As we saw recently with AMC’s Better Call Saul, prequels can be tricky things. You typically only get a prequel to a show if it’s been popular and has a strong fan base, and those fans are going to want everything to line up nicely with whatever’s already been established in the original story. However, unless you want ever-reducing audience numbers, you have to ensure that the prequel is of interest to a wider circle than just the fans.
The show formerly and cleverly known as Westside Story, but which is now presumably for copyright reasons simply Westside, has these two issues to juggle. Now, I’ve already gone into the history of its progenitor Outrageous Fortuneelsewhere, so I won’t bother here but suffice it to say, as esteemed New Zealand shows with a huge fan base go, you couldn’t find a bigger one than Outrageous Fortune. All the same, that finished five years ago and wasn’t widely known in its original form overseas – indeed, these days it’s perhaps better known as the show that the creators of The Almighty Johnsons ran before venturing into matters more fantastical and theological. As a result, there’s a potential new audience for Westside that never saw the original and who might be looking forward to Rachel Lang and James Griffin’s latest production.
So will the story of safecracker Ted West, his wife Rita and their son Wolf, the future prison-bound patriarch of Outrageous Fortune‘s West family, stand on its own two feet or will it simply be a piece of fan service from a creatively bankrupt team that have run out of ideas?
It’s getting to the point where there’s a whole range of family comedies that could air anywhere and you wouldn’t be surprised. Crowded is one such programme – a multi-cam sitcom I could have sworn was set to air on CBS, but is actually going to be on NBC, but honestly could have gone on Fox, TBS or even TV Land without eliciting so much as a blink from me.
It stars former Tick and long-time inmate of Rules of Engagement Patrick Warburton and True Blood’s Carrie Preston as a happily married couple who are at first teary-eyed but are then overjoyed to watch first one then both of their daughters (Mia Serafino and Miranda Cosgrove) grow up then move out the family house to go to college, leaving the couple alone to drink, smoke pot, swear, walk around naked and have sex wherever they want in peace. Largely not on camera, of course.
However, in common with about a quarter of the US population, it’s not long before their children move back in when their relationships or jobs fall apart. And Warburton’s parents (Stacy Keach, Carlease Burke), who were planning to move to Florida, are now going to stay, too. And by the end of the episode, there’s another person moving in, too. Gosh, how Crowded.
The show comes across as Modern Family 10 years on, with Serafino the brain-dead fashion major who only cares about being popular, Cosgrove the epic nerd without any social skills who only cares about science and Keach the old school, emotions are for sissies, Ed O’Neill of the piece. However, it lacks that show’s subtlety, sensitivity and love for its characters, as well as any particularly funny jokes.
What it does have though is both Patrick Warburton, whose comic timing and delivery are masterly, and Stacy Keach who would make O’Neill’s army vet go running into the arms of the Viet Cong if he ever saw him coming. It also has a real sense of ‘been there, done that’ with Warburton and Preston’s relationship: while the show’s idea of married freedom is about as PG-13 as it’s possible to get, right down to the bleeped swearwords, there are moments of real pathos in the pilot episode, such as when the two are crying in each other’s arms as they say goodbye to their daughters on the steps of their colleges.
As sitcoms go, this is as conventional and generic as they come. But at least Warburton and Keach know how to make the audience laugh, even if the writers don’t especially.
If I could show you a trailer, I would, so you’ll have to take my word for it – for now, at least.
In the US: Mondays, 10/9c, ABC In the UK: Not yet acquired
Kids are little bastards, aren’t they? Playing games all the time with their invisible friends, always trying to kill you. I mean who’d have ‘em in the house?
Not most people, by the time they’ve finished watching The Whispers, or at least they might think twice about it. The idea behind ABC’s new supernatural chiller is that something, perhaps a ghost, perhaps an alien, has come to Earth and is trying to kill off various people by persuading their kids to play various games, which typically involve things like weakening floorboards so that their parents fall through them to their doom.
What is it, who does it want to kill and why? All good questions, and ones to which FBI child specialist Lily Rabe (American Horror Story) wants to find the answers, as for various reasons that later become clear, it seems linked to her ex-boyfriend, her MIA husband, a military jet that was flying in the Arctic but has crashed in Africa in the branches of a stone tree, a mysterious hirsute amnesiac vagrant (Milo Ventimiglia from Heroes) who speaks in Arabic when he’s unconscious and is covered in tattoos, the scientist who finds the jet, a politician (David Andrews (Pulaski, Crisis), the president and, of course, the parents themselves.
And because of the interconnected nature of the plot, some or even all these people might be the same person.
If some of this sounds suspiciously familiar, it might be because it’s partly based on Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man (in particular, Zero Hour), and although it’s not the best TV programme ever made, it’s a damn sight scarier and more interesting than the average ABC summertime special.
In the US: Tuesdays, 9/8c, ABC Family. Starts tonight
Usually, there’s nothing quite like the word ‘family’ in the description of something televisual to guarantee its general shoddiness. But over the years, ABC Family has been a notable exception. I stopped watching the network’s output a while back when it started producing things like Bunheads: it may have been the best show in the world, but when you’re a 40-something male, you probably shouldn’t be watching TV dramas about female teenage gymnasts. – that’s just creepy. However, over the years, the network has produced some generally decent shows, including Kyle XY, Three Moons Over Milford, Lincoln Heights, 10 Things I Hate About You and Pretty Little Liars.
As you may have noticed from that list, the network has been moving from genre shows towards more conventional fare generally aimed at teenage girls and young women. But it apparently hasn’t escaped the network’s bosses that what teenage girls want to watch is changing – we’re living in a post-Twilight, post-Hunger Games world. So the network’s decided to take some baby steps back into genre TV. This autumn, we can see the continuation of the Mortal Instruments film franchise in Shadowhunters and now we have Stitchers, a hybrid sci-fi/procedural drama that’s part CSI, part Inception.
Emma Ishta is Kirsten, a technically gifted PhD student who has a rare brain condition that makes her unaware of passing time. This makes her aloof, rude, generally unloved and unable to feel emotions in the same ways as the rest of us – when her adopted father commits suicide she’s unmoved because it feels to her exactly the same as if he’d died years ago.
She’s also willing to break whatever rules she wants to get what she wants. While this gets her kicked out of Caltech, her condition does mean that she’s uniquely suited for the top secret ‘Stichers’ programme into which she’s quickly recruited following the washing out of the previous ’Stitcher’. The programme not only allows the brains of the recently deceased to be preserved for much longer than normal, it allows the ‘Stitcher’ to enter their memories as though they were the real world, in order to solve crimes. And in this first case, she must enter the mind of a man killed in a bomb explosion, because he’s stashed two other bombs around LA and they’re set to go off soon.
And while it’s as stupid as bag full of spanners wearing toupees, it’s at least a good deal more fun than CSI: Cyber. Here, have a rather good, Inception-like trailer that belies the show’s essentially cheap silliness and another trailer that’s a little bit less deceptive.
In the US: Thursdays, 9/8c, NBC In the UK: Not yet acquired
You’d think, given that NBC already has the origin story of one famous serial killer in its schedules, that it would be reluctant to produce another one. But even as Hannibal is about to return to our screens this week for its third exquisite season, here comes Aquarius, which on the face of it should be a far less fictional affair, given that it’s the origin story of real-life sociopath Charles Manson and his so-called ‘Manson Family’, who in 1969 went on to kill actress Sharon Tate and six other people.
Yet, Aquarius is almost as fictional as Hannibal. It stars David Duchovny as an LAPD detective who’s brought in by an old girlfriend (Michaela McManus) to investigate the disappearance of her 16-year-old daughter (Claire Holt). Asked to keep everything quiet because of her important husband (Brían F. O’Byrne), Duchovny has to recruit a young, hip(py) detective (Grey Damon) to help him reach the communes and parties he’s can’t, and hopefully find the daughter.
Except, unfortunately, it looks like a certain Charles Manson (Gethin Anthony) has already found her and recruited her to his growing ‘family’.
Billed as an event series, the show’s about as schizophrenic as they come. On the one hand, it wants to do ‘true crime’, yet practically everything and everyone involved, other than Manson and some of his family members, are fictions. Being set two years before the murders of 1969, there’s as yet no tie-ins with the real crimes and we know that unless the show takes a brief jump or two forward and introduces a whole new set of characters, there’s no chance that Manson will be behind bars by the end of the show’s run.
Yet while everything is linked to Manson, the episodes have a procedural element, with episode two taking some time out from the Manson-hunting to investigate the suspected murder of a wife by her husband, for example. The show tries hard to link this with both Manson and the era, with the surprisingly sympathetic husband nevertheless being an overt racist and the Nation of Islam turning up to give Manson’s ‘Helter Skelter’ philosophy some grounding. But as with the show’s hit-laden soundtrack, it feels as obvious as the vintage cars on display as being an attempt to simply say ‘Hey guys! It’s 1967!’ The fact there’s invariably something to do with Vietnam on the news or Vietnam is on Duchovny’s or Damon’s mind for one reason or another doesn’t help with this.
Aquarius also wants to be something of a cable show. As well as the novel aspect of NBC broadcasting the first two episodes then making the rest of the season immediately available from its web site, the show also has some quite near-the-knuckle sex scenes. Unsurprisingly, given the casting of Game of Thrones’ Renly Baratheon as Manson, not all of that sex is straight, and the show is happy to explore Manson’s bisexual side. There’s also a really surprising scene towards the end of the first episode, which while not quite up there with Outlander’s recent finale, is pretty horrifying.
The trouble is that all of these distinct strands don’t fit together very well at all. While the historical background detail is at least interesting and Duchovny and Damon’s pairing not as annoying as you’d think and is even quite comedic at times as they try to adjust, among other things, to this new ‘Miranda thing’, the two of them feel like they’re in a different show from Manson’s storyline. Indeed, Manson seems to think he’s in another show, too, since a lot of his storyline is about his attempts to get a record contract and his possible involvement in political corruption.
Women don’t really get served well here, either. Different times, etc, etc, but Aquarius only offers us a vision of women needing men’s help in one form or another or of messing things up by ‘transgressing’. On the plus side, though, there is at least an exploration of the race problems of the time and there are even some black characters with lines.
Compared to many NBC dramas, Aquarius isn’t half bad and I might potentially watch the rest of the season, one episode at a time, if I have time. But despite Duchovny’s presence and the potentially fascinating nature of Manson, Aquarius feels like it’s a pale imitation of a something potentially a whole lot better.
