Two days, two posts

It seems wise, before we get too deep into the rest of the Fall season (and, to my horror, a good bit of summer, as well!) to take note of the shows I decided not even to try.  If I’m honest, it’s hard to see much that they have in common, aside from my not being in the mood to see them when they aired.  

Seasoned Television is Important readers know what "SimonBakers" are:  a one-to-five scale, measuring my disapproval for a show I don't watch.  One SimonBaker means "I sort of wish I had had time to watch that."  Five SimonBakers means "you would need to pry my eyes open with toothpicks to make me watch that."  Instead of discussing their Premise and Promise, I discuss their premise and my prejudice against them. 

With no further ado, here are some 2016 Summer and Fall SimonBakers:

Feed the Beast (ABC, new Summer 2016.  Drama.) (Canceled after one season.): Three SimonBakers.

Premise:  Two friends navigate the corrupt underbelly of the Bronx as they try to turn their lives around by opening an upscale Greek restaurant.

Prejudice: Opening a restaurant is, short of actual criminal activity, the worst idea for “turning your life around” ever.  And “corrupt underbelly” is one of my least favorite environments to watch.  I assume it was a bunch of men making excuses for being terrible people.

The A Word (Sundance, UK show, new to US Summer 2016. Drama.) (Will be returning for a second season.): Two SimonBakers.

Premise:  A dysfunctional family raises an autistic son. 

Prejudice:  I couldn’t tell from the ads whether this was supposed to be funny or not.  I presume it was meant to be poignant.  I was put off by promos featuring Christopher Eccleston.  But for all I know, it turned out to be charming and poignant, or whatever it wanted to be.  I just wasn’t up for something that might turn out to be maudlin.

Queen Sugar (OWN, new Fall 2016.  Drama.)  (Will be returning for a second season.): One SimonBaker.

Premise:  Two successful women move back to the heart of Louisiana to run a sugarcane farm and deal with family drama.

Prejudice:  I kept thinking I was going to watch this.  Perhaps I still may.  But it always crept to the end of my viewing priorities, for reasons I can’t quite explain.  I think it was because, much like The A Word, I couldn’t wrap my head around the show’s intended tone:  I couldn’t tell whether it was going to be a story of hard-fought struggle and redemption (yay) or a soap opera (boo).  And I was never in the mood for something I couldn’t predict.  But if it’s the former, surely I am its target market.  I’m still interested in coming back to it. 

Quarry (Cinemax, new Fall 2016.  Historical crime drama.) (Future unknown.): Two SimonBakers.

Premise:  Vietnam vet returns to the US and, through an ironic turn of events, becomes a contract killer.

Prejudice:  I watched the first half hour of this before quitting, but I feel justified in giving it the unwatched treatment, because nothing of interest happened in the half hour I saw.  The whole mood felt macho and sad, and I wasn’t into it.  It’s funny, I really enjoyed Hap & Leonard, and this could have been similar.  But where Hap & Leonard was pulpy and noirish, this looked bleak and morose.

Bull (CBS, new Fall 2016.  Lawyer procedural.) (Likely to be renewed.) Four SimonBakers.

Premise:  A jury consultant helps clients strategize to get the verdicts they want.

Prejudice: SimonBakers are named after my ignorant distaste for the very idea of The Mentalist, and I feel exactly the same way about Bull as I did about that one.  We might as well re-name SimonBakers Michael Weatherlys (although we won’t). There are so many things wrong with this idea, from my standpoint.  First, it’s based on Doctor Phil’s career.  Second, it’s a law show.  But third, and most importantly, it’s a cynical law show that seems to glorify manipulation of the system. Bonus observation:  after a colleague described an episode to me, I realized that a viable law exam format could be “identify all of the things that are legally wrong with this episode of television [described here] and explain why they are wrong.”

No Tomorrow (CW, new Fall 2016.  Dramedy.) (Future unknown.) Two SimonBakers.

Premise:  A young woman gets involved with a free spirit who predicts an imminent apocalypse and encourages her to chase her dreams.

Prejudice:  The whole thing seemed so unrelentingly cheerful and “quirky” in the ads that it put me off.  I love quirkiness when it happens naturally, but when it’s engineered or forced, I find it tiring.  I just didn’t see the appeal.  It might be very entertaining—I might not know what I’m missing—but I didn’t feel like I needed to see.

Pure Genius (CBS, new Fall 2016.  Medical procedural) (Canceled.) Three SimonBakers.

Premise:  A Silicon Valley billionaire and a maverick surgeon operate a cutting-edge hospital to provide free treatment for rare and incurable diseases.

Prejudice:  Any show description that includes the words “billionaire” and “maverick” and tells me the leads will “clear out the bureaucracy of medicine” is probably doomed, where I’m concerned.  I expected a heady mix of self-congratulations, techno-utopianism, and emotional manipulation that sounded deeply unappealing.

On the metaphorical DVR:  SO! MUCH! MORE!

The Past is Personal

Other responsibilities pulled me away from reviewing for a while – too long! – and I’m eager to resume.  So let’s dive right in!

In the last 12 months, TV has given us three shows about time travel—or more specifically, about the idea that changing the past could change the present.  In fact, we’ve had four of those, considering that the entire Fall 2016 season of The Flash has been about the consequences of going back to change the past.

That trend, in itself, isn’t so weird.  Certain ideas hit the zeitgeist, and this is apparently time-travel’s moment.  Perhaps that’s because time travel is one of the few technological frontiers that seem truly out of reach in a world where tricorders and wristwatch-communicators are commonplace.  Perhaps we just hit a critical mass of things in the world that people wish they could go back and change. 

What’s weird is that the driving force of all of them—even the Flash!—is a man wanting to use the advantages of future-knowledge to save his wife or mother from a death he believes shouldn’t have happened.  As a result, the shows are crammed full of hubris and manpain and the selfishly myopic idea that changing the past to save one person is “good,” even if it hurts or kills others.  I find it remarkable how much license the shows give their characters—especially the male ones—even when they make objectively risky or harmful decisions in the interest of “protecting” the women they love.  The women are helpless and stripped of agency—of course, they’re dead—and they exist to motivate the men.  The women's own interests are irrelevant, but implicitly devalued—after all, their judgment cannot possibly be as good as those informed by future-knowledge.  The women’s chief value is as a beloved possession, and getting them “back” might as well be retrieving a child's lost teddy bear.

I don’t mean to imply these shows don’t do good or fun things.  I’ve enjoyed Timeless’s exploration of race and gender in history.  There have been some real clever moments in Frequency (although not clever enough to keep me watching).  Occasionally the shows wrestle with the moral implications of believing there is a “right” history and a whole lot of “wrong” ones, or with vastness of their possibilities.  Full marks to the Flash for portraying the decision to change the past as something other than heroic (but harsher marks for its continued reliance on poor intercharacter communication to create drama).  Mixed marks to the others.

DC’s Legends of Tomorrow (CW, new January 2016.  Action/Adventure.)

Watched:  three or four episodes

Premise:  Several second-line superheroes travel through time to stop a first-line supervillain

Promise:  When first billed, this show seemed like it might have an “Adventuring Party Travels Through Time” vibe that replicated some of the fun of playing the TimeWatch RPG.  (If you’re a tabletop role—playing gamer, I highly recommend playing it.)  And on one hand, it did.  It gave us some of the goofier bits of role-playing, where the player characters wander into unfamiliar situations never knowing whether they’ll make them better or worse.  But the group didn’t feel like a coherent adventuring party—their skills didn’t complement each other, so at any given time there would be characters with redundant skills, yet still gaps in the group’s collective abilities.  And at some point, most episodes would inevitably devolve into a bunch of superheroes whizzing around in set-piece fights.  It felt at once too serious and too silly, perhaps a side effect of bringing in characters from shows with different moods and throwing them into a third mood.  Ultimately, I came away feeling like these characters were second-string for a reason, and they didn’t put their time traveling ability to well thought-out uses, and I wandered off. 

Verdict:  I’d heard the second season was better than the first (and abandoned the “save the damsel” element as well), but after watching the recent crossover, I’m not convinced.

Frequency (CW, new Fall 2016.  Law enforcement drama). 

Watched:  about 9 epsiodes

Premise:  In 2016, a police detective communicates backward through time to help her father prevent the 1996 serial-killer death of her mother.

Promise:  There are a lot of clever things happening in this show.  As the past changes, our heroine remembers the intervening years both ways, giving the show ample opportunity to explore the consequences of changing the timeline.  The characters have to be creative to communicate and use the evidence they gather.  But I gradually began to dislike everyone on the show, and that dislike has grown so strong that I’d rather not watch the show than start actively rooting against them, and those are the options I have left.  Seriously, everyone’s awful.  Corrupt, morally suspect, sociopathic, rude, hypocritical, whiny….   The father is a weird combination of pushover and bully.  The daughter is rash and cruel.  The mother is rigid and headstrong.  The partner is disloyal at best.  Seriously, I’m starting to wonder if the dirty-cop boss isn’t so bad after all. 

Verdict:  This review pretty much sums it up.

Timeless (NBC, new Fall 2016.  Science fiction spy drama.)

Watched: season so far

Premise:  A historian, a soldier, and an engineer travel through time unraveling a conspiracy and chasing a fellow time-traveler who seems intent on destroying U.S. history.

Promise:  The underlying motivations of these characters are maddening.  With only one real exception, every character on the show has selfish and poorly-thought-out motives, and the show doesn’t condemn them for it, although it should.  This show has not one, but two dead wives who need saving, and a dead sister.  And it seems oddly sanguine about letting other people die to save those three.  What makes those three special?  Our main characters knew them.  But setting that aside.  Of the three reviewed here, this show also has the most depth.  It actually considers, sometimes, the broader context and consequences of its characters’ actions.  It struggles to explain how their actions don’t totally derail chronal stability.  It keeps its butterfly effects both real and (relatively) small.  It tackles issues of race and gender in American history—not always in the most subtle or artful way, but at least it tries.  Malcolm Barrett (who I remember fondly from Better Off Ted) is fantastic.

Verdict:  Despite my criticisms, I’m still enjoying it.

On the metaphorical DVR:  More than a whole season's worth of TV!  YEAH!

Summer Camp

I think of the summer season as light-entertainment time.  And although there’s been some pretty intense programming this summer, which I’ll leave for another post, I have to say I’m particularly enjoying the lighter fare.

It’s fascinating to me that this stuff I think of as “light” is actually horror or suspense.  But there’s an unreality to it, and often a dark humor, that makes it feel comforting rather than wholly unsettling.  And as I think about it, summer really did fill up with this sort of light horror/suspense over the last few years.  Harper’s Island, The Whispers, The Strain, Extant, Intruders, Wayward Pines, Zoo…and those are just a few off the top of my head.  Some are more seriously threatening than others, but few really feel like danger.  They take place in far off locales:  islands, pasts or futures, or parallel worlds where the laws of nature have changed. So the stakes are high for the characters, but those stakes will not bleed into our worlds.  I think they’re watchable precisely because of that light touch—watching people struggle to survive wouldn’t be fun if we thought it could actually happen.  Instead, just as science fiction can explore political possibility in a “safe” way, horror and suspense can explore humanity’s darker potentials without threatening our faith in humanity’s fundamental good.   Perhaps they can even be an antidote to our own, more personal fears, distracting us from more realistic everyday horrors with more fantastic ones.

Here’s a few whose topics are pretty scary, but whose executions feel light.  Add these to some of the more suspense/horror based entries from the last post, and it’s a pretty big crowd!

Houdini & Doyle (Fox, UK/US/Canada co-production, new to US.  Period law enforcement procedural).

Watched: season

Premise:  Author/spiritualist Arthur Conan Doyle and illusionist/debunker Harry Houdini team up with a female Scotland Yard officer (based loosely, albeit a bit out of time, on Edith Smith) to solve crimes that may seem supernatural.

Promise:  This AU tweaks history a little bit—but doesn’t have to tweak it too far—to come up with a clever little concept.  Most of the episodes take the question “is X (usually an unexplained murder or con scheme) really supernatural?” as their starting point.  If that were the whole game, it would get tired (see, e.g., Proof), but it’s mostly the framing mechanism for a nice Victorian-era procedural with a personal arc for each character.  Most effective is the Scotland Yard detective, who’s very competent and defiant in the face of pervasive sexism and misogyny.  

Verdict:  Fun, and better than the average summer procedural.

BrainDead (CBS, new.  Supernatural dramedy.)

Watched: season so far

Premise:  A few people doggedly fight an invasion of alien brain-eating bugs that inhabit politicians and make them more partisan.

Promise:  Here’s everything you need to know about this show:  Jonathan Coulton sings the “previouslies” before each episode.  This show has come out at the perfect time and its tone is cartoonishly amusing without being slight.  It’s biting satire about the American political process and cute entertainment at the same time.  I love that its heroes are women and people of color.   And its message is at once optimistic and fatalistic:  A few people paying attention can change things by working together, but the vast majority of political thought is (literally) mindless and destructive and if we don’t watch out, we might as well have our brains eaten by space bugs.

Verdict:  I’m totally charmed.

Dead of Summer (Freeform, new.  Horror.)

Watched: season so far

Premise: In the 1980s, a group of camp counselors deal with a local satanic cult.

Promise:  This show wouldn’t have to be nearly as good or as entertaining as it is, but it knows its tropes well and consistently surpasses them just far enough to stay surprising.  There’s always just a little bit more going on (with the characters, the mystery, the horror) than one might expect.  The story combines traditional “this is what is happening” storytelling with flashbacks into the histories of the characters and the camp to keep us engaged with each and to let us know than there’s always just a little more going on than meets the eye.  The characters have very human secrets and struggles that contrast nicely with the very inhumane things happening at the camp.  And I’m fascinated by the way the show weaves in and out of evoking “Slender Man” mythology without ever quite embodying it.

Verdict:  Good Summer Camp Horror.

On the DVR/Still Unreviewed:  Billions, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, Underground, Criminal Minds: Beyond Borders, The Girlfriend Experience, The Last Panthers, Feed the Beast, Cleverman, Queen of the South, Roadies, The A Word.

Beware Your Family

I was all ready to write a post about summer horror and suspense shows (and I still may) but as I scan the list of unreviewed shows, I’m struck by how many of them are about family mysteries and betrayals:  how your trusted family members may not be who you think they are, or about how unexpected events can destabilize a family.  This trend is particularly notable considering that it comes only two months after my “knowability” post on a deeply related trend.  With families, particularly, knowability is a ripe topic:  family is at once the most enduring and the most fraught set of relationships many will have, and one is tethered to one’s family, in one way or another, regardless of circumstances.  A friend of mine once explained that no matter how close he was with a friend, there would always be things that they could do that would make him not love them anymore…but the same was not true for his kids.  He would always love them no matter what they did.  Testing that principle can make for dramatic storytelling—so much so that sometimes it seems a cheap ploy.  Especially considering its current dominance on the screen.

I’m also struck by how many of these shows feature a sort of Mama Bear character, a woman who is driven to protect her family from an external danger.  Much like the no-nonsense female commander, the mama bear is a sort of strong female character that I can often get behind, but her ubiquity comes with the same risks as any stereotype.  The mama bear is often irrationally protective, ultimately endangering her family and herself with rash or ruthless decisions that call female leadership skills into question.  Perhaps the power and commendability of female leadership loom particularly large in my mind these days, but questions about female leadership of course loom large in many other Americans’ minds right now, too, which makes these portrayals all the more important.  Pervasive images of women scheming, lashing out, or showing compromised judgment in the name of protecting their charges—sometimes to their charges’ doom—well, those kinds of images can make viewers question the wisdom and judgment of the women seeking to protect them. 

I don’t mean we shouldn’t have mama bears on TV, or even scheming ones.  I humbly submit that Mags Bennett is one of the best characters ever created (and brilliantly performed by Margo Martindale).  But when a show’s fundamental theme is about the risks of trusting one’s family and navigating the shifting sands of familial devotion, that mama bear character needs some finesse.  It’s too easy to condemn her as irresponsible while seeing the same sorts of behavior in men as simple loyalty or leadership.

Anyway, here are a few “beware of family” shows from the last few months.  I really liked one of them, at least...

Colony (USA, Winter 2016.  Dystopian Science Fiction Drama)

Watched: Season

Premise: after a mysterious (presumably alien) force occupies Los Angeles, the occupation government recruits a former FBI agent to hunt down the resistance, while his wife covertly aids them.

Promise: This show explores big themes through personal stories in a really effective way.  Both husband and wife believe that they are doing the best thing they can to protect their family from a tyrannical danger—the husband by playing along and the wife by fighting.  The show steadfastly and wisely refuses to tell us who the occupying force are and what they want, leaving us to explore the different citizens’ responses and consider what ours would be, to root for some characters and shake our fists at others, and to ask ourselves big questions about the relationship between freedom and comfort, risk and principle.  What would we do to preserve our ways of life?  Would we place ourselves in danger, or let ourselves get slowly boiled like frogs?

Verdict:  I enjoyed it.

Greenleaf (OWN, new.  Drama.)

Watched: pilot

Premise:  Successful career woman returns to her wealthy, influential church family in Tennessee after 20 years away and discovers secrets and lies just beneath the surface.

Promise:  This is a beautifully produced show with a big cast and no shortage of passive-aggressive glares and soapy scandals to go around.  The stories center not only on the usual soapy family jealousies and power machinations but also larger underlying questions about the inner righteousness of the outwardly-righteous, and the lengths to which they will go to prevent being exposed.  It was all a bit too soapy for me—most of the characters acted strategically rather than compassionately and jockeyed for power in ways that I found it hard to root for any of them—but for viewers who like the “money and power” genre, this one not only worked, but also seemed positioned for more depth than most.

Verdict:  I didn’t connect with it.

Guilt (Freeform, new.  Long-form mystery/drama.)

Watched: first three episodes

Premise:  American assistant district attorney travels to London to help her sister, who has been accused of murdering her roommate; a twisty conspiracy emerges.

Promise: This show is right in Freeform’s wheelhouse, which seems to be tales of young, generally competent women getting in over their heads.  I’m not sure I can think of a single Freeform original production that can’t be boiled down to that premise, actually.  Not that I’m complaining:  It’s good to know there’s an outlet for programming about audacious young women, even if they don’t all land in my strike zone.  Anyway, this show has a lot to recommend it, including twisty conspiracies and a slightly-caricatured mood that means anything can happen.  It highlights some predictable connections between privilege, and money, sex, and death, and some less-predictable ones.

Mostly, though, this show suffers by its comparison with the brilliant miniseries London Spy, with which it has just enough in common to merit the comparison, but little enough in common to suffer for it.  Unlike London Spy, here there’s no one whose emotions we can grab on to, no one we can really empathize with or root for—not even the people who are probably good guys.  Even the older sister shifts pretty quickly from “legal protector” to “scheming mama bear.”  (And the show already had a good scheming lawyer in Billy Zane—it didn’t need another.  Perhaps I’m just disappointed to learn that the show’s creators are both attorneys.  Betrayers!)  The one storyline I find interesting—a connection with royalty that I will not reveal for spoiler reasons—gets relatively short shrift, surrounded by everyone else’s attempts to sway public opinion and direct the course of the investigation.  The moral, I expect, is that image is all: in the age of social media, “whodunit” matters less than “who looks like they dun it.”  While that may be the world we live in, I would rather spend time with the mystery than with the public relations campaign.

Verdict:  I’m wandering off, although I’m curious enough that I may wander back for the season finale.

Animal Kingdom (TNT, new.  Crime drama.)

Watched: first episode and a half

Premise:  After the death of his mother, a teenager moves in with his grandmother, the matriarch of a crime family.

Promise:  This is loosely based on a real crime family in Australia, and it had a lot of potential.  But it didn’t hold my attention, and I think that’s because it didn’t start from a cohesive family place.  From the start, the family is a mess, with mistrust and fractured loyalties.  The matriarch is a leader of sorts, but the rest of the family is a swirl of barely-contained man-boys who, based on the kinds of decisions we see them making now, should have gotten caught a long time ago.  And the matriarch doesn’t have the gravitas I want from a criminal boss either—she’s as much of an enabler as she is a mastermind, and her theme seems to be “I raised 4 boys.”   Much of what I saw centered on how foolish the men’s macho bravado was, but that meant having to watch a lot of foolish macho bravado.

Verdict:  I got bored.

American Gothic (CBS, new.  Long-form mystery.)

Watched: pilot

Premise:  Rich Boston family discovers that they may be connected to a famed serial killer.

Promise:  This family has the array of dysfunction one might expect from rich TV industrialists—there’s the politician, the drug addict, the weird recluse, the icy mama-bear matriarch, and the “normal” one.  It’s not the most ambitious setting, but the thriller/suspense elements are effective and the storytelling craft is well-done and even cleverer than it would need to be.  Two things turned me off from the show:  first, it has a self-serious air that I rebelled against.  The show seems to think it’s important television, when in fact it’s just a nice solid mystery.  Second, and this was the bigger critique:  Despite what seems like a happy marriage, the main character (the “normal” one) decides to hide what she learns about her family’s possible connection to the killer from her police detective husband, who is investigating the killing.  I found that decision so bizarre that I didn’t actually want to watch the rest.  That may have been a rash decision on my part, but she is the character we’re meant to identify with, and I instantly stopped caring about her, and hence the show.

Verdict:  I’m out.

On the DVR/Still Unreviewed:  Billions, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, Underground, Criminal Minds: Beyond Borders, The Girlfriend Experience, The Last Panthers, Houdini & Doyle, Feed the Beast, Cleverman, BrainDead, Queen of the South, Roadies, Dead of Summer, The A Word.