New TV Review, Part Two
Dirty Sexy Money - I've never watched a show starring Peter Krause, but for some reason I really like him. He has some weird likability that makes you root for him. Has he ever played an all-out bad guy? Anyone know? Anyway, I didn't have many expectations or preconceptions about the show going in. Having watched the first episode, I'm not sold. It's too slick in terms of its depiction of the uber-rich family The Darlings. Each of the children seem like shallow, one-dimensional stereotypes, except for the hateful minister son, who's a shallow, one-dimensional out-of-left-field character. One blogger (I'm not sure if she'll swing by here and read this) calls it campy, but I disagree. I think the family is supposed to be taken seriously. Sure they do scandalous or laughable things, but they're supposed to be basically believable. This is a drama, after all. It's not like the Bluth family from Arrested Development, where you know it's a setup for silliness and you happily suspend your disbelief over the ridiculous qualities of the family members. Only the mother is somewhat believable, and only Donald Sutherland's eerie, goofy patriarch is interesting.
I also think the story moved along too quickly at the beginning, showing us each family member, how the family operates, and injecting our hero into the mix. And speaking of our "hero", he's supposed to be a dedicated family man trying to avoid the same career pitfalls of his deceased father that forced his mother out and effectively saw him raised by the Darlings. But then, with the promise of tons of money, he takes the job as the Darlings' family attorney on the spot without a word to his (adorable) wife. And further, the wife doesn't really care. When his new gig forces Peter's character to miss picking up his young daughter from school, the wife is easily placated with the opportunity to dress up and attend a lavish party. I was kind of encouraged by the "twist" at the end of the episode that seemed to introduce a season-long mystery, so I may watch the show again, just not this week because I'm giving NBC's Life a chance. But overall, it's a bad combination of taking itself too seriously while being just a little too fantastical. If it were more of the latter, it might interest me as an escapist soap (like Desperate Housewives).
Moonlight - I don't know what about this show attracted me. It wasn't the casting of Jason Dohring from Veronica Mars, because I was curious before I heard he was in it. I guess the idea of a vampire private investigator just sounded kind of cool (not having watched Angel at all). Well, the show's pretty dumb. It's very cliched all around: the script, the vampire mythology, the crime-procedural aspect. It even rips off "Interview With the Vampire" at the beginning for some exposition. They showed a preview of the rest of the season at the end which leads me to believe it might get better and less clumsy in subsequent episodes, but not good enough to watch again. Blah.
Cavemen - I love the GEICO cavemen ads. For that reason alone, I decided to give Cavemen a chance, knowing that almost everyone on the planet thought it was a horrible idea to import a commercial gag into a sitcom format. Flame me all you want (or just politely disagree) but I really liked the show. Let me start by saying that it's almost nothing like the commercials. The actors aren't the same, which is a bummer. The setup isn't the same, either, which turns out to be a good thing. If the show focused on cavemen obsessing over a particular prejudicial wrong, such as GEICO's insensitive ad, the show would fizzle. Instead it's a straight, standard sitcom with cavemen just living in the world. The "species" issue isn't used for satire on race relations, it's just a jumping off point for jokes (when a caveman is upset over a girl, his sheepish coworker asks if he's going to bite him). The cavemen have jobs, are grad students, play Wii, play squash, have relationships, drink coffee, etc. There's no real discrimination to overcome. If anything, the prejudice is reversed. One character harps on his rule of never dating "sapes", or homo sapiens. This leads to some funny lines. His slogan to remember the rule, "Only put your penis in the same genus." But this miscegenation is more an academic conviction than a social prejudice. At one point he condones his friend abandoning the exclusionary practice as long as he promises it will only be a physical thing.
Verdict: it's a conventional sitcom with the advantage of single-camera location shooting and witty writing. Also, seeing ridiculous cavemen in the situations provides a laugh in itself. A review of comments on Ain't It Cool News today saw the show roundly panned as one of the worst in history. But I suspect that those people had prejudged the show before it aired. They need to open their minds and see that cavemen can be funny, too. It's going on my regular DVR schedule.
Next up: Life and Pushing Daisies, for which I'm getting very excited.
P.S. on returning shows - The Office and My Name is Earl were hilarious last week. Prison Break is kind of lame this season, and Heroes is interesting (only watched the first ep), but it's not wowing me yet.
I also think the story moved along too quickly at the beginning, showing us each family member, how the family operates, and injecting our hero into the mix. And speaking of our "hero", he's supposed to be a dedicated family man trying to avoid the same career pitfalls of his deceased father that forced his mother out and effectively saw him raised by the Darlings. But then, with the promise of tons of money, he takes the job as the Darlings' family attorney on the spot without a word to his (adorable) wife. And further, the wife doesn't really care. When his new gig forces Peter's character to miss picking up his young daughter from school, the wife is easily placated with the opportunity to dress up and attend a lavish party. I was kind of encouraged by the "twist" at the end of the episode that seemed to introduce a season-long mystery, so I may watch the show again, just not this week because I'm giving NBC's Life a chance. But overall, it's a bad combination of taking itself too seriously while being just a little too fantastical. If it were more of the latter, it might interest me as an escapist soap (like Desperate Housewives).
Moonlight - I don't know what about this show attracted me. It wasn't the casting of Jason Dohring from Veronica Mars, because I was curious before I heard he was in it. I guess the idea of a vampire private investigator just sounded kind of cool (not having watched Angel at all). Well, the show's pretty dumb. It's very cliched all around: the script, the vampire mythology, the crime-procedural aspect. It even rips off "Interview With the Vampire" at the beginning for some exposition. They showed a preview of the rest of the season at the end which leads me to believe it might get better and less clumsy in subsequent episodes, but not good enough to watch again. Blah.
Cavemen - I love the GEICO cavemen ads. For that reason alone, I decided to give Cavemen a chance, knowing that almost everyone on the planet thought it was a horrible idea to import a commercial gag into a sitcom format. Flame me all you want (or just politely disagree) but I really liked the show. Let me start by saying that it's almost nothing like the commercials. The actors aren't the same, which is a bummer. The setup isn't the same, either, which turns out to be a good thing. If the show focused on cavemen obsessing over a particular prejudicial wrong, such as GEICO's insensitive ad, the show would fizzle. Instead it's a straight, standard sitcom with cavemen just living in the world. The "species" issue isn't used for satire on race relations, it's just a jumping off point for jokes (when a caveman is upset over a girl, his sheepish coworker asks if he's going to bite him). The cavemen have jobs, are grad students, play Wii, play squash, have relationships, drink coffee, etc. There's no real discrimination to overcome. If anything, the prejudice is reversed. One character harps on his rule of never dating "sapes", or homo sapiens. This leads to some funny lines. His slogan to remember the rule, "Only put your penis in the same genus." But this miscegenation is more an academic conviction than a social prejudice. At one point he condones his friend abandoning the exclusionary practice as long as he promises it will only be a physical thing.
Verdict: it's a conventional sitcom with the advantage of single-camera location shooting and witty writing. Also, seeing ridiculous cavemen in the situations provides a laugh in itself. A review of comments on Ain't It Cool News today saw the show roundly panned as one of the worst in history. But I suspect that those people had prejudged the show before it aired. They need to open their minds and see that cavemen can be funny, too. It's going on my regular DVR schedule.
Next up: Life and Pushing Daisies, for which I'm getting very excited.
P.S. on returning shows - The Office and My Name is Earl were hilarious last week. Prison Break is kind of lame this season, and Heroes is interesting (only watched the first ep), but it's not wowing me yet.
posted by at 3:06 PM
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