They Return

After sampling a lot of the new shows this season and sharing my thoughts I figured it was only fitting that I take a few moments to remark about some of the returning shows and their grand season premieres. Note that all the shows I’m talking about here are ones I actually watched most or all of last season. Other than Veronica Mars (which I’m TiVoing but not watching until the Season 1 DVD comes out so I can catch up) the only returning show that I watched this year but didn’t watch last year is Smallville, but only because HB and Gin love that show and had us TiVo it for some reason so they wouldn’t miss it. I ended up watching it with them but I won’t comment on it since I was more or less lost and playing catch-up the whole episode. I’ll stick with what I know.

Also, for completeness’ sake, I’m coining a new phrase here. Some of the shows I watch are admittedly soap operas. There’s no way around it: The plots revolve around the more or less mundane existences of the characters rather than some fantastical events occurring to heroic or reluctantly heroic protagonists. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a show like that; character-driven dramas can be just as intriguing as action-driven ones when done right. However, there comes a point when the seeds of the true soap operas, the daytime variety, and all their ugly hack-written dreck bubbles to the surface in a painfully overwrought sequence of “I’m your long-lost twin brother and I’m here to tell you the wife you thought was dead is really still allive” sort of eye-rolling schmaltz. When a show gets all über-cheese like that, I call it dropping the soap. It’s when people react to circumstances that are not inherently worthy of high drama as if they were matters of National Security, or when something happens so far out of the realm of plausibility that one must completely destroy their sense of disbelief, and then the writers ask you for one more leap of faith.

So, moving on.

Alias

Ah Alias, how I used to love you. Remember when you were a fun, quirky show about a sexy secret agent trying to lead a double life of normal grad student and international super spy? Remember when you would feature an ensemble of interesting characters and fantastical mythology story arcs held together by a likable, chameleon-like lead? It seems like only yesterday when you had crisp writing and sharp dialogue. When you took chances with plot lines and weren’t afraid to shake things up. I remember those first couple of years when it was like you could do no wrong. Every bold twist, every unexpected turn, every moment of romantic tension, every fight scene seemed to happen with a certain boldness. Anyone might die! Anything could happen! It was… thrilling.

I miss those days. Sure, when you introduced a two-year gap in time, I was a little skeptical. The love-triangle central story line in our third year was at times trying but you held on to some of your early promise. I still felt like you wanted to do right. Lauren being introduced as Vaughn’s wife was worthy of an eyebrow twitch. Lauren turning out to be a bad guy was a bit hard to swallow. Lauren being a double-agent and getting killed by Vaughn was at least a relief: It was over. We could get back to Sydney and Vaughn or, more specifically, we could get back to dream-sequence-less Alias without all the drama.

Then came last year. I had so much hope going in! It seems naïve now, I know. Another system reset. Bring the team back together, oh and here comes Sloane again. I guess he’s a good guy now, huh? Sure. We got less mythology. We got more one-shot, standalone episodes. I felt like it was getting hollow, a shell of what we once had. Where was my reward for four years of loyalty? What was the hook if there wasn’t a complex set of crosses and double-crosses and triple-crosses? Just some chick in funny costumes doing (yawn) another roundhouse kick to the head? Wake me when something happens.

I guess you tried to bring the mythology back toward the end. But it wasn’t good. It was getting sloppy, maybe even stupid. What happened to those writers? The ones I used to admire for their boldness? A remote town in Russia? Sydney off the hook because she has a sister she didn’t know about? My interest wasn’t just slipping, it was racing downward on a greased track. Oh look, a giant red ball of bad CGI. How terrifying.

I was just about to leave. Just about to walk out the door when the final scene of season four made me pause. The abrupt car-crash ending, while ripped straight from the movie The Forgotten, was effective. Oh, I had my skepticism. Vaughn is a double agent? Uh, no. As a matter of fact he is not. I can suspend disbelief, but it does not soar or hover on its own power like a helicopter or a particle of dust. It needs some kind of support, and I wasn’t getting any of that. Still, still I can’t deny I was intrigued. Alias writers have pulled off some even more unlikely twists before. I owed it to you and you deserved one more chance. For old time’s sake.

What a fool I was. Maybe your father, J.J. Abrams is too busy with his real show, his one true love, Lost to bother anymore. Maybe he’s handed you off in a Gene Roddenberry-to-Rick Berman kind of lapse in judgement to people who simply don’t get it. Maybe the writers have gotten to the point where there isn’t anything to do but get silly. I don’t think so, though. Silly is okay. Stupid, intelligence-insulting crap is not okay.

Here’s what I think happened. You want to hear this? Here it is: You got scared. You forgot that which Hollywood is so adept at forgetting which is the simple truth that writing is everything. Maybe in the movies directing is big. Directors can impose their vision on a script when they have months to film and gargantuan budgets. In TV, there’s no time for that. Directorial flourishes, okay, but you can’t change a badly written TV episode with great direction. The most a TV director can do is make it click, make it work. What? The actors? I’m sorry, did I forget them? Actually, no I didn’t. The thing is: They. Don’t. Matter.

Sorry, Us Weekly and National Enquirer subscribers. I hate to break it to you, but those people on screen? They’re not making up those lines on the spot. Not a single one of them. Somewhere, some under-appreciated writer has carefully decided what they should say and do and the actors merely carry out instructions. Story-driven media demands to be driven by (shockingly) the story.

So here’s what went down: You have a hot young actress. A rising star. She’s the marquee name on the show. In a way, you kind of gave her the break she needed. But she’s rising too fast. She’s getting into high-profile relationships with co-stars. She’s ending those high-profile relationships with co-stars and finding bigger, richer co-stars to hook up with. Now she’s making all these requests from the writers. “Don’t put me in so many scenes with my ex-boyfriend. It’s uncomfortable for me to kiss him. My new boyfriend gets jealous.” Blah, blah, blah. But the thing is, your writers are scared. They’re terrified at the prospect of losing their star. No star, no show, right? You forgot that the story is everything. That actor? That contractor? That vessel? Meaningless. You should have stood up right from the start and said, “We’re here to tell stories. If you’re worried about where that story may lead, the door is to your left. If you want to be a part of a great story and make a bit of money in the process, take a seat.”

But you didn’t. Now your fearmonger star is asking for co-stars to be excised from the show. She’s getting married, see, so she needs to have her exes out of the way. Oh, and did you write in my pregnancy? Because—congratulations to me and a big pat on my back—I’m expecting so my character is going to need to get knocked up as well. That won’t be a problem for an action-based show about undercover super spies, will it? Of course not. There’s a good little Word Processor Monkey. Now shoo, and go make me more famous.

Well you may be able to live with yourself, Alias, but I can’t. I hope it goes well for you, I truly do. We had some good times, you and me. But enough’s enough. You know I would normally be standing in ovation with a whoop and a whistle at the shocking death of a major character in a show. What a way to start the season! Except, no, it wasn’t. It was a cheap cop-out. A lame and bitter send-off to a guy who dared to be less of a star than our title character and who got caught in the wake of the Hollywood star machine. Poor sod. But forget about him, he’s just an actor. How about those writers? Sorry guys, you’ve lost it. Too many paychecks? Well phone it in to someone else. I’m out.

You had me, and you lost me. (Apologies to Eric Burns.)

Lost

Watching Lost is sort of like watching a cat stalk a bug. It’s very entertaining as it goes round and round, with brief snatches of brilliance in form and style here and there, but eventually you start to feel like saying, “Come on already!” Plus there is this feeling that when it does finally happen, it will be so sudden and abrupt as to just about ruin the rest of the experience.

Of course the big problem is that at least 85% of the enjoyment of Lost is speculating on what the maddening clues mean and training your eagle-eye to spot the less obvious ones. This is definitely an “Internet Chat Board” show. Where that starts to stumble is that at some point the clues have to become more than just tantalizing suggestions and form some sort of story. When that happens, the story better bring it or the show will fall flat on its face. Without the mystery, I can’t imagine what this show would have to offer.

Which is frustrating to me because as I’ve said before, I don’t have a problem with things being mysterious, where I get leery is when people try and shoehorn something like this into an open-ended format. People in the entertainment industry really, really need to learn the value of conclusions. I’m afraid they’re going to have to keep pouring on the mystery until we’ve all just run out of patience and given up before we’re finally told something dumb like “They were kidnapped by the government. And monsters!” At which point we won’t care, but we’ll still be pretty hacked that we wasted our collective time.

I want the show to push forward and start to reveal some of these mysteries. I want less of the flashbacks that don’t reveal anything new about the characters (in the Season Premiere we learn that Jack… uh… met a guy. Once. A long time ago. For like five minutes.) and more story advancement and/or dealings with new characters. And no, I don’t think adding a bunch of tail section survivors was the right way to go. There’s no reason why we couldn’t be introduced to some of the 30 people also part of the group who get zero screen time.

I still love the show and it hasn’t slipped since last year (other than retaining its inherent difficulties) but it remains a show I watch with great trepidation.

Cold Case

People talk about Law & Order being a very consistent show. In terms of structure—knowing what you’ll get in any given episode—that’s quite true. But I don’t think most people who use that particular adjective with that particular show are meaning anything else, and I don’t think they’re ever really referring to quality.

I actually like Law & Order, although I never watch the first runs, but to say the show’s storyline can be hit or miss is like saying batting against Roger Clemens can be hit or miss. Sometimes L&O is very good. Usually it’s decent. More often than it should be, it’s really dull.

When I say Cold Case is consistent, I mean that in both senses. For the most part you can turn on an episode and know what you’re going to get: An intro flashback setting up the crime/murder, a present-day setup where the team gets the case, title credits, several rounds of interviews where the flashback gets fleshed out or redefined, a hint of main character development, some intense scenes of police detectives doing their work, a breakthrough and the flashback is complete, ending the episode with a musical montage of fading flashback figures, police wrapping the case and people silently emoting.

But what’s interesting here is that for the most part these stories are well-written and interesting. Law & Order stumbles most often by trying to shoehorn an interesting courtroom idea (some legal hot-button issue) into a crime story and solve it in less than an hour. Cold Case just goes with the crime story and focuses on how the crimes impact people in less immediate terms. Law & Order or CSI show how crimes affect the perpetrators or the victims which is immediate, time-of-the-crime focus. Cold Case is more concerned with the people who have to move on after these events and how they change and shape them, what closure could bring to them and how they respond to old secrets.

The Cold Case season premiere was a typical Cold Case episode, neither startlingly brilliant nor anywhere close to disappointing, but somewhere in that nice zone where a show accomplishes exactly what it is trying to and counts that as success enough. The passing nod to the Hunter story from the end of last season was a nice epilogue to that short plot thread (most plot threads that pass between episodes are short) as she tosses the paper in the trash and gets right back to work. The new girl, Josie (Sarah Brown) is an interesting addition to the cast which already contains maybe one too many peripheral characters who don’t get sufficient screen time. Plus this throws off the two-two split for detectives when they go off interviewing suspects or witnesses. I’m not saying I have a particular problem with the new character or the actress, I’m just saying I agree with Vera: She’s trouble.

CSI

The season finale for CSI was close to the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen on this or any other show. And I’m including the episode of the Brady Bunch where Greg fools people into thinking aliens are coming with a whistle, a flashlight and a big piece of cotton stuck to his lip.

We have a member of the cast, a teammate, buried alive and running out of air. Earlier in the show’s run, we had a similar situation with someone who was just a regular victim. In that earlier episode, they got in a helicopter with a snazzy heat-detecting gizmo and they found that girl in like five minutes. Over the open desert. At night.

But when Nick is trapped in the oh-so-clever booby trapped coffin, no one mentions the helicopter thermal gadget. No one really does much besides sit and stare at the video feed from the webcam in the coffin. Of course they save him after a gratuitous two-hour drag during which the CSIs act like nothing more than drooling baboons the whole time and the end result is… the team gets back together?

I hoped that Quentin Tarantino’s misguided hand on last season’s ender would serve to just get the show back on track and let the rest be part of our collective pop culture nightmare of things that should not have been. But no, this season in the premiere we have dozens of references to Nick’s “ordeal” and a long scene of him acting… something about a bug on his arm. (Granted, the bug was the size of northern Wisconsin, but that’s not the point.)

The case here was a car flying through a house which was obvious once they showed the shot of the holes in both the front and the rear of the mobile home. And the big tire-sized and shaped divots in the ground on the backside.

Where CSI has started to make me wonder is that it doesn’t really work on the level of a mystery show. I mean, these aren’t exactly whodunnits, you know? We’re introduced to like two, maybe three possible suspects in the course of a show. In many cases, we don’t really even know who the true perpetrator is until he’s introduced late in the episode. Sorta hard for us to guess who the killer is when we don’t see him, right? I mean, the B case in the premiere wasn’t even solved. They knew who did it in an abstract sense, but they didn’t catch him or even really talk about it much once we heard about the cocaine in the cinnamon rolls.

The show used to work as an exercise in displaying how forensics helps to solve cases, but at this point we get it. We’ve seen these characters snap hundreds of photos, dust millions of prints, process images, examine blood spatter, align bullet entry/exit points, conduct autopsies, collect DNA evidence and shine their blue lights around so much that there is very little else to be shown until some new technique gets invented. So we don’t get much of a mystery, we’ve seen all the police-tech stuff, we’re not dealing with a character-driven show by any means so I have to wonder how many “Freaks that live in or visit Las Vegas” episodes there can possibly be before we just don’t care anymore?

Truth is, I don’t need a cheek swab to tell me that I’m getting bored already.

Grey’s Anatomy

The season premiere of this show dropped the soap so often I felt like what I needed to buy the writers for Christmas was soap on a rope. Meredith (oddly enough the show’s protagonist and least interesting or likable character) finds out her frowned-upon relationship with a co-worker is further complicated by him being married (but separated), she flips out and drowns in soul-crushed misery despite the fact that she’s been dating the guy for, what? A month?

Either way, a show about surgical interns that finds itself using relationship crises for conflict is already fishing around on the shower stall floor for that soap.

Grey’s Anatomy is a good example of how shows like CSI benefitted from thinning the inter-character conflict down. Of course, at some point shows like CSI start to need the characters to be more than a two-paragraph summary on a pilot outline and they would be well served to start showing a little more about what makes them tick. Contrarily, Grey’s has shown flashes of being a brilliant show about doctors on occasion: Instead of “Crazy and Highly Unlikely Medical Feakshow of the Week” most of their stuff has been interns trying to get a chance to get in on routine but interesting procedures. The patients are given enough time to show some character and in some cases even comment on the situation in a way that parallels the main character’s lives. In the season premier Joe the bartender brings something out of George that makes him show some previously unseen cleverness: That’s good melding of character and story.

Shepperd and Meredith’s blah love triangle? That’s not character development, that’s self-indulgent whinging. They tried to meld it to a story by having a patient who was a scorned wife hate Meredith after overhearing about the unintentional affair. The problem there, as is so often with dropping the soap, is that the whole situation could be resolved if people talked the way they would in real life. The obvious reply from Meredith to the patient was, “I didn’t know he was married, the jerk lied to me about it and now I’m just as mad as you are.” Case closed. Instead she sits there and takes it for the sake of letting Dr. Sheppard (the wife) show a compassionate side by coming to Meredith’s defense. Dumb. These slips into soap opera crud make it hard to remember the parts where they get it right as a medical drama.

The rumor is that last season’s finale (episode 10) was not originally supposed to be the finale, the third episode of this season was (episode 13). Having seen that episode, I can say that this seems very likely and the though soap has remained dropped, but the show has just enough going for it to keep watching for a bit and if they could manage to be even half as effective with some plots and characters as they are with others, the show would be one of the best on TV.

Maybe once they get their Christmas presents they’ll pull it together.

Desperate Housewives

Yes, yes, I watch this stupid show. I know. I know.

Here’s the deal with Desperate Housewives: It’s darkly comic blend of corny soap opera, mystery, social commentary and satire made it deserving of about half the praise it got last year. It certainly wasn’t the kind of show that would go down in the annals of history as among mankind’s greatest achievements (despite what the tabloids might suggest) but it was quality entertainment and one of the few true examples of the much-bandyed, rarely-achieved “guilty pleasure” genre. I mean, yeah it had a lot of over-the-top (sometimes way over the top) plots and characters but it always managed to wink at the camera and say, “I know you’re not buying any of this, but it’s pretty fun anyway.”

You had to agree.

But season two is where the rubber meets the road. The big mystery that tied the first season together into a semi-cohesive whole is over, and tragically season two has swept it aside as if it hardly mattered. Now the new mystery is one that many fans are finding less than engaging, the writers are dropping the soap so hard I swear they’re throwing it down, like a gauntlet, daring the viewers to challenge their wit. Susan and Mike on again/off again? Slip. Edie and Susan fighting again? Slide. Susan getting nosy with the uninteresting new neighbor? Whoops, there it goes, watch your toes. Gabrielle fights for the—what—400th time with both Carlos and John? Whoa man, those are some bold moves you’re making there… be careful not to tread too far into new territory.

The Lynette character continues to get uninteresting stories out of an otherwise potentially interesting situation. Bree’s mother-in-law is an ill-disguised stand-in for Rex as a constant challenger to her poise and sense of sophistication. While later episodes have made Bree’s run-ins with the insurance company and George’s dark obsession the most compelling plotline of the season (by far, and considering that it was almost something lost in the shuffle last year, that should speak volumes) early on there is almost no redeeming reason, from a story standpoint, to engage the show.

People have suggested that the writers need time to get the ball rolling again. Last year they had a pre-existing set of bonds to play off of (the friendship between the leads and Mary Alice) while this year most of those bonds have been pushed aside due to circumstances (Bree’s mourning, Lynette’s new job, Gabrielle’s social embarrassment, etc). But to me that sounds like they simply wrote themselves into a corner with the finale last year and it shouldn’t take five episodes to shake things up again. As someone pointed out, among the lead characters, none of them could really even be considered housewives any longer making the show basically a long form version of The Burbs.

I liked The Burbs. If I want to watch it, I have the DVD. It came with the frame. Desperate Housewives, if it doesn’t shape up soon, is going to out with the trash.

Survivor

I watch Survivor despite its reality show status for two reasons: One is that I don’t classify it as a reality show. To me, it’s a game show filmed and edited in a reality style. Despite what you may think, I don’t dismiss reality shows out of hand, I just don’t think most of them are very interesting and precious few of them do anything original. Two is that I love the social/game interaction in Survivor. As someone who finds both human nature and game strategy fascinating, Survivor offers a sometimes unique (if not tainted) glimpse at how people respond to unusual situations in a high-stakes game, how those situations arise and what impact they have on the players.

This year in Guatemala, the big twist was that last year’s loser brigade Stephanie and Bobby John got to come back and take a second shot. After the weaseling and Jeff Probst-ing that got Stephanie farther than she probably deserved last year, giving her a whole new chance to play seems like they may want to try to avoid going to that well too many times or else her whole “poor me the girl with all the bad luck” image is going to be shattered into “Hey, how ’bout you just give her a million dollars and get it over with?”

Don’t get me wrong, Stephanie is an admirable player and has a definite charisma on camera, bringing her back was an interesting move. I just don’t know I feel sorry for her anymore now that she’s gotten at least three leases on life in the game and her tribe still keeps losing.

Unfortunately with Survivor, the twists and highlights usually don’t show up or matter until later in the season. The producers rarely just overhaul the game, preferring instead of tweak and refine each year. The real interest comes later once alliances and strategy and voting conundrums present themselves.

In a recent episode the tribes were re-assigned. The tribe losing the immunity challenge had four from each original tribe and each had a fairly weak member. If no one flipped, a tie would occur and tie breakers have been known in Survivor to not favor the undecided tribes. So the interesting game situation here is, how do you extend the hand of trust, get what you want, but not put yourself in a position to have to make a shady move later that could hurt you in the long run? My solution was that I would find a second member from my original tribe I trusted and offer a proposition to an influential member of the other side: Take one of your most trusted tribemates, and the four of us will form a new alliance. As a gesture of good faith, we’ll take turns voting off one member from our previous tribes in turn, randomly decided. Once the second vote happens and our original tribes are back to even at three, the alliance is set. We pick off the unaligned people and go four strong and firm into the merge.

Of course that’s not what happened. The guy just took someone’s word on it with no guarantees and angered his own former tribe, but that’s why the show is fascinating because it introduces interesting logic problems that factor in very volatile variables like human emotion.

I’m still in.