Month: October 2012

US TV

Review: 666 Park Avenue 1×1 (ABC/ITV2)

2 October 2012 Rob Buckley 6 Comments

666 Park Avenue

In the US: Sundays, 10pm/9pm Central, ABC
In the UK: Acquired by ITV2

So when is an adaptation not an adaptation? When you’ve only bought the book for its title because it’s cool and you’re really adapting something else altogether, that’s when.

You might be tempted to think, for example, that 666 Park Avenue might be somewhat like 666 Park Avenue, the book of the same name – on which its credits claim it is based. And yet a brief yet cursory examination of the book’s Amazon listing (or even, like me, if you flicked through it in the book shop) will reveal a few discrepancies:

Welcome to New York City, where the socialites are witches.

Jane Boyle has been living a fairy tale. When her boyfriend Malcolm proposes, Jane can’t believe her luck and decides to leave her Paris-based job as a fledgling architect and make a new start with him in New York. But when Malcolm introduces Jane to the esteemed Doran clan, one of Manhattan’s most feared and revered families, Jane’s fairy tale takes a darker turn.

Now Jane must struggle with newfound magical abilities and the threat of those who will stop at nothing to get them.

Welcome to 666 Park Avenue….

Yes, it’s Gossip Girl meets The Secret Circle. At least, the book is.

But that’s not 666 Park Avenue the TV series. That is something completely different. And by completely different, I mean it’s Rosemary’s Baby meets The Devil’s Advocate with just a hint of The Shining to give us ‘The Devil’s Janitor’. That’s not as sexy a title as 666 Park Avenue, is it?

When Jane Van Veen (Rachael Taylor) and Henry Martin (Dave Annable), an idealistic young couple from the Midwest, arrive in New York City, the glamorous center of industry and media, they are offered the opportunity to manage the historic Drake. Jane, a small town girl with big ambitions, always knew she wanted to be an architect. Henry, a member of the Mayor’s staff, is grounded, intelligent and tenacious. They are lured by the intoxicating lifestyle of New York’s wealthy elite.

Sexy, enticing and captivating, home to an epic struggle of good versus evil, The Drake maintains a dark hold over all of its tenants in this new, chilling drama, tempting them through their ambitions and desires.

Basically, bunch of people in a building. They all get tempted. They sign their souls over to the guy who owns the building – the Devil (probably) – and then bad things happen. Two new people move in. They’re going to be tempted by something, but you can bet they’re going to do some investigating first.

And despite some really quite gruesome scenes, there is almost nothing interesting about this show. Apart from the title. It’s a real place, you know.

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US TV

Review: Made in Jersey 1×1 (CBS)

2 October 2012 Rob Buckley 2 Comments

Made in Jersey

In the US: Fridays, 9/8c, CBS
In the UK: Not yet acquired. I’m assuming Sky Living had a fit of the vapours

Beware the juggernaut, my son!

The juggernaut – aka CBS – is the goliath of TV. It dominates the ratings. It had oodles of cash. It can do pretty much what it likes. And if you don’t like that, it’ll run all over you.

The newest trick CBS appears to have discovered is to take existing programmes, file the serial numbers off, bolt on a procedural and then call them its own. This season, it’s already deployed its own version of Sherlock as Elementary. Vegas – not to be confused with NBC’s Las Vegas, but easily confused with its The Playboy Club as well as A&E’s Longmire – emerged blinking into the moonlight last week and on Friday, we got Made in Jersey.

Now at first sight, you might not spot what Made in Jersey obviously rips off. After all, the lead character in this legal show, in which a street-smart Jersey girl gets her big break in a Manhattan law firm, isn’t blonde (hint, hint).

But by the end of the episode – in which her exciting knowledge of hairstyling products is used to prove that the student accused of murdering her professor is innocent and that despite everyone’s belief that she’s an airhead, she really can be a lawyer – you’ll be going, “Oh, so that’s what CBS couldn’t get the rights to cheaply! Legally Blonde!”

Because that’s what we have here: Legally Blonde with hair dye but without any humour, and with a legal procedural element bolted on. Another triumph for CBS’s assimilation department.

Are there any redeeming features to the show? Well, at a push, since it’s clearly not the dialogue, plotting, plausibility or characterisation of Made in Jersey that is going to save it, I’d have to say it’s got one thing going for it, other than Kyle MacLachlan looking very bewildered by the whole thing: for the first time in a long while, we have a US TV show that’s about class.

Here’s a trailer:

Continue reading “Review: Made in Jersey 1×1 (CBS)”

Cinemax and the BBC’s Hunted tries to do viral

2 October 2012 Rob Buckley Post a comment

Hunted is a relatively new thing: a shiny British-American action co-production. Like its predecessor, Sky’s Strike Back: Project Dawn, it’s co-produced by Cinemax and showrun by Frank Spotnitz, but in this case, it’s going to be on BBC1 and it’s made by Kudos, the people behind Spooks. It stars Melissa George as a sort-of spy, starts this Thursday at 9pm on BBC1 and on October 19 at 10pm on Cinemax in the US. Also like Strike Back: Project Dawn, it looks great but with a plot that is ‘muchos bobbins’. Here’s a trailer:

Over in the US, Cinemax is trying to raise interest in the show by viral marketing. They’ve set up a web site, Byzantium Tests, that ostensibly claims to be a personality test to see if you are suitable – i.e. disturbed and sociopathic enough – to join Byzantium Security, which is the company (I’m guessing) that Melissa George works for/used to work for in Hunted.

Here’s one of the tests. It features George doing her absolute level best attempt at an English accent.

Unfortunately, I simply don’t have the time to go through the estimated 1.6×10^10 questions in the test to see if it’s any good, but I’m told there’s a good pay-off at the end. Let me know if you make it all the way through…

What to do when your pilot doesn’t get picked up? Get even with your own web series

2 October 2012 Rob Buckley Post a comment

Not all pilots get picked up. That, after all, is the point of pilots – to see which shows work in practice and which don’t. There’d be no point picking up all of them.

But behind every unaired pilot there’s a dozen stories. People meet, people make friends – or enemies – they come up with ideas for new and better shows.

Take Downwardly Mobile, a pilot for NBC starring Roseanne Barr. That didn’t get picked up, although given the NBC comedies that did get picked up, you have to wonder either how good it was or how bad it was.

Some of the actors from that pilot – Jason Antoon, Mary Birdsong, Greg Cromer, Tricia O’Kelley and Romy Rosemont – became friends. And even though Downwardly Mobile never became a series, they’ve decided to stick together and even make their own series – Bitter, Party of 5.

Here they are, ringing up NBC to find out whether Downwardly Mobile got picked up. You can guess the rest, but how will the next episode go?

[via]