Well, I’ve been singing her praises for ages now but thanks to American Horror Story, a lot of people are actually starting to know who I’m talking about now. Here’s a very brief interview with her where she talks about all kinds of things including photography and doing voices for Family Guy.
I miss her doing comedy – follow her on Twitter: she’s very funny.
So, 13 episodes gone already. My, how time flies. An unexpectedly edgy show for the network that gave us Privileged, Gossip Girl, America’s Next Top Model, 90210 and Melrose Place, Life Unexpected has seen foster child Lux locate her birth parents in an attempt to get emancipated, only to be thrown into their care instead – thrusting radio show host Cate and bar-owning Baze into the scary world of parenting a 16-year-old daughter.
It’s not been picked up for a second season yet or by a UK network, but just in case it does, let’s talk about whether the first season was worth sitting through and whether a second season is going to be a much-watch.
In the US: Wednesdays, 10pm, FX
In the UK: Mondays, 10pm, FX UK. Starts November 7th
A new horror show from the creators of Glee!
Yes, Glee. Psyched now? Of course, not.
But then, when Glee was announced as a charming new show from the creators of Nip/Tuck about a High School glee club, there was a similar reaction, so let’s just say “a new horror show from the creators of Nip/Tuck” and take it from there.
Anyway, American Horror Story is something of a misnomer in that it’s not just one horror story, it’s actually every single American horror story ever, more or less, particularly the ones from the movies: there’s The Amityville Horror, Psycho, The Shining, Don’t Look Now, Rosemary’s Baby and more, all rolled up into one big story in which Dylan McDermott (The Practice, Dark Blue) and Connie Britton (Friday Night Lights) move into a spectacularly haunted house in LA with their teenage daughter and have to deal with everything from a two-faced maid, ghosts and a weird melted man who murdered his family to a gimp and a boy who might also be a demon.
And the theme of this big story? What do the creators of Nip/Tuck and Glee think is the ultimate ‘American Horror Story’? Family – and sex, apparently, and plenty of it.
Here’s a trailer:
In the US: Thursdays, 8/7c, NBC
Some things are beyond saving. Ordinarily, I’d have given up on Save Me somewhere after or even during its first episode. But Alex Breckenridge is in it, I like Alex Breckenridge, so I thought I’d give it a little longer.
Oops. That was a mistake.
If you consider Christian Rock – Rock n Roll with all the good things taken out and replaced with cringeworthy, God-praising lyrics – then what we have in Save Me is Christian Comedy. In it, Anne Heche pretends to be a former sinning party girl/mother, although her ‘sins’ are really only the kind of things that Ned Flanders would blush at (oh no! She smoked pot!), who mysteriously becomes a prophet of God after choking to death on a sandwich. She throws her sinning ways away, mysteriously acquiring a miraculous self-awareness that would have come in handier before, and then proceeds to go around fixing both her life and the lives of her friends, family and neighbours with the occasional bit of cryptic advice from God in her head or through children’s versions of the Bible.
And it’s unbearable. It thinks it’s funny, it thinks it’s righteous, and it’s neither. It’s the equivalent of a pastor who likes a tipple or two cracking jokes in a sermon he’s found on the Internet. Its ‘revelations’ are less insightful than those you’d find in a fortune cookie, with such stunning profundity as “inviting your former friends round to dinner might make them friendlier”.
What’s worse is that Breckenridge, who’s credited as a co-star and is possibly the only member of the cast with comic talent (except maybe Michael Landes, although he’s not been well served by the scripts), has been in a coma for three episodes. Presumably the idea of Landes’ character having a mistress was just a little too edgy and interesting for the show.
Don’t mistake the mistake I made. Don’t watch it.
Barrometer rating: 5
Rob’s prediction: Wouldn’t have been cancelled by now if it weren’t the summer. Definitely no second season
Liz Tigelaar, the creator/show-runner of Life Unexpected, gives an interview over here in which as well as confirming the low budget of the show, she explains:
However, it looks like today is Being Erica news day today. Tigelaar drops a strong hint that season three of Being Erica is a go since Erin Karpluk will only be available for the second half of season two of Life Unexpected at most because of filming conflicts (if there is a season two, of course). We’ll know the answer by the end of the week, apparently.
Meanwhile, Big Talk Productions is planning a UK remake of the show, swapping the title character’s therapist for an NHS worker and relocating the action from Toronto to Glasgow. What do you think? Good idea or just show the original on a better network than E4 and with more publicity?
UPDATE: TV.com has more information on the British remake. You don’t think they were cribbing from here, do you?
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