Devilishly funny: The fall season is born of woulda, coulda, shoulda, as networks unleash more misses than hits. But first -- the best ...
September 16, 2007
BY DOUG ELFMAN Television Critic
The best new show of the fall is also the most fun. "Reaper" is a silly little piece of hilarity about a guy who turns 21 and finds out his parents sold his soul to the devil. For eternity, he must serve Satan as a small-fry gopher on Earth.
His first mission is to use a Hellacious hand vacuum to suck up the soul of a fugitive from Hell, then deposit the vacuum at a place, like the DMV, that seems like Hell on Earth. The place will change each week.
This plot is truly unique and fresh. It was created by two writers -- Tara Butters and Michele Fazekas -- whose resumes include "The X-Files" and "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit."
Their track record suggests "Reaper" won't start sucking anytime soon. Plus, it's on ratings-challenged CW, where shows can live forever, so it may not be canceled this decade.
The first episode benefits from being directed by Kevin ("Dogma") Smith. He won't be back, but his tight yet freewheeling style sets a tone for other directors to follow.
The cast is stellar. Bret Harrison (unknown despite starring in Fox's funny "The Loop") plays Sam, a good guy in weird circumstances whose devilish chores may not be so evil after all. Tyler ("Invasion") Labine portrays his scene-stealing friend Bert "Sock" Wysocki, who finds the whole situation totally super cool.
The hardest I laughed at the first episode comes in a stupid scene (I mean this as a compliment here) where the friend throws a bleach-type bottle at Sam's head to wake him up emotionally. Why's it funny? Why's anything funny? It works.
And Harrison and Labine -- portraying witty, dorky workers at a Home Depot-ish store called the Work Bench -- are immediately one of the funniest duos on TV.
I laughed at another scene where Labine wraps big wads of tape around his hands. I asked Harrison why that gag sings.
"You know why it's funny?" Harrison said. "Because it's random."
He and Labine say the scripts are strong, but they're also improvising their characters' comedy. For instance, Labine didn't like one line in an upcoming script where he was supposed to tell Sam, "You do rock the house on 'Guitar Hero.' "
"I said, 'Nah,' " Labine says. "We decided a better line was, 'You do eat steak pretty good.' Or: 'Yeah, you do roll an impossibly thin crepe.' "
"That is comedy, my friends," Harrison says. "Not 'Guitar Hero!' Everybody would say that s---."
He's completely right.
When Labine read the "Reaper" script, he was "relieved to see something ridiculous and asinine." There's a freedom in this, his sixth TV series. He's steering his character away from being just dumb or aimlessly goofy.
"There's a fine line between jackass and a guy who chooses to be a jackass," he says. "I've decided [that] to follow Sam into the depths of Hell sounds cool. F--- it. I work at the Work Bench. I'm bored. That sounds good."
Quite seriously, there is a lesson to be learned from "Reaper." It is not a show driven by committee and focus group (like "Brothers & Sisters," say). It's made by a team of expert individualists who are allowed to explore their own paths.
There are promising reference points for "Reaper." Labine says it will follow a "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" template of being smart and silly but not intimidating or idiotic.
And there's plenty of room to change things up. The devil is portrayed by Ray Wise, who was smiley Leland Palmer on "Twin Peaks." Or is he?
"It has things for comic-book fans like me," Harrison says. "Nuances. Like: What if this guy isn't really the devil? Like: Why hasn't there been a scene yet where he's standing behind my mom waiting to slit her throat?"
There's only one way to find out. Watch "Reaper."
Where have all the good shows gone?
Season starts on a high note but ends on a snore
September 16, 2007
It's a mediocre year for new fall shows. My three favorite new series -- "Reaper," "Chuck" and "Pushing Daisies" -- start great. But in today's lineup of the top 10 new fall dramas and comedies, the rest is the best of the blah.
"Pushing Daisies" (7 p.m. Wednesdays starting Oct. 3, WLS-Channel 7): I keep saying this but it's true. "Pushing Daisies" looks and sounds like "Amelie" meets Tim Burton, though it's helmed by Barry ("Men in Black") Sonnenfeld. The debut is a great little romantic caper where Ned can supernaturally touch dead people once and bring them back to life, and touch them a second time to kill them forever. He and his lady love Chuck (plus their business partner Emerson) go around solving crimes by briefly resurrecting corpses and interviewing them. It's clever, lovely and at times the most sumptuous visual art on TV.
"Life is Wild" (7 p.m. Sundays starting Oct. 7, WGN-Channel 9): Katie's nutty dad moves his family to nowheresville in Africa, just when she's fallen for a boy in her American high school. Suddenly, her whole life changes in the wild. This family show is much better and less smarmier than it sounds, due mostly to pleasant direction and a charismatic star turn from Leah Pipes. It's filmed in Africa, too, not on a SoCal location, so nature lovers rejoice.
"Aliens in America" (7:30 Mondays starting Oct. 1, WGN-Channel 9): So a Wisconsin family decides to take in a foreign exchange student, and what they get is a Pakistani in the era of terrorism alerts. Of course, Pakistanis are not terrorists by definition, but the family and the high school will have to get their heads around this. The debut episode is fairly funny in spots, though it also falls into a few lesson-learning traps. Even so, there's comedy and a possibility for charmingly dorky scenes to come.
"Samantha Who" (8:30 p.m. Mondays starting Oct. 15, WLS-Channel 7): Christina Applegate returns with a strong performance as a woman who wakes up in a hospital with amnesia. This sounds like a soap-opera setup, but the script moves in a good direction. Samantha used to be a cocktail-swilling, lying jerkwad, and the amnesia gives her a chance to realize this and change her ways. The comedy lies in her finding out how awful she used to be. The premiere is just pretty good, but "Samantha" looks like it could add more fun down the line as it develops.
"Women's Murder Club" (8 p.m. Fridays starting Oct. 12, WLS-Channel 7): This is really just a good-cop, bad-guy show starring Angie Harmon, but the debut is well made for what it is. For once, all the detectiving protagonists are women -- a prosecutor, a journalist and other females with snooping skills. They also help each other personally instead of backstabbing, which is a welcome relief on TV. It's a sappy process at its worst, but solid and traditional at its core for fans of the genre.
"K-ville" (8 p.m. Mondays starting this week, WFLD-Channel 32): Here's yet another half-good, half-troubled new series. The good -- it's fairly interesting to watch cops deal with life in post-Katrina New Orleans. The bad -- the plots can be kind of ridiculous at times, adding outlandish storylines to an already crazy situation. Can "K-ville" ditch the dumb and embrace the powerful elements? That's the question.
'Bionic Woman'
September 16, 2007
8 p.m. Wednesdays starting Sept. 26, WMAQ-Channel 5:
I can't believe "Bionic Woman" is in my Top 10 new shows list. That tells you how weak the fall schedule is. It's not horrible. It just doesn't yet execute its mighty premise with super skills.
It begins with an homage to "La Femme Nikita" but poorly so. Then Michelle Ryan, as the good bionic woman, gets upstaged by the great screen presence of Katee Sackhoff, portraying an apparently evil bionic woman.
Even Ryan humbly gives props to Sackhoff for making her rise to the challenge of action scenes. "There was this one section where I have to punch [Sackhoff] and she was saying to me, 'Hit me, hit me.' And I was like, 'But I don't want to hurt you.' But she was like, 'No! Just hit me!"
When impressed TV critics asked producer David Eick this summer if Sackhoff will steal the show, he joked she can be kept in check: "It doesn't take much. Withhold her snacks, and she'll be good."
Ryan isn't a slouch. She's unknown here in the States, but she's a star in England for acting in "EastEnders," a very popular soap.
Anyhow, the show should be named "Bionic Women," since there is good nemesis chemistry between the two lead actresses. Their bond bodes well for the drama, if it survives high expectations, a moderate introduction -- and Isaiah Washington, the guy "Grey's Anatomy" broke up with. Washington joins the show later for a guest-star run before NBC sets him up with his own action series next year. Maybe he'll be "The Bionic Man"?
'Chuck'
September 16, 2007
7 p.m. Mondays starting Sept. 24, WMAQ-Channel 5:
It's the year of the dork, and Chuck is the dork of dorks. He works in a Best Buy-ish place one day. The next, he incidentally gets his brain packed full of national security secrets and turns into a super brainiac spy against his will.
This is a comedic superhero show, unlike most of the dramatic comic book stuff on NBC. The tone is like "Alias" meets "The 40 Year Old Virgin." The premiere is lightly funny.
Can it keep up the comedy? Star Zachary Levi thinks it will. And he believes viewers will be drawn to Chuck as much as he is.
"When I was in high school, I was tucked into a theater doing theater all the time," he says. "I wasn't a jock. I am Chuck in many ways. And I feel the general audience that watches television can relate to Chuck more than they can to a superhero ... He's a great guy, and he means well, and he wants to fix computers. But at the end of the day, he'll pee his pants if someone points a gun at him."
The young-skewing script will be lost on some older viewers, especially when they hear video game lines like, "The terrible troll raises his sword!" But the childlike quirkiness of "Chuck" is not lost on Levi. Dork is the new cool, he says, and he points to Tina Fey as an icon of the Generation of Dorks, with her smartypants eyeglasses and confident, witty outsiderism.
"Tina Fey on '30 Rock,' in a way, she's definitely that cute and unassuming and nice girl, trying to make her way in the world." Chuck will be trying to make his way in a world of NSA agents. People will aim pistols at him. Will he pee his pants? Keep your fingers crossed.
'Gossip Girl'
September 16, 2007
8 p.m. Wednesdays starting this week, WGN-Channel 9:
A few touchy TV critics have lambasted this melodrama soap because it follows fight-happy prep-school teens who get drunk and get raped and such. It's one of the worst new series -- but for its cardboard acting and writing, not for the morals.
I'm including it on this list only for its slight watchability as a potential conversation piece/train wreck. The catty, sex-obsessed dialogue tries to be contemporary -- "tap that ass," limoncellos, etc. -- though all it accomplishes is creating a visual state of awful terribleness.
So anyway, back to the sex and drugs among snooty, old-money teens from New York. Show creator Josh Schwartz, who also produced the rich kids of "The O.C.," claims kids' nasty actions will result in consequences:
"These are flawed characters. And they're trying to do good. And in the environment that they grow up in, they don't always have the best role models," he told critics this summer.
Oddly, "Gossip Girl" is narrated by Kristen ("Veronica Mars") Bell, who gives voice to the title's gossip-writing blogger, a la Perez Hilton. But you never see Gossip Girl. In fact, producers say the narrator is not necessarily even a character Bell will ever play, but that the narration is merely a representation of words being written under the pseudonym of Gossip Girl. That's strange.
Then there are actors who are nothing like their characters. One nasty side girl is played by Nan Zhang, whose real life career path is in science: "I studied for ophthalmology and neuroscience research, and later I focused on photoreceptor retinal damage and ear protection. So just after the [first 'Gossip Girl' episode] wrapped, I was also working on stem cell research."
But don't expect to see any shows to be based on bright young women working on stem cell research. That would really, really draw the ire of the conservative "family values" interest groups.
Doug Elfman
BY DOUG ELFMAN Television Critic
The best new show of the fall is also the most fun. "Reaper" is a silly little piece of hilarity about a guy who turns 21 and finds out his parents sold his soul to the devil. For eternity, he must serve Satan as a small-fry gopher on Earth.
His first mission is to use a Hellacious hand vacuum to suck up the soul of a fugitive from Hell, then deposit the vacuum at a place, like the DMV, that seems like Hell on Earth. The place will change each week.
This plot is truly unique and fresh. It was created by two writers -- Tara Butters and Michele Fazekas -- whose resumes include "The X-Files" and "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit."
Their track record suggests "Reaper" won't start sucking anytime soon. Plus, it's on ratings-challenged CW, where shows can live forever, so it may not be canceled this decade.
The first episode benefits from being directed by Kevin ("Dogma") Smith. He won't be back, but his tight yet freewheeling style sets a tone for other directors to follow.
The cast is stellar. Bret Harrison (unknown despite starring in Fox's funny "The Loop") plays Sam, a good guy in weird circumstances whose devilish chores may not be so evil after all. Tyler ("Invasion") Labine portrays his scene-stealing friend Bert "Sock" Wysocki, who finds the whole situation totally super cool.
The hardest I laughed at the first episode comes in a stupid scene (I mean this as a compliment here) where the friend throws a bleach-type bottle at Sam's head to wake him up emotionally. Why's it funny? Why's anything funny? It works.
And Harrison and Labine -- portraying witty, dorky workers at a Home Depot-ish store called the Work Bench -- are immediately one of the funniest duos on TV.
I laughed at another scene where Labine wraps big wads of tape around his hands. I asked Harrison why that gag sings.
"You know why it's funny?" Harrison said. "Because it's random."
He and Labine say the scripts are strong, but they're also improvising their characters' comedy. For instance, Labine didn't like one line in an upcoming script where he was supposed to tell Sam, "You do rock the house on 'Guitar Hero.' "
"I said, 'Nah,' " Labine says. "We decided a better line was, 'You do eat steak pretty good.' Or: 'Yeah, you do roll an impossibly thin crepe.' "
"That is comedy, my friends," Harrison says. "Not 'Guitar Hero!' Everybody would say that s---."
He's completely right.
When Labine read the "Reaper" script, he was "relieved to see something ridiculous and asinine." There's a freedom in this, his sixth TV series. He's steering his character away from being just dumb or aimlessly goofy.
"There's a fine line between jackass and a guy who chooses to be a jackass," he says. "I've decided [that] to follow Sam into the depths of Hell sounds cool. F--- it. I work at the Work Bench. I'm bored. That sounds good."
Quite seriously, there is a lesson to be learned from "Reaper." It is not a show driven by committee and focus group (like "Brothers & Sisters," say). It's made by a team of expert individualists who are allowed to explore their own paths.
There are promising reference points for "Reaper." Labine says it will follow a "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" template of being smart and silly but not intimidating or idiotic.
And there's plenty of room to change things up. The devil is portrayed by Ray Wise, who was smiley Leland Palmer on "Twin Peaks." Or is he?
"It has things for comic-book fans like me," Harrison says. "Nuances. Like: What if this guy isn't really the devil? Like: Why hasn't there been a scene yet where he's standing behind my mom waiting to slit her throat?"
There's only one way to find out. Watch "Reaper."
Where have all the good shows gone?
Season starts on a high note but ends on a snore
September 16, 2007
It's a mediocre year for new fall shows. My three favorite new series -- "Reaper," "Chuck" and "Pushing Daisies" -- start great. But in today's lineup of the top 10 new fall dramas and comedies, the rest is the best of the blah.
"Pushing Daisies" (7 p.m. Wednesdays starting Oct. 3, WLS-Channel 7): I keep saying this but it's true. "Pushing Daisies" looks and sounds like "Amelie" meets Tim Burton, though it's helmed by Barry ("Men in Black") Sonnenfeld. The debut is a great little romantic caper where Ned can supernaturally touch dead people once and bring them back to life, and touch them a second time to kill them forever. He and his lady love Chuck (plus their business partner Emerson) go around solving crimes by briefly resurrecting corpses and interviewing them. It's clever, lovely and at times the most sumptuous visual art on TV.
"Life is Wild" (7 p.m. Sundays starting Oct. 7, WGN-Channel 9): Katie's nutty dad moves his family to nowheresville in Africa, just when she's fallen for a boy in her American high school. Suddenly, her whole life changes in the wild. This family show is much better and less smarmier than it sounds, due mostly to pleasant direction and a charismatic star turn from Leah Pipes. It's filmed in Africa, too, not on a SoCal location, so nature lovers rejoice.
"Aliens in America" (7:30 Mondays starting Oct. 1, WGN-Channel 9): So a Wisconsin family decides to take in a foreign exchange student, and what they get is a Pakistani in the era of terrorism alerts. Of course, Pakistanis are not terrorists by definition, but the family and the high school will have to get their heads around this. The debut episode is fairly funny in spots, though it also falls into a few lesson-learning traps. Even so, there's comedy and a possibility for charmingly dorky scenes to come.
"Samantha Who" (8:30 p.m. Mondays starting Oct. 15, WLS-Channel 7): Christina Applegate returns with a strong performance as a woman who wakes up in a hospital with amnesia. This sounds like a soap-opera setup, but the script moves in a good direction. Samantha used to be a cocktail-swilling, lying jerkwad, and the amnesia gives her a chance to realize this and change her ways. The comedy lies in her finding out how awful she used to be. The premiere is just pretty good, but "Samantha" looks like it could add more fun down the line as it develops.
"Women's Murder Club" (8 p.m. Fridays starting Oct. 12, WLS-Channel 7): This is really just a good-cop, bad-guy show starring Angie Harmon, but the debut is well made for what it is. For once, all the detectiving protagonists are women -- a prosecutor, a journalist and other females with snooping skills. They also help each other personally instead of backstabbing, which is a welcome relief on TV. It's a sappy process at its worst, but solid and traditional at its core for fans of the genre.
"K-ville" (8 p.m. Mondays starting this week, WFLD-Channel 32): Here's yet another half-good, half-troubled new series. The good -- it's fairly interesting to watch cops deal with life in post-Katrina New Orleans. The bad -- the plots can be kind of ridiculous at times, adding outlandish storylines to an already crazy situation. Can "K-ville" ditch the dumb and embrace the powerful elements? That's the question.
'Bionic Woman'
September 16, 2007
8 p.m. Wednesdays starting Sept. 26, WMAQ-Channel 5:
I can't believe "Bionic Woman" is in my Top 10 new shows list. That tells you how weak the fall schedule is. It's not horrible. It just doesn't yet execute its mighty premise with super skills.
It begins with an homage to "La Femme Nikita" but poorly so. Then Michelle Ryan, as the good bionic woman, gets upstaged by the great screen presence of Katee Sackhoff, portraying an apparently evil bionic woman.
Even Ryan humbly gives props to Sackhoff for making her rise to the challenge of action scenes. "There was this one section where I have to punch [Sackhoff] and she was saying to me, 'Hit me, hit me.' And I was like, 'But I don't want to hurt you.' But she was like, 'No! Just hit me!"
When impressed TV critics asked producer David Eick this summer if Sackhoff will steal the show, he joked she can be kept in check: "It doesn't take much. Withhold her snacks, and she'll be good."
Ryan isn't a slouch. She's unknown here in the States, but she's a star in England for acting in "EastEnders," a very popular soap.
Anyhow, the show should be named "Bionic Women," since there is good nemesis chemistry between the two lead actresses. Their bond bodes well for the drama, if it survives high expectations, a moderate introduction -- and Isaiah Washington, the guy "Grey's Anatomy" broke up with. Washington joins the show later for a guest-star run before NBC sets him up with his own action series next year. Maybe he'll be "The Bionic Man"?
'Chuck'
September 16, 2007
7 p.m. Mondays starting Sept. 24, WMAQ-Channel 5:
It's the year of the dork, and Chuck is the dork of dorks. He works in a Best Buy-ish place one day. The next, he incidentally gets his brain packed full of national security secrets and turns into a super brainiac spy against his will.
This is a comedic superhero show, unlike most of the dramatic comic book stuff on NBC. The tone is like "Alias" meets "The 40 Year Old Virgin." The premiere is lightly funny.
Can it keep up the comedy? Star Zachary Levi thinks it will. And he believes viewers will be drawn to Chuck as much as he is.
"When I was in high school, I was tucked into a theater doing theater all the time," he says. "I wasn't a jock. I am Chuck in many ways. And I feel the general audience that watches television can relate to Chuck more than they can to a superhero ... He's a great guy, and he means well, and he wants to fix computers. But at the end of the day, he'll pee his pants if someone points a gun at him."
The young-skewing script will be lost on some older viewers, especially when they hear video game lines like, "The terrible troll raises his sword!" But the childlike quirkiness of "Chuck" is not lost on Levi. Dork is the new cool, he says, and he points to Tina Fey as an icon of the Generation of Dorks, with her smartypants eyeglasses and confident, witty outsiderism.
"Tina Fey on '30 Rock,' in a way, she's definitely that cute and unassuming and nice girl, trying to make her way in the world." Chuck will be trying to make his way in a world of NSA agents. People will aim pistols at him. Will he pee his pants? Keep your fingers crossed.
'Gossip Girl'
September 16, 2007
8 p.m. Wednesdays starting this week, WGN-Channel 9:
A few touchy TV critics have lambasted this melodrama soap because it follows fight-happy prep-school teens who get drunk and get raped and such. It's one of the worst new series -- but for its cardboard acting and writing, not for the morals.
I'm including it on this list only for its slight watchability as a potential conversation piece/train wreck. The catty, sex-obsessed dialogue tries to be contemporary -- "tap that ass," limoncellos, etc. -- though all it accomplishes is creating a visual state of awful terribleness.
So anyway, back to the sex and drugs among snooty, old-money teens from New York. Show creator Josh Schwartz, who also produced the rich kids of "The O.C.," claims kids' nasty actions will result in consequences:
"These are flawed characters. And they're trying to do good. And in the environment that they grow up in, they don't always have the best role models," he told critics this summer.
Oddly, "Gossip Girl" is narrated by Kristen ("Veronica Mars") Bell, who gives voice to the title's gossip-writing blogger, a la Perez Hilton. But you never see Gossip Girl. In fact, producers say the narrator is not necessarily even a character Bell will ever play, but that the narration is merely a representation of words being written under the pseudonym of Gossip Girl. That's strange.
Then there are actors who are nothing like their characters. One nasty side girl is played by Nan Zhang, whose real life career path is in science: "I studied for ophthalmology and neuroscience research, and later I focused on photoreceptor retinal damage and ear protection. So just after the [first 'Gossip Girl' episode] wrapped, I was also working on stem cell research."
But don't expect to see any shows to be based on bright young women working on stem cell research. That would really, really draw the ire of the conservative "family values" interest groups.
Doug Elfman
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