April 2006 Archives

A late recap of this week's American Idol machinations...

The big story is the final destruction of Kellie Pickler. What an odd situation. Pickler started out strong, so strong that Simon Cowell predicted her as one of the final three, if not the eventual winner. She was cute, she was country, and she was sweet.

I'm not quite sure who sabotaged Pickler the past two weeks, but her songs were awful and her cuteness was transmuted into a horrific look that combined terrible hair, hideous make-up, and ugly clothing to erase all memory of Kellie the Cutie.

And of course, the huge shock is that the American Idol voting public actually kicked off Pickler, rather than reflexively protecting a "nice" contestant from elimination. I'll grant you, Pickler was clearly the worst of the six remaining contestants... but merit doesn't always win out on Idol.

Powered by Diet Mountain Dew, on to the sucks-bites-blows-eats recap of the performances...

Katharine McPhee, "I Have Nothing": I thought she was great, and didn't even notice the wardrobe malfunction that exposed her panties to the American public. Although I will cop to noticing the massive cleavage. Mystifying was the judges ripping her a new one for a performance that was good enough to make her a certain final-two perfomer in my book. More mystifying was that the next night, the judges apologized. The Web is full of analysis about how the apologies were tactical or political, but I don't buy it. I think that the show just looks and sounds far different when you're sitting in the theater than it does at home, and sometimes the judges' perspective just doesn't match up with what viewers see and hear. It would almost be better if the judges sat in a soundproof room off of the theater and watched the show on TV.

Elliot Yamin, "A Song For You": Best performance of the night, and on merit he's your leader in the clubhouse. But remember what I said above about merit?

Kellie Pickler, "Unchained Melody": Eats.

Paris Bennett, "The Way We Were": Blows. To amplify something Randy Jackson said, her voice is a great instrument. It's too bad that the person with the instrument is a 17-year-old who has no clue what she's doing.

Taylor Hicks, "Just Once": Cop-out. Does Taylor want to end up in Vegas in a Michael McDonald/James Ingram tribute show? Next week, he should sing "Ya Mo Be There." There's square and then there's painfully square. Get out of the middle of the road, Taylor, or you'll be run over by a bus. More Ray Charles, less Adult Contemporary Hits, okay?

Chris Daughtry, "Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman?": The song itself hits the grand slam of crapitude: sucks, bites, blows, and eats. In diving, your scores are multiplied by the degree of difficulty of the dive. If American Idol was diving, Chris would have perfect scores -- multiplied by zero. If you wanted to prove that you can even sound good singing boring crap, congratulations!

Hat tips: Alan Sepinwall and TV Tattle.

UPDATE: In an interview with Empire Online, J.J. Abrams hastily clarified that he's only producing the new Star Trek movie, with an option to direct it. Oh, good, so he'll only be mostly distracted from his existing TV shows!

Abrams also insisted that the movie won't necessarily be about young Kirk and Spock, although he then almost immediately began musing dreamily on how cool it would be to revive those characters. This reminds me a bit of when the ubernerds at Ain't It Cool News leaked Abrams' since-abandoned script for the new Superman movie -- a script that, while admirably novel, was roughly as faithful to the source material as an Alias movie in which Sydney Bristow is a five-headed Neptunian nun struggling to raise a boxful of abandoned puppies -- and he had to scramble to insist that all that stuff was totally from an old, discarded draft that would most definitely never be used. Yeah. Totally.

Original post follows...

Oh, J.J. Abrams, why must you toy with us like this? The talented creator of maddeningly uneven TV shows has spent the past season or so in Movieland, toiling for the greater glory of Tom Cruise and his latest Mission: Impossible sequel. And while it looks like a far better movie than either of its predecessors -- which isn't the highest hurdle to clear, exactly -- Abrams' absence has taken a terrible toll on the TV series he created. While he's been gone, the once-amazing Alias has mostly collapsed into a twitching heap, and the initially thrilling Lost has begun to wander around in narrative circles.

With M:I:3: Attack of the Colons finally done, Abrams was making noises about finally getting back to that little ol' smash-hit television show about island-bound castaways he kinda sorta helped create. You know, just for a change of pace. And I'd begun to hope that just maybe he'd give it the creative kick in the pants it's starting to need. Ha! Was I ever a sucker.

The news broke today that Abrams will be making a Star Trek prequel movie for Paramount, focusing on the lives of young Kirk and Spock. I have no doubt it'll be entertaining; Abrams' stellar directorial work on Alias and Lost made for spellbinding TV. But creatively, it's a stupid decision on so many levels.

Already, many die-hard Star Trek fans are howling for blood like a horde of crazed Klingons, certain as only small-minded Internet nerds can be that this film will totally be TEH SUXXORS!!!1!!! (Even an eminently reasonable friend of mine expressed grave reservations that any young actor could possibly match up to her beloved William Shatner.) Abrams goes into this project faced with unreasonably high expectations, and watched like a hawk by a lot of people with a surplus of both righteous indignation and free time.

In addition, Abrams is playing with other people's toys, rather than creating anything entirely new. That was the whole fun of Alias and Lost -- at their best, both series gave us a spine-tingling thrill of novelty. At least Joss Whedon made the jump to the big screen with a direct continuation of a cancelled series -- and if he's since moved on to Wonder Woman, well, she hasn't already appeared in six well-known franchise films, has she?

Worst of all, Abrams is poaching Lost's co-creator Damon Lindelof, who wrote some of this season's liveliest and most intriguing episodes, to help with the movie. I'm not exactly seeing how that's gonna help Lost any. (Even if its writing staff will be joined by Buffy, Angel, and Alias vet Drew Goddard, who I suspect will one day unleash some form of televised greatness upon us.) Congratulations, J.J.! You just left Lost in the hands of Carlton Cuse, the man who created Nash Bridges. I hope you're proud.

I don't begrudge Abrams the chance to play with a bigger set of toys and a flashier budget for a larger potential audience. I just wish he weren't leaving his preexisting and perfectly good TV series to rot in the process. If you've got to abandon your supposedly beloved creations, J.J., at least be honest about it -- I'm not sure I could stand one more facetious interview where you pretend that you're really eager to get back to work on that one show you created, whatitsname, you know. With the people on the island. That one. Yeah.

On the plus side, I am looking forward to the cameo by Security Officer Greg Grunberg.

I now present a description of NBC's sweeps-month drama 10.5: Apocalypse, with my favorite parts boldfaced.

SUNDAY, MAY 21

NBC MOVIE OF THE WEEK (9-11 p.m.)
"10.5: Apocalypse, Part I"

THE EARTH SHAKES LIKE NEVER BEFORE IN SEQUEL TO POPULAR '10.5' MINISERIES -- In NBC's high-octane thrill ride "10.5: Apocalypse," the deadly seismic activities that peaked with a 10.5 earthquake and devastated the West Coast in the first miniseries have altered the core structure of the Earth -- and now threaten to jeopardize North America and the Western Hemisphere, causing catastrophic events. In a desperate bid to save lives and the country, President Hollister (Emmy-Award and Golden Globe winner Beau Bridges) once again calls upon one of the nation's top seismologists, controversial scientist Dr. Samantha Hill (Emmy winner Kim Delaney, "NYPD Blue") and her supervisor and former boyfriend Dr. Jordan Fisher (David Cubitt, NBC's "Medium"). At a loss for how to interpret this continued seismic and now volcanic disruption, Hill re-discovers her seismologist-father's (Frank Langella, "Superman Returns") much-discredited hypothesis from years past that, if correct, predicts even greater ruin and a complete altering of the North American continent. The movie also stars Dean Cain ("The Perfect Husband: The Laci Peterson Story"), Oliver Hudson ("The Mountain"), Garcelle Beauvais-Nilon ("NYPD Blue"), Carlos Bernard ("24"), Carly Pope ("Popular") and Barbara Eve Harris ("Ignition").

TUESDAY, MAY 23

NBC MOVIE OF THE WEEK (9-11 p.m.)
"10.5: Apocalypse, Part II"

GROUND-SHAKING CONCLUSION TO SEQUEL OF POPULAR '10.5' MINISERIES -- In the dramatic conclusion of "10.5: Apocalypse," the nation's team of top seismologists led by Dr. Hill (Kim Delaney, "NYPD Blue") continue to race against the clock to decipher the unprecedented series of quakes assaulting the nation -- and to their horror, they now realize the activity could trigger a split of the entire continent. There is no choice now but to find and rescue Dr. Earl Hill (Frank Langella, "Superman Returns"), who is trapped inside a Las Vegas casino buried due to a major quake. Leading the efforts is FEMA field commander Natalie Warner (Garcelle Beauvais-Nilon, "NYPD Blue") and her team of rescuers, including firefighters and brothers Brad (Dean Cain, "The Perfect Husband: The Laci Peterson Story") and Will Malloy (Oliver Hudson, "The Mountain"), whose wife (Carly Pope, "Popular") is also trapped. When Dr. Hill is saved, he is rejoined with his daughter Samantha (Delaney) -- and the fate of the nation rides on their last attempt to stop the runaway fault line. Beau Bridges ("The Ballad of Jack and Rose"), Carlos Bernard ("24") and Barbara Eve Harris ("Ignition") also star.

Man. How can you not watch?

The Viking funeral for Alias started last night, as ABC burns off the once-great show's final episodes and consigns its bones to the deep.

Anyway, at the end of the second hour of the two-hour airing, Sydney Bristow finally gives birth. And my wife and I stare incredulously as the entire labor apparently takes two minutes, including a single push that delivers a relatively happy breech baby.

Television does births all the time, and it almost always gets it laughably wrong. My wife says the best TV birth she's seen is that episode of Friends where Rachel endlessly waits for her baby to arrive as other women come and go with easy labors. (Can you tell that both of my kids were, er, reluctant to greet the world?)

I understand that, with the exception of medical shows, TV shows are not really going to be about the often lengthy act of having a baby. They want to move on to the next plot. But for heaven's sake, at least make it seem vaguely real. All Alias really needed to do was cut back to the birth as if they'd been at it for a few minutes, telling Sydney to keep pushing -- stuff to indicate that it was an ordeal! At least a little bit!

At least the newborn babies they use are getting better. It used to be that every TV birth was greeted with a shot of a completely clean six-month-old baby. Let me tell you, if that thing was just born, the mother would not be smiling. Anyway, these days the newborn babies look a bit more newborn, and they're often made up to look wet and gooey, like real newborns do.

That's some progress. But when your best example of a real TV birth is Friends, it suggests that the TV industry isn't really giving it the old General Hospital try.

How good is the new Doctor Who? Not just so good that the show's producers have taken what was a camp laughingstock and made it a gigantic mainstream hit in the UK. Not just so good that even American Sci-Fi audiences appear to be warming to it. Not just so good that it has managed to make me, a decades-long lapsed fan, excited about the series again.

No, the new Doctor Who is brilliant because it managed to make the series' goofy arch-enemies, the Daleks, actually scary.

In the episode "Dalek," airing Friday on the Sci-Fi Channel, we learn that the Doctor's hated enemies still look the same: they're essentially murderous robot salt shakers with mouse ears. And Robert Shearman, the writer of the episode, doesn't fall into the trap of the writers before him, who saw the Daleks as campy creatures to be winked at and easily defeated.

Instead, Shearman makes us understand that there's a creature inside that salt-shaker: a soldier, bred and trained to follow its deadly orders. And after enduring decades of torture at the hands of humans -- how's that for role reversal? -- it's pretty pissed off. But just as the Dalek's evil seems to have rubbed off on the humans around it, humanity has affected it as well.

It's easy to make fun of the Daleks, and the old Doctor Who. But in one hour, this new series makes you feel fright, horror, and even pity for what was once a cardboard villain. And in a stroke, the memories of that old TV series with the carboard sets also fade from view.

What remains is one of the best shows around today, at turns laugh-out-loud funny, sad, sweet, and scary. Nestled wonderfully between the gravitas of Battlestar Galactica and the increasing goofiness and self-referentiality of Stargate, Doctor Who is as unlikely a sci-fi revival as Battlestar Galactica was -- and just as successful.

How smart is Queen? They're gonna sell thousands of copies of their various Greatest Hits albums this week, thanks to American Idol. Brilliant.

Here's your guide to last night's American Idol, aided by the quick-hit ratings system known as sucks-bites-blows-eats.

Bucky Covington, "Fat Bottomed Girls": Sucks. Which for Mr. Bucky is actually quite an accomplishment, because as a singer, he blows.

Ace Young, "We Will Rock You": Eats. "We Will Rock You" is not even a song. It's a chant. It's non-melodic. It's also iconic, and yet Mr. Young apparently wanted the surviving members of Queen to turn it into a Backstreet Boys song. Those David Cassidy looks will only get you so far, "Ace" -- if that is your real name.

Kellie Pickler, "Bohemian Rhapsody": Much, much better than I thought. It helps that she slimmed the song down from its original 20-minute running time to about 1:30, thereby eliminating all the hard parts. But still, this was supposed to be a disaster and it was just... ehh.

Chris Daughtry, "Innuendo": Pretty good, except for the fact that every song he sings sounds the same, and (as usual) Simon Cowell is absolutely right -- if he's so talented, why didn't he actually try to take on a song someone other than Freddie Mercury's heirs have actually heard?

Katharine McPhee, "Who Wants to Live Forever": Sucks. Should have been much better, but I was just bored. I don't get her appeal. No, wait, that's not true: I am a red-blooded heterosexual male. I don't get her appeal as a singer.

Elliot Yamin, "Somebody to Love": Good. Not perfect, but pretty darn good. He's probably the best singer in the group.

Taylor Hicks, "Crazy Little Thing Called Love": Best of the night, regardless of what the beaten-down Simon Cowell said. Hicks is settling down and his stagecraft is a little less insane, which helps.

Paris Bennett, "The Show Must Go On": Again I feel like Paris is playing a part rather than actually showing her personality. If she doesn't have a personality, someone should just invent one for her. As it is, she's a chameleon. On one level that's refreshing -- rather than being the bitchy one or the fat one or the crazy one or the soul-music one or the country-bumpkin one, she's the One Who Can Actually Sing. But you get the feeling that it's all an act and there's no substance behind the voice. But it's a really good voice.

Who should go: Ace!

Web linkage: You can't escape it. Aaron Barnhart is now blogging Idol, and Alan Sepinwall's comments are always trenchant.

(Update: And the loser is... Bucky! Well, it's a shame to go on a night when you're doing better than usual, but... Bucky sucked. He really deserved to be gone two or three weeks ago. He has uttered his last unintelligible comment. Yee-haw!)

There is one show on television that is guaranteed to give me multiple laugh-out-loud moments -- and not just laugh-out-loud, but laugh-out-loud-long moments.

It is, of couse, Fox's gritty one-hour medical drama House.

This is one of the big reasons why House has risen to the vaunted status of "show you watch on the TiVo the same day it airs" in our home. Yes, the show's plots are formulaic -- try eight different things to save a patient, the first seven fail, the patient's about to die, a moment of revelation, and cure number eight saves the day. But that's not why we watch it.

First off, I enjoy being swept along by the group of doctors who are working a problem -- and indeed, House feels to me much more like a police procedural than a medical show. Its focus on investigation and leaving no stone unturned reminds me more than a little of Homicide.

But even more than that, I enjoy the characters and their interplay. The show's supporting cast is pretty solid, but when they're interacting with one another everything usually grinds to a halt. That's because these characters haven't been engineered to interact with one another as much as they've been created to square off with Hugh Laurie's Gregory House.

And House is just a revelation. The character is written incredibly well, and Laurie plays him note-perfectly. (Just to amp up the difficulty level, of course, Laurie's doing this all while faking an American accent. As viewers of Black Adder know all too well, Laurie's a Brit, through and through. Let me just say that his accent is immaculate. Which is why Zach Braff's joke at the Emmys last year when he co-presented with Laurie, "I didn't know we were doing accents," was so perfect.)

It's odd, this mixture of pleasure and pain. Why do I get big laughs out of a medical drama? The contrast with the show's serious subject matter has something to do with it. And compare with Scrubs, which ties for second in my laugh-out-loud funny listings (with The Office). There's a wacky sitcom that ends up turning over into pain and pathos a whole bunch.

Alan Sepinwall noticed yesterday that he considers Laurie better at comedy, but Scrubs' John C. McGinley more interesting when it comes to a dramatic performance. I think he might be right, but more interesting to me is the fact that both House and Scrubs mix the funny and the serious and end up doing both better than most of the shows on television today.

Visit TeeVeePedia, TeeVee's April Fools' parody for 2006.