September 2006 Archives

Like Brock Samson -- secret agent, muscle-car afficionado, and magnificently mulleted engine of stabbing-intensive death -- the joys of Adult Swim's The Venture Brothers sneak up on you before going in for the kill.

The twisted little brainchild of Chris "Jackson Publick" McCullough and Eric "Doc" Hammer, Venture seems at first glance like a simple parody of Jonny Quest and other 1960s Hanna-Barbera action series. Like the Quest family, Dr. Thaddeus Venture, his twin sons Hank and Dean, and their bodyguard Brock travel the world in a wicked cool superjet, battling supervillains, ancient menaces, and the obligatory armies of spear-gun-toting frogmen. Unlike the relatively well-adjusted Quest family, Dr. Venture is a weedy, pill-addled failure, scavenging the rapidly diminshing remains of his brilliant father's empire; Brock will vigorously copulate with anything sufficiently female, and is prone to hair-trigger fits of murderous frenzy; and Hank and Dean are, suffice to say, not the sharpest crayons in the box.

Thankfully, their enemies -- as numerous as they are inexplicable -- aren't much sharper. The Venture supporting cast is stuffed to the gills with colorful, indelible, and often hilarious characters: The Phantom Limb, Dr. Byron Orpheus, Master Billy Quizboy, Molotov Cocktease, and so many others. It's like McCullough and Hammer just can't stop creating these guys, drawing ladel after ladel from a simmering subconscious stew of every geek touchstone of the past 30 years.

From Marvel Comics to Star Wars to prog-rock albums about hobbits, if it was in the bottom of your closet, on your stereo, or hanging on your wall in your childhood, chances are you'll see it here, in amusingly sordid fashion. As voiced by Stephen Colbert, Professor Impossible -- Venture's version of the Fantastic Four's Reed Richards -- is the creepy, manipulative, borderline sociopath we all knew the real Reed could be. And if Season One's riotously humiliating death for Jonny Quest's Race Bannon didn't sufficiently violate your childhood memories -- neighborhood children ride his soiled corpse down the street -- Season Two's appearance of Jonny himself as a mustachioed, pantsless, gun-waving junkie should finish the job quite nicely.

McCullough cut his creative teeth working with Ben Edlund on his uproarious live-action and animated adaptions of The Tick, and Edlund's gift for pitch-perfect dialogue and absurdist humor seems to have rubbed off. When Brock -- voiced to manly perfection by Patrick Warburton, who also played the live-action Tick -- is reunited with Molotov, the ex-Communist femme fatale who stole his heart, their passionate clinch is interrupted by Brock's discovery of her cast-iron, hammer-and-sickle-emblazoned chastity belt. "Sorry, dahlink," she coos. "I still can only go to second base."

"I thought the Cold War was over!" Brock howls in agony, and stalks off to the bathroom.

Much like Futurama or Arrested Development, the longer you watch The Venture Brothers, the funnier it gets. McCullough and Hammer aren't afraid to build up a running joke throughout an entire season, or longer. And they're not above playing a brilliant trick or two on their audience. After Season One ended with Hank and Dean's apparent death (in an "Easy Rider" homage), McCullough and Hammer kept mum about the boys' fate. Preview images released before Season Two showed no trace of Hank or Dean. And the first half of Season Two's opening episode was one long, gloriously staged head-fake, right down to the retooled opening credits. When Hank and Dean finally reappeared, the motive and method for their return was as hilarious as it was ingenious. (Suffice to say that if you have death-prone children, it's handy to be a superscientist.)

But for all its mayhem and amusement, a regular Venture viewer will quickly realize that there's a lot more going on here than snide pop-cultural potshots. Nearly every character in the show's sprawling cast is given far deeper characterization than they rightfully deserve, with surprisingly moving results. Brock may be a "Swedish murder machine," as one foe dubs him, but he's also a stand-up guy, doing his best to provide the boys with the paternal guidance and affection they don't get from their wretched pop. Molotov Cocktease seems all steel and leather at first, but in private, she melts into kittenish adoration at the mere thought of Brock -- and from the easygoing way he calls her "Mol," we know these two crazy kids really care about each other. The boys are sweet, well-meaning, and totally unequipped to handle actual life in the outside world. Crazy superscience and evil villains are the only filter they have to process reality, and it's left them isolated and damaged in ways they can barely begin to grasp.

And right about that point -- the point where it's several hours after you've seen the latest episode, and you realize you're still thinking about the characters -- The Venture Brothers truly has you in its grip. Watch long enough, and you'll find yourself rooting for girlish, ineffectual supervillain The Monarch to work things out with his foghorn-voiced paramour, Dr. Girlfriend. You'll feel strangely warmed by the realization that Jonas Jr., Dr. Venture's freakish, malformed twin brother (don't ask) is as kind, brilliant, and generous as his brother isn't. You'll pity Dr. Orpheus, the Ventures' histrionic necromancer neighbor, in his desperate, hapless attempts to be a good dad to his beloved teenaged daughter. You'll muse over the odd, grudging camaraderie developing between Brock and dapper arch-villain The Phantom Limb. And you'll start wondering when Dr. Venture will pull his head out of his ass, get over the crippling loss of his own impossibly perfect dad, and be a better father to his poor, doomed kids.

Too many of today's "grown-up" TV programs seem snarky and self-referential, sarcastically handling anything resembling real emotion from a safe distance. Real sincerity and sympathy seem to have been left for cartoons and other children's fare. (Thank goodness the Brits still embrace it, if the new Doctor Who is any indication.) The great big humanist streak that The Venture Brothers displays, alongside its considerable hilarity, makes it easily the best animated series, and one of the best comedies of any kind, currently airing. In a move that Brock Samson would envy, it makes a convincing feint for your funny bone, but ultimately strikes right at your heart.

Catch new Venture adventures Sundays at 10:30 p.m. ET on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim, or see the latest episode at AdultSwimFix.com.

The title sequence for Smith -- the new CBS drama that follows a group of master thieves as they pull off a series of high class jobs -- is simply the word "SMITH", with the "I" inexplicably replaced by the silhouette of a man walking away from the viewer. I initially found this baffling, but as the pilot wore on, it started to make more sense. Because at the end of the hour, "I" walked away from Smith with no intention of ever returning.

Of course, as baffling things about Smith go, the title animation is pretty low on the list. Way up at the top is the show's assumption that I have any interest in watching the exploits of a bunch of unrepentant scumbags. Smith, at its core, is a show about total bastards. For a change, that doesn't mean lawyers; but that doesn't make me any more inclined to want to spend an hour with them.

Let's briefly run through a few of Smith's main characters -- and keep in mind that these are the folks we're supposed to be rooting for:

Jeff (Simon Baker) is a handsome, devil-may-care ladies man, and also the group's weapons expert. When we meet Jeff, he is being hassled by a couple of Hawaiians for surfing on a "locals-only" beach. Chastened, Jeff heads back to his jeep, calmly towels himself off, returns to the beach with a high-powered rifle, puts a bullet in the head of one of the surfers from 100 yards out, then shoots the other in the back while he's running away. The scene closes on a shot of the surfers' corpses lolling about in the foam, as a wave crashes in and washes a surge of blood down the shoreline. Charming!

Annie (Amy Smart) is a showgirl and also, according to the show's web site, a "beautiful master of disguise." She demonstrates said mastery in the pilot by tearing her shirt down the front and exposing her bra, thus ensuring that no male witnesses will remember her face. The rip in her otherwise flawless tapestry of deception is that there are also hundreds of women on the busy street in front of the museum they're robbing. Her hobbies include getting her coke-addicted cocktail waitress friend to steal gamblers' credit card numbers, then stiffing her pal on the promised blow money.

Tom (Jonny Lee Miller) is British.

And then there's Smith. Smith is a talking orangutan with an IQ of 256 who becomes a political advisor in Washington. Resplendent in his business suit and glasses, Smith makes us both laugh and think by showing us that perhaps we are the real animals.

Whoops, sorry! My mistake. Different show.

Better show.

"Smith" is actually just the name investigators supposedly give to high-class thieves who have not yet been identified. The group's head honcho is really named Bobby (Ray Liotta). He's a devoted husband and family man who, as a fun side project, plans and perpetrates heists that generally result in the death of two or three other husbands and family men. Emotionally he's a cipher, if only because the script is too half-assed to actually flesh him out with emotions.

Bobby's double life is becoming more complicated as his wife Hope (Virginia Madsen) has begun to suspect that those frequent "business trips" are perhaps something more sinister. You might actually sympathize with the lady if you didn't know that she's an adulterer and a recovering addict to boot. Won't somebody please think of the kids?!

In short, these are not good people, and we're given no reason to care about them. This is a problem, because the script spends half its time on these worthless grifters' personal lives. I don't give two shits for any of them, so by extension I also don't give a damn whether the Brit is schtupping the token female, or whether Smith and his cheating junkie wife work out their differences. I'll admit that when the explosives expert died at the end of the pilot and the driver was weeping over the body of his fallen friend, I did get a little bit sad. But only because the other characters were still alive.

Even with such a hateful group of protagonists, there are ways a show like this could still be made to work. It could be played for laughs, minimizing the general awfulness of the leads by making them obvious caricatures. But Smith goes instead for a deadly serious tone, which makes the characters seem like irredeemable scoundrels and saps all the potential fun from the proceedings.

They could pitch Smith as more of a Robin Hood tale, where the thieves only steal from those who have it coming. Instead, the pilot has our band of rogues steal a Rembrandt from a Pittsburgh museum for a Japanese buyer. I'm guessing the writers chose this because they saw it as sort of a victimless crime, but in actuality the public is being deprived of the opportunity to appreciate great art. And try telling the hapless security guard who takes what sounds like about sixty bullets that he's not a victim.

Another potential approach is to make the crimes themselves so well planned and clever that you're interested in spite of the characters. This is what Smith seems to be shooting for, but it totally blows it.

For starters, while we're led to believe that intensive planning goes into the museum job, all we get to see is the team meeting up in a parking garage, a short exposition sequence where they case the joint, and some quick shots of the team taking their positions; at which point they have already magically procured a delivery truck, a construction outfit, and a bunch of other crap. We end up with about as much insight into the crime as we got into the mechanical techniques Mr. T used to turn the A-Team van into a hovercraft.

Worse, the crime sequence itself turns out to be uninspired and not particularly smart. The thieves create a diversion, walk into the museum, subdue the security guards, and take the art. If we got to see this play out with a kind of clockwork intricacy, it might be interesting. But the whole sequence is delivered as a series of jump cuts, that beloved refuge of screenwriters who aren't clever enough to write an actual scene.

And they weren't even clever enough to get this skeleton of a crime scene to make sense. As the thieves escape by boat, they are chased by a long line of police cars driving along the waterfront. The team's brilliant plan is that they have rigged up a truck with explosives, and they intend to blow it up as the police approach. And indeed, they do just that, effectively preventing the cops from continuing their chase -- which is odd, because the truck is parked on the side of what looks like a six-lane road, and the explosion barely reaches out past the shoulder.

Rest assured that if this is the best they can do for the pilot -- presumably the episode the writers had the longest time to think about -- things are not going to improve for subsequent episodes.

Admittedly, Smith does assemble a pretty impressive cast with some big-name talent. Too bad it's completely wasted on this crap.

The jury is out on Ray Liotta's performance, which is either pretty good or absolutely horrible. He spends most of the episode just staring at things with no expression on his face. In the few moments when he is supposed to seem relaxed and at ease, he seems instead mildly constipated. And maybe that's exactly how he's supposed to be; since the script doesn't give us any clue as to his personal motivations, I have no idea.

I have to say, though, that I'm leaning towards horrible, almost entirely on the basis of this weird little "evil" laugh Liotta lets out in one scene. It sounds robotic and totally unnatural. That is, as a laugh it sounds unnatural. As one of those rhythmic farts you let out when you're climbing up a flight of stairs, it sounds as natural as can be. I'm pretty sure that's not what he was going for, though.

I don't buy Amy Smart at all as a slick, street smart femme fatale. But then, I've never bought Smart as anything I've ever seen her attempt to portray. I suspect the only way she'll ever seem like a good actress is if she takes a role in which she is supposed to play a bad actress.

I liked Jonny Lee Miller in "Trainspotting." In Smith, he's just "there", which is all he's really expected to be. I think they just wanted somebody with a British accent and then, upon reflection, couldn't remember why.

Virginia Madsen is also just there. Her rack, on the other hand, is doubtless the most emotive member of the cast, and it puts on its usual terrific performance.

But even if network TV allowed full frontal, no performance would be strong enough to cover up the fact that Smith has little to recommend it. In fact, rack aside, most aspects of the show are actively repellent. If you're the sort of person who enjoys watching somebody's masturbatory fantasy about the criminal lifestyle, by all means, tune on in. Otherwise, don't let Smith steal an hour of your life.

The CW's new family drama Runaway premieres tonight. A copy of the show's second episode just arrived at my house, so I'm going to withhold a full review until I watch it. (It's always better to judge by more than a pilot episode, if you can get away with it.)

But here's my thumbnail sketch: When I first watched the Runaway pilot, I thought it was destined for CBS. I don't know why -- it just felt sort of like a CBS show. A generic CBS drama that tries to combine a family drama with a tense, serialized people-on-the-run action show. And by that score, it didn't fare well: Runaway is not a very good CBS show.

When I found out that Runaway is actually a CW show, I found myself feeling more charitable toward it. When I started thinking of it as 7th Heaven on the lam, it seemed to make more sense. I guess this says more about my feelings about the CW than it does about Runaway, but there you have it.

In any event, Runaway is about a family that's on the run because the dad is accused of a crime he didn't commit. The Dad is Donnie Wahlberg, who was so great in Boomtown and is okay here. My problem with the show is simply its premise: as we see the family settle into their new house and the kids start making friends at their new school, it's hard to believe that the series is ready to pull up stakes the moment that the family is found out.

That realization deflated all the tense scenes and makes me reluctant to believe this show will work for the long haul; after all, if you don't believe that the family will ever really leave their new small town, the family-on-the-run metaphor just becomes a clever conceit for another drama about high-school kids and their parents' problematic marriage. At which point it's, what, One Tree Hill? Everwood? Dawson's Creek? Something I don't want to watch, that's for sure.

After watching the Runaway pilot, this is what I can say: it's not a bad show. But neither is it among the best of the year. And it's got a premise, so far as I can tell, that isn't built to last.

The idea behind Six Degrees is that if you stretch logic far enough, any two people eventually have something to do with each other. Unfortunately, that's the same "eventually" as previously seen in such sentences as "Eventually everything on The X-Files will tie together and make perfect sense" and "Eventually something funny's going to happen on America's Funniest Home Videos." In other words, although it seems at first glance as though these characters have nothing to do with each other, it also seems that way at second, third, and fourth glance.

It's all rather suspiciously reminiscent of Lost. Except without the people stranded on an island. Okay, you know how Lost has all this backstory where the different characters almost interact, leading to all sorts of frantic Internet speculation along the lines of "OMG! Character A used to walk Character B's dogs, and one of the dogs pooped on Character X's lawn!", right? That appears to be what's going on here. So instead of a regular pilot, in which a bunch of characters are introduced along with their relationships with each other, this show had a pilot in which a bunch of characters were introduced along with a gentle hint that maybe they'd have relationships of some sort eventually.

The difference between Six Degrees and Lost (aside from the fact that I've watched at least one episode of Six Degrees) is that on Lost, you already know that the characters have at least one thing in common. And because of that, you know who the important people are going to be. On Six Degrees, it's mostly an undifferentiated mass of people. In fact, it's several different undifferentiated masses of people, and the viewer is presumably supposed to be able to pick out which character in each scene is going to end up interacting with the other characters.

Well, I guess I should say "interacting in a meaningful way". Because the characters do interact, but mostly in the form of passing each other on the street or seeing each other on a subway. It mostly feels like a tenuous Monty Python link between two sketches rather than a meaningful "We're all connected!" revelation.

As a general rule, I prefer shows about characters to shows about plot. Even in plot-heavy shows like Veronica Mars or Carnivale, I like the episodes that don't advance the story arc. So you'd think I would be in favor of a show that completely throws plot out the window, right? Well, it turns out that I prefer the characters to at least be doing something interesting instead of wandering around and occasionally passing each other in the street. I didn't even like Richard Linklater's Slackers all that much, and at least those random characters had reasonably interesting rants to share with me.

I would be remiss in my duties if I did not mention that this show features the acting talents of Dennis Boutsikaris. Yes, that Dennis Boutsikaris. I sometimes wish I could write something scathing enough to generate an angry email from an actor, but unfortunately, I was unable to discern exactly who Mr. Boutsikaris portrayed in this show. Oh well, at least I'll always have that time that the creator of Sledge Hammer! thanked me for a mention.

If the pilot for Heroes were the first issue of a new comic book series, I'm not sure I'd stick around for issue #2. As a comics fan since early childhood, I had moderately high hopes for NBC's new Lost-with-superheroes drama, premiering next Monday at 9 p.m. ET. Alas, Heroes' premiere episode offsets some genuinely compelling plotting with wretchedly inane dialogue and a largely inert crop of characters. When a series begins with a moronic credit scroll breathlessly declaring that this is "Volume One" of its heroes' epic journey, well, you can't say you haven't been warned.

Apparently, discovering you have impossible abilities previous unknown to mortal men just makes you want to whine a lot -- with some sulking and pouting thrown in for variety. That's what most of the budding superhumans in Heroes' pilot do, from the Texas teen played by Hayden Panettiere (Cheerleader Lass!), who mopes that her newfound invulnerability will somehow disqualify her from taking the SATs, to the hospice worker played by perpetually mumbly Milo Ventimiglia (The Sonambulist!), who spends so much time blathering on about dreams and destiny that his end-of-episode leap off a tall building had me openly cheering for him to go splat. (His power seems to be the ability to deliver long stretches of graceless, exposition-heavy dialogue without ever changing his facial expression.)

The thoroughly awesome exception to this rule is Masi Oka (Standout Boy!), as the aptly named Hiro, a Japanese office drone with the power to warp space and time. With his high, squeaky voice and roly-poly features, you'd expect him to be the most annoying one of them all -- but unlike his loser cohorts, Hiro gets it: Superpowers are awesome, and they should be used to help others. He's unabashedly sweet and credibly pure of heart, a welcome ray of sunshine among the series' slathered-on gloom. It doesn't hurt that he namedrops Kitty Pryde and Mr. Spock, either.

It's also cool that the series' apparent lead character is an Indian professor-turned-cab-driver played by Sendhil Ramamurthy (The Expositor!) who's smart, charismatic, and not even remotely stereotypical. Granted, he has little to do in the pilot but endlessly repeat the series' premise, but he's still a pretty neat character, and a welcome shot of diversity in the whitebread ranks of prime time.

Too bad the same evenhandedness doesn't seem to extend to Heroes' view of gender relations. Perhaps it's a side effect of creator Tim Kring's previous work on Crossing Jordan, a series that seems to believe that crimes can be solved entirely via the wearing of sexy halter tops, but the female members of Heroes' cast don't quite come across as well as the males. Besides the sulky cheerleader, there's Ali Larter (Captain Lingerie!), a single-mom Webcam stripper with a staggeringly poor grasp of personal finance; Tawny Cypress (Co-Dependa!) as the alternately blubbery and shrewish girlfriend of premonitory painter/heroin addict Santiago Cabrera (Junkieman!); and the mothers of Ventimiglia and Panettiere's characters, who are both sort of touching, but also obnoxiously and stupidly batty. (It's a good thing the cheerleader's mom gets a second scene in which to be sweet and sympathetic, because her first appearance has her baby-talking to a baffled-looking Pomeranian dog in a way that would be grounds for justifiable homicide in at least nine states.) The guys, meanwhile, are college professors, hospice workers, politicans... you know, people with actual skills and careers. Apparently, having both superpowers and ovaries disqualifies you from such things in Heroes' world.

Having seen the original version of the pilot (via means I'm not at liberty to discuss), I spotted some notable changes in the final version now screening online at Yahoo! TV. For one thing, where the tormented artist once hacked off his own hand to free himself from handcuffs before proceeding to paint a floor-covering portrait of impending apocalypse, he now merely overdoses on some delicious, delicious heroin his girlfriend thoughtfully left lying out for him. It's less gratuitously gory, but it also doesn't quite pack the spooky oomph of the original. There are also some improved special effects in the final scene between Ventimiglia and his semi-slimy politician brother, played by Profit's Adrian Pasdar (The Human Hairstyle!), and a tacked-on cliffhanger ending laudable only for the renewed hope it offers that Ventimiglia's character may, in fact, actually plunge to his death. (Oh please, oh please, oh please.)

Heroes isn't all bad. The producers at least had the good sense to recruit Tim Sale, one of comics' more stylish and distinctive artists, to provide paintings, fake comic book covers, and even the lettering for the credits. The peril our heroes are apparently meant to stop is certainly compelling enough, and there's a clever hint to its origins in a train-crash sequence earlier in the pilot. There's also an entirely welcome twist involving the true identity of the shadowy government agent following Ramamurthy's character around -- although I really could have done without said agent's utterly lame shout-out to The Matrix. And, like last-minute reinforcements swooping in to save the day, future episodes promise the arrival of TeeVee favorite Greg Grunberg (The Scene-Stealer!) as a psychic L.A. cop, and the presence of Wonderfalls and The Amazing Screw-On Head mastermind Bryan Fuller among the writing staff.

It's not improbable that Heroes could improve, and I'll tune in for the second episode on the promise of Grunberg and Oka alone. But if the largely plodding, unoriginal feeling of the pilot sticks around in subsequent episodes, I'll be neither surprised nor dismayed if Heroes fails to take flight in the ratings.

There are two shows on the fall TV schedule that, while seemingly identical, couldn't be more different. No, I'm not talking about Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and 30 Rock. Or Six Degrees and The Nine. (You get the idea -- TV premises are cheaper if you buy in bulk.)

The two shows I'm thinking of are NBC's Kidnapped and Fox's Vanished. By all outside appearances, these are both hourlong, serialized dramas that follow a kidnapping over the course of a season. Both kidnappees are the family members of powerful men. Both kidnappings actually involve more than meets the eye at first -- which is good, because otherwise you'd be stretching a single episode of Without a Trace over 22 hours, and I don't need that much Anthony LaPaglia in my life.

But, oh, what a difference. Vanished is a confused piece of junk, a shabbily directed, flatly acted, poorly written series with a mystifying premise twist that makes the writers of The Da Vinci Code and "National Treasure" look like Marvin Kalb.

Kidnapped, on the other hand, is a slickly produced, fast-paced series with a solid premise, excellent writing, and a great cast. Only Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip's pilot can match Kidnapped's in terms of pacing -- the show moves.

The basic plot of Kidnapped: the rich Cain family (Timothy Hutton, Dana Delany) has a son, Leopold (Will Denton) who is kidnapped on the streets of New York, despite the vigilant protection of his bodyguard, Virgil (the excellent Mykelti Williamson). To the rescue comes shaggy private investigator Knapp (Jeremy Sisto), who tells the family not to bring in the FBI... and FBI agent Latimer King (Delroy Lindo), who comes into the case regardless of what Knapp wants.

Clearly there's more to Kidnapped's plot than meets the eye, but -- unlike Vanished -- the intelligence of Kidnapped's pilot script gives me a good deal of optimism that the show's producers know where they're going. It also helps that those producers include Jason Smilovic and Michael Dinner of Karen Sisco and David Greenwalt of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel.

Yes, there are a couple of eye-rollers in the pilot -- there's always a gung-ho cop who's overly aggressive and screws things up when our heroes Know Better. But in Kidnapped, that cop's failure does give us some idea about the intelligence of Leopold's kidnappers.

I'm also not a big fan of shows that put kids in jeopardy, but Kidnapped walks the right side of that line. Leopold's a smart kid (with a few secrets of his own, I'm guessing), and the way he's treated post-kidnapping isn't anything that set off my child-exploitation radar.

Fans of standalone procedurals like C.S.I. or Without a Trace might get frustrated by the show's overarching plot, which will unfold over the entire season. I might not want to spend a year watching Anthony LaPaglia work a single basic missing persons case, but I'm eager to follow Sisto, Lindo, and Williamson. Kidnapped is a keeper.

The Class is a shitty, stupid television show without a single idea about how it plans to entertain an audience for thirty minutes. Even the laugh track sounds like it's punching a clock, like this is one gig it's not going to be putting on its laugh track resume.

A show this terrible must have a concept: a sort of ad hoc reunion of a third grade class. Naturally, you will be curious as to what I, an internet television critic, would think if I met the people with whom I went to third grade. I believe I would most likely think "Huh? Who are you?" because except for a couple exceptions, I can't remember a single name from that long ago. And the names I can remember are mostly because they were also in my fourth, fifth, and sixth grade classes. I can only assume that "third grade" was chosen for its explicit randomness, but it would appear that the Big Wheel of Random Sitcom Premises has come up empty this time.

The only benefit I can see to basing a show on "people who have essentially nothing to do with each other" is that you could probably get some interesting characters in there. Like if you set a show in a bar, for example, all kinds of crazy people could come in. In this case, though, the hilarity is supposed to come from suicidally depressed losers and guys who get dumped or live with their parents. Now, I'm not saying I don't like laughing at unhappy people. But it helps if the unhappiness is combined with some sort of humor, or at least originality.

To be fair, I ought to watch more than one episode. But why should I put myself out? I already had to put up with thirty minutes of this nonsense, and I didn't see the show worrying about whether it was being fair to me. Besides, this turkey is going to get cancelled just as soon as the network executives can bring themselves to admit that they put it on the air.

Are lawyers really that fascinating? I know a lawyer or two, and I hardly ever ask them to recount the events of their day while I listen, enraptured. I would guess that the daily activities of lawyers, even high-priced trial lawyers, are actually less interesting than several professions who hardly ever get television shows about them.

However, we've clearly reached a point where "They're lawyers!" is all that anyone needs to sell a show. Well, it helps to throw in some adjectives, ideally something along the lines "intense", "driven", and "attractive". And maybe "as seen on Alias and Oz".

In the latest example of the form, Justice is about four intense, driven lawyers who are also attractive. Normally, I would describe the four characters, but luckily for me, Victor Garber's character, along with being the leader of the firm, is also a master of exposition, so I will just steal one of his speeches:

"Tom's first chair, the front man. The good-looking, all-American face of Not Guilty. Alden takes the physical evidence. Nobody does scientific testimony like you or scares experts more. Luther, get inside the DA's head. You know how these guys think. Figure out what he's gonna prove, and tear it up. I'll keep spinning. Biggest media case we've had in years. Be nice to win it."

So, as you can tell, Victor Garber ("Ron", or "The guy from Alias") is in charge of barking orders and pointing fingers. Kerr Smith ("Tom" or "The guy from Dawson's Creek") is the pretty-boy who's the only one who cares if the client is innocent or guilty. Rebecca Malder ("Alden" or "I think she was on a soap opera or something") is the woman, who's allegedly brilliant with scientific testimony. And Eamonn Walker ("Luther" or "The guy from Oz, by which I mean Said and not Hugh Jackman") is the one who does the actual research into the case.

Okay, that's the background. The good news is that this isn't just another cookie-cutter lawyer show. In fact, it's much more annoying to watch than these shows usually are. The camera moves a lot, and it's usually all jiggly. Sometimes it moves through walls with a whooshing sound. When there's nothing better to do, it'll zoom into walls and follow CGI wires. This is particularly true in the scenes where we watch Luther research the case and he walks around as the background changes from the scene of the crime to computer screens to other foolishness. He's also got some kind of 60-inch touchscreen monitor he uses to show information that's easily available on Google.

Another difference is that contrary to the title of the show, it's not really about "justice", so much as "winning". For most of the show, the audience has no idea whether the client is actually guilty or innocent, so we're presumably just rooting for TNT&G (the aforementioned four lawyers) because we like them. That kind of falls down when all the lawyers are such jerks, though (see above, where I called them "driven"). Anyway, the previews sometimes try to make hay out of the "Are they defending a guilty person?" angle, but since the lawyers themselves don't seem to care, it's hard to feel like it matters that much. At the end of the episode, we do get to see "how it really happened", but since that's after the verdict, it's literally anticlimactic.

So basically, it's a team of four people wandering around in front of greenscreens in between scenes where they shout at each other and their client. It's also a big fan of "ripped from the headlines" stories, to the point where a pretty entertaining game could be made where you give a prize to the first person who can identify what real-life case is being "borrowed" for each episode. But then I don't know what you'd do for the 58 minutes left in the show.

In the interest of fairness, I believe I should say some nice things about the show. So here we go: I think the theme song is Warren Zevon's "Lawyers, Guns, and Money". Of course, it's obnoxiously remixed so you can't hear Zevon's voice nearly as well as you can hear the whooshing noises, but if you concentrate, there's a good song in the background.

Aaron Sorkin's Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip premieres tonight on NBC. We reviewed it last month, and Nathan Alderman liked it, with a few caveats.

My personal take: Great, great pilot. A huge amount of fun to watch. I'm not convinced about the show's long-term prognosis, both creatively and ratings-wise, but given the quality of the pilot, I'll be watching until it gets cancelled or until Studio 60 does what the other Sorkin series did: namely, have a colossal creative crack-up.

By the way, don't miss our complete list of fall premieres, featuring capsule descriptions and more. It'll be updated as the fall season unfolds.

It's a shaky time for CBS's two major reality TV franchises, Survivor and The Amazing Race. This spring's Survivor: Exile Island was the time in the series' history where I truly felt that the format, and the contestants' reactions to it, were becoming dull. Then there's Amazing Race, which followed up a universally disastrous Family Edition with a spring season that was, while better than what came before it, definitely on the dull side.

Now both shows are fighting fatigue with format changes and gimmicks to try and wrench out the familiarity that has gradually turned them from comfort food into something I watch with one eye on the set and the other on my laptop. With Survivor, as most everyone in the nation knows by now, fatigue is being fought with a racial-segregation format. Too much ink has been spilled over this idea, which Survivor handles in typically classy fashion, right down to giving the contestants time to air their own concerns about the format twist. Frankly, although the race twist does make for some interesting changes and a welcome diversity to the cast, I'm more intrigued by the logistics and strategies inherent in a four-tribe competition.

The Amazing Race, which premieres Sunday, is also shaking things up -- although given the furor over Survivor, it's not surprising that nobody's heard a peep about it. The cast is slightly more diverse than usual for Amazing Race (which has always been a more racially and socially diverse series than Survivor). Of course, it wouldn't be The Amazing Race without a team of models (they're two recovering drug addicts), a team of cheerleaders (who choose the show's first Detour based entirely on their cheer skills), and a team of beauty queens (ladies and gentlemen, I give you Miss New York and Miss California!).

But there are also the pair of black muslims from Cleveland, the gay couple, the dad and his lesbian daughter who are trying to reconnect after the trial of her coming out, the Indian couple (he wears a COLEGE shirt in the premiere, which is priceless), the triathlete with an artificial leg and her boyfriend the prosthetics expert, and the coal miner and his wife (neither of whom have been outside of Kentucky and Tennessee, which put them at a disadvantage when they land in Beijing).

One of the problems with The Amazing Race is that if none of the teams are particularly endearing, what was once a charming travelogue can quickly become a reasonable approximation of being trapped on an around-the-world tour with a group of people you can't stand the sight of. Judging by the first episode, most of this year's contestants seem to be quite reasonable people. Sure, there's some whining when the woman with the artificial limb gets to pre-board her flight to Beijing. But generally I'm predisposed to like this bunch of people.

Except for one couple, of course.

It seems like every year, The Amazing Race casts one couple whose relationship is either dissolving or has come apart entirely, perhaps just before the race has begun. This year it's Rob and Kimberly, a self-combusting dating couple. In the show's introduction, they explain that somehow, the experience of going on The Amazing Race will either bring them together forever as a couple, or drive them apart for good. (No bets on this one, folks, it's too easy.) He yells at her for perceived slights that aren't really there. She counters by shouting, "If you yell at me again..." And this is three days in. Good luck, guys.

But enough about the casting. Like Survivor, it's easy to notice this season's Amazing Race casting without noticing the changes in the format. At the very beginning of the race (in a rainy Seattle park), host Phil Keoghan warns team members that there will be some major twists in the race's format. Without giving too much away, one team discovers the hard way that just because there's no pit stop doesn't mean you're safe from harm.

Another clever twist: the episode's final check-in involves a strenuous physical challenge. As a result, we spend the show's final minutes watching exhausted racers dig deep to cross the finish line, instead of watching a dozen couples run down a grassy hillside and jump on Phil Keoghan's Mat of Fate.

It's hard to say from a single episode if this season's Amazing Race will shrug off the show's recent stumbles and return it to its best-in-class form. But it's certainly off to a running start. And despite the format tweaks, the show's underlying joys are still there. In the first episode alone, you'll marvel at the number of teams who end up getting stranded in an airport parking structure because they're unable to properly read their clue; you'll thrill at a brief (and blessedly vomit free) trip to a Chinese restaurant to eat stomach-turning cuisine; and you'll laugh at the misfortune of several teams who completely foul up a building challenge because they aren't observant enough about their surroundings.

In other words, it's everything you've come to love about The Amazing Race. Consider me along for the ride again... assuming that Rob and Kimberly don't stick around too long, of course.

Men in Trees, a new dramedy airing Friday nights on ABC, is a ridiculous show. It's silly, improbable, confused, and superficial. In fact, it's been a long time since I've watched any show that is such pure and utter fluff.

I liked it a lot.

Men in Trees follows the exploits of Marin Frist (Anne Heche), a successful relationship coach, self-help author, and exposition-spouting narrator. As part of a book tour, Marin accepts a speaking engagement in the tiny, backwoods town of Elmo, Alaska. While there, she discovers that her fiancé has been carrying on an affair right under her nose.

Aghast that her supposed expertise couldn't even hold together her own relationship, Marin tries to return home, but foul weather and Elmo's quirky transportation timetables conspire to keep her in Alaska. Disgusted with men in general, she finds herself trapped in a town that is 90% male. But eventually, Marin realizes that Elmo is the perfect place to truly learn to understand men, and perhaps come to better understand herself in the process.

In other words, it's basically a mash-up of Northern Exposure and Sex and the City. But Men in Trees differentiates itself by eschewing the gritty realism that was the hallmark of those two shows. Here's a sampling of some of the more asinine plot points we're expected to swallow during the pilot:

• Marin discovers her fiancé is cheating on her when she accidentally takes his laptop on the flight to Alaska. Of course, his infidelity might have remained hidden had he not:

  A) Taken the time to compile a digital slideshow that begins with pictures of himself and Marin, then smoothly transitions to shots of him macking on the hot literary critic,

  B) Named the slide show something that Marin would feel compelled to examine, like "grahams_slideshow", and

  C) Left his computer with a folder window open and stretched across the entire desktop; a folder which contains but a single icon, the aforementioned slideshow of forbidden love.

  I mean, it's nice that Marin is willing to spend her life with a severely retarded man, but she should have expected something like this to happen eventually.



• Marin is horrified to discover that a raccoon has taken up residence in her closet. But when the local biologist comes by to retrieve it, she refuses to go outside because she doesn't want to leave the vermin alone with her favorite shoes.

  Later, as the fluffy, whipped topping on this pie of absurdity, she wrestles the raccoon for her wedding dress.



• Marin is asked to lecture in Elmo because the men of the town don't know how to attract women. 24 hours after her lecture, Marin is sitting in a bar where many of these selfsame men explain to her the "Dirty Harry Syndrome", wherein women unrealistically expect men to be Clint Eastwood-tough and Alan Alda-sensitive at the same time. So are these guys clueless backwoods lunks or worldly, intuitive, amateur marriage counselors?


• Throughout the bar scene, the jukebox is playing some femme-y adult alternative pop song that sounds like it would be at home in an episode of Dawson's Creek.

  I repeat: circa-2006 adult alternative. In a dive bar. In a working schlub's dive bar. In a working schlub's dive bar located in a remote burg in the middle of Alaska, which in the real world would have exactly one record: a scratchy old 45 of Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Lodi" that just plays over and over until somebody goes berserk and smashes the jukebox with a moose jaw.



• At the end of the episode we learn that the tiny radio station in this equally tiny town somehow gets enough call-in traffic to justify the cost of twenty phone lines.


• Marin spends the entire pilot determined to escape Elmo, then in the last moments makes a totally improbable snap judgment to stay there. I suppose it's possible that she was transfixed by a sudden, pungent whiff of salmon, borne on the ocean breeze. If so, you can expect the show to last three years, then end with Marin flying home, taking ecstacy, driving to Fresno, and announcing to the press that even though she's no longer in Alaska, she wouldn't technically call herself a mainlander.

All I'm saying is, if you like your television to be set in a universe even slightly similar to our own, you should probably just move along. There's nothing to see here.

On a positive note, Elmo is refreshingly free of characters who are quirky for quirky's sake. The dopey innkeeper is not also a self-taught astrophysicist who is building a working space shuttle out of pine cones and velcro. The pilot is not secretly a deposed Sudanese prince in hiding who has learned to speak the ancient and noble language of the grizzly. And although there is an eskimo who spouts mystic wisdom, his brand of mumbo jumbo is not an insightful summary of the show's moral; it is useless, completely insane, and very funny.

Not that anyone could summarize the show's moral. While it's clear that Men in Trees aspires to provide astute commentary on the nature of relationships, I can't for the life of me figure out what it's trying to get across. I'm not sure that the writers know either.

See if you can piece anything together from the various nuggets of wisdom the pilot bestows upon us: Men are bad. Except sometimes men are good. But you must understand, it's hard for men because women expect them to be both bad and good. Women are also sometimes bad, but when they are, we just say that they're acting like men. And, well, relationships are just weird, but darned if we don't keep running headlong into the crazy things!

Thanks so much, Dr. Brothers! That explains everything.

The show's other message -- and I know this only because one of the characters actually states it verbatim -- is, "Maybe you should stop thinking in stereotypes." That's all well and good, but it would carry a lot more weight if it wasn't coming from a script that features such stereotype-busting characters as a superficial yuppie who is ignorant of the down-home wisdom of the country folk, a shrewish book editor whose crusty exterior masks a hidden yearning for love, and -- I kid you not -- a hooker with a heart of gold.

So here we have all the makings of a televised train wreck. And yet, Men in Trees' breezy triviality turns out to be the show's biggest strength. A few years back I might have called it inconsequential drivel, but given the recent glut of crime procedurals and moody Lost clones, this dumb, dumb show feels like a fresh Spring breeze blowing through the charnel house. It's just refreshing to spend an hour in an environment where there's so little to worry about; nobody's in danger of being gang-raped, nobody accidentally kills a kid on the operating table, and nobody has to be reconstructed from scalp fragments and teeth discovered in the soft serve dispenser at the Souplantation.

So in spite of my misgivings, my thought process while watching the pilot went something like this: "Oh, this show is cute. Ugh, this show is annoyingly cute. Hmm... this show is intriguingly cute. Hey, I'd forgotten how much I used to like 'cute'!"

That's not to say that Men in Trees is a masterpiece, but it is something that is otherwise in short supply on this year's prime time schedule: fun.

The show has some other things going for it, too, not the least of which is Anne Heche's turn as Marin Frist. As we learned from her stint on Ally McBeal, Heche is a natural at the silly, slapsticky sort of humor that's on display here. She sells her ludicrous situation with an effortless, un-self-conscious charm, and in the process makes her basically obnoxious character seem likeable.

The rest of the cast is also strong, particularly the always terrific John Amos, who gets most of the best lines and deserves them. It's also great to see Abraham Benrubi -- the guy who played Jerry the desk clerk on ER several decades ago when it was still watchable -- as the town bartender; though I'm thinking the lower half of his body should really get a better agent.

The cast's weak link is James Tupper, who as Marin's apparent love interest is so wooden he should be standing in the corner of a cigar shop wearing a headdress. Then again, that might be because all the script asks him to do is be strong and silent, like the mighty oak. Way to blow apart our preconceived notions again, Men in Trees!

There's also some genuinely funny dialogue. I'm shocked to admit that I actually laughed out loud three separate times, which is five times more than I did when I watched the pilot of 'Til Death.

The question is, can Men in Trees sustain our interest in this shallow, overly talky, mildly grating character's love life for more than a couple of episodes? I wouldn't think so; but then, I didn't think anybody would want to watch the four shallow, talky, grating hobags on Sex and the City either, and that lasted six seasons. I still say that show's runaway success was largely a testament to how much yapping guys will put up with in order to get a glimpse of some funbags. Men in Trees probably won't scare up nearly as much of a male audience, because there's no full frontal on network television, and because there are no funbags on Anne Heche.

However long it lasts, you can expect Men in Trees to remain daffy, lightweight, and preposterous. And I think that's reason enough to give it a shot.

What I did in 650 words, the Nobody's Watching guys do in 30 minutes: namely, make you realize that after you watch 'Til Death, you'll be begging for death.

Whatever you think of this fall's crop of new shows, September and October are yielding a near-ridiculous wealth of terrific returning series. In the midst of new seasons of The Wire, Battlestar Galactica, Lost, Doctor Who, and Veronica Mars, all of which are either already airing or will premiere in the next six weeks, don't forget about the little-heralded but long-awaited return of A&E's superb MI-5.

Last seen on these shores way back in early 2005, Britain's marvelously dark, morally murky examination of intelligence and counterterrorism looks all the better in contrast to 24's continuing slide into lurid, Limbaugh-baiting terrorporn. Compared to the adventures of Jack Bauer, Two-Fisted Terrorist Buster, MI-5's previous seasons have displayed about 60% as much stuff blowin' up, perhaps 20% as much gratuitous SUV driving, at least 100% of the suspense, and about three times more nail-biting ethical quandaries.

Though it's almost invisible on A&E's Web site -- really, who needs compelling drama when you've got Dog the Bounty Hunter and Criss Angel: Mindfreak? -- U.S. fans should rest assured that season four kicks off this coming Friday, Sept. 15, at 11 p.m. Meanwhile, those lucky Brits are already up to season five, which bows two days later across the Atlantic. (Stateside purists will want to grab the DVDs of this and previous seasons, since A&E apparently hacks about 15 minutes out of each episode to make room for those commercials we all love so much.) Considering that MI-5 had ruthlessly offed or expelled all its original leading cast members by the end of last season, I, for one, can't wait to see what they've got for an encore.

This past Sunday marked my 12th wedding anniversary. I guess that should put me on the side of Brad Garrett in Fox's new sitcom ’Til Death (premiering Thursday at 8), but to be honest, I think I'm rooting for Death.

’Til Death is all about odd combinations. Brad Garrett and Joely Fisher star as the Starks, a couple married for more than 20 years. Eddie Kaye Thomas and Kat Foster are the Woodcocks, the Starks' new next-door neighbors and a pair of newlyweds to boot. (Speaking of odd combinations, yes, this is a show that stars a cast member from Everybody Loves Raymond and one from "American Pie." Everybody loves pie!)

I'm tempted to say that, based on its simple Odd Couples premise, the show writes itself. But if that were true, I'd be accusing an innocent sitcom of being a lazy writer, and that just ain't nice.

As you might expect, the Starks' relationship is portrayed as only slightly less combative than The Lockhorns. The Woodcocks, meanwhile -- a couple whose family name exists entirely for a series of crass jokes throughout the pilot episode -- are by-the-book lovebirds who giggle and coo and otherwise need to get a room.

Of course, the two contrasting couples aren't supposed to be funny on their own: the real sparks are supposed to fly when they're rubbed up against each other. Sure enough, Garrett's character quickly exposes Thomas to the seamy underbelly of married life, accurately predicting that his blushing bride will (horror of horrors!) veto his dreamed-of purchase of a pool table.

As someone who's been married for a dozen years, I can definitely understand where ’Til Death's producers -- a married couple! -- are coming from. Nobody would deny that the heady days of newlywedhood contain an energy and enthusiasm that can't sustain over the long haul. Of course, that doesn't mean that by the time we've been married more than a decade, we no longer speak to each other and instead communicate entirely by a system of grunts and laser-etched stank-eye stares. Yes, we're assured at the end of ’Til Death's pilot, the Starks really do love each other. But even that sentiment, when it finally comes, is gooey and trite.

Garrett was my favorite part of Everybody Loves Raymond, and in ’Til Death he brings a darker, begging-for-death vibe to his role has Eddie Stark. Thomas was my favorite part of "American Pie" -- well, except for Allyson Hannigan and that hot chick on the video camera -- but here he seems trapped in a bland role (as a high school Vice Principal -- could it get any blander?). I've never really liked Joely Fisher, and her part in ’Til Death didn't convince me otherwise. And I've never seen Kat Foster before, but she seems cute and perky and pleasant, which is basically what her role calls for.

Is ’Til Death terrible? No, it's not. It's at turns boring, obvious, and mildly amusing. These traits would usually indicate a sitcom that, tucked away on CBS on a Monday night, would run for about six years. Unfortunately, ’Til Death is not a CBS show. Instead, it's a show with a CBS vibe that's airing on Fox. And as a result, the show seems to have been modified to insert some of that trademark "Fox attitude" -- namely, crass jokes about the name Woodcock.

I don't see any reason to watch ’Til Death, and I doubt Thursday night audiences will either. If it were on CBS, it might have lasted as long as Yes, Dear. But since ’Til Death airs on Fox, I suspect that Garrett and company won't have to wait long for their show's namesake to arrive, scythe in hand.