NBC Has Low Standards

NBC recently gave all of its new fall series additional script orders. As you all know, I didn't like any of their slate. The only show I've watched past the pilot is Journeyman, and that's only because there's nothing on at that time and I enjoy making fun of its insane time travel solutions to simple problems. The numbers on these shows are also pretty unimpressive.
The only conclusion we can draw from this, and this has been obvious for quite a while, is that NBC is desperate for anything that isn't a complete failure. When your numbers are in the toilet anyway, you start to see the light at the end of the sewer tunnel.
On the other side of the spectrum, the season premiere of FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS was amazing. Something I've come to expect from this program. Also as expected, the numbers sucked again. I'm constantly amazed that people will sit through inane, badly-produced crap like Heroes while good TV dies a slow, painful death.
Good luck to NBC's slate-o-schlock. May it pollute our collective TV screens for years to come.

P.S.: CBS gave script orders on the new show that we don't about here in blog land. If they order a full season, they're going to have to shell out so much money on guyliner.

Life Review

This guy's main adorable quirk is that he really likes fruit. How adorable and quirky is that?

Life is a show about a police officer who’s wrongly imprisoned for 12 years, exonerated, and returns to the force as a detective. Ever since House became a huge hit and Hugh Laurie won every award known to man we’ve had a steady stream of quirky anti-heroes invade our television sets. This guy is not so much quirky as he is just annoying as fuck. Phallic had to keep reminding me that he was “Zen,” not just raised by wolves. Maybe I’m not familiar with that school of thought, as I couldn’t pick out a single Zen quality about him. This show was annoying, depressing, and sometimes confusing. The only scene I enjoyed was when they raid a drug den. The main character’s partner, a recovering drug addict, shoots a bag of coke. It blows up in her face and she’s just covered in the stuff. She immediately- and melodramatically- runs to the crack house’s shower and washes the coke off as she freaks out. It was HI-larious, as Phallic would say. Adam Arkin plays the cop’s only friend and he’s also the only thing this show has going for it.

Verdict: I give it a couple of weeks. It will be one of the first casualties of the TV season.

Would I Watch It? No.

Bionic Woman Review- Geek Porn with Wet T-Shirts

We haven’t been able to post all the updates we wanted on the blog today. Wouldn’t you know it, Kongye has a job and a life outside the blogosphere? Today a little of both intruded when Kongye had our weekly brunch with T and a shitstorm was abrewin’ on the work front. With that in mind, we bring you the reviews of tonight’s 2 NBC premieres.

I didn’t care for either Bionic Woman or Life. Personally I’d lump them together into the not good but not horrifically bad either category; but because Bionic Woman is so hyped and because it seems to be NBC’s big hope for Heroes-like numbers this year, I guess it deserves its own review. Basically, this show just didn’t give me a reason to keep wanting to watch it. I was extremely unimpressed with the staging of the climatic fight sequence in the pilot episode, and if that’s how they choose to showcase themselves it’s just not going to cut it. The heavy use of wire work and the Asian-inspired roof garden really harkened back too much to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon for my liking. The similarities were likely not intentional, but it was all I could think about. This show suffered from trying to make everything too big. In that scene the two women were thrown around and crashed into the building far more than was necessary. The creators don’t trust the quality of their product enough to be subtle with anything. They feel the need to bombard us with too much of everything. Even the rain on this show is over the top and distracting. They’re really trying to clobber us over the heads with this idea that this image is significant.
It’s not all bad. I happen to like Michelle Ryan a lot- or at least I did in Jekyll over the summer. The problem is that I don’t like her as an action hero. On an admittedly shallow level, she just doesn’t have the physique I like in my female ass-kickers. I’m more of a Kate Beckinsale in Underworld kind of person. Michelle’s just on the boxy side (I’m not calling her fat, I can tell she’s actually very fit. Her body type just makes her not naturally lean and I don’t like that). Ultimately, if I’m not going to enjoy watching her fight on an aesthetic level, it just doesn’t make the show as good. I like most of the supporting cast. The producers recast the role of Jamie’s sister and reshot all the scenes with her, so basically all the non-bionic parts of the pilot. The new actress is a vast improvement, and I like that they dropped the goth angle because that’s an overused cliché: the troubled goth teen.
I’m going to lay all my cards on the table: I hate Isaiah Washington. I won’t get into it too much now; but the Cliff’s Notes is that I think he’s a set cancer and he doesn’t take responsibility for his own actions. I found out about NBC’s decision to stunt cast him on Bionic Woman before I saw one frame of this show. I am rooting for this show to fail largely so that Isaiah will find himself unemployed yet again, hopefully for a long, long time. Maybe that’s tainted my perception of the pilot, maybe not. I know co-blogger Phallic did enjoy this and he’ll tell you more about that when he has a chance.

Verdict: I’m hoping this show is pulled from the schedule even before any of Washington’s episodes air. That’s pretty unlikely. This will go on and on far longer than it needs to.

Would I Watch It? Nope

PIME TARADOX

So, Kongye has already contributed her thoughts on Journeyman, but I figured I'd take special note of the most amazing plot thread of the pilot, which is that Kevin McKidd's heroic journey is that he spends most of show fucking up a random guy's life as much as he can.

Step 1: Kevin McKidd is sent back in time and he stops a suicidal man from getting himself run over by a trolley. He gets the man's name (I think it's Neil,) and goes on his way.

Step 2: A few years later, Kevin McKidd runs into Neil in a cafe. Neil is having a conversation with his pregnant girlfriend, wherein he basically tells her that he doesn't want to take care of the baby and she should get an abortion. Kevin McKidd confronts the girlfriend and tells her how totally special it is to have a child, even if it is in a fucked up relationship. She goes back to Neil and eventually gets married to him at some point.

Step 3: Kevin McKidd finds out that Neil kills his wife and child in 1997.

Step 4: Kevin McKidd goes back in time to 1997 and tracks down Neil, who is stalking his wife and child so he can shoot them. As Neil crosses the street while drawing his gun, Kevin calls out his name.

(This is where it gets good.)

Neil turns around AND IS PROMPTLY HIT BY A BUS. He goes flying like 20 feet and smashes into another car's windshield, dying instantly. At this point, I am laughing hysterically. The wife goes up to Kevin and reveals that Neil had threatened to kill her, then Kevin goes back into the timewarp.

So let's review Kevin McKidd's contributions to the life of Neil: He stopped him from killing himself, and instead pushed him into a loveless, abusive marriage with a child he didn't want, and then HE GOT HIM KILLED ANYWAY. All he did was make Neil's miserable failure of a life that many years longer and that much shittier. MY HERO.*

"I did it for the lulz."

*(Actually, it turns out the real goal of his mission was to make sure that Neil's wife got pregnant so the kid could pull a bunch of third world peasants out of a burning bus or something, but it's funnier if you ignore that scene and just pretend that this is like Quantum Leap except Scott Bakula's mission was to be the biggest asshole ever to random bystanders.)

Journeyman- I Didn't Know Time Travel Could Be This Boring

Journeyman is boring. The premise was sort of intriguing: a guy travels randomly through time, changes events, and tries to affect the future. The pilot was just a mess.
The show has been set up to have two main components. We’ll have a procedural element where each week he has a specific timeline that he has to go through and manipulate to a particular goal and we’ll have a larger story arc about his dead fiancé actually being alive and also travelling through time and him trying to figure out the mystery of that.
The mess in the pilot comes from there being too many components to the plot in the main story arc. The main character is married with a son but he has this ex-fiancé who he thinks died at some point in the past in a plane crash. He has a police officer brother that he doesn’t get along with. During his various trips into the past in the pilot we find out all these details- like his current wife was once married to or dating his brother but the show suggests they were having an affair while he was with the fiancé and she was with the brother. In the present they complicate the story by having him disappear every time he goes into the past. This leads to an intervention on the show and so we get hints that maybe he had a drug problem in the past. All this stuff weighs the show down because you just want him to get on with the time traveling, or with anything other than wallowing, really. Further complicating the show is the fact that it’s painted itself into a corner with its central love triangle. This guy lost his great love and now he’s found out that she may be alive and travelling through time with him. He also has opportunities to be with her in the past. At the same time they show him as a devoted family man who will do just about anything to save his marriage. It’s pretty much a no-win they have set up there. There’s a scene towards the end where he finally proves to his wife that he can travel through time by using their wedding ring and their garden that’s actually lovely and works very well on the female demos. One scene isn’t nearly enough to recommend this, though.

Verdict: Journeyman has a fantastic spot right after Heroes. With that comes the responsibility of retaining the lead-in’s viewers. I don’t see enough people sticking around to watch this. I think NBC will keep this for at least a season, but it will lose its time slot.

Would I Watch It? No; but I think it’s cool if it connects with other people.

Chuck- I Want My Hour Back

Wait, is this not, like, the same show? Dude, I was confused by the totally wicked writing and, you know, the fact that you've already stunt-cast that brunette chick.


NBC has high hopes for Chuck. It’s getting really great reviews. This is another one of the shows that I was able to watch over the summer and then again at the Paley Center. Having seen it twice now, I can honestly say I think it’s one of the most shrill, annoying, self-congratulatory pilots I’ve watched in quite some time. Chuck is about a college-dropout computer geek who works as a supervisor of a Nerd Herd in an electronics store. He’s pathetic, lonely, and has no future. One night, for reasons that the show will probably never bother to explain to us, his former college roommate who became a secret agent for NSA (or the FBI or the CIA, who the fuck cares) sent him an email containing a file that when opened downloaded the contents of a supercomputer into Chuck’s head. Apparently there was only one copy of this supercomputer thingy hanging around and when the NSA or FBI or CIA or whichever one of those his roommate wasn’t working for killed his former roommate, they destroyed that copy so now Chuck is it. Oh, have I mentioned that for some reason the CIA and NSA (one of those two is possibly the FBI, I don’t care enough) are violently fighting each other on this show? They kill each other’s agents and damage large sections of Los Angeles and Washington in the process. Office politics can be such a bitch. One of those organizations then sends a hot chick (of course it has to be a hot chick) to kill and/ or protect him. The other government organization sends Adam Baldwin to kill both of them for no reason that’s readily explained.

If that description sounded convoluted and confusing to you, don’t worry. Chuck doesn’t concern itself with things like “logic” and “explaining plot holes.” This show is all about having the producers sit in a room and say “Oh, aren’t we so clever and hip.” There are frequent explosions, car chases, women in lingerie, ninjas, and climactic bomb-disarmings thrown in to keep the mostly ADD-afflicted, douchebag audience happy. I kept hoping that Adam Baldwin would actually just kill everyone and rip off his face to reveal the robot underneath. There is not a single interesting, attractive, funny, or inventive character on this show. Chuck is such a waste of space. He’s supposed to be some kind of lovable loser; but he’s actually just devoid of any personality whatsoever. Any glimmers of action he ever has (I think they show that he’s a nice guy by having him help a dad recreate a little girl’s dance recital) are just completely generic and mundane. He’s also very quietly bitter and has this giant victim complex about his college roommate and his college girlfriend and how they’ve ruined his life. Why would I want to watch a show set around him? The worst part of this show is that it thinks it’s witty. It thinks it has elevated TV to some amazing level and it really hasn’t.

Verdict: The same people of questionable taste who tune in to Heroes every week will eat this shit up. It’s a lead-in to that show, so they can plop their lazy asses on the couch at 8pm and turn their brains off completely until at least 10 (unless they also tune into the next show we’ll be reviewing; in which case, make that 11)

Would I Watch It? I’m making a Chuck voodoo doll already. Where do I stick pins in
for cancellation? I hate NBC.