Canned TV Show #7: Stacked

Pamela Anderson is very attractive.  Yes, legion of followers, it’s true.  She’s a pretty woman and she has large breasts.  One might even say she’s…stacked?  Oh ho ho I crack myself up.  But I can’t take credit for that one unfortunately; the creators of Stacked already beat me to it.  In fact, that crappy joke pretty much sums up any reason anyone would want to watch this “Pamela Anderson in a bookstore sitcom” (wow, I never thought I’d say that phrase), since its worth otherwise is pretty limited.  It’s all standard sitcom silliness, but hampered by a lead actress who possesses very little in the way of comedic talent.

Ok, I’m getting ahead of myself.  Created by Stephen Levitan (who co-created this year’s hilarious Modern Family, quite the jump in quality there), Stacked is a standard fish-out-of-water, workplace situation comedy that happens to take place in a bookstore.  The fish in this case is Skylar (Anderson), fresh out of the sex and booze fueled waters of dating rock stars and partying every night.  She comes into a bookstore conveniently called Stacked, looking for a book on relationships in order to dump her cheating rock star boyfriend.  The store is run by brothers Gavin (Elon Gold) and Stuart (Brian Scolaro), two hopeless dorks who’ve never even been near a woman of Skylar’s staggering beauty.  Gavin’s a failed writer stuck selling other people’s books, after a divorce from his she-devil of an ex (Paget Brewster).  Stuart’s a tad less well rounded (if you can consider Gavin well rounded), and is mostly just a stereotypical nerd who can’t find a girl.  Also populating the bookstore is barista Katrina (Marissa Jaret Winokur), a frumpy tomboy who also can’t find a mate, and Stuart (Christopher Lloyd, yes it’s the one you’re thinking of), a retired professor who apparently has nothing better to do than hang out there spouting one-liners all day.  Together, they get into all sorts of generic sitcom mishaps, but somehow everything works out in the end

And there you have it, that’s the general outline of the show, and you can insert your own lame plotlines and chances are the show will use them at least once.  I really don’t blame the cast for this (except Anderson), they’re all pretty solid comedic actors (except Anderson), it’s just that their characters are all pretty lame and don’t have much to make them interesting.  Lloyd is as funny as the show gets; his delivery is worth a chuckle here and there, but it’s not enough to salvage it.  Since I can’t seem to figure out how to embed clips from hulu, here’s a link to one that pretty much sums up the humor.

So as you can see, it’s all pretty lame banter, and considering they run a bookstore it certainly seems like an easy job, given the amount of time they have to deal with personal stuff.  In fact, the fact that the show is set in a bookstore doesn’t amount to much; they could pretty much set it anywhere and it’d be about the same.  I’m not asking for literary humor, God forbid, but it just seems like a lame excuse to have that silly play on words in the title.  Anderson would pretty much be out of place anywhere that wasn’t a rock star’s bedroom, so the setting is pretty irrelevant.

Despite it’s brief run time, the show managed to rope in some pretty funny actors for guest appearances here and there, including Arrested Development’s Tony Hale, Reno 911’s Thomas Lennon, and Freaks and Geeks‘ John Francis Daley, who can’t seem to find steady work these days.  There’s also appearances from Jenny McCarthy, Carmen Electra, and Anderson’s real-life ex-hubby Kid Rock, who’s actually kind of funny as a creepy UPS guy.  What was it that drew them to this show?  Hale was still on Development at the time, and I’m sure many of the others had careers of their own they could’ve been focusing on.  Maybe it was the chance to work with Pamela Anderson?  I guess that must be it.

That could be one of my biggest issues with Stacked, it feels like it exists solely as a showcase for Anderson’s non-existent talent.  We know she can’t carry a movie, Barb Wire proved that, so what made them think she could carry a whole TV series?  Admittedly, she’s not as terrible here as she was in the aforementioned film, but she doesn’t have the timing to headline a series.  A lot of comedians work for years to have the chance to star in a series, and the fact that Anderson produced a show that she could star in rings pretty hollow.  Also, maybe it’s the fact that laugh tracks usually have an opposite effect on me, but the one for this show feels copious even for a series with real laughs.  And do laugh tracks really make home viewers laugh more?  To me they’re just distracting; I find myself thinking: why are they laughing so hard at this?  At most it gets a chuckle, that’s about it.  The funniest ones are ones where Anderson, surprisingly, takes a backseat to a story about one of the other characters, or offers some input in a plot that does not belong to her.  If the series was more willing to do that more often, it might not have been so bad.  But then again, Anderson is really the only reason anyone watched the show in the first place.  It certainly wasn’t Elon Gold, who looks like a geekier version of Glenn Howerton from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Though he’s not a bad comedic actor.

One of the other sad aspects of the show is that no one, not even the funnier actors, has done much after the show ended.  Winokur was on Dancing with the Stars one time, but didn’t win.  Gold and Scolaro have had guest appearances in stuff, but nothing too solid.  The fact that Scolaro went on to play a bit part in The Brothers Solomon is beyond depressing.  Lloyd was recently in a video on funny or die that was pretty hilarious, but something tells me Stacked was his last real meaty live-action role.  It’s a real shame, given that Lloyd is a legend for playing Doc Brown and Uncle Fester, but at least he has those to add to his legacy, hopefully to blot out this, Fly me to the Moon, Flakes, and a handful of other bad late career decisions.

So, should it be back on the air? Heavens no.  I think nineteen episodes was plenty long for this vanity project to go on.  The series ends on a really sour note that I won’t go into (if, for some strange reason you feel possessed to watch it), but it’s certainly not closure, especially considering the show introduced a couple possible romances for the future.  Honestly though, I could care less.

If you feel compelled to see it, you can watch the whole thing, courtesy of our friends at hulu here:  http://www.hulu.com/stacked

Come back next time, when I’ll be reviewing the recent canned series Aliens in America!  I’ve heard good things, but we’ll see if it holds up to my scrutiny.

Canned TV Show #6: Firefly

Well fans, the hour is upon us.  Possibly the most beloved cancelled show of all time is here, and after five long entries, it is surely the moment you’ve all been waiting for.  For today, I will be reviewing the show most often mentioned when it comes to the idea of shows cancelled before their time: Joss Whedon’s Firefly.

Joss Whedon could have one of the most substantial pedigrees of anybody working in the TV medium.  He’s created numerous shows which have developed massive cult followings, such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spinoff, Angel.  His most recent show, Dollhouse, was recently cancelled by FOX before airing the rest of its second season, but will surely develop its own cult, most likely made up of the people who comprise the cults for his other shows.  Instead of it being his shows that have fan bases, Whedon himself commands a very large group of followers who will love and support pretty much anything he does, which is something very few TV show creators can say.  In fact, the work done by said fan base even lead to a comeback of sorts for this series, but more on that later.

Needless to say, there’s a lot of hype circulating Firefly, and so I had high expectations of the show.  I mean, an intensely loyal fan base, which included several of my close friends, must see something, right?  I entered my viewing experience expecting nothing less than literal TV gold, something that would change my life and the way I thought about it for eons to come.  Ok, so maybe that was a little high, but I certainly didn’t leave the show feeling disappointed.  I admit, it isn’t a perfect show, but it isn’t hard to see why so many people rallied so hard to keep it afloat, to see it return in some way.

The plot is really nothing too radical; but the characters, like any good series, are where the real reward of the show lies.  It’s centuries in the future, after the human population has grown to large for earth to sustain it, humanity leaves to terraform new planets and spread out over the galaxy.  There’s a central governing body called The Alliance, which is similar to your totalitarian governments of most future-set sci-fi, who represent a shadowy antagonist to our heroes, a ragtag group of outlaws who fly through the galaxy in a “firefly-class” spaceship looking for jobs of varying legality to sustain them.  They live outside of alliance rule, and frequently come into opposition with them.  Onboard the ship, the motley crew consists of captain Malcolm “Mal” Reynolds (Nathan Fillion), the stubborn but intensely loyal leader; his first mate Zoe Alleyne Washburne (Gina Torres), who in turn is extremely loyal to him; her husband Hoban “Wash” Washburne (Alan Tudyk), the ship’s pilot; Kaywinnit Lee “Kaylee” Frye (Jewel Staite), the ship’s bubbly mechanic; and Jayne Cobb (Adam Baldwin), the hired muscle of the crew.  Also on board is Inara Serra (the gorgeous Morena Baccarin), a registered “companion,” basically a high class prostitute who is afforded almost royalty status, who rents out one of the smaller shuttles attached to the ship.  In the pilot episode, they also pick up holy man Shepherd Derrial Book (Ron Glass), who ends up serving as Mal’s conscience many a time, and Dr. Simon Tam (Sean Maher), who is carrying cargo which contains his sister River (Summer Glau), whom he rescued from The Alliance, which was performing experiments on her.

So if you managed to make it through that lengthy description of the crew, it’s not hard to see that the ensemble is really the heart of the show, and the characters’ conflicts with one another and with themselves is what keeps the show interesting from week to week.  Really, it’s one of the most interesting and entertaining ensembles ever assembled; everyone gets something interesting to do, and were all on their way to being very fleshed out, well-rounded characters before the show was cancelled.  The fact that even our heroes’ heroism is continually called into question offers a thought-provoking moral paradox to the series.  Each episode pretty much serves as its own adventure, and you don’t necessarily have to watch it from the beginning to get what’s going on at any given moment.  There is a larger storyline and some unanswered questions that carry over, but unfortunately the show didn’t get around to answering them before the ax fell.  What exactly were they doing to River?  Why does Shepherd Book seem to have such intimate knowledge of guns and combat?  Will Simon ever kiss Kaylee (there was a romance developing between them)?  Some things we’ll never know, and some things were cleared up a couple years later, in the form of a feature film called Serenity which gives some closure to the series.  I won’t really go into it, other than the fact that it has the awesome Chiwetel Ejiofor as the villain is reason enough to see it, but fans of the show can’t have a complete experience unless they watch it, and I’m sure pretty much all of them have by now.

One of the show’s central conceits is that the future is basically the same as the present; we’ll be dealing with the same problems we do now, just maybe on a different scale.  The sort of “future meets old west” look the show has going reflects this idea of the past and the future colliding, and it gives the show a unique and creative style.  Occasionally it doesn’t work quite as well, and the deliberate “blue collar” sound to the dialog occasionally sounds clunky coming out of the actors’ mouths.  Some can pull it off, but some sound a little awkward with the phrasing.  Also, the fact that the characters will occasionally slip into Chinese when they want to curse, because evidently the only two superpowers left are the U.S. (woot woot) and China (well of course), can be a little distracting.  I love the colorful ways sci-fi shows and movies get around not being able to swear, like the Chinese phrases here or the use of the word “frak” on Battlestar Galactica, with the excuse that “in the future there’ll be new swear words!”  But these are by and large nitpicky details to an otherwise massively entertaining series.

It’s hard to pick out which episodes are the best, since they all have great moments of their own.  If I had to choose, I’d say one of the standouts is the pilot, which introduces us to our crew and sets up the conflicts that will continue throughout.  The episode “Out of Gas,” in which a wounded Mal stumbles towards the back of an empty Serenity to replace a part which has caused her to break down, which is intercut with flashbacks explaining the origin of the crew and how Mal came to possess the ship we know and love, is another one.  The finale is also great, in which Richard Brooks (who would later reteam with Fillion on FOX’s Drive, which I covered a few weeks ago) plays a philosophical bounty hunter who subdues the crew and then tries to find River, not realizing she’s better at mind games than he is.  These are only a few, but really any given episode warrants a recommendation for some reason or another.  I enjoyed when the show was able to balance a scrappy comic tone and a heavier, more dramatic one, with Wash and Jayne providing a large amount of the comedy.  The closest the show comes to straight comedy would probably be “Our Mrs. Reynolds,” in which sexpot Christina Hendricks plays a con artist who tries to subdue the crew and take their ship, and it’s pretty hilarious.  Shepard Book warns Mal, who believes he accidentally married the girl during a recent celebration on an outer planet, “if you take sexual advantage of her, you’ll go to a special place in hell usually reserved for child molesters, or people who talk at the theater,” and later reiterates, “you were kissing, eh?  That sounds…special.”

So what caused such a beloved show to die an early death?  Probably the most obvious answer would be that FOX seriously mishandled the show.  They ended up not airing the pilot first, and instead aired the second episode, apparently concerned the pilot didn’t bring viewers into the action fast enough, which ultimately made the overall plot more difficult to follow.  More episodes were aired out of order as well, and FOX apparently didn’t believe keeping Whedon’s vision alive was a risk worth taking.  They also stuck the series in a bad time slot, and didn’t advertise it the way they should have.  While the series had a devoted following while it was on, it wasn’t enough to keep it on the air, even though said following sent in postcards and tried to get other networks to pick it up.  While they weren’t successful in keeping it on the air, their vigilance inspired Whedon to bring it back in some way.  I was probably still a tad too young to get into it while it was on, I’m sure had I been older I would have done my part to bring it back.  However, it makes me wonder if it’s better to be a short lived much much beloved show that will live a second life on DVD, to be continually rediscovered and relived, or to be on for several seasons and go without much fanfare.  If I made a TV series, I think I’d prefer the former.

For those who haven’t seen it, you can watch it all on hulu, though I’d recommend giving the DVD a look as well, as there’s some interesting bonus material on there.

So, should it be back in the air? I’m afraid I’m not going to break the trend here: yes, it most certainly should.  I think the thing I would’ve most liked to have found out about is Shepherd Book’s past; he obviously has some experience with fighting and possibly even killing, and it would’ve been cool to see where that came from.  Perhaps a prequel series could be arranged?

To send us out, here’s the kick ass opening title sequence with a kick ass theme song written by Whedon himself, and performed by Sonny Rhodes:

Come back next time when I’ll be reviewing the Pamela Anderson bookstore comedy Stacked!  Is Anderson’s ample cleavage enough to salvage the show?  Based on her acting skills in the past, I’m certain it might have to be.

Canned TV Show #5: The Middleman

Hello legion of followers, sorry for my lateness in posting once again, I was forced to take some time off when my wicked oppressors (or rather professors) decided to pile on the work and distract me from my civic duties.  I also took some time over my Thanksgiving weekend to watch my dad’s copy of Firefly: The Complete Series.  Expect a post on that shortly; I still have to watch a few episodes.  In any case, I’m back in full swing, and with a great show to talk about, one that I believe will make its way to a cult status of its own, amassing a legion of followers not quite the size of mine, but still large, demanding its return in some form.   I am of course talking about The Middleman, a smart, quirky, endlessly watchable nugget of sci-fi comedy goodness brought to you by, oddly enough, ABC Family.

You wouldn’t expect a clever homage/spoof of 60s spy-fi and “monster of the week” specials to be broadcast on the same network that brings the world The Secret Life of the American Teenager, but sure enough, there it was.  And after watching it, it certainly seems a tad on the “too smart for the room” side, and an odd fit for such a wholesome and, well, bland network like ABC Family.  In fact, some of the humor on the show is downright inappropriate for young children who watch Secret Life and think that’s what high school’s really like.  The show’s constant barrage of pop culture references and general quirkiness would feel more at home on Syfy or something like that.  But alas, ABC Family bought the property, and ABC Family is where the show was made.

So where did this show come from, you might ask?  The brainchild of TV writer Javier Grillo-Marxuach, The Middleman was initially planned as a tribute and send up of the aforementioned “monster of the week” genre, and was written to be a TV series.  On its way, it ended up becoming a comic book, and story arcs were published as mini series and then collected in anthologies.  Eventually, Grillo-Marxuach turned it back into a TV script, and managed to sell it to ABC Family, adapting certain plotlines from the comic into whole episodes, and some that were completely new.  It was an odd path for a show to take from conception to birth, but let me tell you, it was worth it.

So what’s the plot, you might ask?   You ask a lot of questions, you know that?  Well anyway, the plot concerns Wendy Watson (played by babeorino Natalie Morales), a snarky artist type who is attacked by some sort of crazy monster at one of her many short-lived temp jobs, and is rescued by a mysterious figure in a green Eisenhower jacket who calls himself The Middleman (played by hunkorino Matt Keeslar).  Later, at her “illegal sublet she shares with another young, photogenic artist” named Lacey (Brit Morgan, also quite lovely), she gets a call from a mysterious temp agency with the comically suspicious name Jolly Fats Weehaukin, only to find out it’s a cover for The Middleman’s super secret crime fighting organization.  There, she becomes The Middleman’s sidekick, who along with the help of sassy android assistant Ida (the not so babeorino but very funny Mary Pat Gleason), fight comic book style evil and save humanity.  It’s a fun premise from the get-go, and the show has fun with it, putting its characters in all sorts of ridiculous situations.

Here’s a quick clip of an ad for the show featuring The Middleman giving some helpful advice:

But a fun premise wouldn’t be enough if it weren’t for how much else the show has to offer.  Morales and Keeslar are both great, and share a chemistry that keeps evolving and getting more interesting.  Gleason is hilarious as the cranky Ida, who always has some snappy comeback and frequently banters with Wendy, calling her a pothead at practically every turn.  The supporting characters are great as well, and the show seems to have a really strong desire to develop them and make them interesting.  Wendy, of course, gets the most development, but The Middleman and Lacey both get a fair amount themselves, including a turbulent romance between them.  Even Noser, a friend of Wendy and Lacey who sits outside holding a guitar and quoting song lyrics, is more than just a one-note character, especially in the second half of the series where he leaves the building and gets more to do.  It’s kind of a funny running joke that we never see him do the stuff he’s supposedly good at, like knowing every possible song to play in “stump the band” or being an ace ventriloquist.  Wendy eventually gets an almost too perfect boyfriend named Tyler Ford (played by Brendan Hines), with whom she shares plenty of witty exchanges.  Also, Kevin Sorbo of Hercules fame shows up as a middleman from the sixties, awoken from cryogenic slumber, and he’s pretty gosh darn funny in it.  Kind of makes me wish he still had a career.

Another important part of what makes The Middleman so enjoyable are the little details each episode contains, making the whole series feel very lovingly and carefully crafted.  There’s sly pop culture gags, intentionally cheesy effects, and all sorts of phrases repeated like mantras.   For example, every villain believes their plan is “sheer elegance in its simplicity,” the fictional restaurant The Booty Chest is almost always referred to as “the pirate-themed sports bar with the scantily clad waitresses,” or Lacey calling The Middleman “sexy boss man” or “pillow lips.”  The show also has some fun with meta-humor throughout each episode.  Wendy asks of a conveniently crawlable vent system: “were these designed by TV writers or something?” and the omnipresent subtitles that state the time and setting often display something humorous (a personal favorite of the setting/time displays: “the underworld–time has no meaning or relevance”).  Overall, it seems like a lot of careful crafting went into the show, and that the creators really loved the things they were spoofing.  It’s entertaining, quirky fare you just don’t find on TV very often anymore.

If it’s so great, why did it get cancelled, you might ask?  Seriously, what’s with the questions?  You freak me out.  If I had to guess, I’d have to say, as usual, ratings did it in.  While the show developed a devoted fan base, it was still a small one, and their love and support wasn’t enough to keep it on the air.  ABC Family cut down the season from thirteen episodes to twelve, and took some funds from the unfilmed final episode and put it towards making the twelfth, a fun story involving a dystopian parallel universe, even bigger budget (the episodes didn’t have a very big budget to begin with, which is all well and good considering the show is kind of supposed to be lovingly low budget).  A comic book was later released, based off the plot of the final episode, to kind of wrap up the series and reveal some important facts.  The cast and creators also came to Comic Con this year to do a table read of the script for the final episode, which is probably as close to seeing it filmed as we’ll ever get.   You can watch the reading on youtube (the real-life equivalent of the show’s own version, My Face in a Tube, presumably a combination of Myspace, Facebook, and Youtube) in seven parts if you so choose; it would’ve been fun to see in episode form, that’s for gosh darn sure.

To close out, here’s a funny compilation of some of The Middleman’s colorful yet mostly G-rated sayings (he is an overgrown boy scout, after all):

So, should it be back on the air? you bet your sweet patootie.  While I wouldn’t call it the heaviest show ever made, it was consistently entertaining and winningly quirky.  Plus, any time I can gaze at Morales’ hotness is a plus for me.  Grillo-Marxuach said he still hasn’t given up hope for the future of the series, and hopes that DVD sales will be strong enough to warrant some kind of return.  So I urge all of you to watch it, and buy the DVD set if you like the show.  You won’t be disappointed, and if you are, well, clearly you’re no follower of mine.  You can watch it all on various websites including megavideo (though they’re lame and make you pay after you watch a certain amount of stuff, unless you wait a while to watch more.  It’s a tricky system).

Come back next time when I’ll be looking at the Holy Grail of cancelled TV shows, Joss Whedon’s Firefly!  Does it live up to the massive hype?  Find out next time.

Canned TV Show #4: Drive

So far on Canned, I’ve reviewed shows that have managed to make it through one season, or in the case of last week, two whole freakin’ seasons.  After last time, which was torturous, this week is a breath of air in a sense.  Today, I’m reviewing a show that was, by contrast, extremely short.  Six episodes, in fact.  And only four of which were even aired on TV.  The show is Drive, a fast-paced actioner about various individuals drafted into an illegal, cross country road race (a fact they are gracious enough to remind us of almost every episode).

After the unfortunate failure of Firefly, star Nathan Fillion and co-creator Tim Minear decided to reteam for this, which would end up another unfortunate failure.  FOX promoted the show pretty heavily, and while the premiere of Drive racked up six million viewers, which isn’t great but not terrible, the rest of the episodes dropped off considerably, and after only four had aired, FOX pulled the series.  The remaining two were later posted online after it was made clear that FOX, which initially promised to air the final two episodes as a one night event, would not be airing them.  Though Drivewas on before the wildly popular 24, that connection wasn’t enough to keep it on the air.

The fact that FOX pulled the plug on the show so quickly leads me to believe they really didn’t have much faith in it to begin with.  It seems like other shows have started out with low ratings but were able to build up positive word-of-mouth and take off, but this one didn’t have that opportunity.  Fans of the show were just left with the frustration of not knowing who wins the race.

But how about the show itself?  Well, I’m pleased to report, I was thoroughly entertained by Drive.  While it wasn’t a great show and occasionally suffered from predictable plotting and inane dialogue, it was a fast-paced, entertaining, often exhilarating show.  It was twisty enough to keep you coming back, and a fair amount of the characters are compelling and interesting, not to mention well acted.  The plot goes like this: a diverse group of people are given mysterious cell phones and are brought to a location, and told that they are now part of an illegal, cross-country road race (see?  They repeat it a ton of times on the show, so I’m going to also).  The grand prize for winning this illegal, cross-country road race is $32 million.  However, some of the racers are not trying to win this illegal, cross-country road race just for the moolah; some, like Fillion’s character, have higher stakes.

The contestants in this illegal, cross-country road race (ok I’ll stop) range from interesting to, sadly, not so interesting.  First, we’ll run down the interesting ones.  Fillion is great as Alex Tully, a man driven to compete and win the race because his wife is being held by the people who run it.  He also has a dark past, one that his wife managed to “save” him from.  He’s riding with Corinna Wiles (played by Kristin Lehman, also good), a mysterious woman who wants a way to break into the race in order to take them down from inside, in revenge for what they did to her as a child.  Also in the race is John Trimble, an astrophysicist and his daughter Violet (played by Dylan Baker and Emma Stone, respectively).  John is suffering from a fatal disease and wants to go on this adventure with his daughter before he goes.  I enjoy Baker in almost everything I see him in, and here he shows a much sweeter side in contrast to the creeps he usually plays.  The scenes with him and Stone feel really believable, and they feel like a real father and daughter team.  In addition, there’s Winston Salazar (Kevin Alejandro), an ex-con who reunites with his estranged half-brother Sean (J.D. Pardo) and the two become partners.  Winston wants to know who broke him out of prison just to be in the race, and why.  Watching the two brothers form a shaky bond is enjoyable, and the actors pull it off reasonably well.  Last in the interesting pile is Wendy Patrakas (Melanie Lynskey), a new mother racing to help protect her baby, and also running from her abusive husband.  She seems like a nice, normal mother driven to do something drastic for her son, and Lynskey plays it well.

In the not so interesting pile are, luckily, only two groups, but with so few episodes, any time with them onscreen is time wasted.  First, there’s Rob (Riley Smith), an Iraq veteran who is officially AWOL after his deployment is hidden from him by his wife Ellie (Micrea Monroe).  This duo just isn’t as compelling as the others, and the actors sadly aren’t that convincing.  Ellie doesn’t wanna see Rob get hurt, but Rob is understandably upset when he finds out, since he’s now in a heap of trouble.  The end of the season sets it up that perhaps Ellie isn’t as innocent as she seems, but it’s really kind of stupid.  Finally, we have the least compelling trio in the bunch, three women who met during Hurricane Katrina and formed a bond.  There’s Leigh (Rochelle Aytes), Susan (Michael Hyatt), and Ivy (Taryn Manning).  While Leigh and Susan are boring, Ivy is straight-up annoying, and she eventually ditches the other two to join Wendy in her car.  This is upsetting, seeing as she’s the biggest part of the three being attached to Wendy, who is a much more interesting character.

Here’s a quick clip that shows the main characters and their reasons for being in the race (though be careful, there are spoilers):

So as you can tell, not everything in Drive works.  Which is a shame, since some of it works really well.  I admit some of the plotting is downright silly, and occasionally cliche.  Occasionally also, the dialogue is pretty weak, but just as often it’s surprisingly funny.  After being last to the first checkpoint, Wendy is forced to “eliminate” Ivy from her car with the bland twins.  When she admits she’d do anything for her son, Ivy decides she has a better chance of winning with her, and comes up with the idea that they ride together.  Upon entering the car and saying something undoubtedly annoying, Wendy pauses and then says “I think maybe I should’ve shot you.”  I’m not an advocate of violence, but I think the show would’ve been better off if she had.

Despite its problems, Drive was compulsively entertaining, and left me wanting to find out who won, and what happened to the characters.  The pilot was a really great 40 minutes of TV, setting up the situations and characters and featuring plenty of the car on car racing action that the premise promises.  It did make me wonder, however, just how long this race would go on.  I strongly doubt they’d be able to stretch it out for very long before it got ridiculous.  Luckily, the fine people over at tvseriesfinale.com shared some of what the creators said would happen had the show continued (read the article here, it’s pretty interesting).  According to Minear and co-creator Craig Silverstein, the show would have featured new contestants in subsequent seasons, with former ones taking on new jobs in the competition.  I’m not sure what that means exactly, but I’m also not sure I like that idea.  If viewers get invested in the characters, I have a feeling it’d be hard to uproot them and ask them to get invested in a whole new set.

So, should it be back on the air? I think so.  The series ends, as you can imagine, in the middle of things, with Violet and John stranded after Ivy steals their car, Wendy in the hands of her jerk husband, and Corinna in the hands of the puppet masters behind the race.  It left me wanting the loose threads to be tied up; did Alex find his wife?  What would become of John, who was dying last we knew?  What’s gonna happen with Corinna?  How about Wendy?  Will Ivy ever cease being annoying?  So much left unanswered.  Forever.  I think, however, the show may have worked better as some sort of miniseries, where it could’ve told the stories of this group and then ended, instead of starting over with a new group next season.  The article above answers some of those questions, but some will probably never be answered.

Check back next week, when I’ll be watching the one-season ABC Family sci-fi comedy The Middleman!  Wrong fit for that channel?  So I’ve read, but I’ll find out for sure.

Canned TV Show #3: The War at Home

Hello legion of followers, sorry I’m so behind on my third post.  You’d be surprised how little time a college student can have to sit on his backside and watch TV on his laptop.  I thought I went to college for that sole reason!

Also, the show I reviewed for today is not exactly one that is easy to watch multiple episodes of.  When I started this blog, I had no idea it would be quite so hard to sit through bad TV, but it really is people, it really is.  Especially when it’s not so much bad as just bland and mediocre to below-average.  A terrible show might at least be a noble train wreck or entertainingly awful, but one like the one I reviewed tonight is none of these things.  I’m talking, of course, about The War at Home, the little-loved FOX sitcom that aired for two seasons between 2006 and 2007.

In doing the little research I do for this blog, I found that the show had a paltry 28 on metacritic, a site that ranks shows with a composite score out of 100.  The general consensus was that it just wasn’t as funny or edgy as it tried to be, which is mostly true, but that’s not my only problem with this show.  You’ll find out what those are later.

As for the plot, the show concerns the exploits of the Gold family, led by sarcastic, slightly bigoted father Larry (Michael Rapaport), equally sassy mother Vicki (Anita Barone), and their kids: attractive but snotty daughter Hilary (Kaylee DeFer), dorky, awkward son Larry (Kyle Sullivan), and smartass younger son Mike (Dean Collins).  Basically, it’s a typical family sitcom setup.  The only difference is, The War at Home tries to tackle hot-button issues like teen drinking, drug use, racism, homosexuality, masturbation, relationships, and a whole lot more, and handle them in a sensitive but funny way.  Only one problem with this noble goal, and one of my chief criticisms of the series (which are the only important criticisms you need note).  The War at Home is never subtle or sensitive, and it’s rarely that funny.  It got a chuckle out of me here and there, but nothing that would make an entire series worth watching (it should also be noted, I did not watch the whole series, call me a cheating lying poopface if you will, but I watched enough from both seasons to get a solid impression of it).  The setups seem edgy enough, but the show almost always ends it trying to step on as few toes as possible.  The copious amounts of laugh track where laugh track need not go doesn’t help the funniness either.  Instead, it reminds you that you could be getting actual laughs somewhere else.  For an example of this general lack of subtlety, check the following:

For something that tries to be “edgy,” The War at Home feels stale right out of the gate.  It feels like a retread of every other “edgy” family sitcom that came before it, especially the much better Married…with Children.  The difference between the two?  In this one, the actors break the fourth wall and spout their lame jokes at the audience directly!  That’s creative, right?  There are few things more infuriating in life than actors on a plain white background.  For a show that attempts to derive so much humor from its dialogue, so much of it feels forced and unnatural.  Maybe if it tried to derive more humor from its characters and situations instead of their inane banter, it would’ve been a lot funnier.

But what about the characters, you ask?  Well, they’re all pretty unlikeable, but not unlikeable enough to be endearing (for an example of this paradox, look at the Reynolds family from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia).  Mainly, they’re all just really mean to each other.  Is that really how modern families are?  A bunch of arch rivals who are willing to extort each other and stab each other in the back for their own gain?  Maybe some households, but there are so few moments where the family actually feels like a family and not just a bunch of taglines sharing a house together for their dynamic to be believable.  Don’t get me wrong, I think Michael Rapaport’s a likable guy and a pretty solid comedic actor, and Barone’s pretty good also.  It’s just a shame that they had to have this sub-par fare as their showcase.  As for the kids, really only one of them is likable in any way for me, and that’d be Larry.  This is probably because I can relate to his awkwardness and cluelessness when it comes to girls.  Wow, I just realized how sad that is.  Mike and Hilary are both just obnoxious little jerks, and I really felt nothing for them but annoyance.  This might also have to do with the fact that Sullivan is the funniest of the three kid actors.  If anyone has a career after this, I hope it’s gonna be him.  This isn’t the best example, but it showcases his goofy comic presence:

The show also features a slew of other recurring characters, including Hilary’s boyfriend Taye (a black guy!  Hoo lordy!  This would be a shocker if the year was 1958!) and his family, who are so carefully crafted to not feel like stereotypes that they essentially feel so anti-stereotypical that they make new stereotypes in some way (the dad went to Yale and attends a country club, that doesn’t allow Jews!  What a twist of fate!).  The big problem is that nobody feels real, and these smaller characters feel as fleshed out as anyone in the family, despite their lack of screentime.  Seth McFarlane even shows up as a 30 year old dating Hilary!  He’s as funny as he can be with the material, but sadly it doesn’t amount to much:

The thing that amazes me about The War at Home is that apparently, somewhere out there, there’s a devoted and adamant following that laments its passing just like I lament the death of Clone High.  And really, when you look at it, there’s a fair amount of the show that actually got made.  Sure, it only had two seasons, but they were both 22 episodes apiece.  That’s some long seasons.  Networks don’t seem to do that very often unless they have tremendous faith in a show.  And when you look at The War at Home, you can see what potential FOX saw in it.  It was a way for the network to appear to be putting forth another edgy family show, a sort of live-action Family Guy, while not actually running the risk of offending anybody.  The show was even settled snugly in between two actually edgy (and actually funny) family shows, albeit animated ones: The Simpsons and Family Guy.  For me, this made it seem even more alien and unnecessary.  It was an unfunny oasis in the middle of a hilarious desert, an obstacle between the Family Guy fan who also loves The Simpsons and getting from one of their favorite shows to the other.  Maybe that’s why the show lasted as long as it did, that people were just too lazy to change the channel for a half hour, a spot now occupied by the somewhat better but still middling The Cleveland Show.  Can anybody lend credence to this?  Shoot me a comment.

So, Should it be back on the air? Definitely not.  While I admit it’s not the worst show I’ve ever seen, it’s pretty damn unremarkable.  It just feels like it’s trying too hard to be both edgy and sanitary,  and while this may be a good combination for a network to finance, it probably won’t feel quite that way with viewers, and even its apparently dedicated fanbase wasn’t big enough to keep it on the air.  If for some reason you feel compelled to watch the show anyway, some episodes are on youtube, but the whole series can be seen on youku or megavideo (go to surfthechannel.com to get to the links).

I’ve decided I should probably get on some sort of schedule with these posts, so I’ll try to do one once a week, probably on the weekend.  Because, you know, I have very little social life.

Come back next week, when I’ll be looking at the short-lived Nathan Fillion vehicle (oh God, what a terrible pun) Drive!  It’s my shortest one so far, which will be a nice break from the almost painfully long one I just reviewed.

Canned TV Show #2: Clone High

Welcome back to Canned, where we dig up canceled shows from the TV vault and breathe sweet life into them for a brief, fleeting moment.  Today’s entry is on the ill-fated animated comedy Clone High, a joint venture with MTV and Canada’s Teletoon network.  I’ll be deciding if this cult favorite deserves its status, or whether it should be buried forever.

Also, I’ll be incorporating video into the post!  Because we all love that, right?  Who likes reading the unnecessarily formal prose of a college student when you can just watch the damn clips he’s talking about?  Well, today’s your lucky day, my lazy friends.

Now that my insulting of my already tiny audience is done, let’s move on to the show.  Clone High takes the relatively clever conceit of having clones of famous historical figures, now grown to teenage years and in a special high school just for them, and uses it to spoof teen sitcoms and dramas as a whole.  And I’ll tell you, dear reader, it is often with hilarious results.

for a little more backstory, let’s turn to indie group The Abandoned Pools to provide us with some info.                                  

As the theme song generously informs us, the clones were created for some sort of government plan, which is never fully revealed by the series’ end.  However, the school’s principal, Cinnamon J. Scudworth (voiced by co-creator Phil Lord) has his own plans for the clones, namely to hold them captive in a clone themed amusement park.  Who are the clones, you might ask?  There’s a large population of clones that populate the school and show up here and there, but the main ones are tall, awkward Abe Lincoln (voiced by Will Forte), who has the hots for sexy Cleo(patra, voiced by Christa Miller), who is in an on-again, off-again relationship with idiotic womanizer JFK (Voiced by other co-creator Chris Miller).  Also in the mix is Abe’s best friend, party-crazed Gandhi (Michael McDonald, not the singer one, the
Mad TV one), and his other gal pal Joan (of Ark, voiced by Nicole Sullivan), who harbors secret feelings for Abe, feelings that he’s too dense to notice.  Other clones show up from time to time, often for the use of random gags.  In fact, one of the funniest things about Clone High is that the fact that the characters are clones rarely comes into play.  instead, the show plays like a straight spoof of other teen shows conventions, and the characters could be just about anybody and it would still be as funny.

The show almost always hits its mark in terms of parody, from the school elections to the presence of drugs to the killing of a character brought in solely for that purpose (which Will Forte denies in his hilarious pre-episode voiceover).  Probably one of my favorites is the aforementioned school election, in which both presidential clones run against each other to win Cleo’s heart.  Mr. Scudworth, meanwhile, needs 2 million dollars for his clone theme park, so he decides to bring in a corporate sponsor for the election, the makers of a paste that’s supposed to give you energy, but really is nothing more than pancake batter and blue paint.  Their entrance at the election is some of the most spot-on parody of “extreme marketing” I’ve ever seen (it’s at about the seven minute mark)

Each episode features a hearty amount of funny moments, and all the characters are endearing.  I have to admit, I’m a big fan of the exploits of Scudworth and his sidekick, Mr. Butlertron.  Scudworth is such an over the top villain and Mr. B, as he’s called, is a great comic foil.  Later in the series, the writers use scudworth to spoof other genres, such as old-timey chasing cartoons like the Wile-E Coyote stuff, with an obnoxious skunk that shouts “try and catch me, bitch!”  In fact, this calls for another of those fancy video clips:

Since there are so few episodes and each one is so enjoyable, I’d say this is one show that should be watched start to finish.  However, the show gets increasingly dark and downright gory as it goes along, and some of the jokes don’t work quite as well.  In the end though, the jokes that hit outweigh the ones that fall flat, and you’re guaranteed to laugh at least once every few minutes or so, if only at the just plain ridiculousness of it all.  Some other highlights include, in my opinion, a rock opera in which the kids get addicted to raisins from a mysterious “Pusher” (voiced by Jack Black), and decide to liberate themselves.  The homages to Tommy are priceless.

In the end, it wasn’t entirely poor ratings that killed Clone High.  In combination with that, its demise came from a force larger and more powerful: the people of India.  Don’t take my word for it, though; here’s one last clip of the creators, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, explaining the show’s downfall:

Reportedly, people in India saw an ad in Maxim magazine depicting Gandhi’s clone in a negative light, and were none too pleased about it.  As Lord and Miller explain, people fasted in protest, and such bad publicity for the network had a hand in bringing the show down.  This explanation leaves mixed feelings in me.  A part of me wants to just tell the Indian people to lighten the hell up, but another part of me understands where they’re coming from.  Gandhi is nothing less than a martyr to them, a hero to millions whose tireless efforts of protest through non-violence gained independence for the nation, so to see his image dancing around naked or being diagnosed with A.D.D. had to be pretty upsetting.  I’m sure in this country, certain people would be upset to see, say, Martin Luther King in that role (though it should be noted, he does show up, but in an appearance that seems calculated not to step on any toes).  In fact, if they were moved to fasting in protest over just an image of Gandhi’s clone, they’d probably shit their pants with rage if they saw the actual show.  However, what the Indian people have to remember is that the Gandhi on the show is not the real Gandhi, but instead is a clone of the real one, a clone who grew up in the American public school system in the 20th century, and may have turned out the way he is on the show.  I doubt the creators of the show planned to insult the memory of one of the greatest people the world has ever known.  It just shows that where you grow up has a profound impact on the person you turn out to be.

So, should it be back on the air? Most definitely.  The series ends on a humdinger of a cliffhanger, with a brilliant two-parter episode.  I’d watch these guys for as long as they can keep up the funniness of the first season, and the characters are lovable, for as pathetic as they all are.  Maybe Lord and Miller can use some of their good will from their first film foray, this years’ winning kids’ book adaptation Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, which features similar humor, to get a Clone High movie made to tie up the loose ends of the finale.  A clone can dream…

If you want to check it out for yourself, most of the series can be viewed on youtube or veoh with decent quality.  I’d highly recommend it.

Come back next time, when I’ll be reviewing FOX’s panned sitcom The War at Home!  Unfairly panned?  We’ll see.

Canned TV Show #1: Kitchen Confidential

As I mentioned last time, this whole project pretty much started with a very short-lived series called Kitchen Confidential, Based on the tell-all memoir by chef and travel expert Anthony Bourdain.  It seemed like a can’t miss proposition: turning Bourdain’s book, which featured plenty of disturbing details of the nasty side of the restaurant business in vivid prose, into a half hour sitcom which would wring endless comedy from its steamy source.  Unfortuately, it didn’t pan out that way; critical opinion was mixed and the show earned very low ratings, eventually being preempted by the MLB playoffs before being pulled entirely.  So the question now becomes, what went wrong here?  To use the obligatory food analogies, was the show all presentation, no flavor?  Insert other culinary reference here?

The show seemed to have a strong enough pedigree: its creator, David Hemingson, scored a hit adapting another book, Sex and the City, for HBO, and it boasted a strong cast who had been on other successful shows in the past.  Its star, Bradley Cooper (in the Bourdain surrogate, instead called Jack Bourdain), had a recurring role on Alias and would later appear in the hit film Wedding Crashers.  It also boasted turns from Nicholas Brendon (Xander on Buffy), John Cho (of Harold and Kumar fame), John Francis Daley (Sam on Freaks and Geeks), and even a recurring role from Frank Langella as the suave Italian restaurant owner.   It seemed like the stars aligned to give FOX yet another hit comedy series to add to their growing list.  But instead, it became yet another entry in an equally expanding lineup of failures which has become something of a running joke at the network’s expense.

The plot goes something like this.  Jack Bourdain, a former hard drinkin’, drug takin’ bad boy chef, is now trying to get clean after losing yet another cooking gig.  It seems like things aren’t gonna be easy on Bourdain’s road to recovery, that is until he gets hired as head chef at a new upscale restaurant owned by Pino (Langella), and is required to put together a kitchen team to help him run his kitchen.  Predictably, he puts together a motley crew indeed, bringing in fellow bad boy sous chef Stephen (Owain Yeoman, Lysander in Troy), longtime friend and seafood specialist Teddy (Cho), goofball dessert guy Seth (Brendon), and rookie chef/punching bag Jim (Daley). Also in the mix is Pino’s daughter Mimi (Bonnie Somerville, from The O.C.), head waitress, cute hostess Tanya (Jamie King), very homosexual waiter Cameron (Sam Pancake), and a whole slew of other minor characters to up the comedy quotient.  Needless to say, such a dysfunctional group produces some wacky comedy situations that, predictably, will still end up making great food and putting Bourdain on the map.

It’s a pretty straightforward sitcom premise, but one that could, theoretically, have a fair amount of comedy mileage.  Sometimes the show manages to deliver on that comedy, with some ridiculous bits that manage to be pretty funny.  Other times, however, the show manages to be so zany that none of it really works.  In fact, part of Kitchen Confidential’s main problem is that it’s too zany, and not enough like its source material.  Where the book itself has plenty of amusing and disturbing bits from Bourdain’s time in high end restaurant kitchens, the show really doesn’t have much of that, but instead focuses on its characters screwing up, then somehow coming together to save the kitchen week after week.

Most of the characters get funny things to do, even if none of them really get developed past their initial sitcom types.  Daley has some of the funniest bits, but his character pretty much stays as “starry-eyed new kid who gets tortured by the more experienced pros” the whole time.  Maybe if the show were on for more seasons, it could’ve fleshed stuff out a bit more.  As it is though, it really doesn’t even attempt that.  Everything’s back to normal at the end of each episode, all conflicts are resolved, and all adversaries defeated.  It’s tactic that a lot of sitcoms use, as if they’re afraid they could be cancelled at any time.  Unfortunately for Kitchen Confidential, that ended up being all too true.

So how bad is it?  Well, in truth, it’s not that bad.  At least not enough to warrant such an abrupt end and painfully short run.  In fact, some of the best bits happened in the episodes that never saw the light of day until their release on DVD, including a funny episode in which the restaurant gets an order of live rabbits, and no one, not even the so-called “sociopath” Stephen, can gather up the cojones necessary to kill them in order to prepare for the night’s dinner.  Several characters have a one-on-one with a representative of the cuddly bunnies, and can’t follow through on the dirty business of finishing them off.  Each episode has a few funny bits, but they’re unfortunately intermixed with unfunny stuff, or stuff that could’ve been funny had it been dialed back a few notches.  Some jokes get stretched past the funny point and into obnoxious territory, and some just fall flat entirely.

Another problem I found is the sexual chemistry between the characters never really worked.  It seems like there’s supposed to be some sexual tension between Jack and Mimi, but it never really amounts to anything, and Jack’s relationship with his schoolmate and female counterpart Becky (the very attractive Erinn Hayes) is a lot more interesting.  Mimi in general comes off as more annoying than endearing, kind of like Elliot on Scrubs, but with less funny moments.  Similarly, Jim and Tanya start a relationship near the end of the series, much to the dismay of Seth, who has the hots for her.  While Seth’s attempts to woo Tanya while she resists create some funny moments, her relationship with Jim has very little buildup, even if I’d rather see her with him than Seth.

The show definitely has a slick and polished look, but it amounts, despite the funny gag here and there, to be mostly style, little substance.

So, should it be back on the air? I’d say yes, if only to air the rest of its season.  The first episodes do well to set up the general outline of the series, but most of the funniest bits never saw the light of day until released in a no-frills DVD package a little while later.  If the show had drawn more from its source material and tried a little more characterization, it may have grown into a more worthwhile sitcom treat.

Luckily for the cast, they all have a little something to keep their legacies intact.  Cooper would go on to star in a scrappy little comedy called The Hangover that managed to be one of this summer’s top grossing films.  Daley still has his cult status from Freaks and Geeks, as does Brendon for Buffy. John Cho, while he probably will never be able to escape from his status as Harold, also had a role in a hit called Star Trek. Even Frank Langella (who, I’ve decided, is very dashing for an older man) won some acclaim for doing some stuff recently, I don’t really know what, he played some president or something.

If you’re interested in watching it for yourself, the whole season can be viewed on Hulu here: http://www.hulu.com/kitchen-confidential

Stay tuned next time when I review the doomed animated comedy Clone High! Or whatever the internet equivalent is for “tuned.”

Canned: An Introduction

The world of television is a dog-eat-dog business.

And, like any business, its products live and die by one thing: how much money they’re rackin’ up.

This is why, an unfortunate amount of the time, good, interesting, and thought-provoking shows slip through the cracks, and those dedicated fans are left wondering, “what happened?  Is it my fault?  How could such quality television get thrown away when filth like Daisy of Love just keeps coming back like a herpes-ridden horror movie villain?”  Often good shows come and go, leaving fans wondering how the characters they gave so much of their life to ended up, hoping for a movie that can tie up all their loose ends.

Then, on the other hand, there are those shows that seem to overstay their welcome, and when they do get cancelled after two merciless seasons or so, us TV-watchers welcome it as a fresh start; a chance for better shows to enter the mix, and hopefully not fizzle and die a painful TV death.

On that morbid note, let me welcome you to Canned, where I will be watching shows cancelled early in their runs (through the magic of the interweb) and see if they truly deserved to fade back into the obscurity from whence they came, or if maybe, just maybe, they deserved better than their untimely fates.

The origins of this project come from a couple different places.  First, a friend/coworker of mine named Angela alerted me to the existence of a show called Kitchen Confidential, a sitcom based on the tell-all memoir by Anthony Bourdain.  I was a fan of Bourdain’s other show (and by other show I mean the only one he had any control over), No Reservations, so on Angela’s lukewarm review of the show, which I think amounted to “it was kinda…eh,” I decided to look into it a little more.  As it turns out, the show was cancelled only four episodes in, with nine more unaired in it’s first season.  From the sound of it, the show should’ve been pretty terrible.  I was surprised, then, to find that it wasn’t really so bad (more on that later).  After watching an episode or two, it got me thinking: what other shows got cancelled before their time?  In my research I found that there were a surprising amount of quality shows that ended after only a season or two, and some that I thought got cancelled long before they actually did.  Some shows were unable to finish their ambitious storylines before they got axed, and some seemed to have no clear end, but still left unanswered questions.  I decided to explore these unfortunate casualties of the television world, to shed new light on them and give them the second look they deserve, or perhaps don’t deserve.

I decided to use another blog series, called My Year of Flops by Nathan Rabin, head writer at The AV Club.  In his series, Mr. Rabin examines notorious critical and commercial failures, and decides if they’re as bottom-of-the-barrel as their reputations may lead someone to believe.  I sincerely hope Mr. Rabin finds it in his heart to be merciful and not sue me, because as we all know, there’s a fine line between homage and rip-off.  I just hope Mr. Rabin finds me on the former half of that comparison, assuming he’d actually find out about it.  Only time will tell…

So with that, I hope you enjoy reading about my trips into the exciting world of shows cancelled early in their runs, and I hope in the coming weeks that I can make anyone who reads these posts rediscover lost TV gems, forgotten with time, but still worth a look.  Unless I hate it, in which case you can bet on me telling you to avoid it like the plague.

Stay tuned for my review of the aforementioned Kitchen Confidential, and all my future posts coming soon!