Lovely wife is off in Barcelona with her pals at the moment, so there’s a slight backlog on things we watch together – 30 Rock, Community, Modern Family, Cougar Town, Being Erica, Life Unexpected and Hellcats. I’ve also yet to muster up the enthusiasm to watch Detroit 1-8-7, My Generation and Boardwalk Empire and I’ve decided not to bother with Lone Star now it’s been cancelled. And as for Undercovers, The Defenders and The Whole Truth, there’s just not enough time in the world to be giving some shows a second chance. I’ve also got Outsourced episode 2 to watch, Law and Order: LA and I might even given Downton Abbey a try, despite it being on ITV. This is a very busy time of year!
Better With You: Just like with the first episode, there’s some good writing, there’s a good cast, it makes you laugh. It has its fair share of cliches, mainly to do with the oldest couple, but they’re reasonably tolerable. But the horrible, horrible laughter track and studio audience are like fingers on a blackboard. I’m not sure despite the fact it’s the only really funny new comedy so far this season that I can actually carry on watching it.
Chuck: It seems like the Buy More is turning into “the place where guest stars who would like to cameo on Chuck turn up”. This week it was the turn of the Old Spice guy who proved nearly as awesome as Captain Awesome – glad to see him back, too, because he is just awesome. Otherwise, a mixture of fun and… oh no, it’s the Buy More crew back. And is it my imagination of is Chuck just not bothering to “flash” much these days.
Dexter: A surprisingly emotional start, with our Dexter mourning the departure of someone close to him at the end of last season. Some real nice touches, no obvious serial killer adversary for our Dexter and it looks like the real enemy for him this year is going to be himself. No Julia Stiles yet (she’ll be along soon), which I’m looking forward to. So very promising.
The Event: Hmmm. Pretty much everything you guessed was going to happen during the pilot has now turned out to be the case. If I spend the reason of the season having every mystery proven to be obvious, I’m not going to be best pleased. Episode three is apparently the point at which things change in interesting ways, so I’ll stick around for that one, but the appeal of the show has dropped significantly as the silliness factor has kicked in.
Hawaii Five-0: Talking of very silly indeed, Hawaii Five-0 tried to do Sneakers this week and it was all a bit laughable. With no Len Wiseman directing, the action quickly fell apart, giving us possibly the stupidest, most badly edited catfight I’ve seen since the 70s. WTF is up with Daniel Dae Kim on that motorbike? And what age is Grace Park trying to play? But the Danny/Steve pairing is a fun one, the return to original series format (a guest helper of the week for Five-0) is a nice touch and the scripts are enjoyably stupid, so I’ll probably stick with this one for now.
House: Distinct lack of women on the main team all of a sudden. But an acceptable episode, even if the new “nice” House is hard to take seriously.
Mad Men: I’m up to speed at last! Very much enjoying the season so far and enjoying the hoops Don is being made to go through. Didn’t like Lane’s father (W Morgan Sheppard from Max Headroom et al) but I do like Don’s new girlfriend and the relationship he has with her.
Parenthood: A much more balanced episode, with both men and women getting decent plot lines. But the last minute “Asperger’s kid takes an interest at last” moment didn’t ring true, Monica Potter’s character is just collapsing and not enough is actually happening – it’s actually hard to say what the point of Parenthood is since there’s no real plot drive towards anything. So I’m on the verge of giving up. Just not quite yet.
Raising Hope: I gave up after five minutes into episode 2, on the general grounds it wasn’t funny.
Rubicon: Not much happening at all still. But it’s engrossing and I have to say Kale – not the hero but his boss – is proving to be one of the most interesting characters on TV for some time: a gay man in a relationship, successful, happy, talented, the hardest man in town despite being in his 40s or 50s, a former US Marine yet possessed with some of the finest taste in interior decor around. No one really quite like him on TV. Makes the show worth watching all by himself.
Running Wilde: Even Peter Serafinowicz couldn’t really rescue this one. A few funny moments, but way too few. I’ll probably watch next week’s though.
Shit My Dad Says: We lasted two and half minutes on this before giving up. Not funny in the slightest.
Smallville: I thought I’d give this one a try again, given it’s the last season. Still as dumb as a box of hammers, and way too comic strip, but it was good to see John Schneider get to cameo. Ditto Dr Fate, even if Chloe isn’t going to be around much now. I think I’ll skip a few more episodes until Supergirl’s back.
Stargate Universe:Not the rip-roaring return I was hoping for, given the strength of the various cliffhangers last season. Everything’s been wrapped up a little too neatly. I also wasn’t happy to see the return of the people they’d left behind on that planet, which robbed that episode of one of the show’s most magnificent ambiguities. The constant darkness also means I can’t see what’s going on half the time. But I’m interested to see what they do with the Lucian Alliance people with Robert Knepper about.
Supernatural: And… I’m out. The end of last season was a natural conclusion to the previous five years, so I think I might as well leave while the show is on a high. The departure of Eric Kripke as showrunner seems to have robbed the show of some of its strengths, since this first episode was dull and was just a traipse over the glories of past episodes. The new format felt very crowbarred into the show (spoilers: look! It’s me your dead grandfather! And here are all your cousins! Let’s go fight bad guys). None of it really rang true. So I think I’ll cut this out of my schedule.
But what have you been watching?
As always, no spoilers unless you’re going to use the <spoiler> </spoiler> tags, please. If you’ve reviewed something on your blog, you can put a link to it here rather than repeat yourself (although too many links and you might get killed by the spam filter).
In the US: Tuesdays, 8/7c, ABC In the UK: Yet to be acquired
Brace yourself: this is the first of not one but two superhero shows on network US TV coming this Fall, with NBC’s The Cape due some time soon (presumably as soon as NBC cancels another show, since there’s no actual airdate yet).
But of the two, this is the most family-friendly. Family, incidentally, is the operative word here. Since ABC scored big last year with Modern Family, it must have seemed natural enough to go for family with the drama as well. Here we have an “ordinary family” – which apparently means “family doing regular stuff but with deep seated emotional issues and resentments, but nothing too dramatic” – whose plane crash-lands in the Amazon. Exposed to some weird green stuff in the river, when they return to the US, they soon discover they have super-powers, which in traditional Heroes style are exactly what they need emotionally: super-strength for the father who wants to fight crime, super-speed for the mother who has too little time, super-brains for the learning disabled son and the ability to read minds for the girl who can’t fit in.
It’s not as adult as Heroes, it’s not as kid-oriented as Kyle XY, it’s not as good as The Incredibles and it’s not as “ordinary” as Misfits – but it’s got Julie Benz (Buffy, Angel, Dexter) and Michael Chiklis (The Shield, Fantastic Four), it does have some really cool special effects and the stories are something the whole family can enjoy. Basically, it’s Merlin for Americans – but better, obviously
In the US: Fridays, 10/9c, CBS In the UK: Not yet acquired
In the neverending quest for new ways to do cop and legal dramas, the concept of the “super-format” has emerged (I just made up that name so don’t go looking for it anywhere else. It’s mine). So you want to do cop shows, but you also quite like the whole lawyer thing as well? Well, how about Law & Order, where you get both cops and lawyers: a twofer super-format. Or maybe you quite like stories about guys on patrol, rookie cops and detectives? Well, how about Southland, then? That’s a threefer super-format. Or perhaps you even like the mix of politics that you get at the top of the police hierarchy with the day-to-day police work of the rank and file as well as lawyers? Well, how about The Wire then?
Indeed, The Wire was perhaps the first of the “super-super format” shows: a format that tries to amalgamate everything to do with the legal system and look at it all equally. But post The Wire, what new super-super format can you have?
Blue Bloods rather cunningly does the very American thing of making it all about family. In this case, the Reagans, a New York Irish family of cops and lawyers. We have Tom Selleck, complete with his old Magnum PI moustache, as the New York chief of police. His dad is the former chief of police. He has two sons, one a detective (Donnie Wahlberg), the other a beat cop. He had another son, who was also a beat cop, but who died in the line of duty. And he has a daughter (Bridget Moynahan) who is an assistant district attorney.
The result is a show in which you get to see all aspects of New York policing, from the politics at the top to the investigations by detectives to the day-to-day issues of the average beat cop to the problems of the legal system – all while the politics of torture are discussed over Sunday lunch. For a while, it actually seems pretty good – and then six minutes before the end, we get the Blue Templars and everything falls apart.
