TV reviews

In the US: Tuesdays, 9/8c, CBS

They say ‘write what you know’, but if everyone in TV does that, we’re going to be in a sorry state very soon. I’ve already lost track of the current number of shows airing, just having aired or that are in development that are based on the lives of one of the executive producers. There’s even a Judge Judy drama on the way. Do we really need that? I don’t think so.

I guess the idea is that it not only gives an air of verisimilitude to the show, as well as a built-in audience and ideas for stories that might otherwise never have occurred to the writers, it also insulates the writers from accusations of racism, implausibility and so on – “But that’s what actually happened!” they can say.

Trouble is that with a lot of these shows, either people’s lives are already remarkably similar to TV shows or somewhere in development, people’s life stories get squeezed into formats that allow the shows to run for 10, 13 or 24 episode seasons, hopefully up to a syndicatable 5-7 seasons or more. The result is they all still end up looking the same as one another and what you see is probably not what actually happened?

Take Bull, CBS’s new show, which is based on the life of Dr Phil McGraw. You know Dr Phil, right? Well, before being a stalwart of Oprah and then getting his own show, he was a ‘trial scientist’. Here he is explaining what that is to Bull star Michael Weatherly.

I say ‘based’, but the show’s creators say ‘inspired’. That suggests that it bares very little resemblance to watch Dr Phil’s life used to be like. Yep, development squeezed the real life out of it while it was shoving the story into a CBS procedural formatting box.

Nevertheless, there might be something true about it. I mean if you think Dr Phil is just a trite regurgitator of homely platitudes with little scientific basis that are designed to further his TV career rather than actually truly help people, which would be impossible anyway, Bull will just confirm your suspicions as it’s just a trite regurgitator of homely platitudes with little scientific basis that are designed to further a very standard legal procedural.

All the same, real or not, seen Justice? Seen Shark? Seen Lie To Me? Then you’ll have seen a whole bunch of very similar shows that were all better than Bull. There’s the standard older, slightly troubled central eponymous white guy who everyone thinks is brilliant and spends most of their time admiring. There’s the diverse team of slightly less brilliant, slightly more personality-free helper monkeys who are going to get significantly less time for character development over the course of the series. There’s the endless stream of supposed pieces of wisdom that are actually just blunt over-simplifications. There’s the never-ending series of false trails before the eventual resolution. There’s blunt talking at anyone who’s not ‘with the programme’.

About the only thing different is the inclusion of a slightly punky computer girl (Annabelle Attanasio), which is more of a head nod to the NCIS audience Weatherly is hopefully taking with him.

If this is an advert for ‘trial science’, it’s also a big epic failure. While it may (or may not) be an accurate representation of what goes on behind the scenes with ‘mirrored juries’ (seen them in Justice and Shark – soz) et al, trying to pass off “she’s thinking of him as being like her son” as profound is a surefire loser. If people are paying big money for this, I’ve got this great wire transfer scheme they might want to hear about.

Bull‘s not without the occasional innovation: I quite liked the way the various members of the jury Weatherly was analysing from afar seemingly spoke their inner desires to him and his ‘too long, didn’t read’ was a nice rejoinder to something from a millennial.

But those moments are fleeting. Unless you like watching TV shows that are just like all those other TV shows that you like – well, it is CBS – give Bull a wide berth.

In the US: Mondays, 8.30/7.30c, CBS

CBS sitcoms almost perfectly divide into two camps: the first are executive produced by Chuck Lorre (eg Mom, Two And a Half Men, The Big Bang Theory) and are surprisingly diverse in terms of ideas, if not their general hatred of all that is good and pure in the world. The second, by contrast, normally revolve around overweight blue collar men married to much more attractive, younger women and who have trouble adapting to modern life as they’d much rather be spending their time sitting around with their mates, knocking back beers. Such men are usually Kevin James (eg King of Queens).

Kevin Can Wait falls squarely into camp two, with Kevin James – for it is he – playing a just-retired cop married to Erinn Hayes (Childrens Hospital, The Winner, Worst Week, Guys With Kids) and having to deal with greater intimacy as he hangs around the home with his two younger school-age kids. Then his high-achieving eldest daughter (Taylor Spreitler) announces she’s dropping out of school to support her nerdy British boyfriend Ryan Cartwright (Alphas) while he develops his app, prompting all manner of soul-searching by James.

I was expecting the worst of this and to be fair, you can probably guess pretty much all the tragic attempts at comedy in the first half of the episode. But things marginally improve once Spreitler shows up with Cartwright in tow. It’s also worth noting that Hayes can do this kind of sitcom standing on her head, and that although James may be best known these days for being besies with Adam Sandler and starring in near-horror movies such as Here Comes The Boom, he’s also a decent enough actor and an appealing presence in this kind of multi-camera comedy. Despite co-creating a character who wants to spend all day playing around in go-karts and drinking beers with his buds, his creation is a warm-hearted guy, willing to let his daughter and her fiancé move back in with him, if it’ll stop her dropping out of school and potentially ruining her future. 

That said, despite the cast’s best efforts, there’s only a smattering of gags that ever manage to hit home (“That’s every stripper’s backstory!”) and viewing is frequently only bearable at times on fast foward. I doubt I could summon up the strength to view another episode, to be honest. But having watched this first episode, it does at least make me think twice before totally writing off anything James is in in future.

In the US: Mondays, NBC, 10/9c

We’re all going to die. Well, maybe not the Scientologists and at least one person from the Planet Zeist is going to live forever (if he wants). But the rest of us are going to kark it at some point.

What happens next is a matter of debate, with numerous religions promising all manner of outcomes, most of which are incompatible with one another. Who’s right? After all, it’s kind of important, don’t you think?

Well, according to The Good Place, Hinduism, Christianity, Buddhism, Islam et al have got it about 5% right. The person in all of recorded history who managed to guess most accurately was a Canadian stoner called Doug who got high on mushrooms in the 70s and got it about 92% right.

It turns out, though, that it’s not whom you worship or how many blood sacrifices you make each week that counts – it’s the quality and number of the good things and bad things you’ve done that on balance contribute to your final destination. And to get to The Good Place, you have to have done an awful lot of extremely good things, because it’s very, very exclusive. Unlike The Bad Place. And you don’t want to go to The Bad Place.

This is the dilemma facing Kristen Bell (Veronica Mars, Gossip Girl, Party Down, House of Lies, Frozen) when she dies and finds herself in The Good Place. She actually wasn’t a good person at all, having been rather selfish, as well as impressively good at selling fraudulent medical products to the elderly. But a mix-up with a human rights lawyer who also did volunteer work in the Ukraine means that she’s now gone to a much better place than she deserves – an exclusive new neighbourhood in The Good Place created by newly promoted afterlife apprentice Ted Danson (Cheers, CSI, CSI: Cyber, Bored To Death), one that’s filled with whatever your heart desires, particularly frozen yoghurt outlets. Here, she can learn to fly, go to parties and never have hangovers, and live with her soul mate in her dream home. Well, someone else’s soul mate and dream home – it is a mix-up, after all.

Trouble is that this utopia is precisely engineered for good people, but before even a day’s passed, Bell’s stealing things, thinking bad thoughts and generally doing the sorts of things that should have had her going to The Bad Place. She is the snake in this particular Garden of Eden, and before you know it, it’s raining garbage, giant stolen shrimp are hurtling through the sky, giraffes are roaming free and everyone’s dressed like bees.

If she’s to avoid being found out and sent ‘elsewhere’, Bell has no choice but to work together with her alleged soulmate, Senegalese ethics professor William Jackson Harper, to learn how to be a good person. But it’s going to be hard going – and somebody else already knows she doesn’t belong there…

Here’s a trailer. I promise it’s not stolen. Much.

Continue reading “Review: The Good Place 1×1-1×2 (US: NBC)”