US TV

In the US: Mondays, 8.30/7.30c, CBS

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?

Continue reading “Review: Life In Pieces 1×1 (US: CBS)”

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

One of the best things about Dexter, Showtime’s little-known show about a serial killer who only kills bad people, was Jennifer Carpenter. A foul-mouthed force of nature, she was both fun and clearly having fun in the show – for the first few seasons at least.

Post-Dexter, her career hasn’t taken off, unfortunately. An attempted USA Network pilot, Stanistan, failed to make it to series, meaning she had to pin her hopes this year on CBS’s Limitless spin-off.

Park that thought for a second because the progress of Limitless from book to TV series is instructive. It originally started life as The Dark Fields, a novel by Irish novellist Alan Glynn about a down-and-out writer who takes a new drug, NZT, that can expand his mental powers. Effectively a metaphor for how people on cocaine feel, it sees the hero turn his life round, become rich and powerful, and ultimately completely dependent on the drug, which turns out to have horrific side effects for those who stop taking it. Unusually for a European writer, though, the moral of the book was ‘don’t do drugs’ and ‘Eddie Spinola’ (spoiler alert) ends up dying alone in a motel room.

The book was eventually adapted by Leslie Dixon of all people. Until Limitless, Dixon was best known as the screenplay writer of Outrageous Fortune, Overboard, Mrs. Doubtfire, Freaky Friday and Hairspray. However, for Limitless, although largely faithful to the original, Dixon actually improved on it in several ways: she added action scenes, a new female character (Abbie Cornish) and changed the ending. In her hands, hero Bradley Cooper also discovers the good side of drugs, solves NZT’s side-effects and ends up running for senator, thanks to the power of NZT. Director Neil Burger and cinematographer Jo Willems also gave the movie a unique visual appearance.

And now we have the TV version, which is both a sequel and an adaptation of the movie. In a script by Elementary producer Craig Sweeny, we get Jake McDorman of you’ll-have-forgotten-it-existed-until-I-mentioned-it-again Manhattan Love Story as a down-and-out singer who ends up taking NZT and with the help of Bradley Cooper, becomes a vital FBI asset, using his vast mental powers to solve crimes no one else can. His helper and biggest support? Jennifer Carpenter.

And two things are clear:

1. Although adaptations can improve on the originals, they can also make them worse
2. You can be too slavish too the original when you adapt it

Why do I say that? Because although Limitless isn’t all that bad and is actually quite fun, mainly thanks to all the things it lifts straight from the movie’s script and direction, it lifts too much – by having a Bradley Cooper-esque hero, it overlooks the fact the show would have been about 1,000 times smarter and better if Jennifer Carpenter were the heroine on NZT, McDorman the straight-laced FBI helper.

Here’s the trailer.

Continue reading “Preview: Limitless 1×1 (US: CBS)”