I’m sure a lot of you will have seen CBS’s Person of Interest. In case you haven’t, let me précis: a genius programmer creates the ultimate surveillance computer, able to predict crimes before they happen, and he recruits an ex-special forces soldier to help him stop those crimes. Initially content simply to be ‘crime of the week’, the show evolves over the seasons to partly become about a war for control of that computer.
Imagine then an NBC show in which someone had wrested control away of that computer from CBS and was using it to… gamble. What you’ll have then is The Player.
Returning to his old Crusoe stomping ground to join his former Strike Back pal Sullivan Stapleton (Blindspot) on NBC, Philip Winchester is an ex-terrorist hunter FBI agent turned Las Vegas security consultant. While helping to secure some foreign dignitaries, things all get a bit personal and before you know it, he’s on the run from police.
Little does he know that he’s attracted the attention of a group of very wealthy people who have been tapped into the world’s information networks for years and can now predict when certain crimes are about to occur. They’d quite like him to help the dignitaries and stop further crime.
But they’re not that bothered. See, what they really like to do is gamble on what’s going to happen. It’s all a big game to them. A game in which Winchester is The Player. Providing help but also supervising the game and making sure no rules are broken are The Dealer (Charity Wakefield from Any Human Heart, Wolf Hall, and Mockingbird Lane) and The Pit Boss, played by none other than tax-dodging action hero Wesley Snipes.
And as you might expect from a show set in sunny Las Vegas, rather than chilly grey old New York, as well as making you feel like you’ve taken something and lost big chunks of time, it’s a lot more explosive, a lot more funny and a whole lot more ludicrous than Person of Interest.
I can’t tell whether to be charitable to Fox or not when it comes to Rosewood. On the one hand, Rosewood is a big budget, primetime crime drama, filmed on location in Miami, and starring a predominantly black and Latino cast, including two lesbians about to embark on an inter-racial marriage.
On the other, it feels like someone fired up a 1995 version of Final Draft, opened the ‘crime procedural’ template and then got it to add a few random names. Because apart from its diversity and setting, Rosewood is about as generic as it comes. And filled with very irritating people.
It stars the marvellously named and frequently topless Morris Chestnut (V, Legends) as a go-getting, high-achieving forensic pathologist who rather than being a public sector employee, hires out his services to both the police department and private individuals who want a second opinion. He does this through a company he runs with his toxicologist sister and her scientist fiancée (I honestly couldn’t tell you what kind of scientist she is, but she does look through a microscope occasionally, so I’m assuming she is one).
It’s pretty lucrative, lucrative enough it seems that he can afford a nice car, a nice house and billboards advertising his services all over Miami. Who wants to bet there’s some drugs money in there that Fox is never going to show us?
So far, so acceptable, and joking aside, it’s good to have a strong, black, male action lead in a TV show who isn’t a hyper-masculine, gun-wielding rapper, sports star and/or drug dealer, but a middle-class guy from a happy family who made all his money by going to college, starting his own business and helping people.
It would be so great if Rosewood were great.
All the same, wishes aren’t horses and a show can’t get anywhere just on happy thoughts. It needs a decent plot, characters, etc. And unfortunately, this is written by Todd Harthan, one of the individuals who gave us the world’s worst TV show: Dominion.
This is where it gets bad. As it stands, the show would basically be private sector CSI but without government-endorsed access to crime scenes. That wouldn’t work as an episodic format, so the twist that’s actually a straighten is that Rosewood quickly shows his family firm’s worth to equally high-achieving, go-getting police detective Jaina Lee Ortiz (The After), so she takes him with her on cases.
Theirs is the sort of relationship that probably looks good on paper, as you congratulate yourself on how economical you’re being with your 40 minutes of run-time, getting all that character establishment and background over and done with in half the time of other shows. But performed by two living, breathing human beings and then smeared onto people’s screens, it’s actually intensely irritating.
Chestnut and Ortiz spend a lot of their time telling each other how accomplished they are – sometimes they talk about how awesome they themselves are, sometimes they just tell each other how awesome the other person is (“What’s the youngest ever foot patrolman to become a detective in NYPD history doing transferring back to her home town of Miami?”). They analyse each other (“I saw drugs and chemicals all over your house. You have a love affair with death.”). They flirt a bit (“I’ll tell you why if you tell me why you’re so obsessed with death…” “Maybe later”). They philosophise at each other (“I learnt then not to be obsessed with death, but with living, because every day is precious.”).
So intent are they with being clever at each other that they won’t have noticed that the audience worked out what was actually blindingly obvious about each of their secrets halfway through the episode and is merely waiting for the characters to ‘reveal’ what they think is marvellously important and deep – except it honestly wasn’t worth waiting for (spoiler alert: she’s not married, she’s a widow), and in Rosewood’s case, it’s edging towards the “Really guys? You went with that?” (spoiler alert: he was a premature baby). It’s also in the trailer.
Unfortunately, as much as Chestnut’s perky, suave Rosewood is fun to watch, Ortiz is even more miserable, duller and superfluous to the plot’s requirements than the similarly charactered Alana De La Garza was in Forever. While there may be romance in the show’s future – and for once, couldn’t a show just start off with the two main characters just hitting it off and liking each other from the beginning rather than waiting four to five years for the inevitable? – it’ll be a bit like George Clooney dating a teflon casserole pan (with perhaps a bit of dancing, given Ortiz’s background) so is anyone really going to be looking forward to that?
The supporting cast are even more unnecessary and rather than having any real characters or interesting qualities of their own, Rosewood’s co-workers/relatives really just seem to be there to show how right-on the programme is and how two women can have a loving and incredibly, blandly normal relationship together.
If you’ve seen any episodes of CSI or Bones you’ll have already seen better cases, so don’t expect to be wowed by the mystery in this first episode at least. But to be honest, you probably won’t want to be tuning in, unless you simply want to artificially inflate the ratings to make it look like Fox’s diversity experiment is working.
But no, this is a blog with a cast iron guarantee that it will cover every new, scripted US TV show for adults, provided they don’t feature too much music, appear on some obscure network I’ve never heard of or start in August. Could there be any stronger bond of trust with you, dear reader?
And gods damn it, it’s September.
So I sat down and braved myself to watch two full hours of Scream Queens. And waddayaknow? After an initially bumpy start, Scream Queens turned out to be the first new show of the Fall 2015-16 that I’ve actually enjoyed.
In the US: Tuesdays, 8/7c, ABC. Starts tonight In the UK:Acquired by Sky1 to air in autumn
The Muppets – everyone loves them right? The Muppet Show, all those Muppet movies in the 80s. All just brilliant, right?
Well, probably, although I suspect an element of the memory cheating. Watching The Muppet Show now, it’s clear there was things going over the heads of us children that were intended to only be understood by adults.
But it still a show that was just a couple of age notches above Sesame Street in terms of its intended audience. Largely, it was a show intended to be enjoyed by kids.
The Muppets, on the other hand, is not. This is a show aimed at those kids all grown up now. It thinks that what the Muppets really needed was to come back but all edgy, with depth and relationships and jokes that will appeal to adults – and only to adults.
It thinks we need Miss Piggy and Kermit to have been dating and to have broken up but forced to work together on Miss Piggy’s chatshow. It thinks we need Fozzie Bear dating a human, whose parents are happy to trot out stereotypes about bears eating raw fish and food out of dustbins. It thinks we need Muppets talking to camera, explaining their lives and innermost feelings in a mockumentary.
No, we don’t. For one thing, we’re adults. Muppets are – or at least should be – for kids. If adults watch them, it should be because they’re with their kids.
But more importantly, Muppets are supposed to be relatively innocent creatures. Sure they used to muck around with John Cleese, but they’re weren’t making nasty fat jokes along the way. They weren’t showing us Missy Piggy, devastated and shattered after her break up with Kermit. This is the Muppets, not Avenue Q.
The Muppets has some good points, most of which stem from the original Muppet format. Sam the Bald Eagle’s morality notes about Miss Piggy’s show are entertaining, as are Beaker and Dr Bunsen. Guest star Elizabeth Banks’ Hunger Games spoof is a welcome updating of The Muppet Show’s similar spoofs, and indicates a welcome willingness for guest stars to send themselves up old-school. Well, a bit, anyway.
But without the charm or wit of the original, this is a literally joyless show, a cash-in on hip adults’ memories of their childhood. YMMV, but this first look presentation has a lot of the same jokes as the first episode. Do you think it works?
Linking narrative. You’ve got to hate it, haven’t you? You’ve got the idea for a cracking, meaningful, funny scene. You’ve got an even better idea for a tender, romantic scene. But FFS, you somehow have to get from Scene A to Scene B and however you do it, it’s either going to ruin scene A or B or is likely to be rubbish or at least not as good. That’s crap that is.
Wouldn’t it be good if you could just stick a set of random scenes together? Just stick them together. You have a whole bunch of characters in one scene doing one thing, a whole bunch of different characters in another scene doing another thing and you just keep doing that.
What do you mean that’s a sketch show? Hmm. Right. Okay.
How about we make them all related somehow and we have them all together at the end in another completely unrelated scene? Would that work?
