My annual TV roundup is a little late this year – I’d intended to do this as a Preview, but Premiere week has come and gone and I got slammed with work, so it’s here now. The good news is, that allowed me to see a good number of the shows that I didn’t have screeners for.

Screeners? Yes, this year I was actually able to get hold of a few early versions of pilots for NBC and CBS, so I’ll indicate which pilots I saw that way. I’ll also note when I saw them, since the earlier I saw them, the greater the chances that there have been significant changes made since I saw them. I’ll also note which shows I’ve been watching since they premiered.

Anything with an asterisk is something I would recommend based on whatever version of the pilot I saw. I’ll probably be watching a couple more shows than that, but those are the ones that really stood out. Anything not listed here, I haven’t actually watched and thus do not feel qualified to give an opinion on other than “that looked stupid enough that even I wouldn’t watch it.”

After the jump, the full list.

Read the rest…

My annual post-premiere week roundup of all the new shows I’ve tried out, so that a) I can advise those of you who want to know what shows are worth your time and b) convince myself that watching all this shit has been worth my time.

I’ll try to disclose anywhere I’ve got friends working or where I’ve worked with principals in the past, though now that I’m getting the hell out of showbiz I feel a bit more comfortable calling a spade a spade when something is terrible.

Starting on Monday nights and going in roughly chronological order, these are the shows I’ve given a chance (anything not listed, I haven’t actually watched):

The Event (NBC, Mondays at 9pm) – Though it was conspicuously lacking in information, the pilot was better than I thought it would be (minus what I found to be spectacularly cheesy visual effects). The producers seemed to quickly realize withholding too much information was going to drive the audience nuts, and they immediately dropped quite a bit of knowledge about what the hell is going on in the second episode. Spoiler (highlight to read): Kerry Weaver is a goddamn space alien! This show desperately wants to be the next Lost, but the characters are way too thinly drawn at this point for it to be comparable. However, it also seems to be avoiding some of the pitfalls that dragged down FlashForward‘s early episodes last year by actually moving the plot forward in a meaningful fashion. It’s a big if, but if they can find a way to significantly flesh out the characters, this could actually turn into a pretty good show.

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Lonestar (Fox, Mondays at 9pm, already cancelled) – Though I didn’t quite like it as much as most critics did, I thought it had a lot of potential and I’m sorry to see it go so quickly after it pulled microscopic ratings. However, I’m more depressed about what this means for intriguing dramas that require the audience to put in effort to watch them. This show could have been handled better – it got stuck with a deathly timeslot (even behind House it was still up against Dancing With The Stars and NBC’s one out-of-the-gate hit in The Event) and had a very weird marketing campaign, but good luck trying to sell any broadcast network on the idea that any drama requiring the audience to think is going to be viable in the future, even with a better slot and a better campaign.

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Hawaii Five-O (CBS, Mondays at 10pm) – This is pretty much the Scott Caan Show, and Caan even makes the purported lead, the wooden Alex O’Laughlin, seem useful as a straight man. I’ve got no attachment to the original, but this is still far, far better than I thought it was going to be given the batting average for remakes lately. However, Daniel Dae Kim needs to cut his nasty, greasy-ass hair or I’m going to fly out to Hawaii with a goddamn pair of clippers and do it myself.

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No Ordinary Family (ABC, Tuesdays at 8pm) – Fun. Needs to get rid of the talking to the camera bit right quick, but Michael Chiklis and Julie Benz are both clearly enjoying breaking out of old characters (him: monstrously corrupt cop on The Shield, her: Dexter’s pushover, now dead wife) and getting to do some much lighter work. The characters could use some more depth, but this one seems promising.

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Raising Hope (Fox, Tuesdays at 9pm) – I’ve got a couple friends working on this one, but I think I’d enjoy it even if I didn’t. Being about a family of misfits trying to raise a baby, it’s a bit of a weird match for Glee, but it’s got some very sweet humor. There’s a real fine line to walk when you have fairly dim characters between laughing at their antics and laughing at how stupid the characters are, and so far it seems to be walking it nimbly. Martha Plimpton is a real standout as the (very young) grandmother. One drawback: They should have kept the snappier original title, which was Keep Hope Alive.

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Running Wilde (Fox, Tuesdays at 9:30pm) – Probably a case of having my expectations too high, but this one is just not very good. It’s basically the Arrested Development gang trying to get the band back together, but instead of playing their original songs, they’re playing shitty covers. Huge, huge disappointment.

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Undercovers (NBC, Wednesdays at 8pm) – For a show about spies, the pilot really didn’t have a whole hell of a lot of action, which was disappointing. The leads are perfectly likeable, though the “They’re spies! Who run a catering business!” portion of the premise is clearly going to need to go away quickly, because it’s so needlessly schticky. I’m still a bit undecided on this one, but the ratings have not been promising.

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Better With You (ABC, Wednesdays at 8:30pm) – Spectacularly bland. And having one show with a laugh track on a night where none of the other shows have one is really, really jarring, and only points up what a stupid convention the laugh track can be when poorly executed.

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Terriers (FX, Wednesdays at 10pm) – Well-done little story about a couple of PI’s, which coasts mainly on the buddy chemistry of Donal Logue and Michael Raymond-James. I worked on a great pilot that Logue starred in (which sadly got bogged down in legal issues and never went anywhere), and he’s a nice, nice dude, and a great actor, so it’s good to see him on a show that makes use of all of his talents. It’s a nice blend of cop show and character study.

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Outsourced (NBC, Thursdays at 8:30pm) – Don’t make the same mistake I did of watching the show to confirm how awful it is. Please don’t. I think it was Dan Fienberg at Hitfix who gave the best quote about this show on his joint podcast with Alan Sepinwall of the same site: If nobody on this show had an accent, not only are the jokes not funny, they’re really not even jokes. Just an awful, awful show.

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Outlaw (NBC, Fridays at 10pm) – This is another one I watched to see if it was as ridiculous as the reviews made it seem, and oh dear god, is it ever. I don’t demand perfect realism out of legal shows, mostly because that would be dreadfully boring. However, I do expect them to take place in a universe that bears some relation to our own, and this one just doesn’t, which makes it impossible to watch if you know a damn thing about the law. Fun party game: Invite a bunch of lawyers over to your house and force them to watch this show. Whichever one lasts the longest without yelling or gesticulating wildly at the screen due to the mind-boggling inaccuracies is the winner.

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Boardwalk Empire (HBO, Sundays at 10pm) – This show was genetically engineered for greatness from birth, with Terence Winter from The Sopranos writing and Martin Motherfucking Scorcese directing, and it’s a mobgasm of the highest order. Scorcese does a typically outstanding job with the pilot, pulling every mob-movie cliche he can think of out of his bag of tricks and making it seem brand-spanking new, and it’s just masterful. The second episode is also really outstanding, which is a very good sign since it was shot on a significantly lower budget and, you know, not by Martin Motherfucking Scorcese. It’s hard not to talk about this show in hyperbole, and judging by some of the “Well, god, it’s the best thing since sliced bread, but couldn’t it have been better?” reaction coming from some corners, it might be possible expectations have been raised impossibly high. But really, when you strip away the hype and concentrate on the product on-screen, it’s hard to deny that this is far and away the best new show of the year.

Over the last few years, I’ve invested a lot of time in shows that, for one reason or another, just don’t work out. They get cancelled, they get so unimaginably stupid that even I stop watching, whatever.

But I haven’t read quite as good a takedown on both the mechanics of a bad show playing out the string and the mechanics of Internet Lovefest Guy commentary as the following magnificent paragraph from Todd VanDerWerff at The Onion AV Club, in his review of the penultimate episode of FlashForward:

FlashForward has been canceled. It is a dead show walking, playing out the string in hopes that it can pull enough of itself together that there will be that one guy in every comment thread on the Internet about great shows canceled too soon who will say, “HEY, YOU GUYS REMEMBER FLASHFORWARD? THAT WAS A GREAT SHOW, AND THE NETWORK TREATED IT SO BADLY, AND IT WOULD HAVE BEEN GREAT.” And, eventually, the number of people who are capable of successfully arguing with this guy that, no, FlashForward wasn’t all that great, and it received a gigantic marketing push from a network that gave it one of its best timeslots, and it debuted to an audience of some 12 million who mostly left because it WASN’T VERY GOOD, even with a mostly enjoyable pilot, will dwindle to nothing, but that ONE GUY, that ONE VOICE OF PASSION and LACK OF REASON, will be able to convince some poor souls that it IS worth checking out, and they’ll head on down to the Best Buy (or the post-apocalyptic variant thereof) and go all the way to the back of the TV on DVD section and find a DVD set on the bottom shelf of the last stand, covered in dust, and they’ll take it home, and they’ll pop it in the DVD player, and they’ll realize that guy was a fucking idiot.

Really, if you’re among the few people who’s been suffering along with me watching this stupidity, you should read VanDerWerff’s recap. FlashForward is a terrible show that could be criticized from a thousand angles, but it’s a rare treat to see someone take such a wide target and pinpoint with such surgical precision exactly what went wrong.

It takes a lot to make me stop watching a show. Evidence: I have watched every single episode of ER since its premiere. IN FUCKING 1994.

But I’m with Alan Sepinwall on this one: Heroes has lost me for good, and not because of anything in particular, but because of the sum total of its stupidity.

I was trying to explain why I still like Lost but am deleting my Heroes season pass to a friend, since both shows are often horrifically confusing and unnecessarily convoluted. It comes down to this: Motivation.

Characters on Lost have either had slowly evolving motivations or still are motivated by many of the same things that they were at the outset of the show. Most of the characters on Heroes seem to be motivated by whatever fits the plot that “chapter”, or even that week.

It becomes impossible to care who’s doing what or why when a character’s motivation can change so frequently and so capriciously, and you find yourself wondering why the hell you’re still watching this show in the first place.

It says a lot about how wrong you’ve gone when an unemployed person with nothing but time to kill decides that watching your show is not worth her time.

Credit to Sars of Tomato Nation for coining the phrase “DVR Break-Up“. Brilliant in its simplification of the process of deleting all recorded episodes of a show, then torpedoing the season pass. Amusing that she inaugurated it with Heroes six months ago, because she does not posess the patience (read: stupidity) that I do.

Spoilers for the last couple episodes of Grey’s Anatomy and The L Word, in the unlikely event that anyone who gives half a shit about either show hasn’t either seen the episodes or heard about them.

There are many shows that, for whatever reason, have their characters do things that are either entirely out of character, wholly implausible, or both. Usually this reason is that the writers have run out of ideas, but sometimes they’re just weird.

The question becomes: How do you address this within the show? Two shows I watch have pulled really odd and implausible plot twists out of their asses, and have gone with entirely different tacks in terms of how the other characters react to the weirdness.

Grey’s Anatomy has had Katherine Heigl’s character, Izzie, fucking the ghost of her dead ex-boyfriend. Like, having actual sex with a ghost. No other characters find out about it for a couple episodes, and when Izzie’s actual living, breathing, boyfriend, Alex, finds out about it, his reaction is roughly, “Whatever.”

The whole fucking-a-ghost thing is weird and implausible enough on its own, but for Alex to not really have a reaction to it made it that much stupider. As a doctor, he should at least be concerned about someone having massive hallucinations. As her boyfriend, he should really be concerned that she’s cheating on him with said hallucinations.

The whole thing’s just been handled atrociously, and what’s worse is that it’s STILL dragging out. There was some resolution in the last episode (apparently, Dead Boyfriend came back to tell Izzie that she’s sick, but he wasn’t an omniscient enough ghost to actually tell her what she has), but there’s still a lot of unraveling that arc has to do.

Meanwhile, The L Word, usually a show I still watch because it’s grown so cartoonishly bad it’s actually funny, actually handled an out-of-character moment for two of its characters really, really well.

Jenny is the resident flake/screenwriter, Shane is the resident seductress/slut. The characters have been good friends for several seasons, but apparently Jenny decided she was in love with Shane, and at the end of the episode two Sundays ago, declared said love.

Shane reacted to this by sleeping with her, eliciting a collective, “What the FUCK?!” from the lesbians and friends of lesbians who still watch this show, because such a pairing really makes no sense for either character. Even in a show infamous for lack of continuity and character inconsistency, this stood out as really bizarre.

But the payoff to the hookup that happens in the first few minutes of the next episode made me completely ignore its irrationality. Alice, a friend of both Jenny and Shane, comes over the morning after the ridiculous hookup, and has an awesome moment of revelation where she realizes Jenny and Shane had sex.

The camera pushes in on her face like in a Hitchcock movie where someone’s just realized they know who the killer is. Due credit to Leisha Hailey, who plays Alice: The way her facial expression morphs into a truly horrified grimace as the camera pushes in is absolutely hysterical.

Alice immediately excuses herself to use the restroom, and sends out a freaked-out mass text to all their mutual friends. The montage of reactions (one person falls off a treadmill, one person busts out laughing in the middle of a meeting, one person even gives an out loud, “What the fuck?”) is truly the best sequence they’ve done in years.

And why was this so funny? Because they took the bomb they just dropped on the audience and showed that even within the show, people were completely flummoxed and thrown by the development, just as much as the audience was. They effectively told the audience, “We know what we’re doing is insane. Stick with us on this one,” by making every other character in the show a proxy for the audience’s reaction.

Now I will grant the Grey’s folks one thing: They have to fill 22 episodes, where as the L Word writers only had to fill 8 episodes for their truncated final season. Part of the reason the L Word writers may have moved to address the issue so quickly was that they really didn’t have time not to.

Whatever the reason, it’s a fascinating contrast in how writers approach plotlines that take both the characters and the audience out of their comfort zones.

I finally gave up on a couple shows I’d watched every episode of earlier this year, Prison Break and Desperate Housewives.

While in DH‘s case I hear I may have given up right before the show creatively resurrected itself, this spoilery item indicates I checked out of Prison Break at the right time.

Because seriously? That’s the most implausible plot twist they’ve come up with, and this is a show that’s pretty much a maze of implausible plot twists.

Shut up, Emo Peter Parker.

Although I’m at a bit of an unfair advantage: Working at the Fox Lot, we got a free screening tonight of Juno.

While I’m not nearly as eloquent a reviewer as Tim (and I actually look forward to his take on this movie), I’ll give the short version.

This is a movie with several major flaws, the most notable of which is a grating, failed attempt to capture the way teens talk to each other. It has its moments of hilarity, but the overall effect is distracting.

That said, if you want to see a LOT of outstanding acting, you should definitely see this movie.

Starting with Ellen Page (who does an outstanding job as the titular protagonist) and going down through every single supporting character, these actors do a really great job of selling material that often does not deserve it.

I’ll throw in a mention of Jennifer Garner, who I’ve always enjoyed but have never been terribly impressed with until now. She really sells the quiet desperation in a role that could have been made shrewishly hysterical by the wrong actress. Luckily, they cast Garner, and she’s great in a pivotal role.

There are a few very strong moments in the story, which I won’t spoil for those who wish to see it. But the bottom line is that while this movie has its issues, it’s certainly still worth being seen just for Page and Garner’s performances.

Also, I’d just like to note that I now have a huge crush on Ellen Page, which feels slightly less wrong after finding out she’s not quite as young as she looks and is actually 20, although still fairly wrong as she cannot legally drink.

I had not even been considering seeing wholly unnecessary sequel Elizabeth: The Golden Age until I read Tim’s magnificent review of it in all its glorious awfulness.

Now, I have to see it. This is why Tim should be writing reviews for a living. God bless Rotten Tomatoes for adding him to the Tomatometer, giving him at least some of the exposure he richly deserves.

Almost a month into the season, I can now declare an official winner: Pushing Daisies.

I’d absolutely loved the first two episodes, with their bizarre hyper-techincolor acid trip set design, extremely strong acting, and cute (but without crossing the fine line into too cute) stories.

I was worried, however, because both episodes were directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, who directed Men in Black and The Addams Family, and whose excellent, ebullient visual storytelling leaned heavily on what turned out to be an absolutely obscene budget.

You saw every penny of the lavish spending on the screen, but in the world of television, that kind of outlay over 22 weeks becomes simply unsustainable.

So unsustainable, in fact, that ABC actually took the draconian step of banning Sonnenfeld from directing future episodes and slashing the budget to the bone. I worried that without the wild, inspired world they were able to paint with all that money, the whole house of cards would fall down.

I’m pleased to report that the writing of this week’s episode was inspired enough that I barely noticed the more drab and dimly lit surroundings.

Trying to explain what actually happens in the show is a bit of a mess. The basic premise is moderately understandable (though is annoyingly reiterated in every episode thus far): The main character touches a dead person once, they are resurrected. If he touches them again, they die, and stay dead.

If he does not touch them again to re-kill them in a minute, however, someone or something nearby will die in their place. He uses this power to help solve murders, and collect rewards. Oh, and he also revives dead fruit to make delicious pies at his awesomely named pie restaurant, the Pie Hole.

But trying to capture the texture of this show in words is totally impossible, other than to say it’s the most wildly inventive show I’ve seen in some time, and it’s clear that both the writers and the production designers have found themselves some truly excellent hallucinogens.

If you’re willing to read some spoilers, professional TV critic Alan Sepinwall sums up why this ridiculousness works a lot better than I can. Even he can’t capture the true level of weirdness, so if you haven’t seen any of the episodes yet, you should try and get the ABC.com streaming to work for you, and watch whatever episodes they have up.

Pushing Daisies‘ weird, wild house of cards could still all collapse in on itself. I’ll certainly admit to some misgivings about how long they can sustain the delicate balance they’ve struck. But until it does collapse, missing it would be a real shame.