Someone please tap ABC on the shoulder and tell them to stop giving Shonda Rhimes unsustainable TV shows. Grey’s Anatomy is teetering along like a wagon with only three wheels. Private Practice is an embarassing blight on humanity. And now Rhimes has the green light to go behind the scenes of television news — an industry that’s dying almost as quickly as viewer interest in her two existing shows. Good thing Rhimes and company have a penchant for detailed stories about dead things.
Archive for January, 2009
BIG BROTHER | How long ’til season 11?
Okay, seriously? I must need an Oscar the Grouch-style T-shirt that says, “I love trash.” I’m trying to tide myself over with Real World Brooklyn, but other than the New York geography porn, it’s really just making me miss Big Brother.
The rumors that a second winter season was in the works have proved false. Here we are, with no strike and loads of scripted programming to tide everyone over. Nonetheless, Big Brother will be a delightful blight upon us all come July.
Best I can tell, they’re still taking applications over at the official site. You’d have to be crazy or never have seen this show to want to be on it, I think, but that hasn’t stopped anyone for eleven seasons running.
Meantime, I’ll be over here watching Real World Brooklyn and marveling at their excesses in our nation’s time of financial hardship.
INAUGURATION | Change in viewing habits is here
Lots of milestones are being celebrated and observed in connection with today’s transition of power. But one of the most striking is the increasing importance of streaming live news events, as we saw last November on Election Day. Live news, once the domain of broadcast and cable networks, is quickly migrating to the web.
Mashable has a snapshot of statistics from this morning’s main event. The St. Petersburg Times considers that today may have been one of our last shared TV events as a nation, but have the technically-inclined already migrated to their portable screens? In offices and on college campuses, computers are certainly more ubiquitous than television sets, and this is only the beginning of a trend.
What will this mean for the networks and cable? Will this shift finally convince them to take Internet distribution by the horns? Or will they continue to be left behind, like their journalistic colleagues in print media?
FAREWELL | Bush messes up prime time one last time
In what’s being called an attempt to defend his legacy, outgoing President Bush will address the nation live in primetime tonight. The fifteen-minute address is scheduled at 8p/7c. Here’s a rundown of changes:
- ABC is pre-empting Ugly Betty and will fill the hour with repeats of Scrubs, followed by Grey’s Anatomy at 9p/8c and Private Practice at 10p/9c.
- CBS will push its entire lineup the length of the address. A rerun of CSI begins at 8:15p/7:15c, followed by Grissom’s final CSI at 9:15p/8:15p and Eleventh Hour at 10:15p/9:15c.
- Fox will fill the first hour with a repeat of Kitchen Nightmares, which has its finale at 9p/8c as scheduled.
- NBC will fill the first hour with My Name is Earl, followed by The Office, 30 Rock, and ER as scheduled.
Fifteen minutes is a rough estimate of the speech length, if history is any indication. Pad your DVRs accordingly. Is it ridiculous to wonder if our next president will be more considerate of prime time?
Why I love ‘30 Rock’
With last night’s Golden Globe wins, 30 Rock has certainly cemented its status as a critical and industry favorite. It’s one of those “best shows you’re not watching.” Like other shows with this distinction, 30 Rock is hard to categorize because it doesn’t exactly fit in any one box. This makes people uncomfortable somehow.
It is safe to argue that the genius of this show and the genesis of its format-busting rests with creator and star Tina Fey, who got used to wearing multiple hats and working in a crazy environment during her tenure at Saturday Night Live, not to mention her years of improv and theater work. That’s the background she brings to the show. She didn’t work her way up the ranks of sitcom writer’s rooms. She comes from a variety and stage background.
So it’s perhaps not fair to lump 30 Rock in with a sitcom like The New Adventures of Old Christine, because they’re doing two different things. Christine is telling traditional linear sitcom stories which keep at least one foot planted in reality. 30 Rock took the sitcom outline, filled in some characters, then doodled on it in crayon and refused to stay inside the lines. 30 Rock is a more polished, stylized, fully realized SNL.
This is one reason I won’t join critics who complain about its ever-present stunt casting. Think of each week’s guest star as analogous to the SNL host, an outsider temporarily and often deftly brought into the fold. While not every celebrity’s character works out (Jennifer Aniston), the success rate (Oprah, Elaine Stritch) is much higher and more reliable than that of SNL hosts (Michael Phelps, anyone?).
As an innovative hybrid, 30 Rock should be compared to other comedy/variety programs, in which case it’s much better than, say, the now-cancelled Mad TV. 30 Rock is a live-action Muppet Show, a Smothers Brothers on ADD for generations that grew up on — and grew impatient with — the neat little boxes into which entertainment partitions itself.
It is difficult even to compare 30 Rock to other series set behind the scenes of a television show. 30 Rock relies on show-within-a-show TGS because it lends credence to the oddball characters who could only get away with such shenanigans in the business of show.
Murphy Brown was groundbreaking, but for entirely different reasons. Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip took a similar behind-the-scenes-at-SNL approach, stripped out the comedy, and spectacularly failed to live up to the lofty ideals it laid out for itself. And can anyone imagine Lou Grant giving Mary Richards medication that “may cause…sexual nightmares”?
It is probable that, as with every generation, the cutting-edge material has a limited appeal. The most subversive shows historically tend to appeal to a younger crowd. Ben Silverman is probably right that 30 Rock is something of a watershed moment in the glacial shift of TV audience measurement. It’s no breakout hit in primetime, but when you throw in online streaming, digital sell-through, and DVD sales, the material is getting in front of millions of eyeballs.
There’s a lot wrong with American television, but as both entertainment and an art form, 30 Rock is proof that talented people can produce quality television in reverse proportion to the amount of interference they have from network suits.
Like any groundbreaking art, 30 Rock will probably not be fully appreciated (at least by the public at large) until long after it is out of production. But it serves as a scintillating time capsule, simultaneously a scathing indictment of and valentine to what the television industry has become.
DVD Wish List | ‘Boston Common’
They’ll put anything on DVD nowadays. It’s not very labor-intensive, wildly popular with consumers, and an easy way for studios to try to recoup a few of the bones they laid out for production. And yet, the formula by which titles are selected tends to elude not only the average consumer, but also the media savvy. There are plenty of bygone series I’d love to see released on DVD (or, failing that, digitally).
At the top of my list is the David Kohan-Max Mutchnick collaboration Boston Common, which ran for basically a season and a half on NBC in the mid-’90s. This was the show the Will & Grace team did before their Emmy-winning Eric McCormack-Debra Messing project.
The cast’s faces would likely be familiar to viewers nowadays. Anthony Clark (Yes, Dear), Traylor Howard (Two Guys and a Girl, Monk), and Vincent Ventresca (Prey, The Invisible Man) are among the most recognizable.
The series revolved around Clark’s backwoods Boyd Pritchett and his sister Wyleen (Hedy Burress), who came to Boston to pursue her dreams of a college education. Boyd stumbled into a job as a campus maintenance man, compelled to stay because of his attraction to student Joy (Howard), who was attached to Professor Reed (Ventresca).
Supporting characters included sassy supervisor Tasha (Tasha Smith) and woebegone university employee Leonard (Steve Paymer). Margot Kidder even had a hilarious guest arc as Wyleen’s drama teacher.
What may sound like a paint-by-numbers ’90s sitcom (which I discovered on USA’s USAM block a few years after its initial run) had panache and wit in the hands of Kohan and Mutchnick. It was here that the creative team honed their talents before moving on to their much more successful, much more popular series (sort of like comparing Aaron Sorkin’s Sports Night to his follow-up, The West Wing).
There’s an authenticity to a show that doesn’t know whether it will succeed which disappears at some point in hit series. (Think Law & Order’s early, on-the-skids years.) This quality is present in the 32 episodes Boston Common produced before ending up on the pile of forgotten NBC sitcoms (The Naked Truth, anyone? Fired Up?). The trouble is, this one isn’t forgettable.
DVD status: unknown
Prognosis: unlikely to see DVD release
NIP/TUCK | Terrible, but I can’t look away
Clearly, I have a problem avoiding some of TV’s trashier shows (see: Big Brother/After Dark). I also have trouble abandoning shows that at one time had an air of quality (Grey’s Anatomy, Degrassi). So it’s a little strange that it took me so long to come around to Nip/Tuck, which returns to FX tonight for season five, part two.
I got sucked in by a friend with the DVDs and watched the first four seasons over the course of a couple months early last year. My impressions were that the first season was provacative and different, but I started loathing the show during its transparent-ass Carver season. Also, the show is totally exploitave and trashy, as anyone who’s seen it can attest.
This fall, I caught the reruns of season five, part one. Damn, has this show gotten terrible. Matt and Kimber are drug addicts who do porn for a quick score and burn down their hotel room. Sharon Gless is a crazypants fake Hollywood agent who stabbed Sean in the half-season finale. Julia is a lesbian — oh, wait, no she’s not — oh, wait, yes, she is. Then Matt falls in love with his long-lost half-sister. Seriously.
The nature of the American TV business model is that it has trouble letting go when the time is right. With its move to Los Angeles, Nip/Tuck has derailed into Passions territory, and I can’t stop watching even though I hate almost all the characters, which is why I’ve hesitantly added a season pass to my DVR. I realize I’ve become part of the problem here. But at least this trash only comes around once a week.
SITCOMS | More like ‘Rita’ meddles
I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to write about Lifetime’s Nicole Sullivan sitcom Rita Rocks, which moves to Mondays at 8:30p/7:30c starting with tonight’s new episode.
I’ve been a huge Sullivan fan since the middle years of Mad TV, which she dominated with characters such as the Vancome Lady. I even watched the horrible Talk To Me a few years back. And I was glad she found steady work as the dog walker on the later seasons of The King of Queens.
Finally someone has come up with a vehicle for her, and I have to admit I expected it to be a disaster. As a harried mother, Rita juggles kids, husband Richard Ruccolo (who remembers Two Guys and a Girl?), and part-time employment with little time for herself. So of course she starts a garage band with the mom from My Wife and Kids, the gay coffee shop manager from Felicity, and Phil of the Future on drums.
The early episodes were a little rough, but the cast’s chemistry smoothed that over until the writing picked up. Lately, the show has hit its stride, the keys to which seemed to be straying from the original concept (Post-It notes and awkward band storylines) and embracing the fact that it’s your typical family sitcom.
So instead of rocking out with the band, Rita meddles in the lives of those around her, with a predictable rate of success. A recent episode had bandmate/neighborhood mail carrier Tisha Campbell-Martin and Rita spying on their bandmate, whom they suspect of cheating on Rita’s daughter. It turned out that the drummer boy was cheating — on Rita and friends — by moonlighting with another band.
Given producer Media Rights Capital’s recent high-profile failure programming The CW’s Sunday nights, they caught a needed break, with Rita qualifying as a hit by Lifetime standards. Yeah, yeah. That Lifetime. Fine then. Don’t watch it. It’s not going to be winning any Emmys, I grant you. But if you do, don’t say I didn’t warn you if you laugh out loud just a little bit.
MARATHONS | ‘Unsolved’ will do in a pinch
I’m working nights these days and thus have been distracted by some daytime television.
Spike TV has been repurposing old episodes of Unsolved Mysteries since October, and I have to say I was initially not impressed. To their credit, Spike fixed whatever was causing that weird sideways letterbox problem in the first episodes I saw last fall. I guess I’ve made a sort of peace with it, because I can’t bring myself to change the channel today. (Worse, this crap is on all day every day this week. Sigh.)
Sarah Bunting hit the nail on the head in her review of the show’s makeover. The shiny graphics and fancy computer technology bring the whole thing down, like dollar store merchandise at Macy’s. As I noted in protest a year and a half ago, my dead TV grandfather Robert Stack was what sealed the deal. Farina didn’t cut it for me as a replacement for the late Lennie Briscoe (another of my TV grandpas), and he’s sure as hell no Bob Stack.
In a related story, I have got to find a day job.
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