TV reviews

In the US: Tuesdays, 8/7c, Fox
In the UK: Not yet acquired

What a disappointment. Of all the comedy pilots that have aired so far, Grandfathered was the one that showed the most promise. It sees aging bachelor lothario John Stamos discover that not only is he the father of a son who takes more after his mother (Paget Brewster) than him, he’s a grandfather, too. Stamos rapidly has to learn from scratch how to be both father and grandfather, while juggling the responsibilities of running his restaurant as well as trying to fit in his partying lifestyle and perhaps even woo back Brewster.

It sounds bad, but thanks to Stamos, ‘one that got away’ Brewster, and a smart script, the pilot episode was both funny and charming. Unfortunately, the show has slowly descended into almost precisely the show that you think it’s going to be from the description I just gave. Stamos’ character starts to become a bit of a dick, while Brewster loses all the spunky indieness that made her so good in the pilot and simply becomes a smothering mum. And girly man Josh Peck stops becoming simply a man who’s good at parenting and becomes a mummy’s boy who needs to man up.

Brewster and Stamos are both giving it all they’ve got, so the fault clearly lies with the variable scripts, which still maintain a veneer of intelligence and charm but not enough to really lift the show back to where it began. The romance is still there between Stamos and Brewster, and they have a real chemistry together. The references to past careers have fortunately shifted from Stamos to Brewster, who got to play the ‘Which Friends character are you?’ game in the latest episode (hint: the actual answer was Kathy with a k)

But it’s just reverted too much towards standard sitcom stereotypes and writing for me to recommend it any more. I might keep watching it, just for Brewster, but I’m not as sure as I was when the show first started, and if it gets any worse, I will be out quicker than a father intending to abscond and claiming to be in need of a six-pack of beer.

Barrometer rating: 2
TMINE prediction: Probably dead by the end of the season 

In the US: Tuesdays, 8.30/7.30c, Fox 
In the UK: Not yet acquired

Three episodes in, The Grinder has already settled into something of a routine. Each episode starts with a scene from an episode from Rob Lowe’s fictitious TV show The Grinder, in which he does something supposedly TV lawyerly but which barely exists in TV shows outside those of the 1980s. Lowe’s lawyer brother Fred Savage mocks it for being a TV cliché and having nothing to do with real law. Savage and Lowe then go to Savage’s workplace and then encounter a case that’s relevant to the scene we saw in the fake show. Lowe then tries to win the case for Savage using the ‘law’ he learnt on the TV show – and loses. Then to avoid bursting Lowe’s bubble, Savage does his best to enable the case to be won using Lowe’s law. 

And for all the meta-textual fun the show has going for it, with commentaries on how difficult second episodes are to maintain the qualities of the pilot while still advancing the show, none of that’s especially funny or clever. Lowe’s character is irritating and borderline delusional as written, apparently having no understanding of the difference between reality and TV. Savage has a thankless task that even his character meta-textually acknowledges in episode two is thankless. The arrival of Natalie Morales in episode two to provide some deadpan undercutting hasn’t upped the laughs either, unfortunately.

Grinder rests.

Barrometer rating: 4
TMINE’s prediction: Cancelled before the end of the season and might not even get any extra episodes ordered

In the US: Sundays, 9/8c, ABC 
In the UK: Not yet acquired

Originally, I billed this as ‘stupid Dallas‘, which given how idiotic Dallas was should tell you how stupid Blood & Oil is. Set in the recent North Dakota oil rush – the one that John Oliver did a piece about on Sunday – it sees two incompetent, newly wed buffoons (Chase Crawford and Rebecca Rittenhouse) head to the 50th most popular US state to set up a laundromat, only to seize the day and grab a slice of the oil boom, while getting into bed (only metaphorically at the moment) with oil baron Don Johnson.

And despite a momentary blip when episode two seemed to suggest that Crawford might have greater mental acuity than someone in a vegetative state on life support – he talks about ‘vertical integration’ at one point – I’m still going to go with ‘stupid Dallas‘, a show about stupid people doing stupid things involving oil.

It’s really hard to explain just how many stupid things happen each episode without giving away big spoilers, but even if you’re sitting at home, texting your friends, watching YouTube videos involving dancing cats and then look up momentarily at the TV screen to devote even 1% of your working brain to what’s going on, what you’ll notice is:

1. Either something will happen that will immediately suggest a future event that the show thinks will be a twist but which is entirely obvious from that point onwards
2. Or that thing doesn’t happen because everyone’s so stupid, it takes another episode for everything to percolate through their tiny, tiny brains.

On top of that, with the exception of Johnson (who’s one of the show’s producers so has probably engineered it that way), every single character, particularly bar-owning loan shark Brit India de Beaufort, is not just stupid but intensely irritating. Plus despite being North Dakota and there being a big oilfield on ‘Indian land’, somehow the show manages to be incredibly white, the only two non-white characters being a black couple serving the local populace with a takeaway van. 

It’s hard to say which Sunday night ABC show is worse: Quantico or Blood & Oil. After all, they both get the same Barrometer rating. Yet although Blood & Oil has never sunk to the same depths as Quantico‘s pilot, Quantico has never been dull, whereas Blood & Oil almost goes out of its way to make a simple rags to riches story as unglamorous, unexciting and miserable as possible. There are no oil baron balls to enjoy, just dirt, mobile restaurants and bankruptcies. 

Either way, ABC’s Sunday night line up honestly makes you want to go to church instead.

Barrometer rating: 4
TMINE’s prediction: Cancelled before the end of the first season

In the US: Sundays, 10/9c, ABC
In the UK: Acquired by Alibi

If I were American, I’d be afraid – at least if I believed for a second that Quantico had any resemblance to reality. Essentially How To Get Away With Murder but with FBI trainees rather than law students, it posits that the US’s future first, best line of defence in intelligence and crime fighting are a bunch of idiotic, pretty children who spend more time squabbling, playing at being mean girls and dealing with their personal backstories than training to stop the bad guys. That’s when they’re not too busy flirting with their implausible instructors, who have their own personal backstories and squabbling to do, too.

It’s perhaps only natural that it turns out that one of these trainees (or maybe even instructors) is secretly a terrorist who blows up Grand Central Station. Who is it? Well, if it was obvious, there’d be no mystery, so this class of elite idiots includes all manner of potential security risks, including a pair of twins who swap hijab at night but pretend to be one person, a guy who’s been to Gaza and pretends to be gay, a woman who has secret phone calls at night in Arabic, and our supposed heroine who killed her own father and spent 10 years in Mumbai.

To be fair to the show, Quantico‘s central mystery has become almost interesting over the past two episodes and it hasn’t been as stupid as it was in the first stupid – or at least the average density of stupid has decreased, even if it still hits the same peaks. Who is the secret terrorist? I’d almost care if I didn’t have to watch such a complete bunch of whiny, brain dead children the whole time.

However, as well as the intense stupidity of the show, there’s its woeful miscasting, particularly of Bollywood actress Priyanka Chopra. As well as her sheer implausibility at pretty much every level as a top FBI recruit, it’s the fact that the show makes it quite clear she’s the star and uses the other characters to make her look better. Chopra also appears to be acting in a different style from everyone else and clearly knows she’s the star of the show, too, despite being the emperiled heroine.

Quantico has gone from being excruciatingly awful to merely painful to watch.You can tell why Dougray Scott cleared off before the pilot even aired, can’t you?

Barrometer rating: 4
Rob’s prediction: Should make it to the end of the season but no more than that