certainly very interesting.

Will I keep watching it? Yes, unless my girlfriend cancels her subscription to HBO.

Follow-up: This one keeps getting better and better.

Detroit 1-8-7

Premise: Cop show

Review: I saw the first episode, and I liked it. I remember thinking it was a solid, entertaining show that had just enough originality in it to make it worth watching some more. But outside of that, I can’t remember a damn thing about it. Nothing.

(While watching another episode, I suddenly remembered something from the first episode, a scene in which a cop interrogates a suspect by simply staring at him blankly. The suspect gets nervous, starts talking, keeps talking, and hours later is telling the guy his entire life story and breaking down in tears. That's the sort of thing that makes this seem appealing.)

Will I keep watching it? I will, at least for now.

Follow-up: The more episodes I watched, the more generic this show seemed, with the interesting, quirky moments getting less frequent and less interesting. I stopped watching.

Better With You

Premise: Three couples, all related, get in situations and tell jokes

Review: Like Detroit 1-8-7, I can't for the life of me remember anything from this show unless I'm watching it. Part of that is just the painfully generic title. The show involves a couple who have been married 35 years and their daughters, one who has been with her boyfriend for 9 years and the other who has just got engaged to a guy she's known a couple of months, and it contrasts these relationships, which fall broadly into the categories blissful lust, deep understanding and loathing. It's generally funny, but by tomorrow I'll have forgotten what it's about again.

Will I keep watching it? Sure, why not.

Follow-up: In spite of being best described as generically funny, this one has been pretty consistently funny. It's pretty much the reaction I had to Friends when I first saw it, and like Friends, it grows on you.

The Whole Truth

Premise: Lawyers duke it out, then at the end of the show the truth of the case is revealed.

Review: Generic lawyer show aims for a Law & Order feel but doesn't really get it. The show goes back and forth between the prosecutors and defense, showing how they deal with evidence and investigate. Through the verdict you don't, in theory, know whether the person on trail is guilty. Unfortunately, in the first episode it seemed pretty obvious, making the final reveal anticlimactic. The first episode also wound up with justice being served, and it all seemed pretty gutless for a premiere that should have shown the audience why this show was a good idea.

Will I keep watching it? Pass

Follow-up: Perhaps unsurprisingly, this has been canceled already.

The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret

Premise: Guy gets a job he’s not qualified for and just gets in deeper and deeper.

Review: Weird, twisted show starring David Cross as a schlub who accidentally gets a high pressured job in England and has already started melting down in the first episode. Each episode, I have heard, takes place the day after the previous episode, and the show is working towards a moment seen at the beginning of the first episode in which Cross is apparently being tried for a crime.

Will I keep watching it? Wouldn’t miss any of this for the world.

Follow-up: Still awesome

Outsourced

Premise: American runs a call center in India.

Review: Apparently some Indians are a bit irked about this show’s reliance on hackneyed Indian themes like sacred cows and spicy food. I can understand how annoying that would be if you’re Indian, but if you’re not it’s more likely to bother you simply because it’s such lazy comedy. But in spite of that, I kind of liked the show. Half of it is pretty dumb, but there are moments, like a girl who speaks in an inaudible whisper acting out a scene from a movie (it’s unclear which movie, but my guess is Taxi Driver) then proudly waiting for applause or an Indian who has studied America suddenly switching to a perfect southern accent that are actually pretty funny.

Will I keep watching it? For now.

Follow-up: This show has proven to be very likable. Yes, you could have a drinking game involving taking a drink every time some India stereotype is tossed out, but it's funny and well meant.

Blue Bloods

Premise: Family of cops.

Review: This glossy series about New York cops was somewhat rousing when it started off with Sinatra singing “New York New York” but lost steam once the actors started speaking (in what sounded to me like a Boston accent, but was perhaps a Queens or Staten Island accent, for all I know). First off, the show is very, very generic; I dare you to find anything in it you haven’t seen in 30 other cop shows. The series opener also had a rather murky and tedious approach to morality. One of the main characters tortures a criminal in one of those “ticking bomb” scenarios television is so fond of. Later the whole family sits around and debates whether it was the right thing to do, while carefully avoiding coming to any conclusions. This debating is admittedly less generic than the rest of the show, but not any more interesting.

Will I keep watching it? Hell no.

No Ordinary Family

Premise: Dysfunctional family develops superhuman abilities.

Review: Family almost dies but become superheroes instead. The show is a mix of superhero stuff and family stuff. The family is mildly dysfunctional (like most families) but everyone acts like it’s a huge crisis. The parents are a bit bored of each other. Will being superheroes fix the family? I don’t really care, but it’s fun to watch them run fast or read minds. If the dysfunctional-family theme doesn’t push the superhero theme out the window this show could be pretty cute.

Will I keep watching it? For now, yes.

Follow-up: I watched this for a few weeks, but as I feared, the family stuff overshadowed the superhero stuff, making the whole thing more of a soap opera than an action series. Which would be fine if the family drama were actually interesting and the characters weren't like those from a million other shows.

Why I Won't Be Watching the New Season of Lost

Imagine you’re at this party and you start talking to this guy. He’s a really cool guy, and he starts telling you a story that is one of the most interesting you have ever heard. It’s a story you think can’t be topped, but then he segues into another, even better story, and you think, wow, this is the coolest guy ever.

Forty minutes later he’s still talking, and it’s all still pretty interesting, but it looks like the alcohol’s running out and there’s this really hot girl talking to a friend of yours and you’re thinking, is this guy ever going to run out of stories? And after another 10 minutes you decide no, he is never going to run out, or pause to take a breath, and you politely excuse yourself.

This is the best analogy I can come up with for why I’m not going to watch the new season of Lost.

If Lost had wrapped up its story at the end of season three it would have been a short but perfect series. But now, as season five is about to kick off, I just don’t care anymore.

It was obvious by the middle of season three that Lost was losing focus. It was still really good, it still had a lot of “wow” moments, but it felt like there was a little more filler, that the show had to go a little too weird to keep up the momentum, and that it was really time to wrap things up. I even thought of blogging an open letter to the producers asking them to make that season the last one, but never got around to it. It is unlikely they would have listened anyway.

I didn’t think the show had anywhere to go by season three’s end until that last “wow” moment in which we get a glimpse of post-island life. Perhaps, I thought, this new twist would kick start the show back into high gear.

It didn’t. Instead, Lost increasingly seemed like a show going in a thousand directions at once. Since season one I’ve been worried that the series could never wrap all its bizarre twists and turns into something that made sense. I thought it would end with nothing but loose ends. But as Lost kept explaining one thing in a convincing manner while introducing something else, I began to think maybe they would pull it off.

As season four progressed though, I came to the conclusion that such a thing was no longer possible. The show has increasingly relied on a sloppy mysticism and it is my belief that the producers have probably convinced themselves that the Island should remain in great part a mystery. I do not believe they plan to offer a satisfactory explanation to all these years of weirdness, and that because they’re not planning to explain, they feel free to throw in more and more "out there" plot turns.

I could be wrong, but it’s unlikely, because you could not at this point explain everything in a two-hour finale. They would have to start explaining things bit by bit from the first episode and do that all season, without introducing any new mysteries. And based on the last four years, I don’t think that will happen.

Season four once again had me thinking about writing that open letter, but once again, I didn’t. It would not have mattered; the producers had actually decided already that they were going to end the series ... in 2010.
I can't go through another two years of unanswered questions, weird pseudo-science, and characters who refuse to answer the simplest question in a straightforward manner (seriously, if I were on that island I would've tied Benjamin to a chair and beat him with a stick until he told me what that smoke monster was). If Lost were a book, I would be jumping ahead to the last page right now.

Will all our questions be answered in two years? I doubt it. I expect the show will end with many loose ends, the producers will decide to make a Lost movie they promise will explain everything, the movie will come out and simply add some more mysteries and everyone will feel like a sucker.

So I'm done. By the end of season four I had simply lost my enthusiasm for what was once my favorite dramatic series. I just don’t care what happens from now one, except to the extent that when the series is finally ended I will go to Wikipedia and find out how it all turned out.

Lost isn’t the only series at this party, and I’ve listened to enough of its stories. Now I’m going to go over and say hello to that hottie from Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles.

you see, there are things men who care about more than sex

Ah, those passionate Englishmen. A poll indicates half of them would temporarily give up sex for a big TV. Interestingly, only a third of women said the same, although there's no way of knowing whether that means women love sex more than men or love big TVs less than men.

I'd like to see a reverse poll. Something like, would you give up your big screen TV for sex with Shakira. Or something.

Gilmore Girls: RIP

Hey look, the Gilmore Girls is over! I saw the ad saying "series finale" so I figured, I'll take a look and see how it all turned out. (Note: I was rereading some of my blog entries, and look, it sounds like I'm going to start talking about the final episode and then I never actually do! Sorry about that!)

I gave up on the Gilmore Girls months ago. After Amy and Dan Palladino left as the producers it just didn't feel right anymore. It was sort of like Invasion of the Body Snatchers; everyone in Stars Hollow looked the same, and sounded the same, but they somehow just didn't seem like they were really the same people.

I hope the folks at the CW network have now figured out how stupid it was to not give the producers the two-year contract they were asking for. The CW is a new network that needs content, and they've lost one of their two best shows (the other being Everybody Hates Chris) because they wouldn't bend a little for the Palladinos. And while ostensibly the show is going because the stars wouldn't come back, it seems probably part of the reason for that is the lack of the shows creators combined with the poor quality of the season.

They could have at least paid the Palladinos something to tell them where the show was supposed to be going; the story went off the rails, but Amy Palladino apparently did have a plan for this year and I'm sure she would have sold an outline to CW if they'd asked.

Classic killing-the-goose-that-laid-the-golden-egg behavior. Bye-bye Lorelei and Rory; sorry you couldn't go out on a high note.

as charming as a sewer rat eating the eyes from an alley cat: my review of Charm School

There's an entertaining British reality show called Ladette to Lady which takes a bunch of obnoxious, overly sexualized women and sends them to a finishing school to teach them to be ladylike. So when I heard about VH1’s Charm School, I thought, cool, an American version of Ladette to Lady.

But I was wrong. Charm School is instead a disgusting, puerile, putrescent monstrosity that represents the very worst television can possibly offer. Words cannot properly express the loathsomeness of this show; one would have to instead combine vomiting noises with the sounds of flies circling shit.

The ostensible premise of Charm School is to take the vulgar, trashy women who vied for Flavor Flav’s affections on Flavor of Love and send them to “etiquette boot camp.” The actual purpose of the show is to find new ways to humiliate these women; the winner is likely to be the craziest and meanest of the bunch.

There is nothing charming about Charm School. First off, the mistress of the school is comedian Mo’Nique, who is funny in her standup act and quite presentable on the show but is hardly the epitome of style and grace (be honest, Mo’Nique, if you had any real class you would never have agreed to appear on this show). Her assistants are some woman who, like Mo'Nique, seem strict but basically decent, plus some guy who's just a prick who delights in insulting women. I can’t find these cast member's names on VH1’s website, which shows you about how important they are to the show.

Charm School made its intentions clear in the first episode when the girls were forced to take a long hike and camp in the woods, then were divided into two teams that had to race through an obstacle course. What, you ask, does this have to do with etiquette? Nothing, although Mo’Nique makes some claim about measuring teamwork.

The team that lost seemed to lose primarily (at least as portrayed in the show, which is of course edited for effect rather than truth) because one of the girls chosen to be a team captain chose weak girls who she worried would feel hurt if no one seemed to want them. She was roundly criticized for this shocking display of decency by the judges, who told her that this was a competition and she couldn’t be soft. I’m sure Miss Manners would completely agree.

In episode two, which I foolishly decided to watch, some guy from The Bachelor got to decide which girl was most presentable. One stole another’s expensive dress to rattle her, then told her so right in front of the bachelor who, instead of being shocked at such creepy behavior, crowned her the winner.

This is all particularly horrendous because Ladette to Lady shows it is possible to make a cheesy reality show that has a little honor to it.

Ladette is not an especially classy show. Basically, they get a bunch of alcoholics, sexoholics, and tomboys together in an old etiquette school where they are taught skills that were popular amongst society women decades ago, like cooking and flower arranging. The show loves its drunken women. In season two, one woman flashes her breasts on every occasion (on English TV, and on the Sundance Channel, which shows it in the U.S., nudity is allowed, so there is none of the blurriness VH1 employs to hide the naughty bits), and not an episode goes by in which we don’t see an archival clip of her lifting her shirt. Ladette also is constantly sending the girls off to pubs or leaving them alone with bottles of booze just so they can go wild and then be chastised by the school’s teachers.

At the same time, the show really does reward graciousness. It does teach these women how to speak more eloquently and carry themselves more gracefully. The women who keep causing trouble get kicked out, the women who work hard and improve stay. Ladette is ultimately a show about transformation, and while most of it is in thrall to drunken debauchery, towards the end the show seamlessly shifts into something positive That glorifies hope and possibility.

But Charm School doesn’t want their cast to transform themselves; it wants them to abase themselves. The show seeks to find all the ways these women can be humiliated, and the women themselves are willing and eager participants in their own abasement.

This is a shame, because these women need help. Obviously VH1 reality shows are all as unreal as you can get, heavily scripted and cast with people with no interest in anything except gaining fame and fortune (I kind of liked some of these shows at first but the utter and complete falseness in every second of every minute of every show eventually drove me away). The girls of Charm School are all hoping that, like “New York” in the first season of Flavor of Love, they can parlay their shame into a career. I’m sure they would argue that it’s just an act, that they’re playing for the cameras and that this is not really who they are at all, and there would be some truth to that. At the same time, people with high self-esteem would never go on a television show in front of millions of people and grovel for success as these women do. The girls of Charm School could use some genuine lessons in etiquette and charm, but what they really need most is a good therapist.

This is what makes Charm School so odious. It takes very screwed up women and tries to screw them up more for the entertainment of the masses. It is not an American version of Ladette to Lady but rather a serialized version of the Jerry Springer Show. Like Springer, Charm School thrives on sleaze, and just as Jerry would end each show with a smug, hypocritical lecture on how disgusting his guests acted, Charm School wants its women to be revolting so it can wag its finger in their faces and say, shame, shame on you. And just as with Springer, the most immoral participants are not the guests, but the producers who exploit them and the audience that revels in their degradation and in a self-righteous sense of superiority.

hey, white guys just have a lot to say

If you want to see exactly how white and male news shows are, check out the handy-dandy charts from Media Matters. Note that the political leanings of the show don't seem to have much to do with anything; Countdown is actually more exclusively white than O'Reilly (although Countdown's host once did rather smugly note that his understudy is a black woman; when does she get her own show?).

I don't know who Paula Zahn is but she seems a bit more open to black guests, although it looks like she's not better on the other races than anyone else.

lovely to look at, delightful to beat to death

Just saw this in the Huffington Post. America's Top Model (dull reality show about a bunch of brain dead models; saw one episode) did a photo shoot in which models posed as murdered corpses.

Now, some feminists object in general to portrayals of women as victims, and I don't know that I would go that far, but these are really disturbing pictures. And it is just hard to imagine what was going through the mind of whoever thought this was a good idea. These are the ultimate in fetishized violence, and they are so creepy that they're rather hard to look at. They also just seem very anti-female. All of which is exactly what any sane person would have thought when someone said; "let's make all the models pose as beautiful, gory corpses." But apparently there aren't too many sane people at America's Top Model.

Might as well start the "save our show" petition now

Y'all should really check out the new TV series The Black Donnellys, because I don't expect it to be around for too long. I wasn't too excited about it from the commercials, which just left me wondering what, precisely the show was supposed to be, but my interest was piqued when I heard it was created by Paul Haggis, the genius behind television series Due South and the tragically short-lived EZ Streets who is probably best known as the writer and director of the oscar-winning Crash.

After seeing the first episode I can understand why the commercials were vague about the show; the show itself doesn't really tell you where the series is headed until the last five minutes.

It's a sharply written, intelligent, complex story. In other words, it's going to be canceled. Like EZ Streets, it has the feel of movie, or even a novel. It is aiming to tell a fairly epic story, and the pilot had just enough characters to make it just slightly difficult to keep track of who was who, which is usually an unpopular trait for a TV series.

Hopefully I'm wrong, and Black Donnelys will be that rarest of things, an intelligent, adult, creative show of great artistry that isn't canceled within the first 3 months, but just in case, don't wait for the reruns. The show is on Mondays at 10, and the premiere episode is being re-shown Thursday at 9. Enjoy it while it lasts.

Stand up comics make TV sitcoms? How extraordinary.

Recently I stumbled across Blogcritics, a site where bloggers can submit reviews of whatever they like.  In theory doing this will actually get a few readers and perhaps steer some traffic to one’s blog, so I signed up.  This is the first review I put up there, and now I’m putting it up here as well.  Will more people read it on Blogcritics?  Unfortunately I don’t see a counter telling me how many people have read my review, so no idea, but I’ll keep doing it for a while and see if I get any response or anything.

Lucky Louie

Premise: Roseanne, but starring a low-key blue-collar guy instead of a shrewish blue-collar gal.

Lucky Louie, an HBO sitcom starring the oddly named comic Louis C.K., lets you know what it's all about in the beginning of the first episode, when Louie's daughter, Lucy, plays the "why" game, a game my sister used to torture me with in which every answer leads to another question.

Lucy starts with generic kid questions, "Why is the sky blue?" and “Why do we eat cereal for breakfast?" As she keeps asking why with each answer, Louis' replies become more introspective. He begins to tell his ten-year-old kid that he failed to achieve a better life because he did too many drugs in college. It's a very human, real scene, and also quite funny. At its best, this is what Lucky Louie gives you.

Louis is a screw up but he knows he is and feels guilty about it. But not guilty enough to stop being a screw up: that's what makes him just like us. His wife Kim (played by Pamela Adlon, who also does the voice of Bobby on King of the Hill) functions both as Louis' emotional support and inquisitor, keeping things together, but constantly berating Louie for his shortcomings. Adlon is terrific, funny, and, like Louie, very human.

The standout of the show is Kelly Gould as the mercurial Lucy who will run out to Kim to excitedly show her something and then, when Louis enthusiastically asks to see it, rage, "I'm not talking to you, I'm talking to mom!" Children are, by objective standards insane, but also cute, and Lucy effortlessly shifts from one pole to the other.

The rest of the cast varies. Kim has a mooching, half-witted brother who seems to be the show's attempt to create a Kramer. Louis has a co-worker who is rather like that sleazy guy who was on Becker and they seem to be on a different, wackier show than the one the nuclear family inhabits.

Louis' boss and his wife are pretty good in the middle ground, but the family across the hall is the only other one who completely avoids the cartooniness of the show's bit players.
Lucky Louie focuses primarily on two things: child raising and sex (my understanding is the latter leads to the former which leads to the end of the latter). Some of the sex stuff seems designed to make the show edgy enough for HBO (as do stunts like having one of the minor male characters appear completely naked with everything showing), but even then it tends to feel pretty honest and it's nice to see a show that has a semi-adult attitude towards masturbation.

Final analysis: It's funny, the characters are likeable, and it's got the funniest and most insightful portrayal of a child I've ever seen on TV. Well worth watching.

The Minor Accomplishments of Jackie Woodman

Premise: People in Hollywood are nuts. Nuts I tell you!

One of the minor players in Lucky Louie is the brilliant standup comic Laura Kightlinger as a sexy woman inexplicably married to Louie's overweight boss. Kightlinger also has her own series, an eight-part miniseries that makes up for its short length with a long title: The Minor Accomplishments of Jackie Woodman. It's playing on the Independent Film Channel. 

In Accomplishments, Kightlinger plays a magazine writer and aspiring scriptwriter trying to make it in Hollywood. According to the New York Times review of the show, the first episode was hysterically funny. I didn't see the first episode, and honestly, I find it hard to believe it was that funny. 

Accomplishments doesn't really seem to be about being funny. It's about showing how horrible people are and how all of Jackie's shots at success are undone by the idiocy of the Hollywood system — although Jackie's own cynicism and apathy could have something to do with it. 

There are very funny moments in Accomplishments, as when two security guards in an office building discuss a man they see masturbating at his cubicle or when Jackie interviews a crazy artist who insists the interview be done without words, leading to a series of weird stares and incomprehensible motions. 

Mainly the show is just sort of depressing. It's got that "everything-sucks-and-people-who-don't-know-that-are-fools" vibe (making it a good companion piece for the similarly dark, but not especially funny, animated British series Monkey Dust). 

Lucky Louie also portrays life as rather hopeless and full of difficulties that may well be impossible to overcome, but it is likeably human where Accomplishments is archly cynical. But that's not the problem; I myself am archly cynical as often as not. The problem is the series isn't all that funny and the characters aren't likable enough to balance that out. 

I appreciate that the show is trying to be something more than a standard sitcom, but if you don't have strong jokes or relatable characters or a compelling storyline and your only target is the painfully easy one of Hollywood, well, you've got problems. 

Final Analysis: This one's keeping me watching, but just barely; it's got just enough sense of potential that I keep thinking the next episode will be really good. I do like Kightlinger, and I do think she could do something great one day, but I don't think this is it.

the lack of basic competence in television

Perhaps it's a small thing, but on the talent show America's Got Talent, while performers were dancing or doing acrobatics a big banner would be flashed over them telling you what number you could call at the end of the show to vote for them, thus preventing the viewer from actually seeing what they were doing. This, even more than the frequent cutaways to David Hasselhoff watching them perform, just suggests that the people making the show don't actually understand that people watch a talent show to see the performances, not to stare at banners and judges.

The thing is, this isn't remotely uncommon. It's like when you watch a movie with subtitles and a big station logo or one of those awful animated advertisements that crawl across the bottom half of the screen, sometimes including sound effects, block out the subtitles. It's hard to decide whether these things are simply a display of open contempt of the viewers or pure incompetence. My guess is it's a little of both.

Unfortunately, this sort of thing gets worse every year because there's not really much you can do about it short of not watching shows you otherwise enjoy. And if you did stop, would the networks even understand that was the reason? Once I stopped watching a cool anime series on MTV2 because they had this huge flashing logo that was like one of those awful flash ads on web pages. What could be more inappropriate than a distracting animated logo on an animated series? I probably wasn't the only one who was annoyed, but I'm sure if the ratings for the show were low MTV2 would just assume people didn't like the show. It would never occur to a network that people didn't like garish logos and advertisements and banners.

You can't even email networks to complain, in most cases. All you can do is complain in network forums, which may allow you to vent steam but which doesn't get the word out to the networks.

Yes, there are bigger problems in the world, and at least on America's Got Talent that little yodeling girl made the finales, but still, big banners cutting off the bottom half of the screen while a clog dancing troupe is performing just pisses me off.

Opinionade: The Series

For a while last fall I was doing capsule TV series reviews, but then new shows started coming so far apart that I couldn’t do a few at once, and devoting an entire blog entry to one show just seemed excessive.  And shows come and go so fast; I would have given a favorable nod to Emily’s Reasons Why Not if it hadn’t been cancelled after one episode.

But I’ve realized that there are now a few shows I’ve started watching recently that seem interesting, so I’ll write a few words on them.

Psych (10 pm on USA)
Premise: Guy with Sherlock Holmes-style skills pretends to be a psychic

Review:  There was a brilliant, short-lived comedy-detective show years ago called Tenspeed and Brownshoe with Jeff Goldblum as a nervous dork and Ben Vereen as a cool, con man type.  About a year later there was some other show I remember nothing about that had four characters, and the one black character was a cool, con man type.  And I thought at the time, why can’t the white guy ever be the con man and the black guy be the nerd?  I knew black nerds and white slicksters, and it just bugged me when TV runs to the obvious stereotypes.

Well look how far we’ve come in a measly 26 years.  In the very fun new detective show Psych, the white guy is faking it ever step of the way, dragging along his nervous Nelly black partner every step of the way.  (And yeah, I know there have been black dorks on TV shows, most famously Urkel, but this just happens to be exactly what I felt was missing in the 80s, so it caught my attention)

The show is a lot of fun.  Shawn, whose father trained him to be hyper-observant, has been phoning in tips to the cops based on what he notices on TV shows, but his advice is so good they decide he must be a criminal himself (this part is not convincing, but now that it’s out of the way we probably won’t have to hear about it again).  To get out of hot water he tells them he’s a psychic, and uses his observational skills to convince them, doing such a good job that they hire him to investigate a case, which he solves.

This comes on right after Monk, and it’s very much in the same mold (of the early Monk, not the present hit-or-miss Monk).  It’s funny and reasonably clever, and it’s neat the way the camera zeroes in on the telling clues Shawn notices.  It’s not, perhaps, as good as I remember Tenspeed and Brownshoe being, but hopefully it will last longer.  

Conclusion: Well, I’ve only seen one episode so I may be getting ahead of myself, but this looks like a winner.

Kyle XY
Premise: mysterious kid with strange abilities and no belly button joins a wholesome American family

Review: Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.  Guy wakes up naked in the middle of nowhere with no idea of how he got there or who he is.  Fortunately he turns out to be preternaturally brilliant, and … oh, you have heard this before?  Of course, that was the short-lived  series John Doe.  Kyle XY has pretty much the same opening, although according to the producers they had the idea for that scene years before John Doe came out.

Anyway, John Doe started out great and went downhill, but I’m hoping that Kyle XY, which also started out great, keeps its momentum a little better.

The first two episodes were great.  Kyle is reminiscent of Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation, an observer of humans trying to puzzle out why they do what they do.  The show is often funny and it’s playing out the central mystery quite well.

The third episode worries me a bit.  This is on the ABC Family Channel, and the third episode was like something you’d see on a “family channel,” with lessons learned about lying and too much sweetness with too little story.  But I’m still hoping this won’t go the way of John Doe, getting bad and then getting lost.

Conclusion: I’m hoping Kyle can avoid both family sappiness and the loss of focus, sense and interesting stories that plagued John Doe.  If it does, this could be really great.

Dog Bites Man
Premise: inept news team goes around pestering people

Review: Comedy Central has only had a few series that more-or-less fall into the classic sitcom form.  There’s Reno 911, a series that has been running for years that I think is horrible, Stella, a brilliant and original comedy that was cancelled after one season, and now Man Bites Dog, which falls somewhere in between comedically.  The show details a news team’s adventures as they investigate important stories like spring break.  The central conceit is that while the news team is made up of improve actors, everyone else on the show is a real person who isn’t told they’re on a comedy show, and presumably believe these people are who they’re pretending to be.  

I haven’t really decided on this one. It’s amusing but not hilarious, and the real-people angle hasn’t really resulted in anything that funny.  The Daily Show’s interviews with people who don’t see to be aware they’re talking to someone from the Daily Show are funnier.  Still, I always have admiration for comedians who have the guts to act like total jackasses in front of people who don’t realize it’s a put on.

Conclusion: I could go either way on this one, but for now I’ll keep watching.

Blade: The Series
Premise: a couple of good vampires try to kill a lot of bad ones.

Review: First off, I think adding “the series” to the end of a title is incredibly lame.  But then, Blade likes the obvious.  The show is mean and macho and generic, with the only interesting personality a peripheral cop-gone-very-bad character.

I don’t need to write a review of this now, because When I saw the movie Blade II I posted a review on imdb.com, and the series is so like the movie that I can just use most of that review:

Blade II Blade: The Series is basically decent. It's got a few cool and/or effective moments, it keeps moving, and everything about it says "basically adequate though uninspired action flick." Snipes The series' star makes an acceptable b-movie sort of action figure, with less presence than Vin Diesel but more talent than Chuck Norris.

I watched it to the end and didn't feel overly restless, so if you just kind of like action pictures and it's on TV it's worth at least looking at. But that's about the best I can say for it.

Conclusion: This is just keeping me slightly interested enough to stick with it, but it’s really a week-by-week decision.  I could very easily give up on this one, but it’s pretty watchable all the same.

Reasons to like Tori Spelling

It has always been chic to look down on Tori Spelling, and even before I had ever seen her I had a negative impression. But the first time I saw her it was in a small part in the Parker Posey movie House of Yes and she was actually pretty good. So I've been pretty open to the possibility that she's actually a decent actress, rather than just a talentless creation of her father.

I was also prepared to like her personally after watching the brilliant, short-lived TV series Grosse Point, a parody of Beverly Hills 90..whatever-the-other-numbers-are in which the character of Marcy was presumably patterned after Tori. Marcy was sweet and insecure, so I thought, maybe Tori is the same.

Now Tori has gone the way of Kirstie Alley in Fat Actress, playing herself in So NoTorious on VH1. On the show, Tori is sweet and insecure, and even her best friends think she's talentless and owes her career to her rich daddy, who speaks to her through an intercom in his mansion, greeting her with "Hello angel" (he produced Charlie's Angels).

So far, So NoTorious is very funny. I say so far, because the first few episodes of Fat Actress were also very funny, and the last few were pretty horrible. But the three I've seen were all very good. And Tori is very good playing herself.

It's hard to know how she feels about the merciless fun her own show makes about her. There's a difference between letting writers make fun of you and actually having a sense of humor about yourself; Michael Jackson made a video that made fun of all his eccentricities but I don't think he thinks he's weird. It's brave to play yourself as an idiot or a weirdo, as proved by Jon Lovitz and David Duchovny on The Larry Sanders show, but it's also good business; William Shatner revived his career by acknowledging his own pompousness.

All of this has me pondering why Tori has always been such an object of ridicule. I never saw the Beverly Hills show, so perhaps she wasn't very good on it, but she probably wasn't worse than any of the others on that show; bad acting is often a feature of Aaron Spelling productions.

The hostility seems to come from the fact that she has a daddy who can give her a career (in So NoTorious she is seen giving a wretched ten-second audition at the end of which her dad shouts out, "you're hired!"). People feel it's not fair. And of course, it's not fair, but it's interesting that people seem far less hostile to a talentless actress whose career is entirely due to her looks. Raquel Welch is one of the worst actresses to ever star in a movie, and owes much of her looks to plastic surgery, but I don't think she was ever despised as much as Tori is. Now, getting a career because you had a good plastic surgeon, or just because you are born good looking, isn't any fairer than getting a job because your daddy owns the company, but it seems to rankle people more. Sure, Tori was born with a silver spoon in her mouth and got chances most people don't get, but then, Christina Aguilera was born with an amazing voice (they blocked her from high school talent shows because it was so incredible), Liza Minelli got breaks because her mom was famous (Judy Garland) and most people in Hollywood wouldn't have their jobs if they weren't born better looking than the rest of us.

So while I certainly envy Tori's good fortune, at the moment I do basically like her, and I hope her show continues to be funny and she winds up besting the naysayers and getting herself a respectable career.

the good, the bad and the icy

While I don't care for macho sports like football or boxing, I have developed a fondness for the more elegant sports, notably figure skating. In the same week I saw the best and worst figure skating television broadcasts I have ever seen.

The worst was on ABC. It was just listed in the TV guide as "figure skating," and listed as a sports show, so one would expect your basic skating competition. But instead there was some bizarre artsy pseudo documentary whatsit. Rather than just showing the event, they tried to make it into some sort of story. They would show chopped up routines, sometimes most of a routine, sometimes just a few seconds, and often the skater would be shot in a closeup that prevented you from seeing what she was doing, or they would use some weird filter or make the screen glisten. This was intercut with backstage moments in which skaters and their coaches and families were talking (at one point you only see a routine on the TV another skater is watching), and then there's a narrator filling in the gaps and trying to make it dramatic (apparently ABC doesn't see a skating competition as inherently dramatic).

It was the sort of special someone would create in a sitcom. You know, some kooky character - Diane from Cheers, Kramer from Seinfeld, Jack from Will and Grace - in some fluke lands a job directing sports, and says, "people don't want to see the same old thing, they want it jazzed up and made into art." And then they make some crazy bit of nonsense and get fired.

A day later, I saw Hilton Skating And Gymnastics Spectacular. I missed the first half hour (I just tuned into it accidentally), but I see Bravo is reshowing it (it was originally broadcast on NBC).

A combination of the two best Olympic sports, this was an all-star lineup of Olympic medalists getting together for a flashy exhibition. For the most part gymnastics and figure skating alternated, but in some cases they would perform synchronized routines. The gymnastics was not so much Olympic routines as Ed Sullivan show routines, with all sorts of crazy leaps and spins and gymnasts tossing other gymnasts in the air. The most memorable figure skating routine involved a giant cube as a prop, and must be seen.

The only weird thing was the final number, sung by some American Idol loser (excuse me, runner-up). Even though it was an international collection of skaters, the final song was America the Beautiful, as though the Hilton's wanted to say; you foreigners are great, but we're still going to whip your ass in the next Olympics. But all in all this was everything I want in skating and gymnastics. And there wasn't a single weird filter or artsy edit in the whole thing.

New TV series, final verdicts on 2005

This fall has been notable for all the pretty good but not great series that I felt borderline about. The Night Stalker started well but jumped the shark in the forth episode. I kept giving it a chance for a few more episodes based on its early promise, but finally decided to give up when episode 7 seemed, while not as bad as the last couple, just dull. But it turned out to be the first of a two-parter, so I thought, well, I'll watch one more and then stop. Then ABC canceled it. That's right, they showed part 1 and then canceled it before airing part 2. Pretty obnoxious, huh?

Last I heard, the networks had only canceled two shows, Night Stalker and Threshold. I'm a little sad about Threshold, because it had good characters, but I'm not brokenhearted by any means. Threshold wasn't a must-see show, but I did like it, and it was certainly better than the non-cancelled Supernatural, which I remain borderline about. For me, character is important in a show, and Supernatural's generic pretty boys just don't do it for me; the show feels like it was designed in committee. It's watchable, but I'm just not excited about it.

Of the dramas, the one that turned out best was Bones, which gets by on its interesting characters, most notably Dr. Temperance Brennan. My first take on Temperance was she was a hot chick version of Dr. House, but as I continued to watch I thought that with her amusing confusion regarding popular culture and her distanced yet sincere approach to people she's really more like a hot chick version of Data from Star Trek: Next Generations. She's funny, she's likable and she has good chemistry with the FBI guy. And the stories are getting a little more interesting. Still a little contrived and obvious, but at this point the drama I would most miss.

I also took a quick look at Ghost Whisperer. It was critically panned but is a big hit so I thought I'd take a look. It's blank, soft-headed and soft-hearted and quite tedious, at least from the half of an episode I saw; more Touched by an Angel than Medium.

The most notable shows this year are both comedies, My Name is Earl, which I think is the funniest show of the season, and Everybody Hates Chris, which runs a close second. It took me a while to see Chris, because there were shows I liked opposite it, but now I can finally write my mini-review of it, along with a couple of the new replacement shows.

Everybody Hates Chris

Premise: Everybody hates Chris, obviously.

Review: It's tempting to compare this show with Wonder Years, since they're both about young boys who grew up in previous decades and both narrated by the adult versions of those boys, but Chris is a much less sentimental, nostalgic show with more edge to it. I would say they're probably equally good, although I might like Wonder Years better simply because I grew up at the same time in the same sort of suburbs. But Chris is very funny. I've never cared much for its overrated creator Chris Rock - I don't think he's that funny and he strikes me as awfully misogynistic - but the young Chris hasn't acquired that disturbing anger that defines the older Chris, making him much easier to relate to. Perhaps as the show goes on we'll see him become a bitter, successful comic.

InJustice

Premise: Sometimes innocent people actually go to jail. Someone should try and get them out!

Review: This has potential. While every other crime show is about a brilliant investigator bringing down a criminal, this is about a brilliant lawyer freeing the unjustly incarcerated. An organization lead by a flamboyant corporate lawyer (with perfect flamboyant, successful lawyer hair) played with gusto by Kyle MacLachlan investigates cases where the wrong person may be behind bars. I've only seen one episode, but it was pretty interesting. It's a very television view of law, in which you prove someone is innocent by finding the real culprit, and the first episode gets a little too fancy in the reason the injustice happens (apparently over-eagre DAs aren't enough), but it's got a lot of the fun investigation quality of the Law and Order shows. I also like it's rather progressive nature and suspicion of power and authority, so I hope they keep doing a good job and have some success. Anyway, I always like Kyle so it's nice to have something to watch him in.

The Book of Daniel

Premise: Jesus thinks you should stop taking tranquilizers.

Review: I was so looking forward to this based on the commercials. It looked like a sort of Desperate Housewives soapy comedy about a priest who deals with a bunch of crazies and has face to face talks with a witty, irreverent Jesus Christ. It's a shame the person who put together the ads didn't put together the actual show, which is one of these sincere, Everwoodish dramas. Even Jesus isn't really that witty; the ads edited his dialog for more punch, but the conversations themselves are genial and sometimes light-hearted but not especially funny. I got bored and stopped watching about a third of the way through the two-hour premiere.

Four Kings

Premise: Four guys hang out and hope their show doesn't get canceled?

Review: I only watched about five or ten minutes of this, it struck me as another of the bland, generic, unfunny comedies that are flooding our airwaves. I couldn't be bothered.

Meet the new series, same as the old series - new TV series (part two)

I've seen enough shows now to get a sense of the season, which is basically made up of a whole bunch of generic comedies and X-Files clones. Almost every crime and suspense show is indebted to X-Files. It seems strange; why, five years after it went off the air, is everyone trying to capture the X-Files vibe? Here's my take on a few more shows, and some revisiting of ones I mentioned before.

The Night Stalker
Premise: Like the old Kolchak: The Night Stalker series except different in every conceivable way

Review: I really don't understand the point in taking the name of an old series for a show that's nothing like it. Kolchak: The Night Stalker starred the middle-aged character actor Darren McGavin as a pushy, rumpled loner reporter fascinated with unusual murders that always turned out to have supernatural causes. He constantly tried to publish the stories but his editor resisted.

This new incarnation is about a young, attractive reporter obsessed with the mysterious death of his wife who teams up with an attractive female reporter and investigates mysterious murders that may have supernatural overtones, not to write about them, which he refuses to do for some dumb reason, but to find out if there's a connection with his wife's death.

The Night Stalker is not really a remake of Kolchak, it's actually a remake of the X-Files, and was in fact created by an ex-writer for that show. You've got the true believer guy and the woman skeptic and all sorts of scary monsters. And while as a remake of the McGavin show this is a complete failure, lacking that show's personality and humor, as a remake of the X-Files it's really pretty darn good. It's scary and stylish, although I could do without those dumb intros and outros where the good-looking Kolchack pretentiously prattles on while key phrases appear onscreen.

My Name is Earl

Premise: White trash low-life discovers karma and decides to make ammends for everything he's ever done wrong

Review: Hey look, it's a clever, original comedy! You don't see much of that, do you? This is a really funny show that plays off the dumbness of its principals but never really looks down on them. Earl is ill-informed (after seeing Carson Daly discussing karma on TV, Earl comes to believe that the concept was invented by Carson) and he's done a lot of bad things, but he's got an admirable determination and a certain childlike logic. The show manages to create a character who you can believe would try and right his wrongs but that you also believe would have done those wrongs to begin with. So far this is the only show I've seen this season whose cancellation would upset me.

Related

Premise: girls talking really fast

Review: Related manages to be kind of clever without ever actually being funny. A group of sisters banter about this and that with the rat-a-tat delivery from the Gilmore Girls, and sometimes they say something that seems like there's a certain intelligence in the thought, but it's not funny or witty or anything like that, it just exhibits a certain facile cleverness. This is from the producers of Friends, and the characters are just as bland and generic as those on Friends. Friends kept me watching because of its sharp writing, but Related is written in an annoying manner and glib dialogue delivered by generic women is not my idea of a good time.

Invasion

Premise: Something's going on, but what? The title suggests aliens, but the show isn't telling

Review: I wanted to check this out because it was from the creator of the brilliant, short-lived horror series American Gothic, Shaun Cassidy, who has apparently created a few other shows since then that were canceled without my ever knowing they existed. If not for Shaun's involvement I might have stopped watching in the middle of the first episode, which managed to make a hurricane seem dull, but I kept watching and the series picked up.

Invasion is definitely a slow build, which is why the first episode was all set-up and no excitement. Now the pieces are falling into place but you can't make out the picture. A doctor who was found after the hurricane naked in the forest has become obsessed with water. The doctor's sheriff husband acts suspiciously but may be okay (judging from this and American Gothic, Cassidy finds small-town sheriff's intimidating). A military guy was found injured with holes in his body, but he was supposed to be overseas; did he really die in the hospital? A reporter is intrigued by mysterious goings on in the area, but her boss, who also was found naked in the forest after the hurricane, insists she not investigate.

At this point, I'm intrigued. The show has a low-key eeriness to it, and while it's no American Gothic so far, I think as the story unwinds this show could have the same mysterious quality that gives Lost its charm. Here's hoping.

And here's comments on two shows I'm giving up on:

Surface

Premise: Sea monsters galore

Review: When I saw the second episode of the series I thought the recap of the first episode was too confusing, but having seen the first episode I realized there was no way around that, because the whole episode was confusing. Surface simply isn't done very well. It follows four separate stories, but none of them are especially involving, and the show often fails to make clear what's going on or why. I feel they're trying to squeeze in a lot of stuff and thus glossing over important details. It's not a terrible show, but it's not really worth watching either.

Commander in Chief

Premise: Woman becomes the president everyone wants

Review: Dream presidents work great in comedies like Dave, where one can take delight in a forthright guy who always does the right thing, but the world is too complex for a fantasy president to work in a drama. Here, Geena Davis is a president who is tough yet compassionate, a straight shooter who always does the right thing for the right and noble reason. But she's doing stuff that wouldn't work in the real world. Sure, it sounds great to intimidate a country into overthrowing their dictatorship, but in the real world patriotism and hatred of the U.S. generally trump hatred of one's own government And in the real world there is not always a good solution to a situation; sometimes you have to choose between a bunch of bad options none of which is going to get you anything close to what you want, a fact conveniently ignored by this show.

There is also a certain connect-the-dots quality to the story, which hits the subjects you would expect it to hit in the order you would expect it to hit them, doing the whole how to run the free world and still be a good mom thing and other such nonsense.

The cast is great, especially an unctuous Donald Sutherland, but the show feels false and contrived. It also just isn't that interesting.