Fall '07: A Very Confusing "Life"
Life is random. A lot of the time, it makes no sense. People can behave in surprising and inconsistent ways, often with little or no explanation. And at the end, none of us can really say we understand it at all.
Unfortunately, the same goes for Life, NBC’s new fall cop show. The bits and pieces it tries to assemble are actually pretty good, but at least in the pilot, they never quite fit together into any sort of coherent whole.
High-concept procedurals with quirky protagonists are all the rage these days — America’s profound disinterest in seeing Jeff Goldblum as a detective who talks to dead people notwithstanding. New entrants to the genre already have to compete with hospitalization-prone twitchy Holmesian detectives, lovably obsessive-compulsive detectives, hot quasi-autistic bone detectives, and of course, a certain Vicodin-popping crippled jerkhole doctor. Life creator Rand Ravich — writer of the much-derided The Astronaut’s Wife, not to mention at least one Candyman sequel — seems to have taken all this in and thought, “I can top that.”
Thus, Life gives us a wrongfully convicted ex-con millionaire fruit-loving semi-crazy Zen cop detective. (With a promiscuous alcoholic ex-junkie partner, no less!) If this keeps up, I fully expect the fall 2009 pilot season to feature at least one show about an ex-cop psychic dentist detective from a parallel universe who practices magic, and is also secretly a bear.
If “wrongfully convicted ex-con millionaire fruit-loving semi-crazy Zen cop detective” sounds like a lot to take in, imagine how poor Damian Lewis must feel — he has to play the guy. Lewis is clearly doing his best as Charlie Crews, freed and back on the force after 12 years’ incarceration for a triple murder he didn’t commit. With only frequent prison beatings and a book about Zen to help pass the time, Charlie’s gone a little nuts. He also apparently hasn’t had access to a single newspaper or magazine in that time, since he reacts with childlike amazement to things like IMs and cameraphones in a way that walks a fine line between endearing and hugely obnoxious.
After watching the pilot, I still have no idea who Charlie Crews is — and not in any sort of good, suspenseful way. Ravich gives us a lot of little facets of the character, and none of them seem to fit with any of the others. He’s movingly compassionate to a dying, shotgun-toting crazy junkie, and gives a great speech to a pair of nasty prison guards about refusing to get angry. But he’s also apparently enough of a petty jerk to snap at a grieving mother for divorcing her violent drug-addicted convict ex-husband, and to pull over the man who married his emaciated Barbie doll of an ex-wife for a minor traffic violation. It doesn’t seem like a complex character so much as lazy, inconsistent writing, and as a result, Lewis’s performance is all over the place. Sometimes he seems wise and insightful; other times, mildly retarded.
This scattershot approach to characterization also applies to his partner, as played by the lovely and usually pretty awesome Sarah Shahi. Her natural charisma and good looks help her pull off the character, but just barely — Det. Dani Reese is woefully underwritten, and her few personality traits seem hastily slapped together. She’s an ex-junkie cop, supposedly clean and sober, and back on the force under shaky circumstances — but wait! She secretly gets drunk and beds random guys! And… that’s about it, really.
Saddled with such a cliched non-character, I really can’t blame Shahi for giving a non-performance. She seems to deliver nearly every line in a sullen monotone that betrays little or no emotion. The script’s idea of giving her a moment of crisis involves having her freak out when the aforementioned shotgun-toting junkie blasts a table of conveniently located cocaine all over her. (“Noooo! Drugs! My only weakness!”) Which, in turn, mostly seems like an excuse to have her strip down to her undershirt and have Lewis haul her underneath a shower for some hot washing-off-illicit-narcotics action.
Even the show itself can’t quite figure out whether it’s a straight procedural or a faux-documentary. Random, cliche-ridden interview segments with various peripheral characters tend to interrupt the action whenever there’s some bit of backstory that needs explaining. I can’t say I hate this, since it’s a reasonably elegant solution to the networks’ inane insistence that every pilot episode spell every nuance of the series out in big capital letters for inattentive viewers. Can you imagine if the first episode of Lost had to put up with that?
KATE: Charlie! I know you’re a once-famous rock star now living in obscurity, but can you stop struggling with your heroin addiction for a second? We have to escape from this monster-infested island on which our airliner crashed!CHARLIE: That’s easy for you to say, Kate! At least I’m not a wanted fugitive on the run for murdering her abusive father!
JACK: Hey, will you two shut up for a second? Even a brilliant surgeon like me needs some peace and quiet to wrestle with my immense daddy issues!
HURLEY: Dude! I’m fat!
It’s a shame that Life comes across so half-baked, because it does a few things enjoyably well. The mystery of the week, if a bit simplistic, is nonetheless satisfying — especially its subtly tense conclusion. The guest actors, especially the grieving mom and the crazy shotgun junkie, do great work. And most of the supporting cast is impressively strong. Adam Arkin is funny and understated as Lewis’s financial advisor, a fallen former CEO now living above his new employer’s garage. Brooke Langton has some serious chemistry going with Lewis as his devoted lawyer; a cracklingly intimate kitchen scene between the two of them is one of the few moments when the pilot truly comes alive. Only Deadwood’s abundantly awesome Robin Weigert is wasted here — for shame, Ravich! — in a flat, by-the-numbers antagonistic boss role. Oh, Calamity Jane, I miss you already.
For a show with such a ridiculously overstuffed concept, “Life” falls weirdly flat. That’s mostly the writing’s fault, and if Ravich steps back and lets other, more talented folks add some depth to the characters — as Tim Kring wisely did last season on Heroes — this show could shape up into solid entertainment. But if it stays as superficial and disjointed as its pilot suggests, Life may end up giving NBC execs a Zen koan of their own to ponder: What is the sound of one procedural flopping?
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