CBS is the most popular of all US networks, but it does have an odd tendency. Whenever it has a successful show, it likes to create a backup in case things go wrong with it. So CSI spawned CSI: Miami and CSI: New York; NCIS got NCIS: LA; Criminal Minds is about to get Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior; and so on.
Sometimes, rather than create a simple spin-off, though, CBS likes to create a show similar to the original. So it is with Mad Love, a sneaky backup in case How I Met Your Mother gets corrupted. The basic premise is pretty much the same: two guys, two girls, two interesting, two not, and there are romantic complications. Here, Jason Biggs (American Pie), a very ordinary lawyer, meets Sarah Chalke (Scrubs), a very ordinary… actually, I missed what she did, but whatever it is, it’s probably very ordinary. Whatever – it’s love at first sight, there’s fireworks and everything.
Each has a much more interesting best friend: Tyler Labine (Reaper), an eccentric lawyer, and Judy Greer (Archer), a nanny who helps brain-dead trophy wives rear their kids. For them, it’s hate at first sight, but you just know that’s going to change.
And as is the trouble with carbon copies, it’s just not as good as the originals. In fact, against a backdrop of the likes of Traffic Light, Perfect Couples and Better With You, it’s a very pale copy that can barely raise a single laugh. Talking of Traffic Light, do you want to have a guess who was in the pilot but got recast again?
In the US: Thursdays, 10/9c, USA Network. Starts January 20th
Three episodes into "lawyer turns negotiator and lives on a houseboat" drama, Fairly Legal (I know there have been four now, but I’m playing catch-up), and the problems that were obvious in the pilot are still obvious now: this is a boring show, filled with largely uninteresting characters – with the exception of Sarah Shahi who’s overdosed on kooky.
Episode two, it has to be said, was marginally better than the first episode, since rather than the overblown implausibilities designed to fool us into thinking this might actually be an interesting show that the first episode hurled at us, this episode focused on some more plausible negotiations while giving us a sub-plot about the reading of Shahi’s father’s will. This left us on a cliffhanger… that was completely ignored in the next episode.
In fact, episode three went back to mine the silly of the first episode, while Shahi’s character continues to be kooky in a way the writers probably think is endearing – and fulfils USA Network’s "characters" remit – but which is actually intensely irritating.
So it’s time to leave Fairly Legal. This is average, mundane drama at best, with nothing to commend it beyond Shahi, who does what she can with the scripts. Fingers crossed she’ll end up on something better afterwards.
Carusometer rating: 4 Rob’s prediction: Will last to the end of the season but won’t be renewed
It seems with Ali off busy doing other things, there’s a mass outbreak of randomness among people wanting to get in on her act.
Randomly, Katherine Heigl has been smoking a metal cigarette. It even glows red at the end when you inhale.
Amber Heard, currently tipped to be 2011’s “next big thing” thanks to her starring roles in The Rum Diary with Johnny Depp and in NBC’s pilot for the Mad Men-esque Playboy, has been getting very random, not only acting as Grand Marshall at a Nascar rally (“Gentlemen, start your engines”) – as you do – but donating no fewer than five pairs of the “Daisy Dukes” she wore in Drive Angry 3D to various online news sites to give away in competitions.
But it’s this news reporter who probably has been the most random this week by spontaneously inventing an entirely new language while on-air (fingers crossed, she’s okay).
Have you seen Ali Larter or one of her sub-contractors acting randomly? If so, let us know and we’ll tell everyone about it in “Random Acts of Ali Larter“
