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!