March 2006 Archives

I have this theory: Television can break even the greatest of writers. It grinds them down, condemning their best efforts to miserable, ignominous failure, until they just don't care any more. Until, instead of bringing gripping, unforgettable entertainment for the screen, they lick their wounds and serve up something bland and awful and entirely in keeping with what the average viewer supposedly wants.

I saw it happen to Paul Haggis. In the mid-90s, he created two of my all-time favorite TV shows back to back: Due South, a surprisingly funny and poignant spin on the buddy-cop series, and EZ Streets, which I've written about below. Due South struggled -- name me one other show that's managed to get cancelled twice -- while EZ Streets outright bombed. Haggis crawled into some sort of hole for a while before limping back to television with Family Law, a CBS series best described as "the sort of thing you'd see on CBS." It lasted four years. Some of those years involved Tony Danza.

Haggis seemed to get his groove back -- in the form of back-to-back Oscar-winning movies -- by retreating into the film business. But it's my sad duty to report that in the interim, network TV seems to have finally had its way with Barry Levinson and Tom Fontana.

The creators of the superlative Homicide and everyone's favorite prison-rape spectacle Oz are supposedly behind ... OK, I've suddenly drawn a blank on the name of the thing, which should tell you volumes about it ... The Bedford Diaries, a new WB series premiering next Wednesday. I say "supposedly" because, having caught a sneak peek of the pilot on the WB's Web site, it's not even remotely close to their previous work. The first episode, from Fontana and Homicide vet Julie Martin, is heartbreakingly bad, full of unappealing characters, bland performances, and exactly zero compelling drama.

The whole thing feels like it's been focus-grouped to death. Hmm... what would the WB want? A show about attractive college students? Having lots of sex? And talking about their sex lives? And making videotapes of themselves talking about their sex lives? Sounds like a surefire sell!

Except it's not. It's downright boring, not to mention completely unsexy. The characters' various sexual encounters are almost entirely embarrassing and stupid, not in a cringe-inducing dramatic way, but in an "I wonder what's on the Food Network right now?" kind of way. The main characters are a stupid, callow younger brother, and his snotty miss perfect older sister, both attending the same human sexuality class at a fictional New York City university. I couldn't stand either one of them, and when they stopped sniping at each other at episode's end to deliver a cloying "I love you, sibling!" speech, I didn't believe it for an instant.

There's plenty of stuff in here that should be interesting. One character's coming back to school after a failed suicide attempt, while another's wildly promiscuous, yet -- dunt dunt daaaah! -- still a virgin. But whether it's the sleepy performances, the flat dialogue, or Fontana and Martin's general loss of their collective will to live, nothing here quite catches fire. Matthew Modine, as the kids' professor, might as well be a robot. Milo Ventimiglia, formerly of Gilmore Girls, tries to add some interesting shadings of regret to his character, the recovering-alcoholic editor-in-chief of the school paper. But for one thing, he spends the entire episode sounding exactly like Christian Bale's deliberately phony Bruce Wayne accent in Batman Begins, and for another -- a recovering alcoholic college student? In charge of the school paper? The hell?

The only thing I even remotely liked about the pilot is its faithful portrayal of the weird, random nature of campus life: a drunken bar brawl between a jock and some guy in a beaver costume, or a couple of guys stumbling down a dormitory hall with their arms full of pizzas, giggling uncontrollably. I repeat: The extras in the background are the most interesting aspect of this series.

The saddest thing about this show is that Fontana, Levinson, and Martin seem to have sold their souls in vain. It got pushed back and pushed back, and now it already seems to have been cancelled before it's ever aired. (Ventimiglia and other cast members have been landing roles in other pilots for next year's fall season.)

The second saddest thing about this series is that its fairly bland attempts at envelope-pushing are already getting smacked down by network censors. The "uncut" version of the pilot screening online includes scenes apparently trimmed from the broadcast version, including -- shock, horror! -- about two seconds of two fully clothed girls kissing in a bar, and maybe a half-second of another fully clothed girl unbuttoning her jeans in preparation for a little "me time." God forbid we should be told that college girls pleasure themselves; it might be the end of civilzation as we know it.

The would-be-suicide supposedly attempted to end her life by jumping off the top of "Levinson Hall." Heh. Cute. Except that watching The Bedford Diaries gives you the impression that the extremely talented people involved were lined up right behind her, waiting their turn. Please, somebody, anybody, maybe FX: Give Levinson, Fontana and company another chance to really shine. If they keep on making terrible TV shows, I might start heading for the top of Levinson Hall myself.

Let me state up front that I think Stephen Colbert is a funny, funny person. I eagerly await the day that the Strangers With Candy movie actually gets shown at a theatre near me. His version of "This Week in God" on The Daily Show was very funny. Heck, if he ever actually published Stephen Colbert's Alpha Squad 7: Lady Nocturne: A Tek Jansen Adventure, I would be first in line to read it.

However, I'm starting to feel like The Colbert Report is just too much Colbert. It's conceived as a parody of the personality-driven news show like The O'Reilly Factor. Well, actually it's pretty specifically Bill O'Reilly that Colbert is mocking, but the problem I have is that he's gone so far into the parody, he's come out on the other side. When he does a bit like "Who's Attacking Me Now?" the audience doesn't chuckle appreciatively at the way Colbert pretends to be an egotistic maniac making his news show all about himself; they howl for blood at the imagined slights he presents. The difference between Colbert's audience and, say, the people who listen to Rush Limbaugh, are pretty slight at this point.

Colbert uses all the same tricks as the people he's parodying -- if you pay careful attention to the opening credits, you'll note that when he's looking up at the camera, he's scowling, but when he's looking down, he's smiling. It is my half-baked theory that this conditions the viewer to want to see Colbert as an authority figure because, um, when he's higher up, he's smiling, which makes us feel better? Perhaps my theory would be better described as quarter-baked. Indeed, it may not even have made it into the oven yet.

Or consider the interview segment. Consider it now! Colbert is so in-character as a conservative blowhard that he frequently shouts down his liberal guests even though he theoretically brought them on the show because he agrees with them. Even though he's "just kidding" when he insists that his guests apologize for being mean to "Papa Bear" Bill O'Reilly (aside: why does Colbert call him that? Colbert hates bears!), he's still browbeating people exactly like O'Reilly does.

Another objection I have to the Report, and this is more in the nature of a general principle rather than something that actually keeps me from enjoying it, is that it's explicitly targeting conservatives (well, "FOX News commentators", anyway) for mockery. You get the occasional shot at liberals in the form of David Cross's faux-Olbermann (or faux-Franken, I guess) liberal radio host who has an alleged feud with Colbert, but that doesn't really do anything to the sense of one-sidedness that goes on.

Really, my problem might just be that I don't feel like watching a whole hour of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report four days a week. It gets tiring. Luckily, I've come up with a solution. You remember that interview segment you were considering? It's often kind of forgettable, isn't it? It's also the weakest part of The Daily Show. So I find that if I skip them both, along with the other segments I've gotten tired of (Okay, pretty much just "Better Know a District"), the time goes by much faster.

The ideal solution (for me) would be for Colbert to just do "The Word" as a regular Daily Show segment, but I expect that won't be happening. And I can't complain too much; the Report is still miles better than Tough Crowd or that Adam Carolla show ever was. Plus, if enough people watch Colbert's show, he might get a publisher to bring Tek Jansen to an adoring public.

UPDATE: An alert TeeVee reader -- wait, we have readers? -- wrote in to crush my hopes and dreams. It seems the DVD of EZ Streets will only have the two-hour pilot and two other selected episodes from the series. This strikes me as a staggeringly inane move, especially for a cult-classic series from the guy who went on to write a couple of minor films known as Crash and Million Dollar Baby.

Between this and the approximately 26 nanoseconds earlier this week when half of the Internet and I mistakenly thought Futurama would be returning to television, I've had my fill of TV-related dispppointment.

Original item follows...

I've been waiting for this since TV-on-DVD first hit it big.

On May 16, all 10 episodes of EZ Streets will be released on DVD through Bravo's "Brilliant But Cancelled" series. Aside from a brief run on the now-defunct Trio network, this'll be the first time Paul Haggis's amazing crime series has reached viewers since its abortive 1996 run on CBS.

When I first found the show in my high school days, it was just about the best damn television I'd ever seen. If it's anything like I remember it, the saga of a cop trying to infiltrate the mob, an honest ex-con trying to go straight, and the mobster around whom they both revolve still compares favorably to The Sopranos, The Wire, and just about anything else you'd care to name. I've never forgotten its ability to create edge-of-your-seat suspense based solely on the moral choices its characters faced, and I still bear a grudge against CBS for pre-empting its tenth and final episode for a rerun of Walker: Texas Ranger.

Best of all, the whole set's available for preorder for an absurdly cheap $15. If you're a fan of crime dramas, it's the best money you'll spend on DVDs this year.

Chris Rywalt and Monty Ashley have already covered this ground, but now that the BBC's new Doctor Who has made it to the States courtesy of the no-longer-entirely-awful SciFi Channel, it bears repeating that this is a terrific little show.

I never cared much for the original series; as a wee military brat in Britain, I vaguely remember being terrified by the spooky theme music and swirling time vortex that played over the end credits. Last year, a Who-loving friend got me to tape one of the rare episodes penned by Douglas Adams off PBS, and I was suitably amused. I'd heard good things about this new incarnation, but I wasn't expecting to like it as much as I did.

I found myself watching both hours of SciFi's premiere with a big silly grin on my face, thoroughly charmed by its offhanded wit and unabashed hopefulness. Rather than act ashamed of its inherent cheesiness, Russell T. Davies' new series runs up and gives it a great big hug, trotting out weird aliens and second-rate special effects with a flourish. The new Who manages to embrace its sci-fi nature without seeming like an insular, by-geeks-for-geeks enterprise. (Unlike some shows I could mention.)

Much like Christopher Eccleston's portrayal of the title character, this show's got a spring in its step, a wink in its eye, and a few brief and intriguing flashes of darkness. As his companion Rose Tyler, a working-class Londoner plucked from mundanity to a life of high adventure, Billie Piper looks vaguely like she's been hit in the face with a shovel a few times too many. Nonetheless, I was pleasantly surprised by the depth and sweetness she brought to her role, not to mention her chemistry with Eccleston. That helps, since their characters are holding hands and skipping along toward the latest apocalypse awfully quickly.

Everything I've read online suggests that the show's first two episodes are among its weakest, with far better still to come. If that's the case, I expect the new Who will fill the Battlestar Galactica-shaped hole in my life quite nicely, at least for the next few months' worth of Friday nights.

It's hard out there for a host.

The opening sequence -- in which Oscar's prior hosts turned down the gig with what was meant to be "humorous" derision -- should have been read as a sign and a portent. Jon Stewart was going to bomb. It was just a question of how big.

That isn't to say he wasn't funny. I personally enjoyed him immensely, but I liked him for precisely the same reasons the Academy's audience didn't: because it was evident he couldn't take the awards seriously. Stewart's great strength as a public entertainer is the way in which he deflates undeserved pomposity with a few pinprick quips. The Oscars' great calling card is its overweening, completely out-of-perspective pomposity. You get a host who is practically broadcasting how insignificant the awards are on a grand cosmic scale, you get a room full of people who have spent the last month narrowing down their focus in life to this evening ... it was bound to be ugly in there.

And this is why I think it's time for the Academy to just quit it with the comedians already. Yes, the host should entertain us, the schlubby Oscar-viewing audience at home, but few of us find the audience neutering of Chris Rock -- who also put the Academy in its place by reminding it that plenty of people don't watch nominated movies -- and Jon Stewart all that funny. Nor do we find it a compelling reason to clasp the movie industry to our collective, iTunes Music Store-buying, DVD-renting, is-there-a-point-to-this-montage-on-why-we-should-go-to-the-movies-when-I'm-viewing-the-montage-on-a-big-TV-at-home-and-it-looks-just-fine?-wondering bosom.

So quit with the comedians. Find hosts who are plainly, clearly thrilled to be emceeing for the night. I'd suggest George Clooney, as his Oscar acceptance speech had a beautifully calibrated degree of industry stroking, but I suspect that between his movie works, good looks and Oscar win, it's only a matter of time before he's bodily assumed into heaven. (I only hope it's before anyone convinces him to make Ocean's Thirteen.)

With Clooney out of the running, please consider this humble request: can Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau please host next year?

Hear me out: we know both of them are good with the hosting thing. Vaughn killed as a Letterman sub. He's got charm to spare and it's ever so slightly tinged with something a little sharper and colder, so it'll pass for that brand of crowd-pleasing "wit" the Oscar producers are so evidently straining to capture. Favreau's no slouch in the hosting department either -- his Dinner for Five series demonstrates an understanding of what it takes to coax people through an event others will want to watch. And like Vaughn, he's also pretty charming, so there's little chance of him veering into toothless muggery.

And I think two hosts would provide the jolt of energy the awards show needs. Think of the best bits of the last few years -- Owen Wilson and Ben Stiller giving out costume awards, Steve Carrell and Will Ferrell giving out makeup awards -- and consider how solid chemistry between two performers can demand your attention and make you enjoy the request. We know Vaughn and Favreau have the chemistry. We know they've got the hosting chops. And it's kind of hard to argue that a guy who remade Psycho and a guy who routinely interviews industry types don't love Hollywood on some level.

It's plainly evident that Oscar will not be winning viewers by attempting to get in on the joke. It didn't work for the Miss America pageant -- which only righted itself this year after returning to the fiction that it really really matters which bikini-clad Tracy Flick takes home the tiara -- and it's not working for Oscar. Rightly or wrongly, the participants demand to be taken seriously, so give them a host that does that. This will free up the rest of us to laugh all night, instead of cringing in empathy for the people who make us laugh all year.