Cue the Hallelujah chorus!
“You were abducted, of course you need crepes.”
— Walter, in Fringe s2e07. This kind of stuff is why I keep watching this show.
Pilot Watch/Flup: Wackiness Doth Ensue & We're Only Still Casting
To follow-up on my earlier post about David Tennant starring in NBC’s awful sounding pilot Rex Is Not Your Lawyer, I would like to point out that Jeffrey Tambor has joined the cast. Per THR, Tambor will play “Rex’s psychiatrist, a specialist in anxiety disorders who himself suffers from them and who also becomes romantically involved with Rex’s mother.” Two bucks on Jean Smart as the mama.
PSA: AMC HD Available Early on TWC in Our Hood
We subscribe to Time Warner Cable. A couple of weeks ago we received a letter stating that we’d finally get AMC in HD mid-December. Jay’s comment at the time was, “Great. Just in time for me to not be watching Mad Men.” Kid’s got a point there, Valerie.
AMC’s re-Prisonering starts Sunday. I started scrolling through channels to see if by chance AMC HD happened to us sooner than expected. IT DID. It’s #479 on our lineup in downtown Los Angeles. Here endeth the public service announcement.
Sayonara, Dollhouse
(Note: This post is a little late, since I’m mired in the grips of #DeathKold09. Any incoherence is strictly the provenance of the virus taking residence in my sinuses. Sincerely, the Mgmt.)
OK, a little backstory here. I was ignorant of the Whedon-verse before Bronwen introduced me to it. One of my labours when I went a-courting was to watch all seven seasons of Buffy, plus season five of Angel. And I enjoyed a lot of it. (Especially “The Cautionary Tale of Numero Cinco”.)
Then we moved on to Firefly. *sigh* I miss Firefly. I’m still pissed that we never learned about Shepherd Book’s backstory.
So, yeah, I wouldn’t describe myself as a rabid Whedonist, but I’ve seen Serenity more than once in the theater. I’ve been to a “Once More With Feeling” sing-a-long. I was looking forward to Dollhouse. Now that it’s cancelled, I’ll watch the rest of the episodes, but I won’t miss it when it’s gone.
The show never quite worked for me. From the start, I felt like the dolls should not have been the protagonists. Their changeability and their blankness rendered most of the engagement-of-the-week plots meaningless for me. Their small changes, flashes of awareness and slow development would have worked much better if they were relieved of the focus. I’d have been much more interested in having the handlers and employees as the protagonists, with the dolls always tantalizingly out of reach. Is Echo more aware or isn’t she? What’s really going on in her head? The dolls are objectified; they should have been the story objects, not subjects. For example, see the work of Summer Glau on Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.
Now, you could say that one of the points of Dollhouse was to deal with that inversion. And I’ll grant that it’s an interesting premise. But premise is nothing without execution. I’m never comfortable saying that a performer or artist is incapable of doing something; doesn’t possess the talent or ability. I’m not interested in discussing whether or not someone has the ability to do something, only what they did and how they did it. But it’s fairly clear that Eliza Dushku did not pull it off. If Amy Acker had been in the lead role, who knows if it would have worked any better? It still wouldn’t have changed some things.
I’m one of the few people who thought Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip was a really good show, and would have happily watched it for many seasons. But in the face of its persistent difficulties, I accepted that the thing to do was just wrap it up and let all the talented people move on to their next thing. And so in the end, that’s my epitaph (har-har) for Dollhouse. Let’s just let it go, and allow all of the talented artists move on to the next project. Which will hopefully be free of all the angst and controversy.
“These are those four outlines submitted by Universal for an hour series. You needn’t bother to read them; I’ll tell them to you. The first one is set at a large Eastern law school, presumably Harvard. The series is irresistibly entitled “The New Lawyers.” The running characters are a crusty-but-benign ex-Supreme Court justice, presumably Oliver Wendell Holmes by way of Dr. Zorba; there’s a beautiful girl graduate student; and the local district attorney who is brilliant and sometimes cuts corners. The second one is called “The Amazon Squad.” The running characters include a crusty-but-benign police lieutenant who’s always getting heat from the commissioner; a hard-nosed, hard-drinking detective who thinks women belong in the kitchen; and the brilliant and beautiful young girl cop who’s fighting the feminist battle on the force. Up next is another one of those investigative reporter shows. A crusty-but-benign managing editor who’s always gett…”
— from Network written by Paddy Chayefsky. To answer to why the Gattaca series will be a cop show.
Pilot Watch: Will Gattaca Miss the Point?
There was this ridiculously long article about Denis Leary’s post-Rescue Me plans in Variety two weeks ago. Buried down at the bottom was word that Leary’s production company has the rights to redevelop Gattaca as a TV series.
(Side rant: Did you miss that news? Don’t feel badly! Variety can’t spell. Apparently they missed that whole obvs part of the movie where the title was based off the four bases of DNA and stuff, hi, whatever. Spell things right, losers!)
I loved Gattaca. I refuse to explain the plot of the film because you should have seen it. And while I haven’t seen the movie in a while, I remember the following bits as being particularly interesting:
- the fantastic 40s/50s-modern set and costume design and general film noir feel
- nature - so to speak - vs. nurture
- Uma’s character’s self-loathing because she couldn’t perfect herself
- liberal eugenics rather than total government control: parents with financial means opt-in to the system, but the system is set up to favor those who opt-in
MTV published an interview with Gil Grant, who’s writing the Gattaca pilot for Leary’s Apostle Films. Grant is writing the pilot as a police procedural set in the future. Here’s how Grant got there:
[The NASA-ish space travel] facility was so specific, so narrow in its focus. It worked for [the movie’s] story, but if you open it up and go outside that world, you can see a broader canvas there,” Grant explained. The idea of a police procedural evolved naturally from there, both as a source of compelling weekly stories and as a portrait of the issues facing a society which has embraced eugenics.
Sure. Naturally. The only thing natural about turning any good concept into a procedural is that people are naturally lazy. But then you know my thoughts on procedurals.
Grant’s timeframe for his Gattaca pilot seems to be after the events of the movie. He says, “I came up with a world which is populated with Valids and Invalids, the same premise [as the movie], but taken into a police department where we’re… integrating, using the analogy of the ‘60s Civil Rights struggle.” He goes on:
Even though it’s technically illegal to discriminate against Invalids, just like in the ‘60s people did. So it’s come to pass that [the government has] ordered the police department to hire their first token Invalid into the detective department. What we’re doing is we’re taking an Invalid and teaming him up with a Valid, a seasoned officer. You know, it’s oil and water.
So it’s like if Elizabeth Mitchell had known Alan Tudyk was a Visitor and she had to be cool with it, and like, they went out on patrol and all, but she made occasional jokes about somebody needing some Lubriderm?
There were two crazy central conceits to Gattaca the movie that made it work and made audiences feel:
- Fear and looming threats of being found out that you weren’t perfect
- Ethan Hawke’s character’s dream of wanting to go to space embodied the sort of pure yearning quest that just about everyone can identify with, and his any means necessary approach makes him the underdog for whom you totes root instead of the underdog to whom you say meh.
Now, I’m not saying that the Gattaca TV series won’t figure out how to be good or interesting or even merely watchable, but - If the Invalids are already being accepted into society, where’s the tension? And if the show actually revolves around police officers, where’s the hope? It’s hard to see where this might go beyond a Season 3/4 Battlestar Galactica - and what looks to be every episode of V - old fashioned “hey gang, let’s smoke out the Others” witch hunt.
And frankly, if Gattaca wasn’t the property the Apostle Films guys were touching, I wouldn’t care. I do a great job of ignoring procedurals on a daily basis. But Gattaca was a really special moment in scifi, so don’t fuck it up, kids!
P.S. Grant has been a writer & producer for NCIS, NCIS: Los Angeles & 24. So, um, at least there might be pithy one-note, one-line jokes and very, very hard perimeters.
Greatest Moments in Television History Ever, OK?
That this moment would be included in our prestigious canon is a fuckin’ given. Do not underestimate the cultural importance of when Dr. Kimberly Shaw RIPPED OFF HER WIG.
To refresh your memory, Melrose Place (old school) began rather slowly. Jane & Michael were married, Billy didn’t want to work in the family carpet store and Amy Locane was the OASW (Original Ashlee Simpson-Wentz), doomed to disappear before the back nine. As the fable goes, Heather Locklear joins the show and the action revs the hell up. The affairs and the catfights reach new heights and the show becomes a pop culture phenomenon.
On April 27, 1994, Fox aired the seminal Melrose Place episode “The Bitch Is Back.” In this episode, Kimberly, played by Marcia Cross, returns to the titular apartment complex after faking dead and being buried. For a dead chick, she looks great. She’s way up on her high horse, swanning around the place and basically being the biggest badass ever. Then she takes to the bathroom and rips! off! her! wig! revealing a shaved head and a brain surgery scar. Squealing and cheering ensued nationwide.
“I hate when TV shows have couples argue for contrived reasons just because the writer wants tension, but when the Taylors get into it, it’s almost always over something real, and if they’re petty or stupid about it at first (Eric claiming the check was for dry cleaning), eventually they talk about it like grown-ups and we get a real resolution. I watch how these two are written, and played by Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton, and I constantly want to chain writers of other TV shows in front of an “FNL” marathon to say, “See this? This is how you can write a happy, mature couple and still keep it interesting.”
