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.

I’ve come down with a truly delightful stomach bug, so my ability to do pretty much anything beyond what I absolutely have to do is somewhat restrained.

Normally I’d have something much longer about the whole Jaypocalypse/Conandrum fiasco playing out in slow motion on NBC, but to be frank, I really don’t have the energy to write up my feelings on what is, at its heart, a battle for the future of television.

Instead, please enjoy this embed of last night’s Jimmy Kimmel show (no, really, it is quite funny). It’s an absolutely savage parody of Leno’s show, particularly in the way that he relies on the band to prop up every single limp joke.

Hopefully more to come when I feel a bit less like I’m in certain scenes from Parasites Lost.

I’m a little behind the times on this one, but while I was actually working for a couple of days last week (helping my union set up and tear down their holiday party), one of the oddest reality show concepts to actually make it to air got thrown at the screen last week.

I speak, of course, of ABC’s Conveyor Belt of Love (Variety’s photo illustration at that link is priceless). How does it work, you ask? According to The Hollywood Reporter:

“If a woman is interested in someone, that man will step aside and wait as the rest of the men go by.  But if another man comes by on the belt that seems better than that woman’s first choice, she can swap out the man waiting off of the belt as many times as she wants until the last man has passed by. If two or more of the women are interested in the same man, the tables turn and the man on the conveyor belt gets to choose which one he would like to wait for. After all 30 men have made it through the ‘Conveyor Belt of Love,’ each woman is left with her final choice as they embark on a date in the hope of finding a true connection.”

The description is pretty stupid, not to mention overly complicated to the point where my eyes glaze over about halfway through it. The trailer THR dug up looks infinitely stupider:

Something that explains a lot about the current state of the airwaves: Television executives watched that 86 second video and determined that, stretched out over an hour, it would be even better.

I would really like to know what kind of wonderful, powerful drugs these executives were on at the time so I can get some for myself. They are clearly the best drugs ever.

I’m up to my eyeballs in studying for the GRE – I take it Wednesday and I think I’m close to running through every goddamn GRE math prep question on the internet.

So, in lieu of an actual post, please enjoy this TV/Movies mashup Casey found that kind of melted my brain:

I’ll probably have something up on the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall coming down later this week – Today’s the actual anniversary but I just don’t have time to write up everything I’m thinking.

Until I was about 21, I thought I was going to be a rock star.

Until I was 28, I thought I was going to make movies and TV for a living.

Until I was ____, I thought I was going to be a professional computer nerd.

—

Life has taken a lot of twists and turns for me since the writers’ strike of 2007-2008. Since that strike began on November 5, 2007, I have spent almost twelve of these last 24 months unemployed.

Part of that was the strike. Part of that was my decision to move into the production line and out of working directly for producers, which is an inherently more volatile career path.

But much of it has been the way the bottom has absolutely fallen out of filming in L.A. The combination of the strike starting a rearrangement of the way the business works and the economy in general going down the tubes has contributed to a precipitous drop in filming here. There’s just no work.

I realized a couple months ago as I was making my bajillionth phone call looking for work that I have not received one phone call back since June. June was also my last interview, for a job I had locked down until an actor decided to put in a good word for his niece, and then she had it locked down.

I’ve offered to take PA jobs again, but they’re not looking to take someone with as much experience in higher-up jobs as I have. In some cases, they think it’s because I think I’m above the scut work (which I don’t, I wouldn’t be applying for a PA job if I did), and in some cases, it seems they think I’ll outshine them (with the people who are insecure enough to actually worry about this, that might be a more valid concern).

Everywhere I look in terms of what my skills can get me in the entertainment business, I either see jobs that are so severely overworked and underpaid that I would rather work at Starbucks again than take them, because at least at Starbucks I would get health insurance, or nothing at all.

And frankly, the way things are going right now with the economy and the out-of-state filming incentives and the studios and networks freaking the fuck out about every last penny, I don’t see that scenario changing in the next 18-24 months at the absolute earliest.

Sometimes, you just wake up and realize that the universe is trying to tell you something. And the universe is telling me it’s time to do something else with my life.

—

And now, a brief comic interlude:

Click to enlarge.

From Amazing Super Powers.

—

I’ve always been a pop-culture nerd, but I wasn’t a serious computer nerd until the last 3-4 years. I learned some HTML programming in college, and really enjoyed it, but the complete time-sink that is working in entertainment pulled me off the track that would have kept me learning more about programming.

While the primary technical things that I’ve done in the last few years have involved technical troubleshooting and working as an ad-hoc IT Guy, what I really want to learn about is how to make computers do what I want them to.

And to do that, I need to learn how to program. I need to learn about architecture and C++ and the vagaries of programming for different platforms. I really want to learn how to take some ideas I have for programs and turn them into reality, from start to finish.

This, however, will require a fair amount of school. Right now I’m on step 0.1, taking some very basic classes at the community college level, trying to figure out exactly where my interests take me in terms of how I want to program.

My ultimate goal is a Masters’ in Computer Science. I’m in the middle of a choose-your-own-adventure bit of figuring out how that’s going to happen, but I do know that I’m sure as shit not going back to school just to get a second Bachelor’s.

I’m putting together an application to Stanford to start next fall, since a) they have an extraordinarily strong program and b) they are one of the only well-respected Graduate-level CS programs that will actually accept people who don’t have a CS undergrad background as long as they’re willing to learn.

It’s an extremely competitive program, so I have a fairly comprehensive backup plan standing by. I’ll get into it at some point down the road if need be.

If I do somehow manage to get into Stanford, however, I expect to hear a lot of this [note: mp3 link].

—

I’ve talked to a fair number of you guys about all this in differing degrees of depth, but I felt like I really needed to try and bring everything together in one place, almost more for my own purposes than to try and clarify it for everyone else.

I certainly won’t say I’m never working in entertainment again. If someone offered me a job right now that would help me keep my union health insurance even a bit longer, I’d take it in a second. But I don’t see my future in production anymore, and that’s where things have changed.

This is a path that’s been slowly coalescing over the last few months, and has picked up a lot of steam since about Labor day, when I finally accepted that I probably wouldn’t work in entertainment for much of the rest of the year.

It took a long time for the pieces to come together well enough for me to see them, but once they did, my way forward became much, much clearer. I’ve got a plan, or really a bunch of plans all leading in the same direction.

Now all I have to do is try and figure out how to get there from here.

The rather brilliant Hank Steuver, kicking off his hilarious review of new daytime talk show The Wendy Williams Show:

What should be on television in the middle of the day? What should fill the space between all those commercials for personal-injury attorneys, cures for urinary-tract infections and the promises of vo-tech schooling? Should anything be on? (Is “off” an option anymore, even in hospitals?)

All the available genres nearly died or migrated to niche networks — game shows, sitcom reruns, soaps, cooking demonstrations, local chatter. What programming remains will make you thank your lucky stars that you aren’t infirm or underemployed. The sound of a television turned on at high noon is the sound of utter human defeat. (The drone never ceases with the ads: bad credit, bad floors, bad living.)

As someone who is under-to-unemployed and on occasion turns on live TV in the middle of the day: Ye gods, is he ever right.

Recently, I have:

• Turned 28, to relatively little fanfare. Which is probably appropriate, because it’s not a terribly significant birthday. Drinks at the friendly local “We have a ton of awesome beer” establishment were fun, though.
   
• Found a surprisingly viable backup employment plan if I can’t get on anything for the fall season (which I’ll go into at some point later on if/when it happens). But the good news is that I am relatively confident that I will not be boiling my own shoes for dinner. At least not until after Thanksgiving.
   
• Had my phone deteriorate to the point where it’s going to take a lot of restraint for me to not smash the thing with a ballpeen hammer between now and next Friday when I get the new iPhone. Thankfully I have kept a dedicated phone replacement fund and have decided to say “Screw unemployment!” and just get the damn new one.
   
• Gotten new neighbors after 5 months of the apartment next door being empty because the landlord refused to face reality about the way rents are falling around here. They seem nice, but their cigarette smoke seeps into my apartment on occasion, and they let their cats roam about, which tends to freak Chaplin out in the middle of the night from time to time.
   
• Broke down and finally gotten myself the “Hooray, I lost 80lbs!” reward I’d been planning to get for months: An iPod shuffle/waterproof headset combo which will keep me entertained while swimming long distances. I’m now doing 2 miles with no problem, and I’m considering bumping up to 4km when I can get away with it.
   
• Watched an absolute fuckton of TV. Rewatched entire 4th season of BSG, now working through Netflix discs of Big Bang Theory (more geekily amusing than I recalled it being, since I dropped it after the pilot) and re-watching Band of Brothers, probably going to go through all of Deadwood next.
   
• Received a sternly worded letter from the landlord to the entire building that the toilets are ONLY for disposal of human waste and toilet paper. I’m not sure whether or not I want to hear the story behind that one.
   
• Have fought the good fight against my body’s natural instinct to stay awake ridiculously late and then get up mid-morning. Generally won, though this week I’ve mostly lost (as evidenced by the timestamp on this post).

There’s an amusing article up at the Washington Post, wherein the author points out all the hilariously inaccurate and wholly fabricated locations that 24 has used during its first season set in my ridiculous hometown of Washington D.C.

The traditional, “In what universe can you get from the White House to Foxhall Road in five minutes?” complaint rears its head. This is familiar to those of us in L.A. who laugh our asses off at the thought of getting from downtown to Burbank in ten minutes in the middle of rush hour traffic.

I will grant you, the “bad guys scuba diving up to the White House” was pretty damn ridiculous, since unless the entire swamp that sits beneath the city instantly liquefies, there will be no bad guys scuba diving up to the White House.

The geographic monkeying is still not as bad as it is on some shows, like when Bones relocated Arlington Cemetery to the other side of the Potomac for their pilot.

But 24 is at least somewhat plausible in its D.C.-ness. I’ve actually been pretty impressed the way that the squat parts of L.A.’s downtown have stood in for D.C.’s legislatively height-challenged buildings.

There’s definitely aspects of it that are unrealistic, but really, there are aspects of every show in which you have to suspend your disbelief. Longtime 24 viewers with any knowledge of L.A. geography whatsoever know that the Time-Traffic Continuum is never, has never been, and never will be respected by the show.

And now, those with that same knowledge of D.C. are learning that for themselves.