Viva Laughlin - oh my god I hate this shit

What did we do to make us deserve this?

You may think I am being extreme when I say Viva Laughlin is one of the worst shows ever produced. You have not yet seen this show, so you do not understand. It truly is that bad. This show is to television what child molestation is to sex. It takes something potentially beautiful and cruelly warps it into something disturbing and repugnant for its own sick amusement.

Lord Douchebag Von Asshole surveys his domain

Meet Ripley Holden, aspiring casino owner and loathesome fucking douchebag. He treats his children like shit and ignores his wife in order to sink his life into a casino (named "Viva!") that he does not have the money to open. He has a history of cheating on his wife, he attempts to buy his son's affection with expensive cars, and his emotional neglect has left his daughter so starved for attention that she begins dating a college professor who might be even older than her father.

And just so we're clear, this is the protagonist. The way the pilot is set up, we're expected to find him roguishly charming and likable.

Did I mention he's also a horrible singer?

That's right, this show has goddamn musical numbers. However, the producers insist that the show is not a musical, and CBS has been trying to avoid this fact for most of their ad campaign, all with good reason. This is because if the overall repugnance of the cast doesn't alienate their audience, the musical numbers will. Seriously, they are fucking awful. Now, I'm not saying that musical numbers cannot be incorporated into a televised serial drama. The BBC productions of the late Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective and Pennies from Heaven both used musical interludes to masterful dramatic effect. The difference here is that Dennis Potter was one of the greatest screenwriters ever born, whereas the writing staff of Viva Laughlin apparently wrote the pilot while huffing spraypaint out of a lunchbag. Let's watch another one of these chestnuts and try to figure out where they went wrong:

Now, Hugh Jackman is an extremely talented performer who I have nothing but admiration for. His portrayal of Wolverine was one of the primary factors behind my fanatical love of the first two X-Men movies, so I can't argue he's unlikeable, and he won a Tony in 2004 for his role in The Boy from Oz, so I can't argue that he's a bad performer when it comes to musical numbers. However, I don't care if you're the best singer in the history of musical theater, when you're doing a butchered karaoke version of "Sympathy for the Devil," you do not want want Mick Jagger's voice playing alongside you to remind people just how immeasurably better he is at singing the song than you are. Sadly, this is still the best musical number featured in the pilot. Aside from this, you will be treated to another one of Asshole Von Douchetoven's Elvis covers as well as the vomit-inducing nadir of the show wherein he dry-humps Melanie Griffith while they butcher Blondie's "One Way or Another."

Yes, you read that right. Melanie Griffith is in this show. Take a look at the following montage and while you're holding back the bile, remember that this was actually put together by CBS to promote the show:

At this point, it's easy to question what kind of a god would allow a creature such as this to exist. The fact of the matter is that Melanie Griffith is a Lich Queen who walks among us to harvest souls for her dark master, the ravenous Bal-Shoggoth.

SEXY.

To add to the overwhelming classiness of Ripley "Douchenozzle" Holden, remember when I mentioned that he cheated on his wife? This is what he was cheating on her with. In the image we're looking at, he is currently informing her that he is rolling for initiative on his "Turn Undead" spell. Just kidding, he's actually trying to tell her that he doesn't want to toss his hotdog down the cavernous, diseased hallway that is her nether regions even though he needs her to help him con her husband into investing in his dead-end casino for white trash too poor to stay in Vegas. Except he doesn't actually need her to con anyone, because her husband turns up dead in Ripley's office that very night, coincidentally while Ripley is avoiding his home and family the entire night and drinking bottles of hard liquor alone in his car. This seems like an airtight alibi to me.

So naturally, the cops get involved, Douchelington becomes the primary suspect, and that's where Detective Peter Carlyle comes in.

"Oh hey, fancy meeting you here in the driveway of your own house. It's kind of funny how we keep running into each other whenever you go outside to get into your car. And then we meet again wherever you end up driving to. Have you cut your hair recently?"

Detective Carlyle, a.k.a. Stalky Stalkerson, figures that the best way to prove a suspect's guilt is by stalking and having sex with the suspect's wife. I wonder why Chris Meloni never realized the brilliant simplicity of this approach throughout his long tenure on Law & Order: SVU. So anyway, Stalky accosts Douchey's wife on numerous occasions throughout the episode, posing as a prospective homeowner in their gated community. While meeting her in such secluded romantic getaways as her driveway and the produce aisle of the supermarket, he subtly probes her for information in a manner that can only be described as entrapment. Meanwhile, he's thinking about a different kind of probing while positioning that ass for enTAPment.

Aside from this parade of living excrement, we've got Douchelord threatening to beat the shit out of his daughter's boyfriend, his son selling his car so Douchebag can sink the money into the financial black hole that is his casino, Douchemonger's pathetic attempts to salvage his failing marriage while he is clearly incapable of expressing human emotion, Hugh Jackman's personal assistant running around making bedroom eyes at both Hugh and The Lich Queen, and a bunch of other shit I drank myself to sleep for a week after viewing in order to forget.

Despite the fact that Viva Laughlin has been universally derided as one of the worst shows of the season along with Cavemen and Big Shots, CBS picked this up for 13 episodes. I doubt even half of them will air. Then again, if CBS had any dignity at all, they would have never even allowed the pilot to make it to the public, so there's always the chance that this will be raping the airwaves for its full order of episodes.

Verdict: Fuck you.

Would I Watch It? I cannot reiterate enough how much the very existence of this show fills me to the core with loathing.

Did You Think No One Would Notice?

Phallic has already provided a review of the first episode of Moonlight for you, and he hit the nail pretty much on the head. Over the summer I read about this show and, having a vampire pop culture fetish, I was looking forward to it as an idea. As soon as they announced this, I immediately started reading comments about how this was exactly like Angel. My first thought was that sure they're both vampire detectives, but they wouldn't put something on the air that was a duplicate of a show that only stopped airing a couple of years ago. I was horrifically surprised to discover that I was so very wrong. Phallic has already mentioned some of the other, more obscure, material that Moonlight rips off and this can be added to the long list. This isn't just similar to Angel because they're good vampires who work as detectives. This show actually steals almost all its details and subplots from that show. The most ridiculous part: they wrote a love interest for Mick St. John that's exactly the same as the love interest Angel had on season 1 of that show (I'm sorry, one is a reporter and the other is an LAPD detective, big difference) and they cast a woman who looks just like the girl from Angel to play her! Take a look for yourself:


That is the always delicious (pre-Law & Order) Elisabeth Röhm steaming up your screen on the right.

Supporting cast observations:
-I love Jason Dohring. I'm a big Veronica Mars fan. I just wish he were more Logan-y on this show. His character could be great if he just loosened up a little and added some serious camp action to the role.
-Shannyn Sassoman is HOT. She's an 11; but bitch either needs some acting lessons or a transition into porn because she is awful in everything she does (I vote for the latter)
-Sophia Myles is an even worse actress. The difference is that she's not nearly as hot and her bad acting is so much more boring than Shannyn's. But, hey, if she stays on this show for a while The Doctor will probably dump her ass and be available again. There's one reason to keep this around for a couple of years.

Moonlight review - I'd say it sucks, but that's just too obvious

"Being a vampire sucks"

Yes, that is the actual first line of Moonlight. It's got a pseudo-documentary opening wherein Mick St. John, vampire, is interviewed about being a vampire. He immediately launches into a monologue that might have well been stolen directly from Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon's comic Preacher wherein a vampire explains how he is invincible to garlic, holy water, crosses, being staked in the heart, and he cannot turn himself into a bat. Mick is a vampire detective who solves vampire crimes in LA while trying to make sure that nobody finds out that vampires exist. He spends this episode hunting down someone who is murdering vapid goth whores for screwing their college professor who leads a vampire cult.

Remember when I mentioned that dialogue was stolen directly from a comic in the first scene of this episode? Well, later "And Death shall have no Dominion" by John Donne gets name-dropped by the leader of the vampire cult. Oh, guess what, No Dominion was Charlie Huston's second Joe Pitt novel. What kind of character is Joe Pitt, you may ask? Oh, just A VAMPIRE DETECTIVE.

God, I can't even bring myself to mock this, there's nothing going on. I'm 40 minutes in, and there's nothing interesting or entertaining happening here, just a leaden string of shitty post-Blade/Anne Rice vampire cliches. Their idea of originality is having Mick shoot up blood instead of drinking it. Oh, blood drinking is like alcoholism/drug addiction that's never been done before by EVERY VAMPIRE MOVIE EVER. Also, to top of the overwhelming goth idiocy of this, the emotional final sequence is set to fucking Evanescence.

Now that the episode's done, I feel I should also mention that Shannyn Sossamon shows up playing pretty much the exact same character as she did in Dirt, an insanely clingy girlfriend figure for the male protagonist who tries to drive him to the dark side. The only difference is last time she was a schizophrenic hallucination and this time she's a vampire. Also, Dirt was actually entertaining.

This show didn't screen at CBS's pilots, meaning they somehow had even less confidence in this than Viva Laughlin!, and that's a show where they've already fired one of the producers before the first episode has even aired.

Verdict: Blah blah we're vampires blah blah I can never get close to anyone because I'm a monster blah blah OH MY GOD WHO CARES. I can't even begin to explain how boring this show is, but I don't think either of us made it more than halfway through this episode before we stopped paying attention. You may wonder why I am posting a picture of Uwe Boll here. That is because he made Bloodrayne, a vampire movie that is currently ranked at #97 on the IMDb Bottom 100 list, yet still manages to be roughly 100 times more entertaining than anything on display in the festival of failure that was the pilot of Moonlight.

Would I Watch It? Dear god no.

Cane- Suck It, CBS

-------------------------------I feel pretty

I HATE Cane. This was by far my least favourite pilot for the new season. Congratulations Cane, you beat the likes of The Big Bang Theory, Big Shots, Life is Wild, and even Viva Laughlin.
Here is why this show makes me so very angry. Unlike the other shows up there, Cane wasn’t so bad that I could look over at my screening companion and actively laugh at it. It was profoundly boring, the cast was full of generic actors that networks cast when they want hot Hispanics, and the whole thing just seemed to be pandering and trying to be a beacon of multiculturalism on network TV. CBS has created, with no exaggeration, a telenovela. It’s not even original to make a telenovela with higher production values because after the demise of the WB and UPN last year a channel called My Network TV came out and did the same exact thing. I’m guessing the budgets at CBS are higher; but I think ultimately it’ll look about the same. I saw some online ad banners and didn’t know they were for Cane at first. Even the banners look more appropriate for a daytime soap.
Nestor Carbonell has some pretty epic guyliner in the pilot. That’s the only thing worth seeing in this whole sorry mess. I have sampled it for you above so you don’t have to suffer through the pilot. Let us never speak of this show again, under any circumstances.

Verdict: It’s the only show on the Big 4 centered around people of colour. CBS wouldn’t dare cancel this. The question is, who is the audience? There are major reasons why every target demo I can think of wouldn’t be at all interested in this show. Given how much I hate it, I think it’ll be the highest rated new drama.

Would I Watch It? I won’t even dignify that with a response.

Big Bang Theory- CBS Needed to Recycle Some Old Sitcom Sets

Tonight is a big night for TV. Lots of shows are returning, and some are premiering. Kongye is here to tell you about the pilots of tonight’s new shows.

-------------Comic gold....for the obese, illiterate masses
The Big Bang Theory: I’ve previously stated my desire for the multi-camera, half hour sitcom to die. This show only reaffirms that passion. Here’s a brilliant premise: a hot, dim chick moves in across the hall from two awkward, (apparently) brilliant geeks. One of the geeks falls madly in love with her but is too socially retarded to make it happen. Hilarity ensues. Oh wait, no it doesn’t. I saw the original pilot of this over the summer and then again at the Paley screenings. For some unknown reason (I don't get why because you can hardly tell the difference) they reshot the opening, which features the geeks at a sperm bank. The writers thought that would be a hilarious gag. It actually does a pretty good job summing up this show: it’s just a bunch of sitcom clichés that you’ve seen before on dozens of other (mostly superior) shows. There’s really marginal talent in front of and behind the camera, and it basically just fails on every level. The two standouts here- one good and one bad- are the hot chick and the tall geek. Hot Chick isn’t a real human being. She behaves kind of like a non-greasy Britney Spears: breaking down and stripping down in front of these complete strangers, then asking them for ridiculous favours. That behaviour is scripted to be weird. What I find unsettling is how she behaves towards the geeks and two more losers they bring in to round out the flock for more “laughs.” Hot chick clearly had a lobotomy while they put in her implants because she just responds with the same plastered on smile to everyone in this show, no matter what. Tall Geek (Jim Parsons) is the only part of this show that works. His delivery of the offensively bland material is great and he’s very endearing. I’d like to see him recast in a far better quality program because I can tell he’s got good comedic skills.

Verdicts: I will forget this show is on the air by tomorrow; but it may continue to run for seasons. Hey, every time Charlie Sheen is on Access Hollywood getting accused of subscribing to Latina Tranny porn sites I think how sad it is that he’s sitting at home, washed up….then they remind me that he has some show I’ve never heard of and he’s the highest paid actor on TV. If the FBI ever had to hide witnesses from me (you know, for when they put me on trial for the meth lab I run out of the MSG subbasements) they should give them shows on CBS because then I’d never be able to find them. Did you people know that there’s a show with David Spade and The Tick on Monday nights on CBS? When did this happen?

Would I Watch It? No