April 2002 Archives

One Saturday morning in the fall of 1992, my brother and I sat down to watch the premiere episode of Batman: The Animated Series-- and had our minds well and truly blown.

We ended up watching that first episode four times in the same day, dazzled by the stylish art-deco designs, the sleek animation and the intriguing, complex characters. My brother and I had been comic book fans for years, and knew that even superhero comics could be dark and sophisticated. We just never expected to see those qualities on a Saturday morning cartoon.

Ten years after Batman made the world safe for "grown-up" cartoons, the Cartoon Network anchors its primetime lineup with two original action series: Samurai Jack from Genndy Tartakovsky, and Justice League, another comics adaptation from former Bat-producer Bruce Timm. One of these shows is visually dazzling and fiercely ambitious. The other features Batman.

Jack, if you haven't seen it, centers on a noble samurai (voice of Mad TV's Phil LaMarr) who has lost his father's kingdom to the predations of an evil, shapeshifting wizard named Aku (character actor Mako, clearly having fun). Just as Jack was about to slay Aku with his magical katana sword, the villain opened a time portal and thrust him into a dark far future where Aku rules supreme. Now Jack wanders, David Carradine-style, through a world of freaks and weirdos, trying to stay one step ahead of Aku in his quest to find a way home.

Tartakovsky cut his teeth on Cartoon Network's first breakout hit, the clever but silly Dexter's Laboratory, and followed that up as co-producer of its biggest success, Craig McCracken's The Powerpuff Girls. His success on those two franchises may explain why the network allowed him to produce a highly stylized samurai epic with minimal dialogue and near-constant action.

The basic plot of each Samurai Jack episode is pretty much the same. Our hero wanders into the story; he is challenged, by Aku or local nasties; he finds allies in need of help; he suffers initial defeat, but regains his courage to triumph; a way home is snatched from his grasp at the last minute; and he wanders off again, bowed but unbroken. But, as Eastern philosophy dictates, it's not the destination -- it's the journey.

Jack is perhaps the most beautiful show on television, a candy-colored picture book of Cubist paper cutouts. Each episode takes Jack to new and dazzling surroundings: Viking villages, '30s-style gangster towns, even underwater cities ruled by giant Sea Monkeys. Characters are outrageously stylized, some to the point that they're little more than a series of primary shapes and colors. Aku is perhaps the series' biggest visual treat, slithering from one shadowy form to another, always retaining his googly eyes and goofy evil grin. He's scary enough to root against, but not scary enough to prompt nightmares in younger viewers.

Jack's adventures are delightfully, bracingly weird, whether he's bargaining with a creepy two-headed lake monster, aiding a team of Mr. Peabody-ish canine archaeologists, or falling in with a pack of pint-sized mobsters who could have toddled out of an old Looney Tune. The numerous action sequences are riveting, marked by swift, fluid motion and impeccable pacing. Jack is always outnumbered and outgunned, frequently takes a beating, and usually triumphs by the skin of his teeth. Tartakovsky and his team use every stylistic trick in the book, from slow motion to shifting aspect ratios, without ever seeming to labor at it.

Despite its deadly-serious action, the show's sense of humor is gentle and humane. Jack's naive and trusting nature makes for very funny moments, but he's never mocked outright. One of the show's funniest episodes has Aku reading propagandist fairy tales to a crowd of bored children, making himself the noble hero and Jack a wicked, razor-toothed villain. When his audience's incessant questions annoy Aku into leaving, the kids take over and start telling their own story, one in which Jack saves the world-- but only after he takes a moment to stare down Aku in a widescreen faceoff.

Samurai Jack's one sour note is that everything Jack carves up is a robot or some other thing that Doesn't Actually Die, Kids. The scrupulously bloodless violence lacks some of the sense of consequence it would have if the stakes were higher. That defanged feeling, the lurking presence of a focus group somewhere, is even more present in Justice League. While Batman presented a shadowy world where its hero could leave a fight bruised and bloodied, Justice League feels a bit too bright and sterile-- and a lot less engaging.

Conceptually, Justice League ought to be a sure thing. Batman and Superman (the veteran of his own top-notch series) join forces with DC Comics stalwarts Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, the Flash, Hawkgirl and the Martian Manhunter to fight evil. Producer Timm certainly doesn't lack in ambition: each story arc takes two, sometimes three half-hour episodes to unfold.

But the series suffers from the absence of writer-producers Paul Dini and Alan Burnett, who worked with Timm on their previous superhero series. Dini's twisted wit and intricate characters are sorely missed here; sure, the fight scenes are impressive, but they'd work a lot better if we cared about the people involved.

Too many of the Leaguers are depressingly one-note characters. The Flash (voice of Michael Rosenbaum) is as obnoxious as he is speedy, a boastful know-it-all whose selfless acts are few and far between. Green Lantern (Phil LaMarr, again) is a stiff-necked military type who's always barking orders. The spooky Martian Manhunter (Carl Lumbly, who gets to have more fun on Alias) is at least likeable, but mostly hangs around making bland pronouncements and turning intangible. Superman (George Newbern of TNT's Bull) should be able to wipe the floor with any and all comers, but he comes across as a hesitant, nebbishy boy scout. Worst of all is Wonder Woman, voiced by Susan Eisenberg with all the integrity and force of wet cardboard. Somehow, comics' longest-running and most powerful female superhero has been reduced to a know-nothing Barbie doll.

At least the heroes look interesting when compared to their opponents. The original Batman and Superman series featured some of the most memorable and sympathetic villains in cartoon history, wringing impressive performances out of B-listers like Lori Petty, Richard Moll, and Adrienne Barbeau. But Justice League's three-part premiere episode, weighted with clunky dialogue and confusing plotting, pitted our heroes against faceless, identical, personality-free aliens.

The producers continued with a legion of faceless, identical, personality-free robots, then a one-note army of mutinous Atlanteans, and most recently a clichéd man-hater of an Amazon. There have been some bright spots -- John Rhys-Davies' turns as Hades, a lascivious three-tongued (!) god of war, was certainly memorable-- but on the whole, there's a sense that the best is yet to come. Considering that a future episode promises the return of Mark Hamill's career-best role as The Joker, perhaps that's true.

The most frustrating aspect of Justice League is that Timm and company get just enough of the show right to give you an idea of how good it could be. Every episode contains at least one impressive plot twist, inventive action scene or clever character moment. After voicing the Dark Knight through the original series, a late '90s revival, and the spinoff Batman Beyond, Kevin Conroy has Batman's characteristic growl down to a science. The Caped Crusader is supremely competent, grouchy, and does not play well with others, which makes him a genuine treat among his goody-goody costars. Maria Canales' Hawkgirl is a lot of fun too. A hard-nosed cop from another planet, she picks bar fights with super-powered aliens and smirks knowingly at Wonder Woman when the Amazon asks what men could possibly be good for.

Perhaps the series' best character move is its redemption of Aquaman, long reviled as the orange-shirted dork of the superhero community. Here, he's a musclebound and bearded badass, willing to cut off his own hand (offscreen, of course) to save himself and his infant son from certain death. He summons killer whales as shock troops, maintains a tense relationship with the surface world, and lets a would-be usurper fall to his death while snatching back his royal trident: "I believe this is mine."

Still, watching Justice League you get the sense that Timm and company are batting for a double, maybe a solid triple at most. It's not bad outright -- it's disappointing, which is almost worse. Meanwhile, every half-hour of Samurai Jack is a great big swing for the fences, hit or miss. No wonder Batman's so grumpy. A guy in a kimono is stealing all his thunder.

Everybody loves Trading Spaces. Everybody but me, and I've never seen it. And at the risk of being unfair, not only do I not want to see it, the very idea sort of fills me with loathing. I tried to watch it once, but I turned the television off just before it started.

I'm not sure why. I mean, it's not like I have terrifically high standards for television. In fact, as has been thoroughly documented, I'll watch pretty much any damned thing, up to and including Relic Hunter. And yet Trading Spaces just makes me shudder.

On the off-chance that you know even less about the show than I do, here's the lowdown: Neighbors swap houses and each redecorates one of the other's rooms. Got that? Neighbor A redecorates one of Neighbor B's rooms, and vice versa. There's a budget of $1,000. I don't know why that's so important, but it's mentioned prominently in every synopsis of the show, so I assume there must be some reason anyone cares. The only other show that tells you its budget is Win Ben Stein's Money.

I don't know much about the regular cast. I gather that there are a couple of designers whose job it is to bully people into ruining their neighbors' houses. In the real world, designers have to work with the owners of the property. There are compromises. On this show, not only do the property owners not get a say, but even the neighbors don't really seem to get any input. And now that I think about it, since it's a television show, I imagine the designers were selected for their outgoing personalities and varied ideas. Which pretty much translates to being the design equivalent of insane magpies.

There are also some women on the show. A lot of the Internet talk that has come to my attention has centered on the idea that these women are attractive. There are probably creepy websites about them. Now, for all I know, these women fulfill a very important role on the show. But the only context I ever hear about them is "Woo! Them girls sure is sexy! Hyuk! I'd sure like to trade some spaces with that one, if you know what I mean!" And that's just gratuitous. As a general rule, I don't like shows where people appear for no reason other than their physical attributes. It's like suddenly discovering that a lot of people are watching Wheel of Fortune because they're really into Vanna White.

Part of my problem with the show could be the anecdotes about people breaking down in tears after seeing what's been done to their houses. There's something sort of intimate about letting strangers into your home, let alone allowing them to change things. So when people see that their family room is now filled with brightly-colored balloons and their hardwood floors have been covered with a groovy shag rug, it seems like they'd feel violated. And I don't think I want to watch that.

I can't help but picture what must happen to these poor people after the show's over. What do you do when most of your house looks normal except for one room that's straight out of a harem? I guess it would be fun for a little while, but after you've shown it to everyone you know, what then? How would you explain it to casual visitors? How on earth would you sell a house like that? I mean, a prospective buyer is going to look at you suspiciously if you try explaining that you let your home get ruined because of a television show. That's not very different from getting an obscene picture tattooed on your face to get on Jerry Springer. It might make sense at the time, but just try explaining it a year later at a job interview.

It's a cycle that's been going on as long as I've been watching television. The weather heats up, the big season-ending episodes roll across our screens, and then -- nothing. All silent, but the chirping of the crickets.

Summer has always been a television void. The networks cram our Novembers, Februarys, and Mays with so much stuff that even if you've got a TiVo with a gigantic hard drive and the ability to record two shows at once, you still can't catch it all. And then it's gone, replaced with reruns and -- lately -- cheesy low-budget reality shows.

I have nothing against cheesy low-budget reality shows, per se. Survivor made the summer of 2000 interesting. And the occasional summer-launched non-reality series can make for some enjoyment, a la Northern Exposure way back when.

But networks pay good money for their series, and they want to get that money back. So they litter the summer airwaves with reruns, particularly of series that are coming back for the fall. The cool shows that they killed by airing them up against hits during sweeps months? No, those don't ever get re-run. They're gone forever.

The networks' abdication from the summertime has led people seeking good TV to turn to an alternative: cable. Cable networks now aggressively promote new episodes of their original series during the summer months, knowing that they'll have little competition from the big boys. (Still other people use the summer to realize that they don't need to watch TV at all -- either way, it's bad news for the networks.)

This is not an article about the gems coming across your TV set on basic cable, however. Nor is it a love story about cheesy low-budget reality shows.

No, it's about the arrogance of the networks, who think that a few tossed-off reality shows can offset the stupidity of abandoning the summer to their competitors. Especially when there's perfectly good stuff out there to fill that hole and keep people watching year-round.

These past few months, I've been marveling at the quality of the series on the BBC America cable channel. Many of those shows, like Coupling, Jonathan Creek, and Manchild have aired only recently in the UK. As someone who used to remember that it took about 5 years for a new episode of Doctor Who to wend its way to public TV in the states, it's very cool to realize that the episodes of Coupling I'm laughing at are fresh, aired late last year in Britain.

But then the thought occurs to me. Why in the world is this stuff, in its first run in America, stuck on a channel that's available only on digital cable and satellite? Especially when, in the summertime, America's TV networks have gigantic holes to fill.

Sure, some British series just aren't airable in America, due to the "accent problem." (Much as I love All Creatures Great and Small, you really need to watch a half-dozen episodes of it to begin understanding what those Yorkshire farmers were talking about.) But not all.

Take Jonathan Creek, a mystery series that airs on BBC America and has aired in Britain since 1997. All the characters speak clearly, so that even the untrained American ear can understand every word they say. The series is a clever, hour-long mystery show featuring bizarre crimes that appear to be unsolvable. Enter Jonathan Creek himself, a wild-haired man who makes his living devising magic tricks -- a helpful trait in solving locked-room mysteries.

Every time I watch it, I exclaim that this is a show that my mother and mother-in-law would both love. As would anyone in CBS's audience, especially the old Murder, She Wrote fans and the younger CSI viewers. Why not snap up Jonathan Creek -- they only make a handful of episodes a year, which makes it perfect for the summer -- and air it in July and August after CSI? They did it, way back when, with The Prisoner. Why not do it more?

Because the networks are a bunch of arrogant bastards, that's why. If it's not made in America, they reason, U.S. audiences won't watch. They can't get the accents, and besides which, the foreign stuff just isn't of good enough quality to run in the U.S. Which just isn't true.

Okay, so if the accent thing really scares you off -- wouldn't want to scare so many people off that the network would get a lower rating than a moldy old rerun of The Agency! -- why not look to our own shores for some lively summer content?

No, I told you, enough with the cheesy low-budget reality shows.

I'm talking about your arch-enemies. Well, they'd be your arch-enemies if you didn't own them: the cable networks. Flip around that new network-cable relationship of airing a show once on the airwaves and then again on cable (the practice that, despite all the rumors to the contrary, did not give Once and Again its name) and premiere cable programs on the network.

Think about it. Take whatever financial piece of the action you need to make it worth your while, and give your weaker cable brethren some exposure in return for ratings. Agree to a summer exclusivity window for some cable-developed series, and then let the cable channels run the hell out of the show the rest of the year.

Consider: A new eight-team tournament of Junkyard Wars on ABC. Fox fills the X-Files' abandoned slot with a special six-episode arc of Farscape. And CBS warms the hearts of viewers everywhere with the one-two punch of Emergency Vets and Trading Spaces.

Okay, maybe it'll never happen. But for pete's sake, networks, do something to make yourselves more relevant in the summertime. Or I may turn to the Summer of Sci-Fi one year and never turn back.

There was a brief article this week in my miserable local newspaper, the San Diego Union-Tribune, about a new "technology that would allow the government to remotely activate your television or radio."

At least, I assume the technology is new. The U-T's reporting is usually about as timely as the humor in a Bazooka Joe comic. For all I know, The Man has been stealthily turning on my TV at three in the morning for the last month. Which would go a long way toward explaining my disturbing, recurring dream featuring Jenilee Harrison and a can of Spray-on Hair.

The brilliant idea behind this great scientific advance is to allow emergency managers, in times of crisis, to turn on your TV and broadcast emergency warnings. According to one such manager, "All of the television announcements do you no good if you're home asleep."

To a certain extent, I can see his point. After all, if Earth's orbit takes us into the tail of a mysterious comet, causing the dead to rise from their graves and feast on the flesh of the living, I want to know good and early. That way I can be the first to get to the closest indoor shopping mall and barricade myself in, living off of Orange Julius and stale Sbarro pizza crust until the end of my days, or at least until a roving anarchist bicycle gang comes by to break up the party.

On the other hand, suppose that, in the wee hours of morning, astronomers discover that a meteor will decimate the planet before daybreak. Our only hope lies with a rag-tag band of jaded former astronauts and rogues, who may be able to divert the meteor's course, or blow it up, or something. Whether they succeed or fail, I contend that I'd just as soon sleep in.

In fact, I would argue that any emergency condition that isn't violent enough to wake me up outright is a punk-ass emergency and deserves to be slept through.

More importantly, though, can we trust any government entity with this kind of power over our entertainment appliances? The potential for Big Brother-style abuse just seems too great.

Consider a few of the horrifying possibilities that this brave new technology opens up:

• The channel suddenly changes to the State of the Union address, mere seconds before the denouement of a particularly compelling Fresh Prince rerun.
• After the TV is tuned to the Cartoon Network for over three hours, the television automatically begins broadcasting public service announcements about the dangers of marijuana use.
• A new era of draconian criminal justice is ushered in when judges are given the power to sentence offenders to house arrest with the television always on and tuned to Mama's Family.
• A visit from your in-laws takes a sudden, horrifying turn when the TV switches on spontaneously during dinner to reveal hot anal action on the Spice Channel.

You see what I mean? It just doesn't seem like a good idea. As far as I'm concerned, keep the government out of my uterus and my Sony Trinitron.

Besides, ain't nobody dicks around with my Fresh Prince reruns.

It's easy to mock Fox. Fox was once your home of shitty reality fare like World's Wildest Police Videos and Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?, and now it's the home of shitty reality fare like Celebrity Boxing.

But Fox is also a network to be admired. Not just for its ability to crack the "big three" and transform them into the "big four," but for its generation of some groundbreaking TV series that would never have seen the light of day at ABC, CBS, or NBC. The Simpsons is one of the best shows ever made -- arguably the best. The X-Files, despite outliving its welcome, is perhaps the most commercially successful sci-fi TV series ever. (Aw, c'mon -- Star Trek isn't a TV series. It's a multimedia monstrosity.)

This year, who had the best slate of new series? You guessed it -- Fox. 24 is one of the year's best new dramas, as everyone has been told repeatedly. But the Fox comedy slate has also been impressive. The Tick was fantastic, and is now gone. But two other oddball, genre-busting, single-camera comedies have just arrived on the scene. Both are appealing in their own ways, and both have great potential (especially when paired together), but one's clearly made of better material than the other.

The more problematic of the two series is Greg the Bunny, a comedy about a world in which puppets are alive and live as a somewhat oppressed minority among us. The titular Greg becomes the star of a kid's show called SweetKnuckle Junction, a Sesame Street clone with both human and puppet stars. The puppets have drinking problems, potty mouths, and just about every other hang-up you'd expect from human TV stars, which can lead to some fairly bizarre moments when you realize you're laughing about the serious drinking problem of a car wash shammy who's got buttons for eyes.

Anchoring the human cast is Seth Green, who played Oz on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Dr. Evil's son in the "Austin Powers" movies. Green plays a likeable slacker type, which is pretty much what he always plays. He's Greg the Bunny's pal, and his dad (the great SCTV alum Eugene Levy) is the director of SweetKunuckle Junction.

Greg the Bunny is funny, no doubt about it. But it's also got a touch of crudity that's unnecessary and uncomfortable. It's as if the show's writers decided that a sitcom about puppets just couldn't be carried off without a little extra helping of that famous Fox attitude. Toss in a puppet making references to genitalia and we're cooking with gas!

But perhaps Greg's biggest flaw is its reliance on TV industry jokes. SweetKnuckle may be populated by potty-mouthed puppets, but it's not that far removed from The Larry Sanders Show. The plots, at least in the show's first episodes, tend to center on the TV show itself -- and while I find that extremely amusing, I have to remind myself that generally shows about the entertainment industry tend to sink beneath the sea before you can say "and starring Jay Mohr at Peter Dragon."

Andy Richter Controls the Universe, on the other hand, is simply a joy to behold. Conan O'Brien's former sidekick plays a regular joe who writes technical manuals for a big company in Chicago. He's got an ex-girlfriend as his boss, a shifty-eyed guy to share his office with, a some-guys-have-all-the-luck Handsome Man as his best pal, and Handsome Man's girlfriend as his object of desire.

Standard Workplace Sitcom fare, all. But Andy Richter lays on a series of Walter Mitty-like (that's Ally McBeal-like, for those of you under 50) daydreams that really make the series thrive. Through Andy's daydreams, we get to see not only what Andy does say, but what he should have said. Often in multiple variations, each one funnier than the one that came before it.

However, the producers of the show aren't quite confident enough in the intelligence of their audience. Every time we finish with a daydream/hallucination, we're treated to the sound of a scratched record (the sound from an audio format prior to CDs that's used as a sound effect a lot in rap and hip-hop, for those of you under 30) to clue us in that what we just saw didn't really happen. Uh... if you can't figure that one out, it may be time to disconnect the ventilator.

The real reason I prefer Andy Richter to Greg the Bunny comes down to the humanity and likeability that Andy Richter has. The characters are generally good people, and in the end we can count on Andy to do the right thing, even if he happens to come by that right thing by a less than ideal path. His heart's in the right place, and we know that -- after a long series of painfully funny incidents, of course -- he'll end up all right in the end.

Before I come across as sounding a bit too much like Steve Allen, let me say that it's not as if Andy Richter Controls the Universe doesn't have its share of what could be considered crude humor. Yes, in one episode a man wearing a spandex suit with the word "penis" on it does deck another man wearing a suit with the word "brain" attached to it. (The payoff? In the end, a gigantic guy in a suit labeled "guilt" beats the crap out of Penis, thus ending Andy's conflicted thoughts about his anti-semite hottie girlfriend.)

But even when Andy Richter's personified penis is on display, grappling with his brain in a greco-roman wrestling contest for the ages, Andy Richter Controls the Universe is sweeter than anything over at SweetKnuckle Junction. Much to the chagrin of Fox programming executives, I'm sure.