Lamenting the Predictably Short Life of Party Down
Jun 30th
Confirmation came this morning that Starz, as most assumed, was done with its commitment to Party Down after Friday’s season finale. Ratings were dismal and in little over a year, most of the original cast had been cannibalized by pilots. And when Adam Scott signed on for a lead role in NBC’s Parks & Recreation, there didn’t seem much point in hoping.
But now’s when the hardcore fans—which, in Party Down‘s case, has to be somewhere in the vicinity of only several thousand—will take to the internet, the street or even a sandwich chain, petitioning other networks to make a home for it.
Honesty time! These tactics annoy the hell out of me. Networks and studios are pretty much going to do whatever they do, regardless of how many frozen cocktail wieners a couple hundred die-hards send them in the mail. And when their plans happen to make the fans happy, others take this as proof positive that the industry will fork out millions to silent persistent whiners. That’s why we now live in a world where even the most predictably doomed and undeserving series seem to ignite a passionate fan base, who’ll literally lay out on the side of the street, pretending to be dead, in protest.
I love Party Down. I love it enough to, say, pay $20 to attend a cocktail party to raise money for a potential extension of the series—but only in a world where I thought that was remotely possible. Even if the show hadn’t been canceled, its third season would have been a Frankenstein version of the original, accidentally drowning viewers when all it wanted to do was make them laugh.
Despite her brief return and wedding on Friday’s finale, Jane Lynch is off enjoying the ubiquity of Glee. Ryan Hansen is one of the lucky few not being recast on NBC midseason rom-com Friends with Benefits. Scott, as mentioned, joined Rob Lowe as the new blood on Parks & Recreation. And even though she backed out of her commitment to CBS’s upcoming True Mad Love, Lizzy Caplan has clearly been keeping her options open.
Could the show continue with a few new cast members (like Megan Mullally in season two), sporadic guest appearances from old ones and cameos from the creators’ stable of comedy cronies? Yes, but I just don’t believe it could ever be as good. I initially came on board Party Down out of debt to co-creator Rob Thomas, who awesomely brought on so much of his Veronica Mars cast over with him.
But as it turns out, my blind allegiance wasn’t necessary. Party Down was unrelentingly funny. And as much as I’ll miss it, I think it’s best to leave well enough alone. Resuscitated series often do more harm than good to this fan’s heart. And if you don’t agree, download Dead Like Me‘s heart-punchingly bad direct-to-DVD continuation.
Ghost-ip Girl: Acknowledging Pretty Little Liars
Jun 25th
Pretty Little Liars may not technically qualify as a TV series—it’s a weekly, hour-long advertisement for Verizon’s KIN—but folks are buzzing and for the past few weeks it’s been the most appealing addition to Hulu. So I’m going to write about it.
First of all, I cannot stop stop referring to it as Dirty Little Liars. A) This is a much better name for a show. B) ABC Family is basically begging for confusion by soiling the cast in all of the promotional stills (see figure 1).
Now, if you’re not familiar with the premise, it’s fairly straightforward. Three identical high school girls and one blond one share a secret that somehow involves the disappearance of their clique’s bitchy ringleader, Allison. After a year of estrangement, they reunite when their missing friend starts sending them cryptic, antagonizing texts… right around the time her dead body is found. Just imagine the kids from I Know What You Did Last Summer accidentally ran over Gossip Girl.
But what made I Know What You Did Last Summer work (oh, it worked) was the fact that the audience actually knew what happened during the summer in question. Pretty Little Liars wants to stretch out the mystery of what the girls did and how it ended in Allison’s assumed death while also throwing in umpteen loose ends each week—each one of them somehow involving sex.
There’s teacher-on-student nookie, parental infidelities, aggressive lesbian experimentation (starting in the pilot!), sibling spouse-stealing and even a shady cop who seems to be gunning for a mommy/daughter threesome. It’s a lot to handle.
To make matters worse, this is where the “they all look the same” issue makes things even foggier. Maybe I’m not paying attention, maybe I’m channeling my father and unable to distinguish any one teenager from another or maybe the set designer needs to be fired for creating four identical (yet admittedly fantastic) kitchens for the doppelganger cast. Seriously, a solid 60 percent of the scenes take place in the girls’ respective kitchens and each has the same cabinets, counters and subway tile.
If only this was on HGTV, they might throw in some back story on the eerie interior (inteerier?) design. But it’s not. This is ABC Family, and I need to give Pretty Little Liars props for the embarrassing truth that even though I’m not within a 30-mile radius of its target demographic, I’ve still managed to devote three hours of my life to it. If they adopt my suggested title change, I’d even watch the whole season.
Looking Back at Treme‘s Slightly Taxing First Season
Jun 22nd
The first 10 episodes of Treme wrapped up Sunday night, and I’m sort of relieved. Even with the dearth of summer programming, watching in recent weeks had become a bit of a chore. Not that I don’t like it, I just need a break. Investing 10 hours into a series without ever pinning down its purpose is frustrating.
Again, I like Treme, for many reasons, but mostly for a trio of strong female characters and actors, all of whom saw major arcs come to a conclusion in the last episode.
Beaten down by the post-hurricane depression and unpaid bills, Janette (Kim Dickens) finally quit New Orleans. She traded in her food truck for a one-way ticket to New York, where she’ll presumably be welcomed by new BCFs (best chefs forever!) Tom Colicchio, Wylie Dufresne, David Chang and Eric Ripert. It could be an appropriate exit, swinging the door wide open for Davis/Annie canoodling. But Dickens says she’ll return as a regular for season two, which also works just fine. With turns on Deadwood, Friday Night Lights and Lost, she’s the sort of becoming the Sam Jackson of good TV.
And then there’s Ladonna (Khandi Alexander), who buried her brother and decided an investigation into his prison death wasn’t worth the anguish. She put her grieving mother in a car with her dependable but square husband immediately after the funeral and then let go of months of sadness in the second line—or would that make it the main line? I’m not sure, but seeing her swing her white hankie and shake her shoulders to her ex’s blaring trombone was invigorating. In a perfect world, this opens her up for some lighter material next season.
If there’s to be Emmy nominations or wins for Treme, well, they’ll likely involve some posthumous honor for writer/producer David Mills who died a few weeks before the series premiered. But if there’s any statues tossed around after that, I hope they’re aimed squarely for Khandi Alexander. (How she ended up cooling her gifted heels at CSI: Miami for seven seasons makes no sense.)
Which brings us to Toni, whose player (Melissa Leo) is easily the most high profile of the three. But all season, she walked an unappealing line between the show’s most compelling and least convincing stories. As a lawyer, her work tracking down Ladonna’s brother was seemingly the only high-stakes arc in play. It was a mystery, and her dedication to the people of New Orleans who slipped into the system’s cracks while everyone else was concerned with other matters was refreshing next to all of her defeatist counterparts—particularly her husband. Professor Creighton Bernette (John Goodman) had the potential to be Treme‘s compassionate narrator, burdened by the events that brought his city down but offering a literary perspective could give the fairly rudderless show some context. Instead, he got the worst dialogue—an honor shared with his daughter—and in an overly foreshadowed turn, an early exit via suicide.
Because he was painted so thin, at least compared to everyone else on the series, the story of Toni’s home life never flourished. She was weighed down by her family’s dopey YouTube forays and the series’ only overly literal acknowledgments of the hurricane and the government’s failure to properly address its wrath. But now he’s dead, which is good for Toni, though maybe only from the viewers’ perspective. Her new burden as a single mother should leave her unburdened in the long run. Eh?
So what happens now? HBO was very generous in its immediate renewal of Treme, but the network doesn’t have a track record of maintaining generosity for long. Ratings hovered below 1 million for most of the season, dipping as low as 687,000 a few weeks back, and even the unanimous critical praise is beleaguered by the consensus that this might not be going anywhere.
I hate to sound demanding. I really like to think I have an above average attention span when it comes to television, but it was tested for much the first season. And as we and the characters get more and more distance from Katrina, I’m not sure what kind of trajectory will come into focus. Then again, that might be the point.
In Lieu of Tonight’s True Blood Recap, a Song
Jun 20th
Last week I moved across the country just to be close to the buzzing heart of television. In the long run, this is awesome. In the short run, I am without cable for at least another week and going slightly crazy because of it. So as all of you enjoyed your homemade Sunday dinners with a backdrop of hi-def nudity, gore and homoeroticism on HBO, I was eating out of a cardboard box from the Whole Foods salad bar during the free bible channel’s grainy encore presentation of Fireproof. You lazy east coasters cannot possibly upload a torrent of tonight’s True Blood fast enough.
At least there’s this, Snoop Dogg’s awful(ly amazing) ode to Sookie. It may have already been on the internet for days, but my reaction time is going to be on the slow side while I keep trying to get this baby back off the ground.
Bones Recap: “The Beginning in the End”
May 21st
I friggin’ love Bones. I love it in spite of the fact that, on paper, it’s one of those conventional and formulaic series tailor made for retirees. That might even make me love it more, because during the worst, most procedural episodes, it remains committed to telling the long-running story of some of the most believable and compelling characters on television. And that’s what TV is supposed to be about, yes? So it’s apropos that I mark the occasion of this sorry blog’s soft relaunch with a few thoughts on the fifth season finale.
The last few episodes saw the relationship between Brennan and Booth take a sad, shitty turn. Booth’s sudsy 100th episode admission of love was received with about as harsh of a rejection as fans could have feared. And what made it so bad was that Brennan knows that she wants the same thing he does. But his influence on her has slowly chipped away the clinical, standoffish character she’d been most of her life. So before fully giving in and arriving at the inevitable—god, please make it inevitable—conclusion that the feeling is mutual, she has to go off on a journey of self-evaluation and, in a term Booth knew she would understand best, evolution.
For the TV landscape of the last decade, the end of fifth seasons above all others are marked by the game changer. Character departures, flash forwards and devastating interpersonal schisms are commonplace. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise that one of the two leads would head off in some story-shifting plot development last night. But it wasn’t just Booth or Brennan. With the exception of Doctors Saroyan and Sweets, the entire Jeffersonian team disbanded… for a year.
They gathered one last time in the very unrealistic venue of an airport terminal. (Past the security checkpoint? I couldn’t tell.) Brennan headed off with Daisy on some anthropological goldmine of an expedition, Angela and Hodgins were going to drive Billy Gibbons’ magical car across the Atlantic and, in a moment I’ll freely admit made me weep, a surprisingly old-looking Booth, heartbroken and out of place in his army fatigues, headed back to Afghanistan. [Sidenote: this series' biggest misstep thus far has been its treatment of post-war trauma, so lets hope it remembers Booth is as thick-skinned as they come and won't return in season six with any social disorders or homicidal inclinations.]
It’s not a total bummer though. Five years in and our duo have still managed to successfully stave off a hookup by many different but believable turns. Fans can gripe, but a fully realized romance between Booth and Brennan will be the death knell for Bones. So as long as the show runners can keep thinking of realistic ways to postpone their fated union, I’m glad to watch.
My Umpteenth Serving of Humble Pie
Jan 7th
Hey, it’s 2009. My last three attempts to resurrect MLTV turned out to be pretty sad, but you might say that this time I’m resolved to make this recently renewed URL viable once again. If anything, it’s just time to push that pesky photo of Lauren Conrad off the front page.
So the fall season ended up being kind of a stinker, huh? All my sophomore faves stunk it up (promptly leading to their respective cancellations), none of the new series ended up being worth the effort and the real meat and potatoes—the kind of shows that make me swoon for this medium the way I do—were all postponed until January. But now it IS January, so several things demand discussion. Friday Night Lights, Lost, Big Love and Flight of the Conchords all return this month and one show that might be as strong than any of them premieres tonight.
I’ll be the first to admit that I didn’t instantly “feel” Damages. Maybe I said something about Glenn Close being distractingly masculine or I could have even compared that dude who won the Emmy to Foghorn Leghorn. Who really remembers? I quickly learned my lesson. And the fact remains that Damages is well-acted, uncomfortably suspenseful and gorgeously shot—if you cut out all the murder, it’d be one hell of a tourism ad for New York.
I haven’t seen the season premiere yet, so it’s a safe bet that I’ll be home tonight by 10. (DVR be damned!) If you find yourself in need of any convincing, simply watch the preview below…or this one… or this one.
Are You There TV? It’s Me, Mikey.
Oct 1st
There’s no easy or remotely excusable way to try to justify the neglect with which I’ve treated our relationship. I can only apologize and admit that the sheer abundance of your new programming is such that I must one again engage this medium in my rambling, amateurish analyses and giddy speculation. (I also need a venue for my writing that embraces my disgust for the serial comma.) And since no one episode or new series seems an appropriate catalyst to jump back in, I will start with a question. What the fuck am I supposed to do about Friday Night Lights?
Over the past months, I really haven’t given much thought to the vehicle for my beloved show’s third season. Confirmation of its persistence (however brief and unprofitable it will likely prove to be) is all I needed. But now, just a few hours off from its return, I have no easy way to watch it. No one has DirecTV—no one! I briefly considered signing up myself before coming to the conclusion that even my hatred of Time Warner Cable is no match for my fear of the unfamiliar. Waiting for NBC’s winter ’09 broadcast is out of the question, so I now prepare to settle for my dreaded nemesis, TV on the Internet.
“Why the hesitation?” you might ask. Well, for starters, it’s not available in glorious HD, it’s slightly amoral, and the purist in me tends to look down on it like a bastard conceived in the backseat of a cheap, foreign car. Plus, it’s totally complicated! These episodes aren’t going to show up on Hulu, you know. I’m going to have to search for them individually and play them on some application I probably don’t already have. To make matters worse, my 14 gigs of free hard drive and OS X “Panther” can’t even begin to entertain these new fangled torrents. And that doesn’t even solve the timeliness dilemma—there’ll be no protecting my vulnerable eyes and busy feed reader from spoilers!
So, what’s a boy to do, TV? I want to celebrate the fruits of your digital loins, but I don’t know how. Mikey needs his FNL.
Desperate Housewives Finale Timewarp
May 19th
In the year 2013, Katherine is a part of the inner circle of housewives. Gabby is fat, has two fat children, and her skin does not seem to be faring well from the years and years of excessive makeup. Bree is some sort of Martha Stewart-esque celebrity with a fondness for dressing like a Victorian widow. Lynette’s children are still comically (and conveniently) delinquent. And Susan swapped Mike for another husband played by the unconvincingly heterosexual Gale Harold. Also, everybody’s hair looks really, really bad.
This is what we learned in last night’s season finale of Desperate Housewives when, as it had been speculated/expected/confirmed in the past few weeks, the last minutes of the episode took the story five years into the future. It really doesn’t seem like the best idea for the show, but it’s also too soon to tell. DH tends to cater to popular response, and if the general consensus is anything like my own, expect a bit of backpedaling come fall.
A whopping 80 minutes of show preceded this climax, and of the many revelations they brought, none topped being able to finally stick a fork in the “Why did Katherine leave Wisteria Lane 12 years ago?” mystery. Not because it was that much of a surprise, but because ABC actually showed a dead baby. As it turns out, he night before she bolted in the negative seventh season, a bookshelf fell on Katherine’s daughter (the original Dylan) at the same moment she knocked her ex-husband to the ground. Since she didn’t notice the noise, the little thing kicked the bucket long before her mother thought to check on her. Katherine’s crazy aunt told her to bury the toddler in the backyard, so that’s what she did. Then she went to Romania to find replacement child in an orphanage. (Duh!) Not the most coherent story, but it’s nice to clear all that business up.
So it looks like Dana Delaney isn’t going anywhere. And no matter where this foolish time jump takes the story, I doubt I am either. I still freaking love this show too much. I should be embarrassed.
Linkin’ Blogs: The TV Blog Coalition, May 18
May 18th
For four days the upfronts happened, and they were blogged about, and it was good. More important still, someone can taste the identity of that fifth cylon on Battlestar Galactica. And I may agree.
- BuzzSugar got the awesome opportunity to chat with the adorable Bret Harrison (a.k.a. Sam the bounty hunter for the Devil) about the future of Reaper. (BuzzSugar)
- Thanks to CBS, Moonlight’s dead. But what will we do without our weekly Jason Dohring fix? Come share your ideas on where he should be cast next. (RTVW)
- Talk of long division and twin side beds? Either Scooter has been watching too much of The Big Bang Theory or Death Cab for Cutie has a new album out. Well, most likely both. (Scooter McGavin’s 9th Green)
- This week, the TV Addict spent some time in New York professionally reporting on the TV Network UpFronts. Oh who are we kidding… we met 90210′s Kelly Taylor! OMFG! (the TV Addict)
- If only Kevin and Scotty waited one more week, they could have had a real marriage instead of just a big ol’ gay commitment ceremony out there in California! Either way, it was extremely sweet and wrapped up an uneven season of Brothers & Sisters on a high note, well, at least until the whole not-incest thing between Rebecca and Justin. (Tapeworthy)
- While Jace attended the upfronts this week and broke down the networks’ scheduling decisions, he was more captivating with pondering just who the Final Cylon is on Battlestar Galactica and offered up his theory on who the last sleeper agent might be. (Televisionary)
- Dan didn’t (still hasn’t, actually) get a chance to see this week’s Top Chef, but you can get a chance to create your own episode through this Top Chef Mad Lib. (TiFaux)
- Raoul chatted with Survivor winner Parvati. (TV Filter)
Upfronts 2008: So… You Think You Can Stop Dancing?
May 15th
My silence may be eerie, but I’m sneakily still very much liking TV. In fact, I just got in from the Fox upfront party. It’s been an exhausting and kind of uneventful week, but what better excuse to touch base than the TV equivalent of prom?
So this year marked my first in-person upfront experience, and I have to say, they’re kind of gross. A bunch of sloppy ad folks boozing to the point of public embarrassment and blatant starfucking does not a good time make. It was an education though. My deep love of So You Think You Can Dance (returning in one week!) was slightly challenged by the throng of contestants from seasons two and three that could literally not stop dancing at any point during the night. Brazilian BBQ buffet? Dance! Line at the porta-potty? Dance! Creepy ‘80s cover band? Um… dance!
They have their charms though. And about a month from now I’ll be so thoroughly into their successors, this transgression will be long forgotten. What won’t be forgotten is the fact those two beautiful creatures pictured above and Eliza Dushku all bolted before I got there. Perhaps it’s best that they stay on their respective pedestals, but I sure would have love to see TV actors not on Gossip Girl every once in a while.
Enough of that. Let’s get down to business. This time last year I was an unhappy camper. Veronica Mars was done, I was mostly unimpressed with the pick-ups, and Eliza Dushku’s pilot was passed over by FOX. Things could not be more different in 2008. Friday Night Lights and How I Met Your Mother, the two bubble shows that I desperately needed to see renewed, will both be back with a vengeance. I’m genuinely excited by some of the new offerings. And this year’s Dushku pilot, a little show called Dollhouse by some writer/auteur/genius named Joss Whedon, is a sure bet for midseason. If you can catch the trailer (they keep pulling them), you will see how very drool inducing it is. Full fall schedules for all the networks, if you haven’t already seen them, can be found right here: ABC, CBS, FOX, the CW. (NBC’s is oooooold news.)
There weren’t any surprises this week. News of renewals and pickups, save a few exceptions, all came weeks ago. The only real shock was that after all the hullabaloo over the upfronts being “soooo different” this year, they were more or less the same. No complaints on my part, as I can think of far worse things than tradition. Attention-starved dance competition veterans for one.