September 2001 Archives

Wolf Lake stars Lou Diamond Phillips, fresh from several movies that appear to have been funded exclusively by Showtime and HBO, as a policeman. When Lou's girlfriend Ruby vanishes from a blood-spattered car, he hops on his motorcycle and takes off to the Cascade mountains outside Seattle. On the way, the viewer gets an early glimpse of the horrors to come when Ruby's face floats up on the screen in front of Lou's bike. I'm surprised he didn't crash, actually, but I guess the moody music and cutaways to stock footage of a full moon hardened him against cheesy film-school antics. That's probably why he was able to run so well through a forest filled with dry ice in the inevitable nighttime chase.

Speaking of cheesy effects, the producers apparently believe that the best part of Arnold Schwarzenegger's Predator was the scenes where the monster saw with heat vision. Or whatever that was. Oh, and you know that bit where something turns out to be a dream sequence and they suddenly cut to someone sitting upright in bed, covered in sweat? Yeah. For that matter, remember the end of Michael Jackson's Thriller video, when he looks around and his eyes are yellow? That very shot appears seven or eight times in the pilot. Sadly, there are no dancing zombies, presumably because they were all booked by Angel.

I am contractually obligated to mention something good about this television show, so here goes. It's got one of my favorite character actors, Graham Greene! In "Dances With Wolves," he was Kicking Bird, the Noble and Spiritual Native American. In "Thunderheart," he was Walter Crow Horse, the Noble and Spiritual Native American. In the PBS-friendly Canadian show Red Green, he's Edgar Montrose, the deranged explosives enthusiast, which doesn't support my premise, so I'm going to ignore it. But in Wolf Lake, he's the Peculiar and Spiritual Native American, and the role is clearly within his range.

For years, Graham Greene has been the official Hollywood Indian. Well, when they need someone to mutter mysterious wise sayings, anyway. He even got nominated for an Oscar for "Dances With Wolves," although he was pretty much the only person associated with that production who didn't go home with a statue. He's very much within his range here as Sherman Blackstone, who the CBS web site describes as "the keeper of all the town's secrets, and he alone knows the ancient lore of Wolf Lake." He also does magic tricks, possibly to keep himself interested.

So at least there's one entertaining actor. And this is the first time that the Official Hollywood Old Indian (Greene) has appeared with the Official Hollywood Young Indian (Lou Diamond Phillips), so that's something. It's a shame that Lou chooses to mark this historic occasion by acting in so stiffly a manner that it's almost like he's daring the television critics in the world to use the phrase "Wooden Indian." Luckily for the TeeVee legal staff, I am far too cultured to resort to such vulgarities.

When Lou, who I must remind you is playing a very "deadpan" character, arrives in Wolf Lake, he finds that it's populated by mysterious and weird characters. This combination of a stoic investigator and a Pacific Northwest town full of mysterious and quirky characters is presumably supposed to reminded the audience of Twin Peaks, but I don't think the producers counted on us saying "Boy! Twin Peaks was a much better show than this! Even the movie, which made no sense, was much better than this! Come to think of it, even that one Newsweek article that tried to explain the first season of Twin Peaks was much better than this! Maybe instead of watching the rest of this show, I'll just sit back and try to remember what the deal was with the Log Lady."

Lou is not burdened by such thoughts, or, as far as I can tell, any interior monologue whatsoever. In the case of his investigation, there are a lot of what I take to be "subtle" hints that the town is full of werewolves. There are statues of wolves, a lot of multiple births (triplets and quintuplets), and the aforementioned PredatorVision. Of course, those are all wasted because the whole thing is called Wolf Lake, and everyone knows ahead of time that it's a town full of werewolves. Lou comes off fairly thick-headed, never connecting the white wolves wandering around town with the mystery he's allegedly trying to solve. I expect he'll get clued in in later episodes, but if our Dead Pool is any indication of things to come, he'd better get clued in mighty fast, because his show doesn't have long to live.

It's surprising that Wolf Lake ever made it to the screen. Originally, it was going to be about two warring clans of werewolves, produced by the one of the people behind Kindred: The Embraced. But that was too silly (or something), and the whole concept was changed to Lou and his quest to find his lost love. In a city full of werewolves. And the Kindred: the Embraced connection has vanished ever since the producer took his name off the project. That's correct: someone whose resume proudly boasts a series about vampires based on a role-playing game decided that Wolf Lake would bring shame upon his family. Not burdened with such worries is Tim Matheson, formerly of The West Wing and Animal House. And 97 other roles, including the original voice of Jonny Quest. Sorry; I got a little distracted there. It's probably a bad thing when a show about werewolves isn't as interesting as talking about the resumes of the actors.

CBS advises viewer discretion because of the brief silhouetted nudity. I too advise discretion if you haven't built up a powerful tolerance to bad television. This sort of thing requires years of training.

All great art seeks to shock. It can be the elegance of the technique or the daring of the subject matter or the sheer, unadulterated beauty of the perspective, but all truly great art wants to leave the people who experience it reeling in their shoes, overwhelmed and amazed. And so, the first five minutes of the premiere of The Education of Max Bickford are triumphantly, unapologetically great art. You can't help but boggle at the screen and think, "My God, is that really Ron Glass? From Barney Miller? What the hell happened to him?"

But other than that, pfft. Max Bickford is a limp meal of American cheese on white bread, aged in a closet since 1968. The self-absorbed adventures of a self-absorbed college professor (Richard Dreyfuss) as he struggles to find relevance, Bickford couldn't be less relevant. What the world needs now is most emphatically not wayward ex-hippies bemoaning the fact that time is linear. Yet another boomer longing for his bomb-throwing, dope-smoking, student-fucking glory days, Max Bickford is exactly as interesting as you'd expect, by which I mean not at all. Well-enough acted by Dreyfuss (and almost no one else), the show falls somewhere between the low-grade whine of a spoiled infant and the feces-flinging rage of the senile. "What's wrong with these kids today? Why do things have to keep changing? I'm tired. Where's my pudding? Get off my lawn, you damned punks!"

Does CBS know its audience or what?

Reportedly inspired by Dreyfuss' own mid-life crisis, Max Bickford has all the hallmarks of a classic, woe-begotten vanity project. It's pretty and expensive and them Oscar-winners -- Bickford has two, Dreyfuss and Marcia Gay Harden -- don't just wander in off the street, y'know. But, of course, almost nothing interesting is being done with any of it, save providing pre-fab situations for the self-pitying title character to be frustrated by. Golly. Sounds fun. While you're at it, can I have a kick in the groin, too?

A long-tenured professor at a northeastern liberal arts college, Bickford finds a promotion handed to a former student in the same week that his teen-age daughter announces her pregnancy and -- yes, this is right, I double-checked -- his best friend returns following a sex change operation. Any of this might be entertaining if it were better acted or better written, but save Dreyfuss' usual gruff geezer routine, all the significant players fumble and grope and find nothing to grab on to. The most amusing thing about Helen Shaver's transsexual is how, ahem, grafted-on the character feels, a last-second stab at something other than generational cat-fighting. Katee Sackhoof's Nell, Bickford's daughter, has all the emotional stability of a speed freak. And poor, poor Marcia Gay Harden has to deliver the most inelegant, hammer-heavy line of the whole rickety carnival: "Is this because we slept together?" (Not actually said: "You people at home getting all this?")

Somewhere out there, agents are being fired.

But it's really Dreyfuss' show -- in far, far too many ways -- and given the number of embarrassing things he has to do, he does a pretty game job of pulling most of them off. Voice-overs that explain the obvious? No problem! Delivered as quotes from a thinly-disguised autobiographical novel? Sure! On the inspiration provided by his 11-year-old son, the only character in the whole thing who acts even remotely like an adult? Well, two out of three ain't bad. At least Philip Roth will be watching.

Dreyfuss has chops, give him that. If only the effort were in service of something, anything, better than Max Bickford. The show will undoubtedly be a hit with aging northeastern liberal arts college professors -- one shudders to think of the drinking games -- but there's no reason for the rest of us to give a damn. An aging boomer, starring in a thinly-disguised autobiographical show, playing an aging boomer, writing a thinly-disguised autobiographical novel -- you can only hope that all that self-referentially eventually collapses in on itself, compresses to an infinitely dense point, and disappears from our universe entirely. The Education of Max Bickford is of interest to exactly no one, save Richard Dreyfuss, his mother and his therapist -- not necessarily in that order.

But, man, Ron Glass. Wow.

A couple of years ago, Judd Apatow helped create a TV series called Freaks and Geeks, one of the rare shows about high school that didn't feature impossibly beautiful people tackling issues like teenage pregnancy and drunk driving and tort reform while sounding as if they had just sped-read through Kevin Williamson's dog-eared copy of Roget's Thesaurus. No, the Freaks and Geeks ensemble looked and spoke like actual high school students. They faced the things you and I probably grappled with -- dating and peer pressure and homework and... I mentioned dating, right? It was a pitch-perfect show, sweet and funny and at times painful to watch because it hit too damned close to home.

For their efforts, Apatow and his cohorts were rewarded with a dead-end Saturday night time slot, little to no promotion, a time slot switch, a lengthy hiatus, a lecture from the NBC brain trust about how people only like to watch happy shows and, ultimately, a fanfare-free cancellation. I'm pretty sure NBC also keyed their cars and egged their homes and probably kicked their dogs, though I have no absolute proof.

Well, Apatow is back with a new series -- not on NBC, thank Christ, but on the Fox Network, which knows a thing or two about taking chances. Particularly chances involving horny singles on a lush tropical isle. In Apatow's case, the show is Undeclared, a comedy about freshmen college students getting their first glorious, horrific taste of freedom.

The temptation for the lazy TV critic is to saddle Undeclared with the "Freaks and Geeks Goes to College" label and then pour yourself another stiff belt of gin. Well, I'm just as lazy as the next guy, but even I won't make the mistake of comparing the two shows -- and besides, I'm more of a whiskey man. When it wasn't focusing on its great characters, Freaks and Geeks was about the intricate world of high school cliques, a caste system that makes India look like some sort of hippie commune. There's none of that in Undeclared. It's about the experience of college -- the independence, the responsibility, the furtive search for intimacy, the bonds formed with others while retching up half a case of Keystone.

Compare that with other shows about college that have populated the prime time landscape. If it's not Brandon Walsh serving up a legal summons to a third-world dictator visiting Chancellor Arnold, it's Kelly Taylor joining a professor's crazy cult or hunting down her date-rapist or... geez, I don't know. It all sort of blends together after a while, give or take a Luke Perry cameo.

Undeclared isn't like that. In the coming weeks, you'll see episodes about breaking up with your high school boyfriend, getting your first credit card, paying a complete stranger to write a term paper for you, making the girl in the dorm room across the hall notice you. You know -- stuff that actually happens to people.

Well, not me, so much. My college experiences featured far fewer girls. But even there, Undeclared's got me covered.

"You ever dump anyone?" one of the girls asks Marshall, a lovable dolt played to perfection by Timm Sharp.

"Almost," he replies. "But we never actually went out or talked or anything."

Undeclared is one of those single-camera sitcoms devoid of any laugh track. And with dialogue like that, you won't need any cues on when to laugh.

It isn't often that TeeVee gets to see previews of a show before it airs -- most of the time, we're watching a program's debut at the same time you are. A crummy little dot-org Web site just isn't at the top of most studio's lists for doling out preview casettes, you see, and it's not like Jon Seda's people are jumping at the chance to favor of us with a sneak peak of his work in UC: Undercover.

But, as if by magic -- magic in this case being a package from FedEx -- a couple of three Undeclared tapes wound up on our front doorstep. And I can say, without fear of looking bad in a couple of days, that if you don't watch Undeclared's season premiere tonight, you're missing out on an early front-runner for best new show of the season. (TV producers, please note the advantage of sending us preview tapes. Or cash contributions. Or both.)

Unless Fox pulls a switcheroo on us and airs old Saved by the Bell: The College Years reruns on us. In which case, I'm going to be cheesed.

Should you tune in -- and need I remind you that you've been advised to do so -- you'll see a fine ensemble cast striking all the right notes while creating distinctive characters you'll want to spend a half-hour with each week. Of particular note is Seth Rogen, a TeeVee favorite from his days as the sardonic Ken on Freaks and Geeks. He's just as funny in this show, using his newly issued credit card to day trade stocks on the Internet or drunkenly touting the merits of the motion picture "You've Got Mail."

(Rogen also wrote one of the Undeclared episodes that TeeVee previewed. In that installment, without giving away any state secrets, Rogen makes out with an attractive young lady. He's no dummy, that Seth Rogen.)

There are missteps, of course. Loudon Wainwright plays the father of Jay Baruchel -- sort of the focus of Undeclared -- and it's not that Wainwright doesn't do a decent job. But his character just feels out of place in the Undeclared universe. It would be like a West Wing episode where President Sheen's barber pops into to Oval Office to talk about dry, itchy scalps and protectionist trade policies.

Don't laugh -- I hear Sorkin's considering that for sweeps.

Still, in Undeclared, it's a matter of comparing Good with Not-as-Good -- and from what I've seen thus far, it's Good in a cakewalk. Credit for the show's stellar debut goes to the handful of qualities it does share with Freaks and Geeks -- stellar, true-to-life writing and a healthy respect for its audience.

The fact that Tori Spelling's not on camera pledging a sorority doesn't hurt, either.

It is not always an easy thing to be a black person in America. You have to face the daily slights and indignities that are monstrous largely because they're offered up so casually and routinely. You have racial profiling, of course, and a playing surface that isn't always level. And even if that doesn't bring you down, there's always the minor annoyance of having to read articles by dopey-if-well-meaning white guys that start out "It is not always an easy thing to be a black person in America."

Add to that list of affronts television and the thrice-heated leftovers it regularly serves up to African Americans. There are roughly three hours of weekly prime-time programming geared toward what the television industry charmingly calls urban audiences, all of it consigned to a life of obscurity on UPN or the WB. By and large, the shows are loud, inane and -- if the writing is really crackling on a particular week -- sporadically funny.

One on One, which premiered on UPN earlier this month, doesn't figure to change that equation any. This is the kind of show to which the lofty ambition of "Sporadically Funny" is best set aside for the more realistic goal of "No Longer Puzzling to the English-Speaking World." In fact, if One on One constituted one-sixth of the programming that network TV had deigned to target at me and others of my race, it wouldn't be long before the Triniton was tossed in the dumpster and I was off to Kinko's to print up copies of my pamphlet denouncing The Man.

One on One, the 2001 TV series, is not to be confused with "One on One," the 1970s movie starring Robbie Benson as a highly recruited college basketball star. No -- here the premise is only slightly less ridiculous. Flex Alexander plays Flex Washington -- since Alexander is apparently a silly surname that must be changed as it does not carry the gravitas of the name Flex. He's a divorced sportscaster who lives in Baltimore and is always macking on the ladies... except when his 14-year-old daughter is around. And she'll be around a lot from now on, what on account of her mother moving to Nova Scotia for a year. The characters make it sound like she's relocating to the far side of the sun as oppposed to a mere time zone away. The scene in which Flex and his one-time bride agree to change their long-standing custody arrangement took less than a minute in the pilot episode and wrapped itself up before the opening credits even rolled with nary an attorney, paralegal or family court judge in sight.

Again, I repeat that the show is set in Baltimore and not, as you might suspect, Magic Fairyland.

We can tell that it's Baltimore, see, because some of the characters are wearing Baltimore Ravens caps. Oh, and the exterior shots of Flex's spacious apartment bear more than a passing resemblance to the precinct house from Homicide. Fans of the late, lamented NBC series needn't tune in anticipating cameos from the likes of Bayliss, Meldrick and Munch. The only homicide taking place during One on One is the murder of laughter.

None of this is the fault of the actors, with the possible exception of Kelly Perine, who, in the role of Flex's buddy Duane, is basically responsible for standing around and wearing a hat and registering differing degrees of bemusement at the supposed hilarity taking place. But Flex acquits himself nicely -- a definite step up from his last stint on TV in the remarkably wretched Homeboys in Outer Space. And Kyla Pratt, as the daughter, does not instantly set off the "See Moppet/Gouge Out Own Eyes" stimulus-and-response mechanism I apparently have implanted in my brain. So that's progress of a sort. No, the actors do what they can with the material they're given.

And that's where the problem lies -- the material is simply lousy. It's Sitcom-by-the-Numbers. Insert Set-Up A into Punchline B. Take a Comical Misunderstanding, add water, and viola -- instant comedy!

Or a damp script. Take your pick.

Near as I can tell, One on One is going to focus on an irrepressible horndog forced to take some measure of responsibility now that his whip-smart kid has moved in with him. If that's your idea of quality entertainment, dig in. Me, I've seen it all before -- I know how this story plays out.

And so do the writers and producers behind One on One, apparently. Because every creative decision seems culled from the sitcoms that have come before it. The Flex character is an irresponsible horndog on the make because that's what other shows do. The daughter is a sassy back-talker because all TV children are sassy back-talkers. Duane wears a hat because... well, I'm not sure exactly. Maybe it's a shout-out to Michael Nesmith. But the point remains -- One on One is a warmed-over rehash of ideas, characters and jokes you probably stopped watching after the first dozen times it aired. So why bother tuning in now?

Then again, maybe the sameness and blandness that pervades One on One is a cause for hope. Yeah, it's not a very good show, another addition to the roster of not-very-good shows the networks target at black audiences. But it's no worse than the not-very-good shows that networks have targeted at white audiences for years and years. That's no reason to take to the streets singing "Ebony and Ivory," but in this day and age, you take your encouragement where you can.

Contrary to popular belief, Lost and The Amazing Race are different shows. In Lost, teams don't know where they are, and they have to get to New York City. In The Amazing Race, teams are in New York City, and they have to race to a mystery location. So you can see that, while both are reality shows involving teams rushing across the world, they're almost completely... well, almost completely the same, I guess. They're also suspiciously similar to those Michael Palin PBS specials like Around the World in 80 Days, if you ask me.

But if you squint, there are differences. Lost is a half-hour NBC show, while The Amazing Race is a hour-long CBS show. See? Completely different! Although in both cases, the fun apparently comes from watching the contestants try to communicate with bemused natives. If you just can't get enough of Americans talking loudly and slowly in the hopes that that will translate into any language, you can take a break from scouring AMC listings for Hope & Crosby's "The Road to Zanzibar," because a good forty percent of the dialogue in either show consists of teams being shocked that someone doesn't speak English. The other sixty percent, as per standard reality show rules, is people either screaming at each other or feebly trying to outwit the other teams, who are all either yelling at each other or engaged in wacky schemes of their own.

Lost is brought to you by Conan O'Brien, which explains the low-key name. The Amazing Race is produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, which explains the unjustified presence of the word "Amazing." Potential guest stars for Lost include Max Weinberg and Mr. T, while there's always a chance that Bruckheimer can get Tom Cruise or Bruce Willis, providing that one of the exotic destinations is Hollywood.

The real difference in these shows, assuming that we can continue to pretend that there is one, is in the examples. Let's cover Lost first, which gives the winning team $100,000 and a car (as opposed to The Amazing Race's cool million dollars). First, the contestants got blindfolded, taken to an airplane hangar, and taken away for body searches, which only heightened the hostage impression. Then they got loaded on a jet at 4 a.m., and off they went. They'd have felt pretty stupid if it had turned out to be a big scam. I mean, let's say somebody tells you that they're a television producer, and you have to get blindfolded and flown somewhere. Don't you at least consider the possibility that the only way you'll appear on television is with the caption "Last Known Photo?"

The start was easier for The Amazing Race, which simply gathered the teams in New York City for interminable "Meet the Contestants" footage.The Amazing Race also has twenty-two contestants, while Lost has only six. Luckily, The Amazing Race cuts down on the confusion through the cunning use of stereotypes.

In every reality show, the contestants are quickly assigned stereotypes. Lost does a pretty good job of speeding up the process by having people say things like "As a gay man..." in the first ten minutes. They also have someone named "Lando," which is definitely worth something. I mean, come on. Lando! However, the contestants might as well not even have names on The Amazing Race, which has teams that have large imaginary subtitles labelling them "FRAT GUYS," "YOUNG LOVERS," and "WORKING MOTHERS." And so on, since there are eight more teams that I can't bring myself to commit to memory. Luckily, each episode will eliminate one of the teams, because if Survivor has taught us nothing else, it has taught us that the American public likes seeing people thrown off of television shows. Which may explain the lasting popularity of ER.

On Lost, Each team has a cameraman, who is allegedly as lost and hungry as everyone else. However, the cameraman doesn't have to help set up the tents or carry the packs, so it seems like a softer task. On the other hand, as far as I know, the cameraman has to rely on the orienteering abilities of two reality show contestants and isn't eligible for the hundred grand. So there's that. By sharp contrast, The Amazing Race has a cameraman system that I don't remember. Sorry about that.

One of the challenges the Lost teams face is that they don't know anything about geography. Having studied a globe, I can authoritatively say that dawn in Argentina is at a different time than Mongolia. Speaking of Mongolia, that's where the first Lost challenge took place. Meanwhile, the Amazing Racers don't really have to know too much, because their airfare is pre-paid. Also, their first trip was to South Africa, where there's a lot of English speakers.

Part of the theoretical fun the audience has is considering how they'd play the game differently from the contestants. I asked some of my co-workers what they'd do if they suddenly found themselves in Mongolia, and most of them said they'd probably try to go west to Europe and from there get a plane to the U.S. Except this one guy, who claimed to have family in Ulan Bator. I suspect that having a lot of family around the world is one of the things that would disqualify players, just like having the slightest idea of geography. Any players that know in advance that the planet is round probably have an enormous advantage.

So which should you watch? I think the choice is clear. Lost, being half the length, will only eat up thirty minutes of your life. That's still probably thirty minutes too many, but you can't have everything.