TV reviews

In the US: Tuesdays, 10/9c, ABC

Faith-based television has a bad reputation. That is, it has a reputation for being bad. To be fair, that’s largely because not only is it preaching to the converted, it typically airs on networks with small budgets and few creatives. The result is dogmatic, hectoring TV that has the subtlety of Pat Robertson.

But when it airs on mainstream networks, it can often rise above the banal. Sure, you can still end up with the likes of Of Kings and Prophets (cancelled so quickly I didn’t even have time to review it) and the just horrific Saving Grace, but you can still end up with jaunty little shows like Joan of Arcadia, Highway to Heaven or even Quantum Leap. Touched by an Angel? Well, let’s not speak about that…

Trouble is the good ones are all much of a muchness and new kid on the block Kevin (Probably) Saves the World doesn’t exactly deviate from the standard formula. It sees Jason Ritter (The Class, The Event, Another Period, Goliath) playing the titular Kevin, a somewhat aimless complete nobody and failure as a human being, who tried to commit suicide – and failed at that, too. Sister JoAnna Garcia Swisher (Privileged, Animal Practice) is so worried about him trying again that she gets him to move in with her, back in the small town in which they grew up but which he left a decade ago. That’s despite the fact Ritter wasn’t there for her when her husband died, something Ritter’s niece (Chloe East) still hates him for.

One night, a meteorite – one of more than 30 – strikes the Earth nearby and Ritter being somewhat dumb, only goes and touches it. When he wakes up, he can suddenly hear and see Kimberly Hebert Gregory (Vice Principals), who claims to be a ‘warrior of God’ – what we call an angel. She tells him that he’s one of the 36 righteous souls who keep the world going. In fact, he’s the only one left and he now has to find 35 others whom he can anoint as the new righteous souls. At least, once he’s becoming properly righteous himself.

Trouble is, no one else can see or hear Gregory, although they can at least see the results of her actions, and he can’t tell anyone that he’s one of the righteous ones. Ritter’s also not even emotionally equipped to make himself, his sister or his niece happier or better. So can Kevin save the world?

This again?

So there you go. It’s Joan of Arcadia again. It’s also Quantum Leap again. It’s even Highway to Heaven again. It’s the “God moves in mysterious ways to go and help the little guy to help other little guys, usually with the help of some kind of angel that can only be seen by said little guy” formula that we’ve seen so many times before. Gregory is precisely the kind of older black woman that Community satirised as inevitably being a TV ‘cosmic mentor’. Ritter eventually sees the light and starts becoming a better person. There are no surprises other than JoAnna Garcia Swisher being a professor of engineering.

But beyond that slavish following of the template, Kevin (Probably) Saves The World is actually okay. It can be quite heart-warming, doesn’t tell you you’re a sinner and doesn’t quote scripture at you. It takes itself a lot less seriously than you might expect, with Ritter being a complete idiot and most of Gregory’s life lessons for Ritter involving her hitting him or something bad happening to him like his car being run over. Ritter’s funny and appealing, and not a loathsome, godless atheist as you might have expected, either.

There’s a good supporting cast as well, with India de Beaufort (Kröd Mändoon, Blood and Oil) as Ritter’s ex, who’s now one of East’s teachers and holds a slight torch for him still; J August Richards (Angel, Raising the Bar, Agents of SHIELD, Notorious) is a local cop and possible romantic interest for Garcia Swisher.

There’s also ample room for the series to expand. Those other meteorites all brought angels to Earth as well, so there’s the possibility for them to show up. Garcia Swisher is working with the US government to find out the significance of so many of them all hitting the Earth at the same time.

Probably not

Of course, for Kevin to save the world, if the show lasts the maximum of seven seasons, Kevin has to find an average of five righteous souls a season, so we’ll quickly know if it this is the kind of show that’s planning on treading water and moping around town for its run, or whether there’ll be some actual pace to it. Somehow, I doubt it’ll be the latter but you never know.

Would I watch seven seasons to find out? Almost certainly not.The comedy, dialogue and plotting are pretty weak. It’s unremarkable stuff at every level, although it’s not bad and does have potential.

All the same, it’s good to know that reasonably good faith-based TV can still be made.

In the US: Sundays, 10pm, Showtime. Starts October 15
In the UK: Wednesdays, 11:05pm, Sky Atlantic. Starts July 25

There is a black and white cultural divide. That’s true both here and in the US.

Look at TMINE – how often do I review anything on BET (Black Entertainment Television)? I don’t need to because virtually nothing that airs on BET gets picked up in the UK. That’s despite the fact BET has a UK channel. Did you even know there is a BET in the UK? Probably not. Unless you’re black. Although, actually, probably not even then – it’s really not well publicised, you know.

Or take Tyler Perry. A huge star in the US. His films have done so well he’s worth $600 million. Ever watched a Tyler Perry movie? Particularly one in which he spends a lot of time in a dress? Probably not – unless you’re black, although they’re actually really hard to get hold of in the UK and it’s not like they’re in cinemas much, either.

Anyway.

It’s that difference between ‘famous with black people’ and ‘so well known you’re white famous’ that White Famous plays with. You all know Jamie Foxx, right? A movie star now, but he started out as a comedian. His first leapt to fame was on TV with In Living Color and then The Jamie Foxx Show. Sometimes wearing a dress.

The exact point at which he became ‘white famous’ is unknown to me, but White Famous is based on his life, so maybe I’ll find out by watching. Here, we get to see Jay Pharaoh (Saturday Night Live) playing a modern-day version of Foxx called Floyd Mooney. A promising up-and-coming black comedian, he’s already successful with black comedy audiences but despite the efforts of his agent (Utkarsh Ambudkar) to make him ‘white famous’, his refusal to play ball and insistence on calling out racist behaviour by the Hollywood elite means that he’s so far failed to hit the (really) big time. That and refusing to appear in movies where he has to wear a dress.

But when one of his tirades against a white producer’s racism (Stephen Tobolowsky) goes viral, he attracts the attention of ‘Jamie Foxx’ (played by… Jamie Foxx), who wants him for his next movie. If he’ll wear a dress. Just like him.

Will Mooney be strong and stay a ‘comedian’s comedian’ or will he take the white haberdashery dollar for the sake of his baby mama (Meagan Good), kid and his career?

Continue reading “Preview: White Famous 1×1 (US: Showtime; UK: Sky Atlantic)”

In the US: Sundays, 8/7c, CBS

Post-Brexit and post-Trump, the idea that large groups of people are inherently wise and capable of making good decisions collectively has taken something of a beating. But there is a certain degree of truth to the idea that there is ‘wisdom in the crowd‘.

Strictly speaking, CBS’s Wisdom of the Crowd should more properly be called Knowledge of the Crowd – maybe it got lost in translation from the original Hebrew, being based on an Israeli TV series of (more or less) the same name – since it’s really about crowdsourcing information from people. It sees Jeremy Piven (Entourage, Mr Selfridge) going full Iron Man as a genius tech billionaire who gives it all up to launch a crowdsourcing app/platform called ‘Sophie’ (you know, cos of the Greek word for wisdom) to help find out who really killed his daughter, as it’s almost certainly not the poor sod who’s currently languishing behind bars.

Piven’s idea is that if he puts up $100 million as a reward and adds all the evidence to Sophie, people will visit the site or download the app, they’ll spot things that have been missed or provide valuable additional information. Powerful data mining and stats techniques will then work out what’s dross and what’s the 10% of actually useful information coming from the crowd, creating correlations that the police would never make.

YA tech innovator

There have, of course, been plenty of “tech innovator” shows in the past year, in which genius tech billionaires decide that a given industry needs some innovative Silicon Valley thinking and a big pile of silicon chips in order to meet the challenges of the 21st century (eg Pure Genius, APB). These shows have, in turn, inadvertently been shining demonstrations of exactly why that’s a dumb idea, with our heroes essentially discovering that there are reasons things are currently done the way they’re done and you screw things up colossally if you tinker too much.

To its credit, Wisdom of the Crowd actually does a surprisingly good job of avoiding this issue, without simultaneously ‘doing a Numb3rs‘ – ie coming up with extremely complicated theoretical solutions that wouldn’t work in practice and which the police could do anyway using other methods. Here, Sophie’s data mining probably would be able to look through eye witnesses reports and the like, as well as chatroom discussions et al, to come up with associations humans would miss (and if you don’t believe me, have a word with Cambridge Analytica). It probably would attract the attention of people who would ignore a police request for information (although how long it would maintain that attention is something later episodes might have to address, since I imagine it would get uninstalled from phones relatively quickly normally).

Similarly, the app allows more than simple crowdsourcing of information. When Piven and his team (of course he has a team) want to eavesdrop on a suspect’s conversation, helper police bloke Richard T Jones (Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles) who’s along for the ride to monitor progress on the case points out that hacking the suspect’s cellphone would be illegal and the results inadmissible in court. So Piven and co find a nearby app user and use the app to video chat with her to ask if they can use her phone to record the conversation – it’s voluntary so admissible.

At the same time, the show does still highlight issues around data privacy and the information freely available online to all of us, about all of us. And it also points out that crowds can be very stupid, too, with the posting of information about an innocent Arab taxi driver they’re looking for leading to him getting beaten by a baying mob.

Standard CBS format

Although there is this degree of wisdom to Wisdom of the Crowd that lifts it above the usual CBS tech nonsense (eg Scorpion) and a decent cast that also includes Monica Potter (Parenthood, Martha, Meet Frank, Daniel and Laurence) as Piven’s politician ex-wife, where it all falls apart is in its use of the standard CBS procedural bolt-on format module.

Do we have a special secret room full of people standing up in front of computers, staring at some giant monitors? Check. Do we have a diverse yet still absolutely interchangeable cast of hard-working, genius characters? Check. Does the plot follow the standard crime investigation plotting, with false leads et al? Check.

Boring. So very very boring.

Needless to say, by the end of the episode, Piven’s daughter’s murder isn’t solved, forcing him to keep on looking while investigating other related cases that the data mining algorithm throws up accidentally. Did you see that coming? Of course you did.

Wisdom of the Crowd

Wisdom of the Crowd is probably the most promising new procedural of the past year or so. However, that’s a low bar, given the inanity we’ve been facing of late, and I can’t really imagine myself watching more than a couple of episodes at most, given it’s only got a couple of moderately interesting characters and an absolutely generic format.

If you like episodic procedural crime shows, though, this might be worth trying out. I’ll see what my mother in law says – she’s love this kind of thing.