 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
July 2008 Archives
YULE TUBE: Christmas in August!
July 31, 2008 6:53 PM
Call me crazy, because in this respect I am. Can't ever get enough Christmas TV -- even in August. And it just so happens a bunch of cool yule episodes are airing over the next few days.
One of them is among the funniest sitcom episodes ever made at any time -- the Frasier episode in which Kelsey Grammer's character pretends to be Jewish to please his new girlfriend's mother but has his ruse ruined in myriad ways, most notably by David Hyde Pierce, caught in the bathroom with a Christmas tree using nasal spray while costumed as Jesus for a neighborhood pageant. The description doesn't nearly do it justice, so tune in to this memorable Frasier (Friday night at 12:30 a.m. ET on Lifetime) to see just how hysterically farcical this show could go. How much do we miss it?
Ditto Everybody Loves Raymond, which repeats its classic disaster "The Christmas Picture," in which Ray finally gives his mother exactly what she wants -- a family portrait -- and she rejects it anyhow, sending him completely over the edge. It encores on New York's WWOR/9 Wednesday at 6:30 p.m., while viewers in other areas 
should be able to find it on their local affiliates around the same day/time. Another syndicated treat on an even more demented plane: Family Guy, which repeats its Stewie-in-the-nativity catastrophe on New York's WPIX/11 Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. ET. Look for it on other local affiliates, too, to savor mom Lois's alcohol-fueled streetcorner meltdown of Frosty the Snowman.
Christmas soap suds are coming, too, on Beverly Hills 90210 (Saturday at 9 a.m., Sunday at 7 a.m. ET, SOAPnet), and then there's the ever popular holiday murder mystery on Tru Calling (Tuesday at 11 a.m. ET, Sci Fi).
If all this puts you in a warm yule mood, stay there by perusing my book Christmas on Television, which details hundreds of episodes over a 60-year-span, from Jack Benny and Jackie Gleason to Pee-wee Herman, from The Flintstones to South Park. Plus holiday-themed specials, TV movies, soaps, kiddie shows, commercials and more. Just click on the title for the Amazon link.
And -- Merry Christmas!
(Right on time. Five months early.)
FLICK PICKS: '70s westerns
July 29, 2008 5:44 PM
"A picture of the west that is at once romanticized and surprisingly decrepit." Could we be speaking of Deadwood? Actually, look back 35 years. Western films of the 1970s remade a genre that was both ultra-American and essentially dead in those tumultuous years of Nixon, hippies and the Vietnam War. Good guys in white hats, bad guys in black? Sorry. Only shades of gray here.
Monte Walsh (Thursday at 8 p.m., Turner Classic Movies) kicks off TCM's festival of '70s westerns that exemplified this new cynicism and complexity, finding resonance with a counterculture generation who'd grown up watching Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, only to discover as adults that the real world was a lot less tidy or tuneful.
The romanticized-and-decrepit quote above comes from TCM.com's smart essay about Monte Walsh, the 1970 end-of-an-era saga with Lee Marvin and Jack Palance. That web page also offers handy links to equally enlightening ruminations on Thursday night's other '70s westerns: Robert Benton's 1972 Bad Company (10 p.m.), Richard Harris in 1970's A Man Called Horse (midnight), Clint Eastwood directing and starring in 1973's High Plains Drifter (2 a.m.), Kirk Douglas directing and starring in 1975's Posse (4 a.m.).
From these '70s double-dippers on through Kevin Costner in Dancing With Wolves and Mario Van Peebles' in a different Posse, stars have always seemed to be drawn to directing in the western genre. Because it's elemental? Because it's our national mythology? Because it's just so macho cool?
Watch the movies. Read TCM's always thoughtful essays. Come to your own conclusions.
HOT SPOT: Support your local scriptwriter!
July 28, 2008 10:59 AM
Whew. I'm just back from two weeks at the L.A. press tour, where TV critics heard all about the networks' fall plans for scripted shows. Which makes it all the more depressing to look through tonight's network listings and find . . . reality crap.
Oh, excuse me -- UNscripted shows.
So here's advice I may never give again. Let's all tune to CBS' encores of adequate sitcoms (The Big Bang Theory, How I Met Your Mother, Two and a Half Men, Old Christine) or Fox' repeats of serviceable dramas (Bones, House). Somebody has to punish NBC for serving up a night filled with American Gladiators, Nashville Star and Dateline, and ABC for delivering High School Musical: Get in the Picture, Wanna Bet? and The Mole.
And splitting our votes among the 192 options on cable won't send the right message.
The numbers need to reflect network viewers' preference for high-quality scripted shows. Actually, any scripted shows -- anything other than the perhaps not scripted but certainly "manipulatively produced" programs that currently fester under the rubriquet "reality."
Look at Bianculli's Monday best bets above. Just one broadcast network program. One. Of six. This is not right. Beyond the households that can't afford premium cablers like Showtime (which accounts for two of the night's top choices), there are also folks for whom cable/satellite of any kind remains a luxury. And today's economy is forcing more people to make precisely that sort of choice.
Summer has increasingly become a network dumping ground. Used to be reruns. Now it's cheap and tawdry fare focused largely on dubious "talents," deceit and humiliation.
Could we please have our reruns back?
TCA PRESS TOUR: 'The Shield' finale rocks the house; 'Sons of Anarchy' plays the encore
July 15, 2008 7:44 PM
FX' newest drama is called Sons of Anarchy, but it might as well be called Son of The Shield. And if you look at the entirety of TV today, you're seeing Sons of The Shield.
That iconic FX series -- which not only put a virtually unknown channel on the map but also blew the doors open for all of basic cable to go premium without charging extra -- is ending its run this fall with a seventh season being called The Final Act. Filmed before last fall's actors strike hit, it has already sent seeds drifting across the fields of tubedom. Key writer Kurt Sutter is now running that brawny Anarchy saga, about the parallel society of an outlaw motorcycle club. Key writer Glen Mazzara is producing the ambitious movie-spinoff series Crash as a Shield-level gambit for Starz. The writing team of Elizabeth Craft and Sarah Fain has moved to Josh Whedon's mind-wiping Fox midseasoner Dollhouse.
And TNT is loading up on original drama series, and USA is full of them, and Lifetime is into the act, and even AMC is Mad Men-ing. And thank goodness, because, well, have you seen what the networks are running lately?
Nothing to compare in the specific or even in the aggregate to the FX presentations at the Television Critics Association's L.A. press tour Tuesday morning. Give them three hours, they'll give you an entire bleeping network! First up: Glenn Close, Ted Danson and new cast regular William Hurt for the second season of Damages, currently being shot in New York for a January return. Next: Sons of Anarchy, a series about a subject you think you don't want to know about -- relationships among arms-dealing bikers? -- only to discover in the deep-reaching pilot episode that you do. And finally: The Shield, which would be a TV classic if it ended rightnow, without ending, but returns Sept. 2 for 13 final episodes that promise to keep ratcheting up the fireworks, the tension, the societal smarts.
Did we mention that Nip/Tuck returns in January, too, with another 18 episodes, plus more to come till it wraps in 2011 with its hundredth episode? Then Rescue Me storms back in the spring, airing another 22, and adding Michael J. Fox as the new boyfriend-in-a-wheelchair of Denis Leary's onscreen ex. The FX comedy It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia drops back in on Sept. 18 with 13 half-hours, then another 39 to keep it running. And it gets a companion comedy on Oct. 9: Testees -- be careful how you spell it -- from Kenny & Spenny wacko Kenny Hotz, about thirtysomething pals playing medical guinea pigs.
You get breathless just writing or reading about the wealth of quality/distinctive stuff. Even the FX shows that don't make the long haul -- the Iraq war drama Over There, the Hollywood smarmfest Dirt -- are worth a look, if not two or three or seven. The FX trademark, delineated Tuesday during critics' Q&A with Fox program chief John Landgraf, is that they've always "allowed the writer to almost wholly reinvent the genre, or put something on the air that's really different. We've also tried to experiment with tone," as in Eddie Izzard's comedy-drama class study The Riches. (It's two, two, two shows in one!)
Shield creator Shawn Ryan [at far left in TCA panel pictured above] noted that when he originally pitched the concept some seven years ago, then buzz-free FX was telling writers "they'd do anything except a cop show." But of course, The Shield isn't that, despite the surface "franchise." It's about modern urban life as faced by public servants and putative friends, buffeted by cultural and social dilemmas where neither choice is desirable, forced to scramble through sticky wickets resulting from decisions either way. So are their actions good? Bad? Expedient? Inevitable?
But that makes it all sound deep, and the gift of most FX shows is they're just so damn entertaining to watch. You don't have to think profoundly about social justice (The Shield) or identity crises (Nip/Tuck) if you'd rather just chew on the delicious melodrama these series consistently deliver. Critics were pigs in you-know-what getting a preview screening of The Shield's upcoming season premiere on the tour hotel's closed-circuit system the night before the panels, wallowing once more in all those vivid characters and the down-and-dirty L.A. atmosphere and the bravura action unfolding forthwith. (Not that anyone on The Shield would ever use the word forthwith. Or know/care what it means.)
It's like watching a football game, said cast member Catherine Dent (beat cop Danny), analogizing how her husband records gridiron action on TiVo for later viewing, steadfastly refusing to know the outcome/score until he watches the game all the way through. "People focus on the finale," she demurred after critics pushed for early clues. "What people are going to be gratified about is, this is going to be a really good game."
She got agreement from series star Michael Chiklis [pictured above left], whose electric performance as good/bad/different kind of cop Vic Mackey kick-started an entirely new career (he's not your mother's Commish anymore). Because the show was now heading toward an end, the actor/producer said, "the writers were able to write with almost reckless abandon, where they knew that things were spiraling out of control and unwinding and one bomb after another drops that you can't take back." Through the deaths of colleagues, and threats to his family, and his own violent acts since the 2002 pilot's original sin -- let's not forget he put a bullet in the head of a fellow cop ready to reveal his corruption -- Vic has "definitely become a guy that understands there is tremendous consequence, not only for himself but everyone around him, for the decisions that he's made." Chiklis said. "He's in that vortex, and he's swimmin'."
"This finale is what Vic Mackey deserves" was the firm declaration of co-star CCH Pounder, who plays frequent adversary/boss Claudette Wyms, arguably the show's "moral center" (a term about which the actress is not crazy). Another firm promise of closure came from later cast addition David Marciano (he's the work-shirking comic relief of Det. Billings), who alluded to the end of "The Sopranos" with its controversially vague blank screen. "It's been mixed reviews about that finale, but I will tell you about this finale, there will be no mixed reviews," Marciano said of the series-ender. "You're gonna feel like you've gotten your money out of it."
Ditto the second season of Damages, where Glenn Close's monstrously controlling attorney gets a taste of her own medicine from Rose Byrne's once victimized but newly empowered associate. "They make her more of a warrior in season two," Byrne said during that show's panel. "She's made of steel a little bit more. The first season, the audience was so much ahead of her, and this season, it's sort of the reverse." The table-turning fun extends to new cast addition William Hurt, Close's old costar in The Big Chill, who shares a past with her character and resurfaces in what Hurt called "intense wind shear."
Even Ted Danson [pictured] is back as misbehaving billionaire Arthur Frobisher. "That doesn't necessarily mean he survived" the first-season finale, teased producer Todd Kessler. His partner-brother Glenn added, "The show moves back and forth in time, so we have the opportunity to use actors in ways that are not conventional," though he said this year's mix of flashes forward and back will be "slightly less complex and easier to grasp."
Sons of Anarchy will be more complex than you might expect. Unless, of course, you know to expect more already from FX. Its richly human portrait of dangerous dudes on the wrong side of the law doesn't necessarily put them on the wrong side of civilized society. The guys in this outlaw motorcycle club have created, in fact, a parallel society of their own, with distinct rules, ranks, family structures and even, said series co-creator Sutter, "regret and remorse."
Ron Perlman, beloved of tubeheads for Beauty and the Beast (but best known this week for the $36 million opening weekend of his movie Hellboy II), plays the gang's ruthlessly criminal top dog. Former British Queer as Folk and American Undeclared star Charlie Hunnam is the heir-apparent son of the club's founder, who's starting to wonder whether this is really the life his late father intended. Katey Sagal, the Married With Children icon who has strutted her dramatic stuff on The Shield (she's married to Sutter), is thus the woman in the middle, mother to one, lover to the other, described by Sutter as "kind of a bad-ass rock 'n' roll chick."
Of course, he also described the character as Shakespeare's Gertrude, admitting he'd "imposed a sort of Hamlet archetype on top of" the biker-culture drama. It's not such a weird synthesis. That's what lives in this life are, Sutter said. "These are people whose kids go to the same school as every other kid, who buy groceries at the same place everybody else buys groceries," when they're not running guns and murdering people.
The elder biker generation's motivations actually sprung from their experience with the most conventional structure of all: the military, Sutter said. "They began as fraternities, of brotherhoods of guys, most of them just [Vietnam] war veterans getting together to blow off steam. And in a very short period of time, a lot of these clubs morphed into essentially organized crime syndicates. And I thought that was such an epic arc." Perlman noted, "These are guys who pretty much came to this after having given the ultimate sacrifice to their government. And then they came home, and they got a little bit disillusioned about what heroes and warriors are supposed to be greeted like. And they formed an alternate kind of thing to depend on, an alternate family, an alternate political structure."
Which, if you think about it, is another FX trademark (TM) -- whether it's the surrogate couple formed by those Nip/Tuck doctors, or the Vic-Shane-Lem-Ronnie axis of The Shield. At FX, you're family. That goes for fictional characters, real-life show writers, or well-fed FX viewers. This is one clan you count yourself lucky being born into.
TCA: Dennis Hopper goes 'Crash'
July 12, 2008 4:10 AM
Here's how to make people pay attention to your ho-hum cable channel:
Give them quality programming.
FX did it with The Shield. TNT did it with The Closer.
Now Starz has a series inspired by 2005's Oscar-winning best picture Crash.
Yeah, like that's a weekly show.
But hold on. Just maybe. A persuasive case was laid out at the Television Critics Association press tour Friday afternoon by the movie's co-writer/producer Bobby Moresco, and key Shield scripter Glen Mazzara, and, admittedly cast in the series as "probably crazier than any character" yet spewed through his '60s-damaged persona, pop culture intensity icon Dennis Hopper [right].
Yes, Starz is ad-free premium cable, so yes, the R-rated movie's TV spinoff has its (liberal) share of violence, sex and drugs. (They promise!) But the Oct. 17 arrival also looks to offer a keen dose of insight in exploring precisely how far a cross-section of citizens will go in taking their shot at the American dream.
In other words, Crash the series -- thus far unseen by critics, except for a quick clip reel here that amounted to a movie trailer -- isn't a continuation or a recapitulation of director Paul Haggis' highly charged feature, about the happenstance intersection of disparate Los Angelenos venting their frustrations with their own lives through acting out against others largely based on simplistic cultural assumptions.
"I didn't feel the need to go back to that movie," said Crash TV showrunner Mazzara, who movingly talked about his TV take not in specifics but in emotional terms: "It really comes out of the emotion that I felt when I watched that film. . . . I'm writing it, I would say, from the inside out."
Moresco said, "Glen has his own big idea that he's exploring about the city of Los Angeles and the people who arrive there from elsewhere." His tapestry includes an impulsive white male cop and his sexy female Hispanic partner, a frustrated well-to-do white mom and her going-bust developer husband, a Korean immigrant paramedic leaving behind gang life, and even a Guatemalan kid making his way north toward the promise of America.
Hopper plays a once-successful record producer of wild unpredictability, aging and desperate to prove he remains contemporary. "He seems to have a tremendous empathy and understanding of things," the actor said, "and at the same time, he has no limitations how he addresses other people or other races or other genders. He's totally a loose cannon." "He doesn't have an edit button," added show producer (and movie actor-producer) Don Cheadle. Mazzara calls him "close to death. He's worried that he's going to be irrelevant, and he hires a young African-American driver, and he sees this kid as his redemption." Of course Hopper also declared at press tour that his very first scene in the show puts him in the back of the limo having a spirited conversation with his penis. "It's as free as television will ever be," Hopper said.
Who knows? Maybe a guy talking to his own private parts gets viewers to watch. And then they discover more depth than they bargained for. It's hard to imagine otherwise, considering the show's pedigree -- and the ambition to extend not the film's plot lines but its character-based examination of racial and social fault lines that trip us up no matter how smartly we try to avoid them. As Cheadle put it, "There were a lot of hanging chads, so to speak, from the film" that were worth following through on.
"One of my favorite moments in the film," said Mazzara (who was busy at the time on The Shield and had nothing to do with the feature), "is where Sandra Bullock is upset that the dishwasher is full. It's an incredibly simple, mundane and yet impactful moment." Of course it's not about the dishwasher at all. He wanted to evoke "those very realistic and yet soul-searching moments, sort of heartbreaking in a sense. I wanted to tell that."
People in real life seldom say exactly what they mean or approach distressing issues directly. Life is random, and roundabout, which Crash the movie captured in a gut-check way that left it haunting many viewers for days afterward.
"Things aren't black and white, things aren't that clearly delineated, where you can say this person is this and this person is that," said Cheadle (who may or may not appear in the series at some point). Most people contain "a duality," as he termed it, that "can surprise you and show you that they also have another side to them."
That's pretty much what Starz is trying to do, too. Its filmcentric parent company has been a leader in TV digital movie channels (like Encore and its genre spinoffs for westerns, mysteries and more), plus digital cable video-on-demand, internet-delivered content (Vongo) and other services where you can come and find a movie of a type you want, when you want. But that's a random business of its own, luring a viewer for a title or two here and there. Starz CEO Bill Myers told critics, "We've always wanted to try to get some real compelling content that would bring that customer back week in and week out."
Crash takes its stab for 13 episodes starting in October.
[In Starz photo: Crash costars Brian Tee, Arlene Tur, Nick E. Tarabay.]
TCA PRESS TOUR: HBO's 'True Blood'
July 11, 2008 3:29 AM
So now we've had our first true network presentation here at this summer's Television Critics Association press tour. Oh, wait -- the presenter was HBO. Sure seemed like an actual broadcast network, though. In three businesslike hours, the premium cabler touted a wider range of program types than most over-the-air networks present over two full TCA days of star-laden panels, glitzy parties and showbiz hype-o-rama.
No pop culture phenomenon like The Sopranos or Sex and the City this time. Just something perhaps even more impressive -- a broad spectrum of solid choices that all stand for quality in various proficient ways, demonstrating that even without an audacious blockbuster or critical darling, HBO continues to deliver a truly premium lineup.
There was the big and "important" miniseries -- this weekend's Generation Kill (Sundays at 9 p.m. ET starting July 13), a seven-part docudrama "embedding" us in the first month of the Iraq war with a unit of elite Marines, from The Wire producer David Simon. (Read David Bianculli's take on Generation Kill here.)
And there was another HBO drama series that people will talk about -- the wildly entertaining sex-and-vampires drama True Blood (debuting Sept. 7), a lurid yet funny and possibly profound Louisiana-set melodrama from Six Feet Under creator Alan Ball. [HBO photo above: Ball on right, with stars Anna Paquin and Stephen Moyer.]
And a new comedy that people will love or loathe -- Little Britain USA (debuting Sept. 28), adapted from the BBC sketchfest where two men create and play all sorts of bizarrely archetypal everyday men and women from both sides of the Atlantic, who behave in the most obliviously, good-naturedly, totally offensive ways.
And stand-up comedy from a unique talent -- a fall special showcasing Ricky Gervais, grinningly awkward creator-star of the BBC's original The Office and HBO's Extras.
And a relevant documentary -- Thank You, Mr. President: Helen Thomas at the White House (Aug. 18), about the front-row press conference reporter who's covered nine presidents, here profiled by a documentarian who was the niece of one and might have been the daughter of another, Rory Kennedy.
All of which makes me want to say you don't need to hit a grand-slam home run every at-bat, when steady singles and doubles will score just as many runs. But HBO co-president Michael Lombardo was already working a baseball metaphor in answering critics' questions Thursday afternoon in a Beverly Hills hotel ballroom.
"It's always heartening to get a big audience," Lombardo allowed. "But it would be a mistake for us to be swinging for home runs because that's when you're apt to not deliver on quality." If shows don't get big-time buzz, Lombardo said, yet "they are done well and engage a significant or a sizable group that's unbelievably loyal, that will be fine."
This didn't come off as an excuse for not having another Sopranos, either, but as astute thinking at a moment that smash-bereft HBO might inadvisably resort to panicky big-swings-for-the-fences. Lombardo's presidential cohort Richard Plepler noted, "There's 30 million subscribers, and there are many different sensibilities among those 30 million subscribers. And to different pockets of that 30 million, different things resonate." (In other words, don't worry, Real Sex and its late-night skin kin will be around for awhile.) "We're looking to satisfy a wide cross-section of tastes across our subscriber base," Plepler said. "People have an emotional connection to different things." He meant "different" people have that, but each of us can also adore Buffy the Vampire Slayer at the same time we love Law & Order.
HBO's lead fall series is much closer to the former than the latter. True Blood, adapted from the Charlaine Harris novels of the southern gothic supernatural, has vampires coming "out of the coffin" in figurative terms, surfacing after the invention of synthetic blood allows them to live openly as the newest spat-upon minority group agitating for equal rights. Set in a steamy delta podunk town, the action is hot and heavy with kinky interspecies sex ("fangbangers"), courtly bloodsuckers, plucky bar waitresses, backwoods outlaws, and a definite Twin Peaks-ian vibe. The lure of the forbidden drips like sweat on a sticky summer night.
So what if it's not The Sopranos? Lombardo got it right when he noted "True Blood is a show that's enormously fun to watch." Series creator Alan Ball said here he's just trying to do justice to Harris' addictive Sookie Stackhouse books. He found her first vampire tale "totally by accident," killing time at a bookstore before a dentist's appointment (which sounds like the sort of ironic juxtaposition an episode might feature), and quickly discovered "it's the kind of book that you think you're gonna read one chapter before you go to bed and you wind up reading seven."
His series adaptation is funny, funky, creepy, kinky, sentimental, deep and trashy, all at once, as bountiful a bundle of alluring attributes as its protagonist -- a young, blonde, mind-reading waitress-loner played by Anna Paquin, who won an Oscar at the age of 10 for The Piano back in 1993. (She also played Rogue in the X-Men movies.)
"She's so many things in one person," Paquin said here. "She's tough and she's courageous and she's smart, but she's sweet and she's innocent and she's naive and she's quite sheltered. And she is completely open-minded, which, in her very small town is a little bit less common. And there's just something about that level of enthusiasm that she has for things that are new and things that are exciting as opposed to being frightened." In other words, she's drawn to that broody new-bloodsucker-in-town (Stephen Moyer), who can only come out at night and reveals mysterious powers to match her own.
The pilot hour alone features gut-crunching fights and icky murders and graphic sex and "God hates fangs" debates on cable TV. (And every episode promises a kick-ass cliffhanger.) Ball gives us a world that's entirely distinct, believable and relatable, yet truly its own universe. "It's a world that isn't so media-saturated," Ball noted happily. "It's a world where people are actually interacting with each other rather than sitting at their computer reading blogs all the time."
True Blood is visceral. You can feel it, smell it, taste it, which makes it delectable to consume if not profound to ponder. And that's a big "if," with critics having seen just two hours so far. "Part of the joy of this whole series is that it's about vampires, and so we don't have to be that serious about it," said Ball, as he was asked about the allegorical sociology of the show's oppressed caste. "However, they totally work as a metaphor for gays, for people of color in previous times in America, for anybody who is misunderstood and feared and hated for being different. I think it's a bigger metaphor, and at the same time, it's also not a metaphor at all. It's vampires."
Told you HBO was into everything.
(They're also into multimedia in a big way with True Blood. A "prequel" campaign is already up and running with online's Blood Copy Report, a website chronicling "the amazing days we live in as vampires attempt to integrate with humans." New video "news coverage" rolls out weekly.)
TCA PRESS TOUR: All TV, all the time
July 9, 2008 3:57 PM
One minute, you're hearing from the sublime cast and creator of AMC's deliciously smart drama Mad Men. The next -- literally -- it's Dave Attell talking about his remake of the hallucinatory '70s fave The Gong Show, replete with wiener jokes, fart symphonies and a drag queen crooning about "hot pussy." (S/he's holding a kitty cat, people.)
So this is why TV critics love their press tour. No, it's not just for meeting celebs. (Many are less than interesting without a script.) It's not for the free food. (Ain't always so hot, and if you're typing missives like these during rare session breaks, who has time to eat?) It's not even for the nightly partying hearty. (OK, maybe when we were younger and the networks were more spendthrift.)
Nope, we're here for the big, wide, wonderful world of TV into which we're plunged, wet and dripping (just like that hot kitty), for a whirlwind couple of weeks each summer. Members of the Television Critics Association or their publications pay their own way out to L.A. to hear about and see so much TV that -- as one of the Gong Show judges puts it about a tubby guy in need of a bra who breaks out of a straitjacket -- "My eyes were vomiting."
Luckily, that's not the reaction all the time. The very first interview session I hit at this summer's press tour opened my eyes to a moving series I never would have otherwise paid attention to. Who needs another reality show like WE's The Locator? But wow, what an emotional impact for this morning's first-up hotel ballroom panel with person-finder Troy Dunn [above right], his investigator mom, and an adopted daughter and biological mother he reunited. Dunn turned out to be a heartfelt guy, inspired by his own adopted mom's decade-plus search for her biological mother -- who then summarily rejected Dunn's entreaties for a meeting, tellling him "If I knew it [her baby] was going to call, I might have aborted it."
Whoa. "We believe you can't find peace unless you find all the pieces," Dunn said of his work for yearning souls -- a line of patter that looks canned on paper but sounded heartfelt here. This was right after I asked his mom about her "negative" experience, and she amazingly said being rejected by her birth mother was actually "positive" because, though she'd "hoped for a new beginning," she needed closure, and got it, and even got to give "a gift to my birth mother" -- the "peace of mind" that "it" would never show up in her life unbidden.
Neither Dunn and mom nor the shy reunited pair who answered questions alongside them seemed stoked for celebrity. It was easy to take Dunn at his word when he called The Locator a "pay-it-forward scenario," in which he hopes to inspire viewers to go for their own closure.
Going for it also seems to be the promise of the second season of AMC's Mad Men, already showered with critical hosannas, awards and buzz galore. "You think it's gonna go one way," said Golden Globe-winning star Jon Hamm at the show's Q&A session, "and the material takes you in a different direction." Recurring costar Robert Morse, the old lion at the show's 1960 ad agency to Hamm's ambitious young exec, promised "an astounding direction" to the new episodes starting July 27, so exciting that Morse said he goes to the table reads of scripts he isn't even featured in.
The season premiere provided for critics' preview finds Hamm's Don Draper challenged by yet younger ad creators, while his wife (January Jones' Betty Draper) becomes a somewhat new woman after a chance encounter with an old friend turned "party girl" (polite-speak for paid escort). The office even acquires a newfangled Xerox machine!
I'm not being sarcastic there. Mad Men finds depth in superficial moments like that. It continues to be an enthralling drama of sneaky power -- sinuous and savvy enough to win over even an initial skeptic like me. Though I felt the first half of AMC's first season was engaged in some smoke-and-mirrors salesmanship itself -- elegant and moody on the outside, cold and empty inside -- the subsequent episodes pulled me into their unpredictably tangled web. (The first season just came out on DVD.) The characters' emotional distance reveals itself as a social mask (and more), and there's a lot more "there" there than at first glance. Like the ads these guys produce, it's so thoroughly thought-through that it seems effortlessly slick. Weiner says he knows viewers (and critics) adore the show's surface sheen of Kennedy-era chic, "but I'm always trying to put the poison into it also -- the snagged material" of those perfect sheath dresses and tailored suits.
Don't go looking for those on The Gong Show. This Comedy Central remake of Chuck Barris' drug-tinged hit of the Studio 54 disco era is decidedly low-rent and frat-happy. Premiering July 17 at 10 p.m. ET, host Dave Attell introduces it as "the wet spot on the casting couch of Hollywood," and things head downhill from there. If low is where you wanna go, watch a magenta-haired guy push a needle all the way through his arm or see 15 bikini-clad babes stand atop a guy calling himself The Human Floor.
The giddy glee of Barris' original network (un)talent(ed) show for the entire familiy has been replaced by cable's adolescent naughty-boy ick factor. Judge Steve Schirripa (Bobby from The Sopranos) gets it right in the critics' screener episode when he tells one wannabe, "This is a talent competition, and you're more of just an idiot."
But The Gong Show has its place, as does Mad Men, as does The Locator, as do the other 16 shows presented to TCA critics today alone. Before two weeks are out, critics who avail themselves of everything offered at press tour will have attended a hundred Q&A sessions and a half-dozen set visits, along with corralling creators, cast members and network execs in hotel hallways and evening events for one-on-one access.
It's all TV, all the time, of all kinds. Need anyone ask why we love this medium?
WEIRD & WILD: 'Car Talk' cartoon?
July 7, 2008 3:57 PM
How much do we love NPR's Car Talk? We wish that public radio's weekly advice/amusement hour had its own channel, 24/7, so we could listen to Tom and Ray Magliozzi chortle whenever we need a laugh, too.
So this week's premiere of public TV's animated half-hour series Click and Clack's As the Wrench Turns (Wednesday at 8 p.m. ET on most PBS stations; check local listings) should be occasion for congratulation. But we're not so sure.
There's a reason these guys titled one of their VHS tapes Faces Made for Radio, number one. Not that they're unpleasing to gaze upon, but it's more fun to imagine the visages of Tom and Ray in your own head, giving each other grief and crafting aural images of their sister, mother, kids and random adventures. It's not like we never see these guys -- they recently hosted PBS' NOVA hour Car of the Future, for instance -- but on a regular basis, we'd rather just hear them, thanks.
And number two, As the Wrench Turns isn't Car Talk-on-TV. It's an animated "sitcom," which means it needs a running situation, which forces it to make concrete the imaginary Car Talk Plaza from which the brothers facetiously broadcast each week. The cartoon thus introduces co-worker characters, as the pair's antics "broaden out." Oh, how we've learned to flee from this term, often used to describe, say, movies (badly) adapted from stage plays. Do we really want to see Tom and Ray campaigning for president? Turns out we enjoy the practical auto information of Car Talk as much as we do the guffaws.
So while we'll give Click and Clack a chance on the tube, we're not persuaded our affection for the Magliozzis' real-life voices will transfer to fictionalized cartoons.
See for yourself in preview clips here.
WEIRD & WILD: 'People Who Won't Go Away'
July 6, 2008 9:51 PM
Gotta love that episode title, right? And this special installment of The Soup Presents (Monday at 10 p.m. ET on E!) picks on all the right celebrity victims -- Danny Bonaduce, David Hasselhoff, Scott Baio, Janice DIckinson . . .
More mercilessness, plus video-clip assaults, can be found online at The Soup Blog.
HOT SPOT: 'Big Love' is back
July 5, 2008 5:23 PM
Now there's something to watch on Saturday nights through the summer. HBO is re-airing all of Big Love, starting with the polygamy drama-comedy hour's 2006 pilot (Saturday, July 5 at 8 p.m. ET, HBO2). Bill Paxton stars as the harried businessman forever trying to satisfy (no, not that way) wives Jeanne Tripplehorn, Ginnifer Goodwin and the sublimely resentful Chloe Sevigny, while keeping their lifestyle secret from the mainstream world they're trying to live in. He's also busy fending off the more primitive plotters back at his extended family's polygamy "compound" (led by the always stunning Harry Dean Stanton).
All 24 episodes of the first two seasons will air on HBO2 as a weekly countdown to HBO's strike-delayed third season, which should then be due as 2009 arrives.
Of course, you can also order Big Love DVDs at a sizable discount here.
HOT SPOT: 'Friday Night Lights' daily
July 1, 2008 4:21 PM
Just noticed that Universal HD is starting a full run of the first season of the must-see drama Friday Night Lights weekdays at 10 a.m. and 5 p.m. (as of July 1).
That means you'd get the complete first season by the end of July, which is a fleet way to fulfill this addictive fix. And it's in high-def! See UHD episode schedule here.
You can also watch every FNL episode of the first two seasons, in lesser-def, at NBC.com.
Or on bargain-priced DVD sets here.
FLICK PICKS: Big band movies on TCM
July 1, 2008 1:54 PM
Well, beat me daddy, eight to the bar -- Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, Duke Ellington, Jimmie Lunceford, Artie Shaw, Kay Kyser and Cab Calloway [pictured at left] are just a few of the varied big band leaders being showcased on Wednesday nights throughout July by Turner Classic Movies.
They're appearing in dramatized musicals like 1937's Hollywood Hotel with Benny Goodman (Sing Sing Sing) and 1941's Las Vegas Nights with Tommy Dorsey and his skinny young vocalist named Frank something (Wednesday double feature at 8 and 10 p.m. ET).
They're backing Hollywood stars like Lucille Ball in 1943's Best Foot Forward, with Harry James (Wednesday/Thursday at 3 a.m. ET), and Danny Kaye in 1948's A Song Is Born (July 9 at 8 p.m. ET), a feast featuring Goodman, Dorsey, Louis Armstrong, Lionel Hampton and Charlie Barnet.
But they're also out front in late-late-night short subjects that serve as even better historical (if not sociological) documents. TCM's lineup late Wednesday/early Thursday this week: Jimmie Lunceford (4:55 a.m.), Jammin' the Blues led by Lester Young (5:10 a.m.), Freddie Rich (5:25 a.m.) and Larry Clinton (5:40 a.m.). Next week's collection has Cab Calloway singing Hi De Ho (July 10 at 5:40 a.m.)
Best of all, future TV icons take their turn with the baton, or congas, as the case may be. Cuban bandleader Desi Arnaz appears with his 1946 orchestra on July 17 at 5:30 a.m., followed by Ozzie Nelson circa 1939 on July 23/24 at 4:45 a.m. and circa 1943 on July 31 at 5:50 a.m. (All times ET.)
Get the whole playlist at TCM's Big Bands in the Movies site.
