Deadly Furniture

To be honest, I was always going to like Supernatural a little bit. The show, or at least the little of it I’ve caught from promos and general mass media knowledge, draws too much from Joss Whedon’s Buffyverse and The X-Files (there’s even a direct reference to Mulder and Scully in the pilot) for me not to enjoy it just a little bit. But I’ll be honest, I didn’t think that I’d enjoy it so much. Sure, Supernatural has its fair share of CW groan-worthy lines and there are more than a couple of slow parts in the middle of it’s pilot episode-but I could always say the same thing about many a Buffy episode (*cough*seasonone*cough*). All in all, the show’s pilot creates a compelling storyline and two pretty and watchable main characters. (Quick Aside: As I was reading through the IMDB cast to find names, I just realized that Mitch Pileggi aka ASSISTANT DIRECTOR WALT SKINNER is a guest star for eight episodes. This elevates Supernatural from “watchable” to “will watch next episode immediately in order to get to !!!SKINNER!!! faster.”)

The pilot starts twenty years in the past and sees the death of the two main character’s mother from a strange demon possession/attack/something that creepily forces her against the ceiling and then sets the room on fire. The grieving father (played by the very watchable Jeffrey Dean Morgan) immediately becomes a man obsessed with revenge. His life, and therefore the lives of his two sons, centers around weapon training and demon hunting. Fast forward twenty years and you have a pretty messed up family. The youngest, Sam, (played by Jared Padalecki or the very annoying Dean from Gilmore Girls) has never wanted to be a part of his family’s obsession and has therefore run away to college and hopefully law school. His older brother, Dean, (played by Jensen Ackles aka I’ve actually liked him in a couple of things that he’s been in) is the complete I-will-break-the-law opposite. Dean interrupts Sam’s new normal life to tell him that their father has gone missing and they should go looking for him.

The rest of the episode sets up the entire series, as the two brothers who actually hate each other in many respects, have to hunt demons/spirits/supernatural things as they search for their father together. Supernatural therefore promises to include a whole lot of monster-of-the-week episodes but the ending of the pilot (a repeat of the brother’s mother’s death) promises that there may actually be a few episodes that connect to a bigger Truth (oh X-Files, how I love you). (Quick Aside #2: Wait, Mark Sheppard and Mark Pellegrino show up in this show too?!!?!!?)

Needless to say, any episode that ends with “Let’s get to work.” is something that’s going to make me watch the next episode. Add to that the whole science fiction element, the watchableness of the cast, the fact that ASSISTANT DIRECTOR WALT SKINNER appears, and you’ve got me for at least the first season.

Series to Watch: Supernatural and The X-Files

By about twenty minutes into the pilot episode of NBC’s Parenthood, my mind had already escaped into the world that I like to call “Thursday Night Comedies.” I mean…LeVar Burton is on this week’s Community. Come on. For the most part, I don’t like family drams (see also Brothers & Sisters) and from the start the characters of Parenthood came off as pretty predictable bunch of related people. The family patriarch who isn’t as faithful to his wife as his children think; the deadbeat daughter with two teenage children who has to move home after making one too many bad choices; the daughter whose job in a law firm makes her feel distanced from her own young daughter; the son with commitment issues who unexpectedly realizes that he actually has a kid from a previous relationship. We’ve all seen these characters before, and we all know where this is going.

Needless to say, I was about to give up and put in some good ol’ Buffy. But then there was this scene. The oldest son Adam (played by Hey! That’s Peter Kraus from Sports Night!!) has been trying to get his young son, Max, interested in sports the entire episode. Having had problems with his own upbringing, all Adam wants is to be best pals with Max. Adam wants his boy to be a better version of himself, a great athlete, a famous baseball player. It’s a predictable and normal relationship.

But then there’s this scene in Max’s classroom. He sits down at a table, folds a sheet of paper in half, draws a half circle, and tries to cut it out. He can’t. He tries over and over again, getting more and more frustrated, but he can’t do it. Every piece becomes a mangled mess. As you feel ever bit of maternal/paternal instinct set in, you realize that sports is the least of Max’s worries. There’s something wrong with him, and he knows it, but nobody else does. In those wordless moments you see a desperate child and there’s nothing you can do to help him. It’s haunting, in a way, and it’s a scene that I haven’t been able to get out of my head ever since.

Instead of watching Buffy, I kept watching Parenthood out of a desperation to know that someone helps Max--which thankfully eventually happens. Later, near the end of the episode, Peter Kraus turns on the serious acting and admits to his father that there’s something wrong with Max. Those two scenes combined may actually make me watch the next episode of the series--that along with multiple reassurances that the series does get better and the knowledge that eventually Michael Emerson guest stars.

At least--I think I’ll watch the Peter Kraus parts.

First…

Big Love. To be honest, my opinion of this series opener was doomed from the start. Bill Paxton, the show’s main character, is one of the people on my list of “Actors That I Don’t Like But Have No Real Reason For Not Liking.” Nothing in the world would compel me to watch an entire se

ries (of five seasons no less) that would force me to watch Bill Paxton each episode. However, I remembered the show getting some buzz way back when it started and it’s in the midst of its swan song so I thought that I would put all prejudices aside and watch it.

I was not impressed. Sure, 90% of this may have been my failure to put my aforementioned thoughts about Bill Paxton aside, but the other 10% is entirely rational. The general premise is the life of a polygamist, Bill Hendrickson, and his three wives. As one would imagine, the politics of handling three different families is not only psychologically stressful, but also financially troublesome.

Each wife has their own problems and each want to believe that Bill loves them the most. Margene (Ginnifer Goodwin) is the newest, youngest wife who actually comes from outside of the religious community that the rest of the family comes from. She’s barely treading water trying to live up to everyone’s expectations. The least sympathetic wife, Nicky (Chloe Sevigny) likes to online shop and is stealing money from the family’s general fund to fuel her addiction. The most sympathetic wife, Barb (Jeanne Tripplehorn who has the greatest last name of all time) was married to Bill for more than a decade before he married Nicky and is perhaps the only sympathetic and interesting character in the pilot. Halfway through the episode, I was screaming at Barb to leave this man and go and be incredible somewhere else. She has a job, she has her children, get out and get out fast. But, of course, she didn’t listen and I was left frustrated.

Perhaps it was the overly long opening credits that actually make-no-sense (I mean, the Beatles?), or perhaps it was boring religious stuff that I confess I didn’t really care about, or perhaps it was that troublesome Paxton, but this just isn’t a world that I want to re-visit. When I wasn’t bored or disinterested, I was angry and frustrated.

Speaking of frustration….

Ugly Betty. Second confession: I didn’t actually make it through the pilot. In my defense, I almost made it to the end and I knew how it was going to end anyways because the plot was that predictable and boring. Oh my goodness, she’s ‘ugly” (more like gorgeous under some uglyclothes) and she’s going to work in the fashion industry? Can this work? HIGHGINKS!!

I can see the feel that the show was going for. Very like Pushing Daisies, the show is supposedly set in a “real world,” but it has a very Alice In Wonderland-esque quality to it. The easiest I can describe it actually comes out sounding sort of creepy but here it goes--it looks like everything is in a way magically edible. Far from a dark realistic world like in, say, Damages, there is something very fantastical about the world of Ugly Betty and, although you know that the setting doesn’t actually exist in the real world, you continue to want to search for it. For a further example, I believe that somewhere, out there, there is a pie store that has Lee Pace behind the counter. One day, I will find it.

Where it succeeds with art direction, Ugly Betty fails in characters. With ten minutes or so left in the show, I suddenly came to the startling conclusion that I didn’t care about what happened to any character the last thirty minutes had spent time on. Sure, you’re supposed to care for Betty (America Ferrara) but I guiltily found that I thought she was pretty dumb. I understand having your own style, but all she needed to do was put on a suit and all her problems would be solved. She’s smart enough to realize that. And then everyone else is so over-actingly horrible that you don’t bother to learn their names or pay attention to what they’re saying because they bother you so much.

I couldn’t bare another minute of it so I turned off the television and re-watched clips from Pushing Daisies.

Which leaves us with…..

However unlike these other two pilots, it seems like a disservice to try to lay out the plot of such a complex show in a short summary and to then go into a short discussion on how cool and cinematic the whole episode felt. It would be like trying to describe “Pilot: Parts One and Two” of Lost and capture the brilliance of the opening episodes. In fact, Lost may be the easiest thing to compare to Damages. Sure, one is about a cut-throat lawyer and a new, young associate who becomes caught up in a bloodthirsty, cruel world and the other is about (insert long discussion about the brilliance of Darlton and how their show is “about” something different for every viewer here). But “Get Me A Lawyer” utilizes the same flashback techniques as the ABC show, and has its own sense of cinematic style that makes the pilot seem like it is the opening act of a thirteen-part movie.

Damages falls short of Lost as the big mystery is more or less announced at the end of the pilot episode. The twists are a little too easy to figure out for avid television viewers, and “Get Me A Lawyer” lacks the complexities of Darlton’s shows. However, there is a point where the comparisons to perhaps the greatest television show since forever and Damages becomes unfair. Glenn Close’s Patty Hewes is no Ben Linus, but that doesn’t mean that she isn’t a compelling villain and that Glenn Close doesn’t act the frak out of the part. The plot points aren’t as surprising, but when (my one spoiler) that dog died and the murderer isn’t who we think it is, I may have smiled a little and said, “Nicely played, Damages, nicely played.”

I have a feeling that Damages isn’t the type of show that I’m going to want to marathon. It may actually take me a while to get through the series. But unlike Big Love and Ugly Betty, I’m pretty sure that I’m going to continue watching it. This, for a viewer that has perhaps the shortest attention span ever, is saying something.

Series to Watch: Pushing Daisies and Lost

There is an audience out there, a pretty large audience, that loves the predictability of a procedural storyline. There’s something comforting about the fact that, although the story-of-the-week changes, there’s a known rhythm, an expected turn, a happy ending at the end of the forty-two and a half minutes. This audience is the reason why CBS is the most watched network on television--all CBS does (besides Survivor, the detestable Two and a Half Men, and other nameless, forgettable sitcoms) is procedural dramas.

However, there’s also a large audience out there that needs a variety in storytelling. We sicken at the ability to predict turns in the storyline, say what a character will say before they get around to saying it, and know that this isn’t the bad guy because we still have thirty minutes left before the show is over. These are the type of people that find their heaven in shows like Lost, The West Wing, and Battlestar Galactica--all shows that threw large curveballs (if you’ll figure the cliché baseball reference) at its audience that left them talking and pulling their hair out until the next show aired.

That being said, I have a soft spot in my heart for these CSIs, NCISs, and Cold Cases. I, in fact, was a faithful watching of CSI: The Original before the characters stopped acting like characters and refused to grow in any way possible. One of the most suspenseful hours of television from my younger, pre-Lost days was season one’s “Grave Digger,” an episode directed by Quentin Tarantino himself. Then there was the military drama JAG that, besides having perhaps the catchiest theme song before NBC’s Parks and Recreation, I still list as one of my old-school favorites. Both of these series had predictable, structured approaches to storytelling, yet I loved them anyways.

I think as a lover of television--even someone who loves the odd, the unpredictable, and the sci-fi--you’re bound to have a couple procedurals that you watch. Mine happen to be ABC’s Castle (whose success is only 90% thanks to the great and powerful Nathan Fillion) and, more recently, CBS’s The Good Wife. Nothing says that I wouldn’t like any of the other countless cop/lawyer/investigator drama’s out there. There most be something appealing about NCIS (besides the great and powerful Mark Harmon) for it to continue to get the ratings that it has, and there doesn’t look like there’s anything necessarily uninteresting about The Mentalist or Blue Bloods. But the fact is, my mind can only handle a limited number of structured, known shows at a time--and these are the two that I’ve currently chosen.

The Good Wife (airing on CBS on Tuesdays at 10) centers around Alicia (played by Julianna Marqulies), a wife whose political, state attorney husband (Chris Noth) cheats and lies. While he goes off to jail, she is left to pick up the pieces of her family and try to avoid the inevitable limelight. Thanks to her good old-friend Will (Josh Charles), she lands a job at a large, Chicago law firm where she becomes a junior associate. From there, the expected court cases start coming, but there’s a surprising amount of variety of them (murder cases, terrorist charges, civil cases, class actions) and of telling them. Add to this the fact that there’s more than a small spattering of character growth and drama as well (something that CSI had in bygone days. [Insert nostalgic sigh here]).

After watching a couple of episodes of The Good Wife, I found myself unexpectedly caring, a lot, about what happened to these characters. It isn’t just the love stories or will-they-won’t-they-tension, I cared about the friendships (notably between Alicia and Archie Panjabi’s investigator character Kalinda). I cared about whether the struggling law firm would survive so that these characters could continue to scheme. I cared that a character was fired, and almost teared up by the end of some episodes. The show also manages to bring in interesting and compelling guest stars without you even really noticing (Amy Acker and Michael J. Fox anyone?). To my shock and surprise, I suddenly realized that this was my new show to watch on Tuesday nights.

I’m sure that if I ever got around to turning on The Mentalist or the newly-dead Medium, or NCIS, I may be able to find equally compelling characters and stories behind the procedural bore. Maybe one day, when Nathan Fillion finally makes it big in the movie world and Castle has to end, I’ll watch one of them. For now, I’m too busy watching the non-structured genius of Community and Parks and Recreation.

Episodes to Watch: “Heart,” “Running,” “Breaking Up”

What follows in these sure to be infrequent and unintelligible posts will be a mixture of thoughts and reviews from television, movies, books, plays, and, when the new Mumford & Sons album comes out, music. We can't promise anything remotely nearing well thought-out theories or consistent likes and dislikes. We can't even promise when, if ever, we'll post next (this, of course, lies entirely with Rebecca's employment or lack-there-of).

In the end, this is a space where the thoughts in our brains find a permanent, if online, residence. They may be stupid, they may be unfounded, they may be irrelevant, but at least they're ours.