TV reviews

Poor Carusometer. How can you cope? First, The Black Donnellys. Now The Winner‘s messing around with the whole third-/fifth-episode verdict thing. Showing two episodes per week? Curse you, Fox.

Still, time to report back. It was all going so well, sort of, last week. While not the best comedy series in the world, pioneering nothing and having the usual anaemic female characters, The WInner still had a relatively high chuckle count.

This week, it went into a slow plummet as the show veered first into cringe comedy before hurling itself into blatantly offensive misogyny. It’s all very well having Rob Corddry as a 13 year old boy in a man’s body, but does he have to be the same rude, crude, stupid 13-year-old in every other US TV show since the dawn of time? Why couldn’t he have been a junior Alex Keaton or something? In the first few episodes, he had a certain innocence, but now, he’s offensive and not particularly funny.

So disappointing.

The Medium is Not Enough hereby declares The Winner is a 4 or “Major Caruso” on The Carusometer quality scale. A Major Caruso corresponds to a show that David Caruso might exec produce or star in, ensuring that every script consists entirely of one-liners, fat-jokes and pratfalls. If anyone questions his decisions, he will tell them to watch ‘real comedians’ like Carrot Top or Jim Davidson, who only coincidentally have red hair.

It’s very confusing trying to pass a third-episode verdict on The Black Donnellys. Apart from the fact, I haven’t seen the pilot episode in some time and there have been a few changes made to it (like the addition of Kate Mulgrew to the cast. Plus I’m pretty sure someone died in the first episode yet he’s still around by the third. How odd), there’s also been a web-exclusive episode that advanced the plot a bit but hasn’t aired on television. So is this the fourth-episode verdict, the third-episode or the third-and-a-halvth? Oh so tricky.

Anyway, whatever aired this week, it’s time to pass verdict since I don’t especially want to watch any more episodes.

As you may recall, the pilot episode had a really rubbish first half and a really very good second half. That’s pretty much how the show has continued since, with each episode having a deeply dull first half followed by a clever second half. The unreliable narrator technique is still working nicely and provides some much-needed amusement, since otherwise, all the episodes would revolve around what to do with dead bodies and how to make sure this, that or the other Donnelly brother doesn’t get killed because of all the dead bodies.

All the same, I’ve lost interest. If this is “the Irish Sopranos as some claim”, I’m glad I’ve never got round to watch the actual Sopranos, because relentless turf wars, recriminations over murders and obvious idiots being obviously idiotic isn’t a great wait to spend time. I see next week, for instance, Tommy goes to the wake of another man he killed. Wasn’t that this week’s episode?

So The Medium is Not Enough declares that The Black Donnellys is a three or “Minor Caruso” on The Carusometer quality scale. A Minor Caruso corresponds to “a show in which David Caruso might guess star. If the show features Irish characters, he will make much of his Irish heritage, claiming that it gives him more insight than ‘those so-called writers’, adding frequent references to the script about Blarney Stones, Lucky Charms, curling and potatoes, as well as putting on an accent that ‘only lesser talents’ than he would describe as ‘sounding more like Scottish or maybe Pakistani’.”

I hated the pilot episode of Rules of Engagement. I absolutely hated it. It was the most derivative, insulting load of cobblers I’d seen in a long while.

Seems others agreed with me. Here’s the original cast (men only, because let’s face it, women don’t count according to the show).

Here’s the current cast:

Ooh, women. Plus, two out of the three main characters have been recast. There was only one good thing about the pilot – Patrick Warburton – and he’s still there. But we’ve lost the kid from Joey and gained David Spade. Oh dear.

I refused point-blank to watch the new version of the first episode, so the second episode was the first I bothered with.

“Hmm, it seems to have improved,” I noted to myself, mentally pencilling in some sort of “don’t judge a series by its pilot” message to blog about. It didn’t suck completely. Sure, there was plenty of latent misogyny (Oh no! His girlfriend knows something about sex and has had loads and loads of boyfriends! That means he’s inadequate and threatened, and she’s an *insert anti-female insult of your choice here*), but the older couple, despite their supposed jadedness were kind of nice together, David Spade wasn’t in it much, and Patrick Warburton was still great.

But this week’s episode. Oh dear. All the promise of the pilot was back again. Just awful. Hateful. I would stick a burning David Spade goatee on CBS’s front lawn if I could (Note to self: sounds good, not sure what it means, and it has potential to be offensive. Should I keep it? Probably not.)