And I'll watch the pilot episode for anything. If it sucks bad enough, I quit after a few minutes. But it has to be pretty amazing to get me to watch episode two.
Now I know every single one of you is thinking about your favorite show and how lame the pilot for that show is and how it would be unfair of me to judge your favorite show based on that pilot.
Too bad! There's too many shows out there, too little time, and my attention span is too short. If a show "takes a few episodes to get into," it fails. And that's something you're just gonna have to live with. I'm a bad boy. A loner. A rebel. I'm not here to make friends. I'm so bad I should be in time-out.
So just for a gag, I watched the pilot for a bunch of new shows this year. I had no expectations for any of them. Let's see what happened!
This show is a completely wonderful and unexpected delight. I recommend it to anyone and everyone. Rob Lowe plays an actor who just finished eight seasons on a cheesy courtroom drama where he played the title character, "The Grinder." And now he's returned to his Idaho hometown, where his brother- perfectly played by Fred Savage- is an actual lawyer. Lowe decides he wants to apply all the legal "knowledge" he "accumulated" in eight years of his awful show to the real-life legal world (Much to his hard-working brother's annoyance). Every performance on this show is spot-on, the writing all rings true, and the premise arrives fully-formed. Right from the pilot, everything feels right and you can sense the rich history behind everything. It feels like the fifth season of a show that's been refining itself and getting better each year. It's laugh-out-loud funny, too. And it stays clever and funny over every episode that's aired so far.
"Blood & Oil"
It's about the oil boom in North Dakota, which is an interesting and disturbing thing that's really happening right now (Jon Oliver gave a good rundown on it). The show did nothing for me, though. It starts with a traumatic car crash where a couple's livelihood is ruined by an oil truck running them off the road. And I saw where it was going from there and had no interest. Just another soap opera with slick production values. Cool that they cast Don Johnson, but that's it.
"The Jim Gaffigan Show"
Gaffigan's stand-up comedy is a blast. Some of the magic translates here. He has seven kids and likes to eat. That's the premise and the source of all the humor. It starts great with an episode about vasectomy- a really solid pilot- but future episodes fall flat and take lazy sitcom shortcuts. Comedies of errors. Misunderstandings. Locked doors making people miss appointments. And people being snippy and shrill to each other. It's funny when "Curb Your Enthusiasm" has people constantly bickering, but it's annoying here. Some cool moments, but not a gem.
"Ash vs. the Evil Dead"
After 23 years of waiting, "Evil Dead 4" has finally arrived. And it's in the form of a TV show with the original star and the original director. If you're a fan of the movies, you've already seen this and know it's perfect. If you're not a fan, this hilarious, totally demented show will probably not win you over.
"Wicked City"
This is the one I was most excited about, since it's the first and only network show this fall that's already been canceled. So I was hoping it was gonna suck suck suck. I love a good train wreck. Well, it was pretty bad and depressing and ugly, but at worst, it only sucked sucked. It's a generic cop drama with an L.A. cop hunting a serial killer. The only thing setting it apart from the 5,342,674 other shows about L.A. cops hunting serial killers is that it's set in the 80's.
And that's where it lost my respect. Because it's not all bad. It's competently made. Looks alright. The actor playing the good guy cop is okay. He does the best he can with the part. But it's set in the year 1982. And it has a scene where Billy Idol is performing live in a club. He plays "Rebel Yell." That song didn't come out until 1984.
If you set your movie in the past, you GET YOUR FACTS STRAIGHT. Bad show, no cookie.
It's an excellent show. It's also too dark. Heaviness on harshness layered with darkness covered in grit with anger and rage sandwiched between despair and cruelty. Jessica Jones is a private detective with mild superpowers fighting a bad guy with mind-control powers, played frighteningly well by David Tennant. The other Netflix Marvel show, "Daredevil," was also pretty hardcore, but they went a bit too far on this one. Everything about it seems designed to be abrasive and tough on the viewer. If you can handle the darkness, it's a solid piece of work. (UPDATE: The characters get annoying after a few episodes and it's too many episodes long.)
"Grandfathered"
Uncle Jesse from "Full House" plays a 50-year-old swingin' bachelor who discovers he got a girl pregnant 25 years ago and that the resulting child has since had a child. So it turns out he's a grandfather. It's not terribly funny, but it's cute and works passably well as a family drama.
"The Muppets"
This is a divisive one. People love it. People hate it. People hate people for loving it. People love people for hating it. I tried hard to like it and get into it, but it was just depressing. Meshing Muppets with "The Office" is a fun idea for a sketch, but it wears thin as a show premise. Also the tone is mean. I'm happy there's a new Muppet show, but sad that it's this one.
"Quantico"
Garbage. It's about FBI recruits and a terrorist attack involving one of them. Every plot development is ridiculous and not a single character comes off as believable or likable. Also they go out of their way to attack Mormons in the pilot episode, getting every detail wrong in the process. They introduce the character by showing him having a farewell gathering/party in the Salt Lake City temple. That's not how temples work. They're not event halls. Right off the bat, you can tell the show's writers did zero fact-checking. It goes downhill from there. This article goes into spoilery detail about it, but TLDR- a Mormon ends up being a monster in a totally unbelievable way. Showing Mormon underwear on TV is the least offensive thing in this episode. But even if they got the Mormon stuff right and didn't demonize that character, this show would still be a wretched mess.
Cool enough. A woman appears in a bag in the middle of Times Square covered in tattoos with no memory of how she got them. We follow a special unit assigned to figuring out what her tattoos mean, since they seem to hold clues to big-time crimes. It swings for the fences with a Statue of Liberty-blowing-up terrorist plot in the pilot. Nothing amazing or world-changing, but a fun ride.
"Scream Queens"
From the guy who made "Glee" and "American Horror Story." It's a super-snarky, ridiculous, gross, satirical, surreal show about a killer on a college campus targeting the most popular sorority. And the sorority members DON'T LEAVE THE HOUSE despite the fact that they keep getting killed. Jamie Lee Curtis plays the dean. Almost nothing on the show makes sense- people do and say the strangest things for the strangest reasons. Especially the fraternity goofballs. The language is the most extreme stuff I've ever heard on a network TV show and its total outlandishness becomes part of its charm. It's totally indefensible and to my great shame, I look forward to each new episode.
"Minority Report"
Not awful, just a pretty generic police procedural with a psychic. It feels like a direct-to-DVD sequel to "Minority Report." And it IS a sequel, to their credit. They aren't just re-booting or re-telling the movie. It's about the the pre-cog characters and what happened to them after pre-crime was abolished at the end of the movie. And it's just not that interesting.
After giving us more "Arrested Development" and "Wet Hot American Summer," Netflix resurrects another classic comic property- the brilliant 90's HBO sketch comedy series, "Mr. Show." (For legal reasons, they changed the name to "w/Bob and David.") All the main cast members are back and this shows that they're all still at the top of their game. Endlessly funny and inventive.
-Phony McFakename
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