There are certain themes for drama that are quite hard to base a series around, for the simple reason that they aren’t really very enjoyable. Some ideas, particularly the more escapist ones divorced from real life, are fun to start with and it’s up to the programme makers to see if they can make them less fun (eg travelling through space and time with an ancient alien in a police box that’s bigger on the inside than on the outside); other ideas, particularly those close to home, are miserable and it’s up to the programme makers to see if they can somehow entice viewers to watch.
Cancer’s one of those topics that really has to woo viewers. If you don’t believe me, try listening to one of the current crop of interviews with Toni Collette and Drew Barrymore as they try to explain how much buddy-buddy fun and ‘girls night out’ Miss You Already is, despite being about breast cancer.
Canada’s This Life suffers from a similar problem. An adaptation not of the iconic 90s BBC Two show but of ICI Radio-Canada Télé’s French-language show Nouvelle Addresse, it sees Torri Higginson (Stargate Atlantis) playing a 40-something single mother who writes a popular newspaper column about being a 40-something single mother (what’s up with all the heroic 40-something parental newspaper columnists in the colonies, by the way?).
She’s a bit dull and consumed with her family, rather than herself, as younger, free spirited sister Lauren Lee Smith (The L Word, CSI, Good Dog, Mutant X, The Listener) is happy to point out to her. So she decides to carpe diem, perhaps even go out with that new high school principal who seems to be into her (Shawn Doyle from Endgame).
Except then she discovers that the cancer that she’d thought had gone away six months earlier has returned, and this time it’s terminal. She has less than a year to live. Now she needs to prepare her kids for when she’s not around, while deciding how she’s going to spend her final year on Earth.
Want to watch it yet? Of course you don’t. It sounds miserable. And often it is. You’d practically have to be inhuman not to be weeping buckets when Higginson gets her diagnosis and prognosis.
This Life attempts to make itself more palatable in a number of ways. Firstly, it gives us Lauren Lee Smith. She boxes in her spare time and does the Walk of Shame so regularly, she even has spare dresses in her office. She’s even toying with having a regular threesome with her latest one-night stand and his girlfriend.
Then there’s Higginson’s teenage children, who have their own things going on, involving boyfriends and girlfriends (or lack thereof), school work, squabbling, etc.
Still not persuaded?
Fair enough. None of that is really that appealing or as fun as it thinks it is, either. Neither does This Lifereally establish in this first episode why you’d want to watch a show that ultimately is going to be about someone slowly and painfully dying, leaving her children alone. After depicting Higginson wanting to seize the day before she finds out her cancer is back, and then taking the ‘gut punch’ of the episode title that stops these plans in her tracks, it’s unclear if she’s going to properly seize the day for the rest of the series or simply start going to lots of lawyers and investment brokers to try to establish a legacy for her kids.
Maybe it’ll be uplifting, maybe it’ll be depressing, but given Nouvelle Addresse has lasted three seasons, I’ll bet on option one. This Life also has a strong cast, with Higginson particularly good, and some good direction.
It’s just it’s a programme about someone dying of cancer, without much to relieve the pain. And that could be too close too home for a lot of people.
In contrast to all the other shows that decided with their second episodes to improve on their crappy pilots this season, Limitless appears to have been planned this way all along. Which is odd. The first episode was generic dullness – a continuation that bolted a police procedural format onto the superior Bradley Cooper movie about a slacker who takes a drug that gives him incredible mental capabilities but which has lethal withdrawal symptoms.
As I mentioned at the time, it was inherently not much different from any number of other CBS “clever people solve crimes” shows, such as The Mentalist, Numb3rs, Elementary, Criminal Minds, Intelligence, Scorpion, and CSI, beyond a little more spit and polish, presumably acquired through experience of making so many identikit shows.
The oddest feature of the first episode was its messed up casting, with livewire Jennifer Carpenter from Dexter cast as the dull FBI agent who plays second fiddle to twentysomething musician-slacker Jake McDorman from Manhattan Love Story. What were the producers thinking, I wondered?
Well, it’s quite clear what they were thinking now, since apparently, the pilot was intended to lure in the fans of the movie. But as of episode two, the series officially became a comedy with occasionally dark undertones. It became Chuck. A better Chuck than Chuck in fact, since at least it can manage to do action and Carpenter doesn’t have to look like a lovesick puppy the whole time (poor Yvonne Strahovski).
And as a comedy, it’s actually quite fun, warm, engaging and inventive – considerably better and nicer, in fact, than just about anything CBS classes as a comedy. Best touch of the show so far, beyond some wildly inventive fantasy sequences, has been the recruitment in the third episode of McDorman’s fellow lead from Manhattan Love Story,Analeigh Tipton, as his ex-girlfriend, newly impressed by the NZT-improved McDorman.
What it isn’t any more is either a good police procedural, since its plots wander between dull and unrealistic, or a continuation of the movie Limitless, beyond constant acknowledgements of the existence of Bradley Cooper’s character and the NZT MacGuffin. Tonally, it’s off completely here: Cooper has evolved into something a tad evil, and NZT does little except make McDorman a bit more energetic, focused and smarter. There’s little of the OCD, drive and mastery of the world that the movie’s NZT brought to Cooper.
Indeed, McDorman is well cast as the driftless and not-that-smart-even-on-NZT lead, well suited to the idea of an amiable shmuck who can drag up inspiration from old episodes of Miami Vice and dream-sequence all manner of hard-boiled shenanigans and adventures for Carpenter, since he isn’t allowed to go on missions with her, only stay in the back room analysing things on his regulation one pill a day.
I still think Carpenter would have been a better lead, and it would have been interesting for a change to have a show about a female slacker turning her life around, and not through setting up a cupcake business. The vestigial dark through-narrative about Cooper blackmailing McDorman also sits oddly next to the rest of the almost exclusively comedic and heartwarming qualities of the show.
But as it stands, Limitless is now a considerably more interesting, albeit different show than when it started.
Barrometer rating: 2 TMINE’s prediction: I’m not on NZT, but I think this has the potential to run and run. However, I’m not convinced it quite has that magical ingredient needed to make an audience love it.
In the US: Tuesdays, 8/7c, ABC In the UK: Mondays, 8pm, Sky1. Starts October 19th
I think it’s fair to say the universal reaction to the first episode of The Muppets was “Oh my God, what have you done?” An attempt to update The Muppet Show as a mockumentary set behind the scenes of Miss Piggy’s supposed late night chat show, it tried to give us adult, cringe comedy and depth of relationships.
It was horrible. It was wrong.
In common with a number of other new US shows this autumn, subsequent episodes have been an attempt to correct the pilot and put the programme on a stronger footing. Here, episode two seemed to show the right direction, effectively ditching most of the adult-oriented content in favour of what was basically a single-camera version of The Muppet Show, complete with a plethora of celebrity cameos, only with less slapstick and fewer laughs. It wasn’t great, but at least it didn’t make you want to a hug a toy Kermit and cry out “What have they done to you, old friend?”
Unfortunately, episode three started edging back towards the adult. Not hugely, but the joke count plummeted again, despite Christina Applegate’s best efforts.
It might well be that given time, The Muppets would end up being the comedic delight it should have been. But it’s not right now, so I guess it’s time to lower the curtain on this one.
Barrometer rating: 4 TMINE’s prediction: Will probably last a season thanks to the name value of the show, but will be lucky to be renewed
